Monday May 29, 2023

The San Juan Star

Lawmaker: Well Over Half of Gender Violence Complaints Filed Against Police Force Members Go Unresolved

GOOD MORNING

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.

More than half of gender violence complaints against police agents go unresolved

By THE STAR STAFF

About 65% of the gender violence complaints filed against police officers in five years went unresolved, according to a probe conducted by the island House of Representatives.

Women’s Affairs Committee Chairwoman Jocelyne Rodríguez Negrón on Sunday presented the findings and recommendations of an investigation report into the protocols used when police officers are involved in cases of gender violence.

The report is the result of House Resolution 659, a measure that was filed at the beginning of 2022 to investigate, among other matters, why complaints against police officers go unresolved or do not result in criminal charges.

“It is commendable that there is total transparency, rigor, and commitment when it comes to resolving cases of gender violence among the members of the Puerto Rico Police Bureau,” said the District 19 (Mayagüez and San Germán) legislator.

INDEX

sioner of the Police Bureau to establish a “Women and Domestic Violence Crime Unit,” which will consolidate the investigation of crimes committed against women.

Related to domestic violence involving a police officer, the DSP is governed by General Order 600, Section 644, entitled “Investigation of Domestic Violence Incident Involving Puerto Rico Police Employees,” which establishes additional procedures for handling such cases.

The organization Kilómetro Cero sent comments about the investigation, stating that four intimate femicides perpetrated by police officers have occurred in the past five years and that there was a total of 78 domestic violence complaints in the past year.

The House committee issued a series of recommendations to strengthen the necessary mechanisms to protect victims. Among them was new proposed legislation for a procedure that would allow the OPM to investigate gender violence complaints against police officers.

“This committee investigated why the complaints are not resolved, the failure to file charges against agents who engage in this conduct, possible solutions and identification of resources so that agents have more training and professional help,” Rodríguez Negrón added.

Among the report’s main findings is that 65% of the cases from Jan. 1, 2017 to Nov. 2, 2022 were consulted and not filed, according to data provided by the Justice Department. That percentage represents 242 cases not filed out of a total of 372.

“When we carefully evaluate these statistics, it is alarming to observe the recurrence of names of members of the police, with different complaint numbers and dates, where the final disposition is consulted and not filed,” Rodríguez Negrón pointed out.

Through various information requests, the Office of the Women’s Advocate (OPM by its Spanish initials) told the House committee that the Police Bureau provides the data that feed its statistics. Concerning complaints of domestic violence against members of the police force, during the period from Jan. 1, 2017 to Oct. 24, 2022, the OPM received 422 complaints.

The OPM also disclosed to the House panel that only 17 municipal councils, or 22% of the total 77 municipal councils that have municipal police, have been trained on Law 59-2020, known as the “Law for Education, Prevention and Management of Domestic Violence for the Municipalities of Puerto Rico.”

The Department of Public Safety (DSP) reported during the hearing that it is in the process of complying with Act 83-2020, the purpose of which is for the commis-

Likewise, the report proposes the creation of a Prosecutors Unit specializing in crimes perpetrated by law enforcement agents that will work closely with the OPM. The committee suggested that the OPM be the entity to manage the specialized unit with budget allocations from the Justice Department and the Police Bureau.

In addition, it recommended administrative fines be issued by the OPM against municipalities that have not complied with the training mandated under Law 59-2020, and that police officers receive additional training related to the biopsychosocial aspects of gender violence.

“Institutionally, the failure is obvious: the police do not comply with the protocols established for handling domestic violence in cases that involve agents of their own body and, when they comply with them, they turn out to be ineffective,” Rodríguez Negrón said.

Rep. Jocelyne Rodríguez Negrón

Senator seeks inventory of first-responder facilities in flood zones

By THE STAR STAFF

After visiting Police Bureau headquarters in Comerío, at-large Sen. Keren Riquelme Cabrera reported the filing of a resolution focused on developing an inventory of police barracks, fire stations and/or emergency management centers that are located in flood zones.

“Last Friday we visited the facilities of the police barracks in the municipality of Comerío to evaluate the structure and dialogue with the law enforcement agents who work there in order to know their needs and attend to them with haste,” the New Progressive Party senator said. “One of the first things we observed was that the barracks is located in a flood zone and that is very dangerous in case of the impact of a major storm. That is why we are going to file a resolution this week to investigate this situation as a matter of urgency, not only in this important municipality but throughout the island.”

Riquelme Cabrera emphasized that the current administration has developed programs to rehabilitate and modernize

barracks throughout Puerto Rico, something that has not happened since the 1990s.

“There is a reality and that is that many barracks, and stations of the firefighters and emergency management

bureaus are located in flood areas,” she said. “The objective of the resolution is to identify each facility of these three important services in the event of a storm or natural disaster, make a record of them and develop programs to locate them in other places that do not represent a flood hazard and at the same time can provide the same service to the citizens that they always offer.”

“On several occasions, these barracks have had to be evacuated, as happened in July 2020 when the La Plata River flooded its banks,” the senator said. “Our resolution also orders an economic feasibility study, just as it orders the Public Buildings Authority to make a report on properties under its name that can be used as barracks and stations, in cases that merit relocation.”

Riquelme held a working meeting with Lt. José David Colón, as well as with several other members of the Police Bureau stationed in the central island municipality, to discuss the problems that concern them, including the location of the town’s main barracks.

Emergency meeting will address lack of space on ferries for Vieques residents

By THE STAR STAFF

Vieques Mayor José “Junito” Corcino Acevedo, along with New Progressive Party (NPP) House Minority Leader Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Nuñez and the senator for the District of Carolina, Marisa “Marissita” Jiménez Santoni, said over the weekend that they will be convening an emergency meeting with the company HMS Ferries and the Integrated Transportation Authority (ATI by its Spanish initials) to address the lack of seating space on the ferries that service the offshore island municipality.

“It’s disrespectful, it just is,” Corcino Acevedo said. “Tickets for Vieques have to be available first and all the time. It is not fair for our people to wait hours. I am calling an emergency meeting to investigate and take corrective action so that it does not happen again that residents do not get return tickets after they leave the island; the past cannot happen again.”

“Leave the explanations for others. We do not accept that Vieques residents have to wait five or eight hours to return to their homes,” the mayor added. “We are going to have that meeting with the HMS company and ATI personnel as a matter of urgency and from there we are going to outline a plan that is to be implemented immediately to resolve this crisis.”

The mayor’s statements arose after a group of Vieques residents, starting Friday, had denounced waits at the ferry terminal that exceed five hours due to the lack of tickets.

According to the agreement with HMS Ferries, each daily trip -- both round trips -- must have 35 tickets reserved for Vieques residents. But because it is a long weekend, the number of passengers increases considerably.

Likewise, Corcino Acevedo said he would be discussing with ATI and the directors of the authority for the redevelopment of the former naval base at Roosevelt Roads in Ceiba the idea of identifying an area for parking

near the boat terminal and thus create a municipal company between Vieques and Culebra, to reduce prices and raise funds

for municipal coffers. Currently the private company charges around $20 for leaving a vehicle 24 hours.

Sen. Keren Riquelme Cabrera

Vieques residents say they have endured waits of over five hours at the ferry terminal in Ceiba due to a lack of available tickets.

By THE STAR STAFF

The University of Puerto Rico (UPR) is seeking to have a recent lawsuit brought by its retirement system’s board moved into federal court, according to a recent notice of removal.

The UPR Retirement System sued UPR and its governing board’s president on May 11 in local court, alleging that the UPR had illegally created a second retirement system when it closed the pension plan to new members and opened a defined contribution plan for new members. They argued that the law allowed UPR to have only one retirement plan and asked that the court prevent reform implementation.

As part of the UPR Fiscal Plan, the Financial Oversight and Management Board established two potential paths for the UPR to reform the UPR Retirement System. The first option was to freeze the existing retirement plan and move to a defined contribution plan with no reduction in accrued benefits. The second option was to freeze the existing plan and move to a defined contribution plan coupled with a reduction in accrued benefits.

Furthermore, as part of UPR’s fiscal year 2023 budget,

The University of Puerto Rico Retirement System sued UPR and its governing board’s president on May 11 in local court, alleging that the UPR had illegally created a second retirement system.

during the fiscal year the UPR must adopt pension reform “in which the defined benefit plan is frozen and a defined contribution plan is implemented” or otherwise must find an additional $11.9 million in savings for fiscal year (FY) 2023 and would not receive an additional $20 million in funding which are conditioned upon such pension reform milestones. Accordingly, the UPR moved to implement pension reform, selecting an option that did not reduce benefits.

The retirement system board seeks, among other things, a declaratory judgment that the proposed pension reform is arbitrary and illegal.

The retirement system did not include the oversight board as a defendant and argued that UPR wasn’t an entity that had been restructured, so the case could be heard in local court. Although UPR has not filed for bankruptcy, it argued that the case still belongs in the federal court overseeing the commonwealth’s Title III bankruptcy proceeding.

“If plaintiffs’ requested injunctive relief were to be granted, the UPR and its governing board would be enjoined from implementing the pension reform,” the notice of removal argued. “This outcome will have severe adverse economic consequences for UPR under the FY23 budget.”

UPR looks to have retirement system board’s lawsuit moved to federal court Hospitals Assn. to hold workshops for compliance with new DEA rules

By THE STAR STAFF

The Puerto Rico Hospitals Association reported that it will be developing several workshops to comply with new U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) regulations that update the requirements for health professionals who are registered and accredited by the federal agency.

“We are facing a new scenario where health professionals who are licensed or have applied for accreditation with … the DEA are required to comply with the provisions of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023,” said Pedro González, executive vice president of the Puerto Rico Hospitals Association. “The federal agency enacted a new mandatory one-time, eight-hour training requirement for

all individuals registered with the agency. Especially professionals linked to the treatment and management of patients with the use of opioids or other substances covered under the Expansion of Training and Access to Medicines Law will have to access these workshops known as continuing education that are now a requirement for anyone who is in the process of renewing their licenses as of June 27, 2023.”

Officials announced that eight-hour workshops will be offered at the Hospitals Association’s facilities in the Villa Nevárez Professional Center building in San Juan, in a hybrid manner (face-to-face and virtual) for doctors, physician assistants, nurses and dentists who make up the first group that will be trained to comply with the new DEA requirements as part of the process of obtaining or renewing

Morovis graduates 2nd class of chefs

By THE STAR STAFF

Morovis Mayor Carmen Maldonado González presided over the graduation ceremony of the Second Municipal Culinary Class on Saturday.

“My congratulations to all 45 participants and my deepest gratitude to chef and teacher Carmen Concepción for her extraordinary work of education and mentoring,” Maldonado González said. “In Morovis we promote the education and development of our citizenry through entrepreneurship.”

Maldonado González said that will soon begin an advanced course and initiate classes in international cuisine.

In May 2019, the northern-central municipality began the current initiative with advice and input from Concepción, an experienced chef. At the first meeting, held at the Barrio Barahona Community Center, the mayor highlighted the principles of the project.

“In Morovis we have a lot of talent in traditional cuisine, which, added to our agricultural production, guarantees alternatives for economic development. What we are promoting is that citizens have the tools for their development,” the mayor said. “The key is to generate an entrepreneurial attitude, break down obstacles, provide good service and be competitive. I am convinced that we are going to generate a good group of new Moroveño entrepreneurs.”

of their licenses.

“We have established these conferences to help meet the DEA’s new requirements. In line with our ongoing quality project workshop on opioid utilization, we will be holding courses to meet the requirements for a health professional who is going for the first time to apply for a license or be accredited with the Drug Enforcement Administration, or failing that, needs to renew their current license,” González said. “The training requirement required by the DEA is onetime, not recurring. The federal agency has indicated that especially those health professionals who handle psychiatric cases involving addictions, personnel who have been previously authorized in the dental area, medical assistants or nurses must take the eight-hour training courses.”

By THE STAR STAFF

Agroup of statehood supporters is urging Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia again to drop the idea of seeking a status vote and, instead, asked Congress to approve a resolution in favor of certifying Puerto Rico as an incorporated territory.

The letter sent to Pierluisi comes after the Puerto Rico Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has been undertaking a study on the Insular Cases and the “Doctrine of the Unincorporated Territory” and its effect on the civil rights of Puerto Ricans on the island.

The insular cases are a series of U.S. Supreme Court opinions from early in the 20th century on the status of U.S. territories acquired after the Spanish-American War. The Supreme Court held that full constitutional protection of rights does not automatically extend by its own force to places under U.S. control, which means unincorporated territories such as Puerto Rico may lack some constitutional rights because they were not part of the United States.

Pro-statehood lawyer Gregorio Igartúa testified at a hearing held by the commission that the fact that Puerto Rico has not been certified as an incorporated territory has caused social, legal and political discrimination against the U.S. territory. He said the differential treatment has resulted in the territory’s bankruptcy and the loss of professionals.

Regarding the letter, whose contents were endorsed by former UPR President José Saldaña, Inter American University of Puerto Rico law professor Andrés Córdova and Héctor Ramos, prevailed upon the governor to support the territorial

incorporation of the island. The letter notes that in 2019, the U.S. Conference of Mayors at its meeting in Hawaii approved a resolution to certify Puerto Rico as an incorporated territory.

They said that by all accounts, Puerto Rico is already an incorporated territory because Puerto Ricans already pay federal taxes and most federal laws already appy.

They said the status legislation currently before Congress puts into question the U.S. citizenship of Puerto Ricans ob-

tained under the Jones Act, and is a futile exercise because it has little support.

Last year, a group of U.S. lawmakers unveiled the Puerto Rico Status Act discussion draft legislation, a consensus bill between Democrats and Republicans on how to deal with the U.S. commonwealth’s status.

If eventually passed in the U.S. House and Senate, the Puerto Rico Status Act would create and fund a process for Puerto Rico residents to participate in a binding vote to determine the island’s political relationship with the U.S.

The ballot would not include the current commonwealth status, according to the draft. Voters would instead choose between three options: statehood, sovereignty in free association with the U.S., and independence.

Under the legislation, Puerto Ricans would maintain their U.S. citizenship under all options for at least one generation. Those born after Puerto Rico becomes independent or a freely associated state will not be U.S. citizens. If Puerto Rico chooses statehood, the U.S. will begin the process of admitting it as the nation’s 51st state, the draft says. If the island chooses free association, it will be independent but share some agreed-upon functions with the U.S. government. If it chooses independence, it will be a sovereign nation.

The chances of territorial incorporation for Puerto Rico are higher than statehood, Igartúa said. He noted that federal Judge Gustavo Gelpi in the Consejo de Salud ruled that Puerto Rico was an incorporated territory, which Congress can’t deny because all of the elements for incorporation are present.

“The incorporation gives us equality in federal aid and puts us in transit toward statehood,” Igartúa said.

Pro-statehood group keeps pushing for territorial incorporation as best path forward CROEM graduates to participate in Puerto Rican Parade activities

By THE STAR STAFF

The Graduate Student Association of the Mayagüez Residential Center for Educational Opportunities, known as CROEM ALUMNI, will be represented by a group of CROEM graduate students who will travel to New York to participate in the 66th edition of what was the Puerto Rican Day Parade and now is to be known as the National Puerto Rican Parade.

“There is a lot of excitement among the group of CROEM graduate students, who have reorganized to participate in the largest Hispanic cultural event in the nation, which brings together nearly two million people on Sunday, June 11 on Fifth Avenue in New York,” said Wilson Nazario, executive director of CROEM ALUMNI. “We have appointed environmental scientist NydiaYanira Reyes as our presidential delegate and Silvia Ramírez, who will be in charge of coordinating our participation in the activities of Puerto Rican Week in New York City and the 2023 National Puerto Rican Parade.”

Puerto Rican Week in New York will begin on Sunday, June 4 with the celebration of the Annual Mass of the National Puerto Rican Parade at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, located on Fifth Avenue, New York. The calendar of activities of Puerto Rican

Week highlights the celebration of the reception at the home of Mayor Eric Adams, known as “Gracie Mansion,” scheduled for the afternoon of Thursday, June 8.

The National Puerto Rican Parade will take place on Sunday, June 11 starting at 11 a.m.

“Our organization CROEM ALUMNI reports that on Friday, June 9, the delegation from Puerto Rico that includes mayors, legislators and public officials will participate in a conversation aimed at the empowerment of communities whose theme this year will be the important theme of ‘Health: Needs and Opportunities for Puerto Rico,’” Nazario said.

“We can anticipate that Major General Dr. Lester Martínez López, a son of Maricao and current assistant secretary for health Affairs of the United States Department of Defense … will be with us. Likewise, Dr. Carlos Mellado López (secretary of the Department of Health), Dr. Carlos Rodríguez Mateo (administrator of ASSMCA), Luis Rodríguez Díaz (director of the Traffic Safety Commission), attorney Luis Javier Hernández Ortiz (president of the Puerto Rico Mayors Association), businesswoman Sheila Otero Rivera and ambulance industry specialist Asiris Rodríguez, Cameron McKenzie (president of the Puerto Rico Chamber of Commerce), Sen. José Luis Dalmau Santiago (president of the Puerto Rico Senate), Rep.

Rafael Hernández Montañez (speaker of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives) and the scientist assigned to the Atlanta CDC, Dr. Francisco ‘Paco’ Tomei Torres.”

The CROEM ALUMNI director added that while it was previously reported that the event is free of charge, for reasons of space, those wishing to participate must submit a request and be granted confirmation of their seat by calling 787-409-8376.

Attorney Gregorio Igartúa

Puerto Rican Week in New York will begin on Sunday, June 4 with the Annual Mass of the National Puerto Rican Parade at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. The parade will take place on Sunday, June 11 starting at 11 a.m.

With debt limit deal in hand, McCarthy and Biden turn to task of selling it

By LUKE BROADWATER and CHRIS CAMERON

Aday after striking a deal in principle with President Joe Biden to raise the debt limit, Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his leadership team began an all-out sales pitch on Sunday to rally Republicans behind a compromise that was drawing intense resistance from the hard right.

To get the legislation through a fractious and closely divided Congress, McCarthy and top Democratic leaders must cobble together a coalition of Republicans and Democrats in the House and the Senate willing to back it. Members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus have already declared war on the plan, which they say fails to impose meaningful spending cuts, and warned that they would seek to block it.

So after spending late nights and early mornings in recent days in feverish negotiations to strike the deal, proponents have turned their energies to ensuring it can pass in time to avert a default now projected on June 5.

“This is the most conservative spending package in my service in Congress, and this is my 10th term,” Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, R-N.C., a lead member of McCarthy’s negotiating team, said at a news conference on Capitol Hill on Sunday morning.

House Republicans circulated a one-page memo with 10 talking points about the conservative benefits of the deal, which was still being finalized and written into legislative text on Sunday, hours before it was expected to be released. The GOP memo asserted that the plan would cap government spending at 1% annually for six years — although the measure is only binding for two years — and noted that it would impose stricter work requirements for Americans receiving government benefits, cut $400 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for global health funding and eliminate funding for hiring new IRS agents in 2023.

“It doesn’t get everything everybody wanted,” McCarthy told reporters on Capitol Hill. “But, in divided government, that’s where we end up. I think it’s a very positive bill.”

Biden told reporters that he was confident the deal would reach his desk and that he would speak with McCarthy on Sunday afternoon “to make sure all the T’s are crossed and the I’s are dotted.”

“I think we’re in good shape,” the president said. Asked what sticking points were left, he said, “None.”

Still, the deal, which would raise the debt ceiling for two years while cutting and capping some federal programs over the same period, was facing harsh criticism from the wings of both political parties.

“Terrible policy, absolutely terrible policy,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” referring to the work requirements for food stamps and other public benefit programs. “I told the president that directly when he called me last week on Wednesday that this is saying to poor people and people who are in need that we don’t trust them.”

Jayapal, the chairperson of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she wanted to read the bill before she decided whether to support it.

Some on the right had already ruled out doing so before seeing the details.

“No one claiming to be a conservative could justify a YES vote,” Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., a member of the House Freedom

Caucus, wrote on Twitter. Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., posted his reaction to news of the deal: a vomit emoji.

But McCarthy argued that Republican critics were a small faction.

“More than 95% of all those in the conference were very excited,” McCarthy, who briefed Republicans about the deal on Saturday night, said on Fox. “Think about this: We finally were able to cut spending. We’re the first Congress to vote for cutting spending year over year.”

The deal would essentially freeze federal spending that had been on track to grow, excluding military and veterans programs.

Rep. Dusty Johnson, RS.D., an ally of McCarthy’s, said that House Republicans would overwhelmingly support the debt deal. He played down the right-wing revolt,

claiming that leaders never expected certain House Freedom Caucus members to vote for it.

“When you’re saying that conservatives have concerns, it is really the most colorful conservatives,” Johnson said on “State of the Union,” pointing out that some Republicans even voted against a more conservative proposal to raise the debt ceiling. “Some of those guys you mentioned didn’t vote for the thing when it was kind of a Republican wish list.”

Still, it was clear McCarthy would need votes from Democrats to pass the measure through the House — and those might not prove easy to deliver, especially from the left wing in the House.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said he was undecided about how to vote but expressed anger at the negotiations, which he compared to hostage-taking on the part of Republicans.

“None of the things in the bill are Democratic priorities,” Himes said on Fox. Himes said the legislation was not “going to make any Democrats happy.”

“But it’s a small enough bill that in the service of actually not destroying the economy this week may get Democratic votes,” he said.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader, said McCarthy and Biden would speak again Sunday afternoon before the Biden administration briefed the House Democratic Caucus.

“I do expect that there will be Democratic support once we have the ability to actually be fully briefed by the White House,” Jeffries said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

But he was clear that he did not like the position Democrats were in.

“We have to, of course, avoid a market crash. We have to avoid tanking the economy. We have to avoid a default,” Jeffries said. “The reason why we’re in this situation from the very beginning is that extreme MAGA Republicans made the determination that they were going to use the possibility of default to hold the economy and everyday Americans hostage.”

The U.S. Capitol in Washington, as pitched negotiations over the debt limit continued, on Saturday, May 27, 2023.

Yellen’s debt limit warnings went unheeded, leaving her to face fallout

President Joe Biden’s agenda.

Top White House and Republican negotiators reached a deal in principle Saturday to raise the debt limit for two years while cutting and capping some government spending over the same period, but congressional passage of the plan before June 5, when the Treasury is projected to exhaust its ability to pay its bills, was not assured. The federal government’s cash balance has already fallen below $40 billion.

of payments.”

The Treasury Department has developed a default playbook from previous debt limit standoffs in 2011 and 2013. And Yellen has become quite familiar with those: During the last two significant standoffs — in 2011 and 2013 — she was a top Federal Reserve official contemplating how the central bank would try to contain fallout from a default.

sified, Yellen has not been as involved in negotiations with lawmakers as some of her predecessors.

Biden tapped Shalanda Young, his budget director, and Steven Ricchetti, White House counselor, to lead the negotiations with House Republicans. Yellen has not attended the Oval Office meetings between Biden and Republicans.

By ALAN RAPPEPORT

In the days after November’s midterm elections, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was feeling upbeat about the fact that Democrats had performed better than expected and maintained control of the Senate.

But as she traveled to the Group of 20 leaders summit in Indonesia that month, she said Republicans taking control of the House posed a new threat to the U.S. economy.

“I always worry about the debt ceiling,” Yellen told The New York Times in an interview on her flight from New Delhi to Bali, Indonesia, in which she urged Democrats to use their remaining time in control of Washington to lift the debt limit beyond the 2024 elections. “Any way that Congress can find to get it done, I’m all for.”

Democrats did not heed Yellen’s advice. Instead, the United States has spent most of this year inching toward the brink of default, as Republicans refused to raise or suspend the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit without capping spending and rolling back parts of

Yellen has held her contingency plans close to the vest but signaled this week that she had been thinking about how to prepare for the worst. Speaking at a WSJ CEO Council event, the Treasury secretary laid out the difficult decisions she would face if the Treasury was forced to choose which bills to prioritize.

Most market watchers expect that the Treasury Department would opt to make interest and principal payments to bondholders before paying other bills, yet Yellen would say only that she would face “very tough choices.”

White House officials have refused to say if any contingency planning is underway. Early this year, Biden administration officials said they were not planning for how to prioritize payments. As the U.S. edges closer to default, the Treasury Department declined to say whether that has changed.

Yet former Treasury and Federal Reserve officials said it was nearly certain that emergency plans were being devised.

Christopher Campbell, who served as assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions from 2017 to 2018, said that given the rapidly approaching X-date, “one would expect” that “there would be quiet conversations between the Treasury Department and the White House around how they would manage a technical default and perhaps prioritization

Yellen was briefed on the Treasury’s plans during those debates and engaged in her own contingency discussions about how to stabilize the financial system in the event that the United States could not pay all of its bills on time.

According to the Fed’s transcripts, the Treasury Department did in fact plan to prioritize principal and interest payments to bondholders in the event that the X-date was breached. Although Treasury Department officials had trepidations about the idea, they had expressed to Fed officials that it could ultimately be done.

Fed officials also discussed steps that they could take to stabilize money markets and to prevent failed Treasury auctions from prompting a default even if the Treasury Department was successfully paying creditors. Yellen said in both 2011 and 2013 that she was on board with plans to protect the financial system.

“I expect that actions of this type might well prove unnecessary after the Treasury finally states that they do intend to pay principal and interest on time and we have finally issued our own set of policy statements,” Yellen said in 2011. “But if the stress nevertheless escalates, I’d support interventions to alleviate pressures on money market funds.”

Yellen added that she was concerned about how vulnerable market infrastructure was in the event of a default and said officials should be thinking about ways to plan for a default in the future.

“Given that we could face a similar situation somewhere down the road, I think it’s important for us to think about lessons learned so that we and markets will be better prepared if we face such a situation again,” Yellen said.

Eric Rosengren, who was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 2011, said in an interview that he expected that Yellen, who is known for being rigorously prepared, was busy considering contingency plans as she did at the Fed more than a decade ago.

“It would be irrational not to do some planning,” said Rosengren, adding that Yellen’s background of dealing with financial stability matters makes her well placed to be as ready as possible for the fallout of a default. “The last thing you want is to be completely unprepared and have the worst outcome.”

As the debt ceiling standoff has inten-

“It doesn’t look from the outside likeYellen is playing an active role in the budget negotiations,” said David Wessel, a senior economic fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked with Yellen at Brookings. “That may be that it’s not her comparative advantage, it may be that the White House wants to do it themselves, and it may be that they want to protect the credibility of Treasury predicting the X-date.”

Yellen has taken a more behind-thescenes role, briefing the White House on the nation’s cash reserves, calling business leaders and asking them to urge Republicans to lift the debt limit and sending increasingly regular letters to Congress warning when the federal government will be unable to pay all its bills.

A White House official pointed out that Yellen has been the Biden administration’s primary messenger on the debt limit on the Sunday morning talk shows and that she is coordinating on a daily basis with Jeffrey Zients, the White House chief of staff, and Lael Brainard, the director of the National Economic Council, to plot the administration’s strategy. Other officials have participated in the Oval Office meetings because the White House continues to view them as budget negotiations, the official added.

The Treasury secretary also cut short a recent trip to Japan for a meeting of the Group of 7 finance ministers so she could return to Washington to deal with the debt limit.

Whenever the debt limit standoff does subside, Democrats will most likely come under renewed pressure to overhaul the laws that govern the nation’s borrowing the next time they control the White House and Congress. Fearing that a fight over the debt limit would put her in the precarious position that she now faces, Yellen said in 2021 that she supported abolishing the borrowing cap.

“I believe when Congress legislates expenditures and puts in place tax policy that determines taxes, those are the crucial decisions Congress is making,” Yellen said at a House Financial Services Committee hearing. “And if to finance those spending and tax decisions, it is necessary to issue additional debt, I believe it is very destructive to put the president and myself, as Treasury secretary, in a situation where we might be unable to pay the bills that result from those past decisions.”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, in Washington on March 22, 2023.

Texas AG is the first statewide officeholder to be impeached in over a century

By J. DAVID GOODMAN, JAMES DOBBINS and NICHOLAS BOGEL-BURROUGHS

Lawmakers in the Texas House voted Saturday to impeach Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, temporarily removing him from office over charges that he had used his elected position to benefit himself and a campaign donor.

After a four-hour proceeding before a packed gallery, the vote landed with titanic force in the Texas Capitol, where a statewide officeholder had not been impeached in more than a century, since the Legislature voted to oust the sitting governor, James Ferguson, in 1917, for embezzlement and misuse of public funds.

Before Saturday’s vote, Rep. Andrew Murr, the Republican chair of the House investigating committee that recommended impeachment, closed by urging his colleagues to impeach. “The evidence presented to you is compelling and is more than sufficient to justify going to trial,” he said, adding, “Send this to trial.”

The final vote was 121 members in favor of impeachment — a bipartisan coalition that included nearly every Democrat and a majority of the chamber’s Republicans — and 23 against, with two abstaining. As they voted, the board in the front of the chamber lit up in green lights signaling support. It went well beyond the 75 necessary.

“It was a hard one, a hard one, really hard,” Rep. Jeff Leach, a Dallas-area Republican who voted in favor of impeachment, said after the vote.

According to Texas law, Gov. Greg Abbott may appoint an interim attorney general, pending the Senate trial, but he is not required to. A spokesperson for his office did not respond to a request for comment on what he intended to do.

With the impeachment vote, Paxton was immediately removed from office, pending the Senate trial. No date had been set for that to begin.

The Senate trial will be presided over by the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, an arch conservative aligned with many of Paxton’s supporters. Patrick has maintained a neutral posture in public comments this past week. A two-thirds vote is necessary to convict in the Senate, where Republicans hold a 19-12 advantage.

The speed with which events proceeded left legislators, Texas officials and other political observers stunned and grasping: Just a few days ago, almost no one in the Capitol had been even aware that such a significant investigation of Paxton was underway, much less that an impeachment vote could be the result.

His fellow Republicans, who introduced the 20 articles of impeachment, presented Paxton as a rogue public official who could not be trusted in the office he occupied. They did so in reference to Paxton’s actions, which they said in many cases amounted to crimes, and contrasted them with the integrity of those who stood up to him, many of them conservative Republicans.

“Attorney General Paxton continuously and blatantly violated laws, rules, policies and procedures,” said David Spiller, a Republican member of the investigating committee, speaking to the House on Saturday. “As a body, we should not be complicit” in that behavior, he said. “Texas is better than that.”

Paxton released a statement immediately after the vote, calling the process “illegal, unethical and profoundly unjust.”

“I look forward to a quick resolution in the Texas Senate, where I have full confidence the process will be fair and just,” Paxton wrote. He has many allies in the more con-

servative Senate, including his wife, Angela, and personal friends.

The articles of impeachment charged Paxton with abusing his office in a range of ways, including taking what amounted to bribes, disregarding his official duty, obstructing justice in a separate securities fraud case pending against him, making false statements on official documents and abusing the public trust.

Many of the articles focused on Paxton’s purported use of his office to benefit a particular donor, Nate Paul, a real estate investor in Austin who has given $25,000 in political contributions to Paxton. Those included using the office to intervene in a legal dispute that Paul was having with a nonprofit, and hiring a lawyer on contract to work for the attorney general’s office, at Paul’s request and over the objections of senior staff members at the attorney general’s office, in order to look into a federal inquiry of Paul.

Paul also provided other benefits to Paxton, the articles of impeachment said, including giving a job to a woman described during the impeachment proceedings as Paxton’s “mistress,” and providing expensive home renovations, including countertops valued at around $20,000.

Paxton, 60, who has denied any wrongdoing, has been a strong supporter of conservative legal causes and one of the chief antagonists of the Biden administration on a range of issues, including the Affordable Care Act and immigration on the southern border. Paxton also challenged the results of the 2020 election in court, a losing fight that won him the support of former President Donald Trump.

The allegations of corruption and abuse of office were described in 2020 by several of his top aides, who requested an investigation of Paxton. The aides who spoke up

either resigned or were forced out or fired. Four of them filed a lawsuit over their firing. The FBI also opened an investigation, and in February, the Justice Department said the inquiry had been taken over by investigators in Washington.

What changed this year was that Paxton sought state money to try to put the most serious matter behind him, asking for $3.3 million in state funds for a settlement that he had reached with the four aides. The Texas House responded by initiating an investigation of the request and the underlying accusations. Their findings that Paxton’s actions had been improper and possibly illegal provided the first official condemnation of his behavior.

Outside the Capitol, a small number of opponents and supporters of Paxton protested and occasionally confronted one another. “What he’s doing is the right thing, and the speaker is doing the wrong thing,” said a 76-year-old retired information systems manager from Austin, who declined to give his name.

Ilan Levin, 54, an associate director at an Austin nonprofit, stood beside his bicycle arguing with Paxton’s supporters. He held a cardboard sign that said, “IMPEACH!!!” But he said he did not think the impeachment vote would have a big impact.

“A lot of Texans will forget about it by the next election cycle,” he said.

The Texas State Capitol, on Saturday, May 27, 2023.

By KELLEN BROWNING

When more than 11,000 film and television writers in the Writers Guild of America union went on strike this month, they called out deteriorating working conditions, criticized unfair pay and said they worried about losing their jobs to artificial intelligence.

One of their demands stood out: Hollywood writers wanted studios to guarantee them weeks of work at a time, giving them some certainty, rather than a new method that would hire them by the day. In other words, they want to avoid becoming part of the gig economy.

Adam Conover, a comedian, said studios were trying to “employ us one day a week like we’re Uber drivers.” David Simon, creator of “The Wire,” wrote that screenwriting had become “a ruthless gig economy.” And Lisa Takeuchi Cullen, a writer and producer for “Law and Order: SVU,” tweeted that “we fight for writing as a career and not a cheap gig.”

“We’re looking at a future where writers could be hired per day in order to come in and work on an ongoing series,” Takeuchi Cullen said in an interview. Writers already work on a freelance basis, but she said day-to-day arrangements were more unpredictable and left them in a bind, unable to predict their finances or pay their rent. “Suddenly, a television writer is going from job to job to job, trying to patch together their annual income.”

In other words, for some, gig work has become shorthand for instability and low wages. That’s what state lawmakers in Minnesota thought, too, when they passed a bill this month guaranteeing minimum pay for Uber and Lyft drivers that they said would add a layer of security to a challenging career. It was vetoed by the governor Thursday, one sign of how fraught the question of protections for an ad hoc workforce has become.

The writers strike and demands have prompted renewed attention to gig work, where someone might work for a variety of companies or for themselves, often with irregular hours. It’s an old concept, with musicians playing gigs and artists and other creative types working their own hours while selling their work.

Over the past decade, the idea of gig work has been popularized by app-based platforms like Uber and Lyft, which classify their drivers as independent contractors and avoid treating them as employees. Many fulltime workers, especially those in low-wage jobs, were enticed to these platforms by the prospect of working flexible hours and driving passengers around to make money.

The allure of flexibility soon gave way to a reality of low pay and unreliable hours, labor advocates say, though the companies say that drivers’ wages are still increasing and that record numbers of people are driving on their platforms.

Still, the shifting perception of Uber and similar companies has caused some workers to sour on the idea of gig labor, even though workers for online platforms make up only a small part of the gig economy and less than 1% of the overall labor force, by some estimates.

“Gig work has become a dirty word. Ten years ago, it still contained this possibility of freedom from the 9-to-5,” said Louis Hyman, the author of a book about the gig economy and temporary work. “It’s gone from being the possibility of freedom to the certainty of insecurity.”

It’s difficult to determine how big the U.S. gig labor force is today, in part because gig work has so many different possible meanings. Most estimates, including from federal data and academic studies, suggest that 10% to 15% of U.S. workers rely on or participate in alternative or gig work, though some tallies suggest that as many as a third of U.S. workers occasionally receive some kind of supplemental income from this work.

Though drivers for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Instacart make up a small percentage of this workforce, their concerns — about earning less money, growing expenses and the increasing dangers of their job — have reverberated across the gig industry.

Bitter fights between labor advocates and the companies have erupted across the country over whether drivers should be considered part of the gig economy at all. Labor activists contend that the platforms are misclassifying their drivers as independent contractors and depriving them of labor protections and employee benefits, while not allowing them to act fully autonomously. The companies say that drivers prefer the flexibility of being independent and that they have cobbled together some compromises that offer limited benefits while maintaining that flexibility.

Some drivers say they have seen their wages decline. When Eid Ali started driving for Uber and Lyft in Minnesota nearly a decade ago, he said, he earned as much as $400 per week driving full time. Over the past few years, it’s been more like $100 or $150, before expenses, for the same number of hours driven.

For drivers like him, “it was a slow realization,” Ali said. He said drivers initially gushed about the benefits of being a gig worker, with decent pay and flexibility. Now they are more likely to dissuade others from such work.

“They used to say something positive about the gig economy: ‘Yes, we are making enough to feed our families, it is flexible, we are working whenever we want,’” he said. “That is not there now. It’s gone.”

Ali, president of an advocacy group called the Minnesota Uber/Lyft Drivers Association, helped push for the Minnesota gig bill.

Others say they have not seen much of an erosion in the promise of gig work. It is still a popular way for people to earn money on the side, and a coalition called Protect AppBased Drivers and Services, which is backed by the gig companies, said driver earnings are rising. The coalition pointed to compromises — like Proposition 22 in California, which

prevented drivers from being classified as employees but gave them a minimum wage and limited benefits — as signs of progress.

“More than 1.3 million Californians choose to work with an app-based rideshare or delivery platform because this kind of work offers guaranteed earnings and benefits like access to a health care stipend,” said Molly Weedn, a coalition spokesperson.

Alexsiya Flores, a part-time gig driver for companies like DoorDash and Shipt, a delivery service, said she has not “seen that much pushback — I’ve seen things getting better” because of minimum-pay bills like Prop 22.

“I am always looking for things that have flexibility,” said Flores, a filmmaker in Los Angeles who is part of the industry coalition.

Still, labor experts and advocates say the term “gig work,” in the minds of many, has become a stand-in for low-paid or exploitative work — in part because of how people perceive companies like Uber.

“Uber and Lyft have made that more negative connotation more prominent,” said Laura Padin, director of work structures at the National Employment Law Project, which has argued that gig drivers should be classified as employees. “There’s been a shift in what people see about those types of jobs. People realized they’re not as good as they seemed” initially.

Low pay and unhappy working conditions are far from exclusive to the gig economy, and might even be reasons gig work continues to grow, despite its drawbacks.

“These kinds of low-paid platform jobs are only possible because the rest of the economy has failed the American worker,” Hyman, the author, said, arguing that the financial stress for workers in retail and service industries made Uber seem like a favorable alternative.

Has ‘gig work’ become a dirty word?

A traveler enters a car from a ride-hailing service at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on April 19, 2022.

Wall Street Rallies, European Shares See Biggest Gain in 2 Months

Wall Street’s main indexes rose and European shares logged their largest one-day gain in two months on Friday as talks on raising the U.S. debt ceiling progressed.

Treasury yields climbed as investors rethought how long interest rates were likely to keep rising.

Democratic and Republican negotiators were still struggling to reach a deal to raise the U.S. government’s debt ceiling with the deadline looming.

The MSCI world equity index, which tracks shares in 49 nations, gained 1.09% but was still down 0.51% on the week.

U.S. data showed stronger-than-expected consumer spending in April. The increase in personal consumption expenditures (PCE) raised expectations the Federal Reserve will hike interest rates again in either June or July.

U.S. President Joe Biden and top congressional Republican Kevin McCarthy appeared to be closing in on an agreement ahead of a June 1 deadline that would raise the government’s $31.4 trillion debt ceiling for two years. A top Republican, however, said there were disagreements over some benefit programs for low-income Americans. Meanwhile, after the market close Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen extended the deadline for raising the debt limit to June 5.

The dollar eased against a basket of currencies, but was still on track for a third straight weekly gain as markets bet on higher-for-longer interest rates. [FRX/]

Gold advanced from two-month lows, and oil prices rose.

Euro zone government bond yields were higher as robust economic data and hawkish remarks by central bank officials triggered some upward repricing in market bets on euro zone interest rates.

“This week has been a bit of a wake-up call to rate expectations. There is a realization that inflation is going to be stickier for a lot longer,” said Mike Hewson, chief markets strategist at CMC Markets.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.00% to 33,093.34, the S&P 500 gained 1.30% to 4,205.45 and the Nasdaq Composite climbed 2.19% to 12,975.69.

Chip stocks surged for a second day on optimism about artificial intelligence. Marvell Technology Inc finished up more than 30% after it forecast its annual artificial-intelligence (AI) revenue would double.

Shares of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, Nvidia Corp, added 2.54% after vaulting to a record high on Thursday following a bumper forecast.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index closed 1.2% higher, bouncing back from Thursday’s eight-week low. Swedish gaming company Embracer jumped 13.1% to top the index, and Faurecia added 7.5% after Jefferies upgraded the French car parts maker to “buy”.

Italy hopes to close 2023 with economic growth of between 1.2%-1.4%, higher than the official target set at 1% in

MOST ASSERTIVE STOCKS

PUERTO RICO STOCKS COMMODITIES CURRENCY

April, Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti said.

The yield on two-year Treasury notes, which rises with traders’ expectations of higher federal fund rates, rose to 4.5598% from 4.51% previously.

In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei rose 0.4% with revenue and production upgrades for Nvidia boosting Japanese firms with exposure. [.T]

The cost of insuring exposure to U.S. government debt dropped on Friday.

China’s yuan slid along with Chinese stocks as the shine comes off expectations of a booming post-pandemic recovery, sending steel prices in the country to a three-year low.

“The U.S. debt issues are not the only ‘ceiling’ that we are dealing with, as a slowdown in Chinese economic data suggests that a ceiling for growth may be forming as well,” said RBC technical strategist George Davis.

Brent crude settled 69 cents, or 0.9%, higher at $76.95 a barrel and U.S. crude closed up 84 cents, or 1.2%, to $72.67 as traders juggled conflicting messages on supply from key producers ahead of the next OPEC+ policy meeting.[O/R]

Spot gold prices rose 0.33% to $1,946.69 an ounce, and gold futures edged up 0.03% to settle at $1,944.30.

Kyiv repels its largest ever drone attack launched by Russian forces

By MARC SANTORA and ANDRÉS R. MARTÍNEZ

Explosions echoed across Ukraine’s capital for hours before dawn Sunday as air defense teams raced to combat the largest swarm of Russian attack drones targeting Kyiv since the war began more than 15 months ago.

The Ukrainian air force said it had shot down 52 out of 54 Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones aimed at targets in central Ukraine, describing the number launched as a record. More than 40 drones were intercepted over the capital, where city officials said at least one person had been killed and another injured, probably by falling debris.

As Ukraine draws closer to launching a counteroffensive aimed at reclaiming land lost in the first months of the war, Moscow has stepped up its assaults on Kyiv. The capital has been attacked 14 times this month by waves of Russian drones, cruise missiles and sophisticated ballistic missiles.

“This was the largest-ever drone attack on the capital since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, particularly using Shahed loitering munitions,” the Kyiv military administration said in a statement.

Ukraine’s complex air defense network has become adept at intercepting the Russian barrages, often shooting down the majority of the dozens of drones and missiles. The arrival this spring of the American-made Patriot system, the most advanced U.S. ground-based air-defense system, has given it an added layer of protection. This month Ukrainian air defenses managed for the first time to shoot down some of the most sophisticated conventional weapons in Russia’s arsenal, hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, according to Ukrainian and U.S. officials.

Although nearly every assault on Kyiv in May has been thwarted, the attack Sunday was the first to result in the loss of life.

One person died and another was hospitalized after debris from a downed drone hit a seven-story nonresidential building, the Kyiv military administration said in a statement. It said the roof of a shopping mall caught fire and a warehouse was set ablaze.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine praised the work of Ukraine’s air defense forces, calling them heroes.

“Every time you shoot down enemy drones and missiles, lives are saved,” he wrote in a statement on the Telegram mes-

saging app.

The assault on the capital came as Ukrainians prepared to mark the city’s founding 1,541 years ago, a holiday traditionally celebrated on the last Sunday in May.

“The history of Ukraine is a long-standing irritant for complex Russians,” Andriy Yermak, a senior adviser to Zelenskyy, said after the assault, vowing revenge.

Mykola Oleshchuk, the commander of the Ukrainian air force, said the “record number” of drones aimed at Kyiv were “gifts” from Russia on Kyiv Day but that air defense teams working through the night had probably saved hundreds of lives by ensuring “only fragments” remained by the time the assault ended.

Ukrainian officials were quick to note that Russia has targeted the capital since the first days of the war, when they hoped to quickly seize Kyiv. The intensity of the assaults has ebbed and flowed — with Ukrainian officials saying that Russia is constantly trying to adapt its tactics.

In the latest attack, air alarms sounded in Kyiv around 1 a.m. on Sunday as the first wave of Shahed-136 drones streaming toward the city was detected.

“The routes of these aircraft were somewhat unconventional,” Natalia Humeniuk, the spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern command, said in an appearance on nation-

al television.

“They tried to bypass the southern air defense as much as possible, as evidenced by the fact that they flew mainly over the temporarily occupied territories and then dispersed across Ukraine,” she added, saying that the drones had hugged riverbeds in an attempt to evade radar.

The Ukrainian air force has explained how missiles and drones become less visible on radar the closer they press to the ground, which is one reason it is hard to shoot them down outside the Kyiv city limits.

Ukraine’s most sophisticated air-defense systems like the Patriot — which employs interceptor missiles that cost $4 million per shot — are largely reserved for countering Moscow’s most sophisticated missiles. To counter the Iranian-made drones Russia has been launching, Ukraine has tended to rely on less expensive weapons such as anti-aircraft guns and Stinger missiles.

Around 2 a.m., the skies above Kyiv lit up with tracer fire as the Ukrainian air defense teams took aim at the drones over the heart of the city.

While the drones themselves, with their distinctive triangular wing design, were often not immediately visible to civilians watching the battle in the sky, when the Ukrainians found their target, the resulting explosion looked like a fireworks display.

For nearly five hours, explosions echoed across the capital until the last drone disappeared from Ukrainian radar.

Here’s what else is happening in Ukraine:

— Front-line strikes: Russian attacks on towns and cities closer to the front line continued. Ukrainian officials said Russian shelling of the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine injured at least one person. Russian fire killed at least one person in the town of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine, the officials said. Nearly two dozen villages near the front in the southern Zaporizhzhia region were hit in artillery attacks, injuring at least four civilians, local officials said. Russia also continued to shell towns and cities close to the border, killing two people in the Kharkiv region, local officials said.

— Dnipro death toll: Local officials said the death toll from a Russian missile strike on a medical facility in Dnipro on Friday has climbed to four. Authorities initially expressed hopes that people still listed as missing might be found alive.

“The three people who went missing during the missile attack on Dnipro have been found,” the Dnipro military administration said in a statement Sunday. “Unfortunately, they have been killed.”

A 56-year-old doctor, a 64-year-old employee of the damaged medical facility and a 57-year-old employee of a neighboring veterinary clinic were among the victims.

— Bakhmut: Combat has largely subsided in the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, with only one clash reported over the past 24 hours, Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s eastern forces, said Sunday on national television.

Russia now controls the shattered city after a bloody monthslong battle, and the Wagner mercenary group — whose fighters led much of the assault — appears to be following through on a pledge by its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to withdraw from there. Cherevaty said Russia was “rotating its troops, replacing Wagner” fighters with other units. That echoed an assessment from Britain’s defense intelligence agency on Saturday.

Ukrainian officials have said Kyiv’s forces had recaptured land on the northern and southern outskirts of Bakhmut. But Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy minister of defense, said Saturday that Ukraine had halted combat operations there for now.

A tobacco factory damaged by debris in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sunday, May 28, 2023.

Flood-battered Italian region may see more violent and frequent storms

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

The floods that submerged the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna this month, killing 15 people, leaving thousands homeless and grinding transportation and businesses to a halt, were not one-off events, warn experts, who predict that there are more similar, frequent and violent storms to come.

“The question to ask,” the country’s civil protection minister, Nello Musumeci, told an Italian newspaper, “is not whether a disastrous event” like the deadly flooding will happen again, “but when and where it will occur.”

The causes of floods are complex, including land development and ground conditions. But many experts in Italy, including Barbara Lastoria, a hydraulic engineer, have linked the two devastating storms that occurred over two weeks to climate change.

The amount of water that fell — about 19.6 inches of rain in 15 days, more than half the average annual rainfall in the region — was extraordinary, experts say, exacerbated by a monthslong drought that had left the terrain struggling to absorb all of that rain. It swelled nearly two dozen rivers and sent billions of gallons of water pouring into streets and untold acres of farmland.

The storms found fertile ground for disaster because of events both natural and humanmade, including questionable decisions and decades of neglect of some infrastructure.

About 70% of Emilia-Romagna was already at risk of flooding — “a well-known fact,” said Francesco Violo, the president of the National Council of Geologists. And of the 80,000 landslides that have been mapped there, several hundred were reactivated by the recent storms, he added.

The area that flooded is a low-lying flood plain for the Po River. And the widely held view among geologists and hydraulic engineers is that the region’s urbanization in recent decades not only reduced the space where water could flow but also contributed to the sinking of vast areas where water had been extracted to keep foundations dry.

Rivers were channeled, narrowed, diverted and entombed over generations. Riverbeds and embankments have not been properly maintained; vegetation and animal dens have weakened levees. Many canals, waterways and dams built in past decades — centuries, even — to calm waters flowing down from the Apennine Mountains have been partly neglected.

“Structures to intercept water had been built over many years, and even if many still

function, some others have to be fixed up in terms of retrofitting and maintenance so that they can be used again in an optimal configuration,” said Lastoria, who works with the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research.

In response to the floods, the Italian government on Tuesday set aside 2 billion euros ($2.15 billion) for the flood-stricken area, but Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said that the full damage still had to be evaluated and that more funds would go toward reconstruction.

Experts say rebuilding must go hand in hand with preventive measures to at least mitigate the effects of future storms.

“Prevention, maintenance, protection pay off significantly,” said Carlo Carraro, president emeritus and a professor of environmental economics at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

But Italy is one of the few countries that have not approved a European Commission directive, the National Adaptation Plan, that obliges all European Union member nations to adopt policies to reduce their vulnerability to climate change.

On Wednesday, Musumeci, the civil protection minister, told a Senate briefing that the plan would be out at the end of this year or

the start of next year, “updated with data processed between 2016 and 2020.” He said that the plan “had not made significant progress” for years but that a “major acceleration” would now take place.

Studies have shown that every euro invested in these policies equaled five or six euros in averted damage, Carraro said.

“Extreme events have always happened, but because of climate change, they are becoming more frequent” and more expensive, he said.

Italy has spent 75 billion euros over 40 years on damage caused by severe weather events, according to an estimate by the European Environment Agency. “It is an average value that hides, however, an exponential trend,” Carraro said.

There are many departments, regional officers and officials in municipalities responsible for assessing risks and planning countermeasures to disasters. But they are fragmented, said Violo, from the geologists’ council.

“Often they don’t work together to coordinate necessary interventions,” he said. “It would be important to create a central office that could ensure a long-term vision, over years, because if ordinary plans aren’t kept up,

then emergencies happen.”

Centuries ago, the country began building artificial barriers and dams in many mountainous areas, which make up about 70% of Italian territory, but maintenance was gradually abandoned. The solution to flooding on lowerlying plains starts there, said Mauro Agnoletti, the UNESCO Chair on Agricultural Heritage at the University of Florence. Maintenance must be increased, he said, “especially in areas upstream of cities.”

Italians generally do not dwell on the fact that their livelihoods, or their lives, could be at risk from natural calamities — at least not until disaster strikes, experts say.

That indifference puts risk assessment and risk prevention “out of the political agenda,” said Erasmo D’Angelis, the former head of Safe Italy, a government organization, who evaluated such risks and allocated funds to offset them.

“Major, national public works project must immediately get on the way in order to ensure the safety of millions of citizens,” he said, “not to mention an enormous industrial and cultural heritage.”

To confront the challenges of climate change, some experts have suggested stopping land consumption and redeveloping or reclaiming abandoned, polluted or degraded areas. Where new construction is deemed unavoidable, they say, it should take into account existing hydraulic conditions and guarantee that they would be maintained after completion.

“Ensure that climate change is factored into all planning,” said Ilaria Falconi of the Italian Society of Environmental Geology.

Some have also proposed building reservoirs along rivers, but that can run into political opposition. D’Angelis noted that building reservoirs to stop flooding from the Seveso River in Milan led to “harsh battles” with town mayors and took years.

Others say that Italy already has many structures that could be revived for the protection of millions.

“Dams already exist in Italy in the best places they could be built; the problem is recovering them so that they work to their full potential,” said Lastoria.

She suggested broader solutions like more sustainable agriculture, rethinking how “how we occupy the territory, to give back some space to water” and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“There is no quick simple solution, no magic wand; that’s why you need to plan,” Lastoria said. “Otherwise, we risk reaching a point of no return.”

Excavators work on both sides of Santerno river in order to build a retaining dike and to tear down a home severely damaged by the flooding in the rural area surrounding Lugo (Ravenna) on Saturday, May 20, 2023.

For these veterans, ‘free’ health care is a 5-hour flight away

By PETE McKENZIE

Ovenny Jermeto was on a combat tour 7,000 miles away from his island home in the Pacific when a bomb blew up his vehicle in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan. He survived and completed his deployment, but later lost feeling in his right foot and struggled with anxiety and depression.

He returned to the United States to finish his enlistment, eventually getting discharged on medical grounds. Then, he had to make a difficult decision: remain in the United States for free health care or return home to the Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and spend thousands of dollars a year traveling to military hospitals in America for treatment.

This is a predicament for hundreds of people from the Marshall Islands, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia — all former American colonies in Pacific Micronesia — who served in the U.S. military as foreign citizens. Thousands of foreign citizens enlist in the U.S. military every year; hundreds of them are from Micronesia, a result of the country’s close ties to the United States. According to the State Department, the regional rate of enlistment is double the rate in the United States, with almost 1% of Micronesians serving.

The Veterans Affairs Department, which oversees veterans’ benefits, is largely hamstrung. Federal law prohibits it from directly providing medical services to veterans in foreign countries other than the Philippines, a department spokesperson said. Most veterans are not entitled to use the Military Health System, which is overseen by the Defense Department and is responsible for active-duty soldiers, retirees and their families.

Jermeto, 44, chose to move back to Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, in 2019, almost a decade after the episode in Afghanistan. Since then, he has scrounged for three trips to the closest U.S. military hospital, a five-hour flight away in Hawaii, and spent years without medication. To cope, he said, he drinks regularly with other veterans. He tries to limit himself to 12 beers a session. The alcohol emboldens him to share memories of Afghanistan, which in turn allows him to cry.

“The only option is drinking,” he said. “Drinks are my meds.”

Hospitals in the Marshall Islands should, theoretically, be an option. VA spokesper-

son John Santos said that although the department could not directly provide care outside America, it reimburses veterans if they get it. All veterans are eligible for subsidized care, and those with conditions related to their service get it for free. But health systems in Micronesia are so short of resources that getting care locally is practically impossible.

Traveling to VA hospitals is also not easy. Federal law permits the VA to compensate veterans for health-related travel, but regulations restrict that to movement within the United States and its territories. Micronesian officials estimate that hundreds of veterans live there, but they do not have a precise number.

The United States has expanded its support for Micronesia in recent years, largely driven by concern over China’s efforts to win influence in the region. The Marshall Islands, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia are independent but remain closely affiliated with the United States, which controls their defense policy and funds much of their government spending under agreements known as compacts of free association.

Another Marshallese veteran, Misao

Masao, 40, served two tours in Iraq. On the second, a friend took his spot on a patrol that was hit by two suicide bombers. Masao’s friend was killed.

“It could have been me,” said Masao, who has struggled with anxiety and depression ever since. He was prescribed a cocktail of six medications, but the difficulty of traveling to the VA hospital in Honolulu means that “I run out of medication all the time.”

The United States, Masao said, “forgot” him. “If you treat my fellow soldier in California good, then treat your fellow soldier in the Marshall Islands the same,” he added. The VA declined to comment.

There has been a bipartisan push in Congress to address the issue.

“This is a question of basic fairness,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said in an interview. “If someone puts on the uniform to serve our nation, they should be given the same benefits that our service members receive, no matter where they live.”

In 2019, Schatz proposed legislation that would require the VA to experiment with providing services to veterans in Micronesia through telehealth and by opening small clinics there. The bill remains stalled.

Jermeto enlisted in 2006. He was fresh out of college with a young son to provide for and few job prospects. Soon he wrapped up a tour of Iraq. In 2011, he was sent to the Pech River Valley in Afghanistan, where he patrolled narrow mountain roads.

One day his vehicle struck an explosive device. When he regained consciousness, he said, he saw that shrapnel had gouged his right leg, shredded his gunner’s belly and sliced into his commander’s left arm.

Treatment helped him complete the tour. But he eventually lost feeling in the leg and was incapacitated by anxiety and depression.

By the time he was discharged in 2018, he could not tolerate crowded areas, so he sought refuge in the Marshall Islands. But even there, his condition, he said, forces him to isolate from family.

Traveling to “the mainland,” as many Marshallese refer to the United States, to refill his prescriptions can be prohibitively expensive. Jermeto, whose main source of income is a disability benefit, can catch a free military flight from a nearby American base to Honolulu, but a round-trip flight from his home to the base costs about $500. The military flight is also often full. Hotels and food in Hawaii can cost hundreds more.

In April, Jermeto traveled to Honolulu for his third VA appointment since his discharge. But a scheduling error forced him to wait three more weeks to consult a doctor in person and refill his prescriptions.

Kalani Kaneko, a Marshallese senator and former health minister, has repeatedly appealed to VA officials to treat people like Jermeto like other hard-to-reach veterans.

“We’re not trying to invent new ways of operating in the VA because they’re the same things they’re doing now for those isolated places in the United States,” Kaneko said.

Kaneko, 47, is a two-decade veteran of the U.S. Army. He suffered traumatic brain injuries while training as a tank driver in Fort Irwin, California, for which he takes several medications and travels frequently to a VA hospital in Portland, Oregon, for care.

But his main motivation to push for change is a sense of guilt. Toward the end of Kaneko’s military career, he worked as an Army recruiter. He persuaded Jermeto and many other Marshallese men to enlist.

“I lose sleep over that,” Kaneko said. “They could have been better off doing something else, but I pursued them.”

The Marshallese neighborhood in Waipahu, Hawaii, which has the second-biggest Marshallese community in the United States, after Arkansas, May 9, 2023.

My fantasy bookshelf

By ROSS DOUTHAT

After filing last week’s newsletter comparing “Succession” to a work of “Game of Thrones”-style fantasy, I recorded a podcast episode with Razib Khan in which we talked about our shared affection for actual fantasy novels, our experience as early George R.R. Martin adopters and other matters of deep nerd interest. It was a wide-ranging conversation, but one that stayed mostly with the big names of the genre — Martin, J.R.R. Tolkien, a few others — rather than offering a detailed list of reading recommendations. So since we’re headed into a holiday weekend and everyone needs a true break from politics, I thought I’d offer a short list of novels for anyone interested in the kinds of things fantasy does well and looking for almostsummer entertainment.

To be clear, this isn’t a list of my all-time favorites or even a list of “fantasy novels that should be adapted for TV instead of making more seasons of ‘The Rings of Power.’” It’s just me turning a glance at my bookshelf into a newsletter. But one thing I said to Khan is that I think the great 21st-century fantasy saga is still to be written — one that uses the multivolume, fatpaperback architecture that developed in imitation of Tolkien to fit a lot of different ideas and characters and experiments inside the epic framework; one that achieves what Martin was clearly shooting for with “A Song of Ice and Fire,” but at a higher level of literary craft and without his HBO-mediated writer’s block. You can think of this list of novels, maybe, as

various inspirations for that imagined perfection.

“The Goblin Emperor” by Katherine Addison

This is a striking stand-alone novel, written in a controlled, almost Kazuo Ishiguro-an style, about a half-goblin prince suddenly elevated to the throne of a highly cultured elven empire. A pure novel of court politics, where the game of thrones barely leaves the palace, its main imperfection is that its youthful-emperor protagonist becomes a successful power player a little bit too easily and without much moral cost. But the style and setting and court language stay with you; they’re achievement enough. (Addison’s shorter, more novellaish follow-ups, featuring a gay elven detective operating elsewhere in the same empire, are more Ishiguro-an still.)

The “Farseer” trilogy by Robin Hobb

This is another story rooted in court politics and featuring an unwanted royal scion, but more expansive and closer to the standard architecture of high fantasy — multiple books, magical warfare, rumors of apocalypse and so on. Hobb’s hero, Fitz, is one of the most successful examples of character-building and compelling interiority in recent fantasy. The world around him is more unevenly constructed, with some brilliant core ideas surrounded by a certain amount of superficial sketch work and oddly cardboard villains for such psychologically focused storytelling. But I read not just the initial trilogy but also the six other books in the story, which for my teenage self wouldn’t have meant much but at this stage of my reading life counts as the strongest possible endorsement.

“The Crystal Cave” and “The Hollow Hills” by Mary Stewart

“Since we’re headed into a holiday weekend and everyone needs a true break from politics, I thought I’d offer a short list of novels for anyone interested in the kinds of things fantasy does well and looking for almost-summer entertainment,” writes the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

world Antietam told through shifting battlefield perspectives, and it’s probably his best.

“Spinning Silver” and “Uprooted” by Naomi Novik

These are stand-alone novels but spiritual siblings, attempts to play with the mood and setting and rhythms of a fairy tale in a Slavic setting. “Uprooted” has the more winning main character and romance; “Spinning Silver” has the more successful plot and the fuller dose of fairyland. The latter also has a strong Jewish component, which was critiqued by Michael Weingrad, author of the entertaining essay “Why There Is No Jewish Narnia.” I think his charge of anachronistic liberalism against Novik’s medieval characters has some bite, but those weaknesses are balanced by other storytelling virtues, a sense of Faerie’s mysteries above all.

“The Book of the New Sun” by Gene Wolfe

Publisher

I’m not an Arthurian-mythos obsessive, and there are a lot of fantasy novels working that particular seam without being distinctive. Stewart’s 1970s-era Merlin novels are exceptions, or maybe they’re just better for being a point of origin for later attempts at historically grounded Arthuriana — with the mystical elements rendered especially well, and likewise the story of kingdom-building after Rome’s decay. The subsequent installments, “The Last Enchantment” and then the Mordred-focused “The Wicked Day,” falter a bit by trying to shoehorn too much of the mythos into a plausible Britainin-late-antiquity timeline. But the first two books, which carry the story from Merlin’s boyhood through Tintagel to Arthur’s ascent to the throne, were my favorites as a teenager and remained favorites when I came back to them more recently.

“The Heroes” by Joe Abercrombie

Abercrombie has written a lot of novels that basically offer what Martin gets accused of delivering: a fantasy world ruled almost entirely by cynicism and violence, every romantic trope deconstructed, every piety undermined. He has a picaresque style that carries this off more entertainingly than that description might suggest — though eventually to diminishing returns. But his most interesting work is an attempt at genre-mixing, a trio of books doing, respectively, a Western, a “Count of Monte Cristo”-style revenge plot and a battle novel in the style of Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels.” “The Heroes” is the single-battle book, a fantasy-

This is just a classic at this point rather than a contemporary recommendation, but I’m including it as an excuse to note Brian Phillips’ terrific essay on Wolfe, which sells his work better than I possibly could.

“Memory, Sorrow and Thorn” by Tad Williams

Williams’ trilogy actually is the modern fantasy saga that I recommend to would-be fantasy adapters at HBO or Amazon. It has all the classic genre elements — the court politics and the supernatural backdrop, the world hovering between modernity and magic, even the commoner in love with a princess — held together and balanced more successfully than in almost any competitor. It’s realistic and plays around with Tolkienian expectations without being grim-dark or tediously deconstructionist; it’s politically minded without being swallowed up by its intrigues; it’s derivative of the medieval world but self-aware about its subcreation’s debt to our reality. And most importantly, it’s well written and carries off its ending without getting lost in world-building longueurs. Williams wrapped up the final novel when Robert Jordan was at his peak and Martin was getting going, and you can feel in his last book (big enough to be split in two for paperbacks) the expansionist temptations that prevented those two authors from finishing their sagas — but also a strong reeling-in impulse, a thus-far-and-no-further awareness, pulling his story inward and back to a successful ending.

May we all have such wisdom. Happy Memorial Day.

Dr. Ricardo Angulo

POR EL STAR STAFF

SAN JUAN – El Festival Casals culmina esta semana con un variado programa que incluye los conciertos del guitarrista cubano René Izquierdo, el violonchelista danés Jonathan Swensen y la ópera Porgy and Bess. Izquierdo se presenta este martes, 30 de mayo, a las 7:00pm en la Sala Jesús María

Sanromá del Teatro Bertita y Guillermo Martínez en el Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico (CMPR). Swensen le sigue el miércoles, 31 de mayo, a las 7:00pm en la misma sala. El festival tendrá su clausura con la presentación de la Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico (OSPR) interpretando la famosa ópera Porgy and Bess el sábado, 3 de junio, a las 7:00pm en la Sala Sinfónica Pablo Casals del Centro de Bellas Artes en Santurce (CBA). Para este gran cierre, la OSPR estará dirigida por el director brasileño Fabio Mechetti y estarán acompañados por la soprano puertorriqueña Melba Ramos, el barítono Eric McKeever y la Coral Filarmónica de San Juan, dirigida por Carmen Acevedo Lucio.

En el concierto de este martes, Rene Izquierdo interpretará con su guitarra la Guajira a mi madre de Antonio Rojas; Mirándote de Eduardo Martín; Perla marina de Sindo Garay y La comparsa de Ernesto Lecuona. Asimismo presentará un compendio de danzas cubanas y música puertorriqueña, como Velorio de Ignacio Cervantes y Romanza de Juan Sorroche.

Actualmente radicado en los Estados Unidos, Izquierdo nació en La Habana, Cuba. Se ha establecido firmemente como uno de los virtuosos de la guitarra clásica del mundo. Es célebre por su habilidad para tejer un dominio técnico incomparable de su instrumento con su don de narración, logrando una experiencia musical íntima con su audiencia. Ha actuado con gran éxito en giras por América, Europa y Asia. Se ha presentado en prestigiosos escenarios como el Carnegie Hall de Nueva York, la Ópera de Manaus en Brasil y el National Recital Hall de Taiwán.

Por su parte, el chelista Jonathan Swensen presentará la pieza Fantasia de Despedida de Bent Sørensen; la Suite núm. 4 para chelo, BWV 1010 de

Johann Sebastian Bach; Tres estrofas sobre el nombre de Sacher de Henri Dutilleux; Las alas de la primavera de Bent Sørensen; y la Sonata para chelo solo, Op. 8 de Zoltán Kodály.

Swensen es considerado una gran estrella en ascenso del violonchelo. Es un artista de música de cámara muy solicitado en los Estados Unidos y Europa. Recibió la Beca de carrera Avery Fisher 2022 y ha sido destacado como el “Nuevo artista del mes” de Musical America y “One to Watch” en la revista Gramophone. En su prometedora carrera ha compartido escenario con orquestas como la Orquesta Ciudad de Granada, la Filarmónica de Copenhague, la Orquesta Sinfónica de Aarhus, la Orquesta Sinfónica de Odense, la Orquesta Sinfónica de Islandia, la Sinfónica de Mobile y la Sinfónica de Greenville. Además, ha tenido recitales aclamados por la crítica en el Kennedy Center y en el Merkin Concert Hall de Nueva York. En el 2022 lanzó su álbum debut “Fantasía” con obras para violonchelo solo, que recibió críticas muy favorables.

Para el cierre del Festival, la Orquesta Sinfónica de Puerto Rico interpretará la pieza Choros núm. 6 de Héitor Villa-Lobos y el arreglo de Robert Russell Bennett de la obra Porgy and Bess: A Concert of Songs para soprano, barítono, coro y orquesta, compuesta por George Gershwin. El reconocido director brasileño Fabio Mechetti estará como director invitado y el concierto contará con la participación de la soprano puertorriqueña Melba Ramos en el papel principal, junto al barítono Eric McKeever y la Coral Filarmónica de San Juan, dirigida por Carmen Acevedo Lucio.

“No saben cuán contenta me puse cuando mi agente me informó que estaba siendo invitada a participar en el Festival Casals. Volver a cantar en la tierra donde nací es algo que me llena de mucha alegría. Volver a ver a mis amigos y colegas y hacer música de nuevo con ellos. Doy gracias al cielo y a los responsables por esta oportunidad”, manifestó Melba Ramos sobre su regreso a los escenarios puertorriqueños.

Actualmente radicada en Austria, Ramos nació en Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. Obtuvo el Primer Premio en las Competencias del Metropolitan Opera distri-

to de Puerto Rico los años 1987, 1988 y 1989. Logró su primer contrato como soprano en Europa en el año 1992 en la Opera de Wuppertal de Alemania. Ramos ha participado en numerosos conciertos y festivales en ciudades alrededor del mundo como Tokio, Osaka, Yokohama, Kyoto, Salisburgo, Halle, Bad Uhrach, entre otras. A lo largo de su exitosa carrera de más de tres décadas ha interpretado importantes roles en prestigiosas puestas en escena como “Lucía di Lammemour”, “Don Pasquale”, “La Traviata”, “Madame Butterly”, “Aida” y muchas más.

Los boletos para todos los conciertos están disponibles en ticketera.com. Para el concierto de clausura, las personas también podrán adquirir boletos en la boletería del CBA.

Padre del gobernador será enterrado el miércoles

POR CYBERNEWS

S AN JUAN – El gobernador Pedro Rafael Pierluisi Urrutia informó que los actos fúnebres de su padre, el exsecretario del Departamento de la Vivienda, Jorge Pierluisi Díaz, comenzarán el martes 30 de mayo en la Parroquia Santa Teresita en Santurce a las 3:00 p.m. y a

las 6:00 p.m. se celebrará la Santa Misa por su eterno descanso.

El sepelio se llevará a cabo el miércoles 31 de mayo de 2023, a las 10:00 a.m. en el Cementerio Nacional de Puerto Rico en Bayamón.

Pierluisi Díaz dedicó gran parte de su vida al servicio, inició su carrera como teniente del Ejército de los Esta-

dos Unidos y trabajó como secretario del Departamento de la Vivienda de Puerto Rico durante ocho años.

Además, Don Georgie fue un ingeniero civil, presidió la Asociación de Contratistas Generales en Puerto Rico y recibió el Premio Alejandro Herrero, el más alto honor de la industria de la construcción. Continuó su labor en la industria como árbitro y mediador hasta su retiro.

Última semana del Festival Casals 2023 presenta conciertos de guitarra, chelo y el gran cierre con la ópera Porgy and Bess

Tornado. Treasure. There was nobody like Tina Turner.

By WESLEY MORRIS

My paperback of “I, Tina” is falling apart. Anytime I open it, a new page goes fluttering out. Last night, it was page 37. Tina Turner’s talking about the songs that grabbed her as a little kid. LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle Dee” got her because it was quick. “I always liked the fast ones,” Turner writes, “liked that energy, even then.”

You can call this thing a memoir — she spoke it, in 1986, to Kurt Loder, who interpolated it as literature. But it’s always read like a recipe book to me. The ingredients include force, power, will, sex, might. Hence the shock at her death. They’re saying she was 83? Nobody’s buying that. The ingredients made her seem immortal. For seven decades of making music, it all sizzled in her. That energy. It shot from her — from her feet, thighs, hands, arms, shoulders, out of her hair, out of her mouth.

Anytime she and a trio of Ikettes would get to jumping forward, bending over and throwing their arms out, then wagging those fingers, hair a-whipping, it wasn’t merely dancing they were doing, it was sorcery. Tina covered a lot of songs. But I’ve never heard her do “I Put a Spell on You.” She didn’t have to. That dance was it. I read that Adrienne Warren, who played Turner on Broadway, needed physical therapy and personal training to survive the part. For the Hollywood movie of Turner’s life, Angela Bassett essentially became all muscle. They both won acting awards. But the prize most fitting is probably a gold medal.

As a professional vocalist, Turner knew her scales. But I’m sure the scales knew her, too — Richter, Kelvin, Decibel, Fujita-Pearson (that one’s weather for “tornado”). If we’re talking about her doing the Acid Queen in “Tommy,” then the scale must be pH. That energy of hers built a wing of rock ’n’ roll where you can hear a body. Other singers — tremendous, foundational, godly singers — could belt. Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Baker, Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Tina grew up around Pentecostals. She could scream. Loder makes the astute point that Turner arrived in 1960, near the dawn of amplified sound. They were made for each other.

Her first hit, with Ike Turner — the man who named her Tina after the white jungle queens of Saturday matinees, the man she was with a decade and a half, the man who for years put her down and beat her up — was called “A Fool in Love.” The song uses inside-out call-and-response. The backing singers call the chorus, and Tina responds like this: “Yay-ay-heyhey-heeyyy!” The magnitude of her wail and the amplitude of its womanly Blackness stops you cold. It paralyzes you with exhilaration. Mmm hmm: That energy.

And look, it did have ... other ... registers. She growled, panted, moaned, squealed, yipped. Everybody knows that she was fine-looking, but in the middle of a song, conventional beauty went out of the window. Black singers get it: You’re practicing the art of stank. Sometimes to make that art, you need to be art, and Turner’s face mid-song was art at its most arresting, ornate and original: It was cubism. She could be flesh-wound raw and choir-loft ethereal. Take the time, in 1966, that Tina gave herself over to Phil Spector and wound up with “River Deep — Mountain High,” one of the most

triumphant studio moments of any great singer. She takes the title at its word. She’s Sisyphus. After every chorus, she rerolls her love boulder, even across the bridge. There’s tension, between her nature and Spector’s; her sonic force and his symphonic, percussive Wall of Sound. He put a napkin in her lap, and she used it to mop her brow. (Ike hated that song.)

Turner could get her voice down so low, so sweaty, so sensual that she skipped right past suggestive. It was simply what it sounds like it was: that good pain. She could sound ready for, say, whatever pleasure was in store for her toward the end of the version of “Let Me Touch Your Mind” that’s on “Live! The World of Ike & Tina,” from 1973. Onstage, she, with Ike, transformed Otis Redding’s weepy ballad “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” into X-rated psychodrama that Tina had to bring herself to enjoy being part of. She had to find a way to sell it.

I’ve seen the footage of what happens when thousands

of people take her in at once, often mostly white people — in London, in Osaka, Sweden and Los Angeles. I’ve heard them on “Tina Live in Europe,” from 1988. And I cry. They just lose their minds over her, this Black woman raised in the hollows and back roads of Tennessee, in Nutbush. It’s something — to witness her enthrall masses, to rock them; to see an “Oprah” audience go bonkers with awe, as if she were a wonder of the world.

What is that? It’s the survival — of poverty, of Ike, of tuberculosis she didn’t know she had. It’s the hard-won freedom. It’s the way the songs promised she’d survive: “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.” But there’s more: She loved herself, loved being herself. We wanted to catch ourselves some of that. Page 133 of “I, Tina”: “I got to thinking that maybe I was such a mixture of things that it was beyond black-or-white, beyond just cultures — that I was universal!”

Arena Tina, Universal Tina, is the Turner I got: “Private Dancer,” “What’s Love Got to Do with It” Tina. The first time I saw her was probably “Friday Night Videos” when I was 8. And here was this long-looking woman in a leather miniskirt, stockings, heels, a denim jacket and hair as imposing as a lion’s head. Little me wanted to be her strutting down the street in that “What’s Love” video, one leg almost completely crossing the other. She looked bad, certain of her badness, strong — but also soft, the way she’d lean back into a dancer and shimmy with his buddy then shimmy with another dude. When she won all those Grammys in 1985, I wanted to sound like the woman accepting them. Was it Continentalsouthern? Caribbean-showbiz?

This was a new Tina, polished, spiritual, with a devastatingly elegant repossession of image and voice. Her renaissance constituted a statement of command — those weren’t wigs up there, they were headdresses. That energy — it had been reinterpreted as wisdom, wisdom that snarled, wisdom that would rule Thunderdome. The lava had cooled some. The smooth fire in this new life and sound of hers — rock ’n’ roll with pop’s synth sheen — had a musical point: “Show Some Respect,” “Better Be Good to Me.” So we did, so we never stopped.

It just occurred to me what else “I, Tina” is. I’ve read this book ratty, but I’d really never thought about that title. It’s a declaration, yes, the staking of a claim. It’s also the beginning of a vow. To live, I think. To live so fully, so galactically, so contagiously, with so much daring, candor, zest and, yes, energy that no one is ever going to believe it when you die.

Tina Turner performs at Madison Square Garden in New York, April 7, 2000. Tina loved herself, loved being herself. We wanted to catch ourselves some of that, Wesley Morris writes. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

‘Anatomy of a Fall’ wins the Palme d’Or

Zone of Interest.” Directed by Jonathan Glazer and based on the novel of the same title by Martin Amis, the film centers on the commandant of Auschwitz and his wife, whose home is adjacent to the extermination camp. An icy exploration of the banality of evil — the family eats, relaxes and sleeps to the constant sounds of screams, shouts and gunfire — the movie sharply divided the critics here.

“Fallen Leaves,” the latest from Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki, won the Jury Prize. A love story in a gently funny and melancholic key, the movie stars Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen as a couple who meet one night in Helsinki. The actors accepted the award on behalf of their director, who sat out the presentation.

score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died last month.

The best actor prize went to the great veteran Japanese actor Koji Yakusho, star of Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days.” The film centers on a loner who works cleaning (some amazing) public restrooms in Tokyo. His quiet, routinized existence is disrupted by an unexpected visit from a niece, an interlude that brings him joy but also anguish. Wenders, whose documentary “Anselm” was shown out of competition, watched with a broad smile as Yakusho received the award.

By MANOHLA DARGIS

The 76th Cannes Film Festival ended Saturday with the Palme d’Or awarded to “Anatomy of a Fall.” Directed by Justine Triet, this intellectual thriller centers on a woman who is brought to trial after the mysterious death of her husband. Written by Triet and Arthur Harari, the film was an early favorite with critics.

Triet is the third woman to have won the Palme. Julia Ducournau won in

2021 for “Titane,” and Jane Campion took the prize in 1993 for “The Piano.”

The Palme was presented to Triet by Jane Fonda, who noted the “historic” number of women — seven — who had films competing for the top honor. The strong main competition, with a jury led by director Ruben Ostlund, effectively announced that the festival had returned to full strength after several unsteady pandemic years.

The Grand Prix, essentially the festival’s runner-up award, was given to “The

Best director went to VietnameseFrench filmmaker Tran Anh Hung for “The Pot-au-Feu.” A sumptuous drama set in the late 19th century, the film stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel as a gourmand couple who live and cook in rural France. The movie’s focus on the sensual pleasures of food charmed many, although a less-enchanted critic likened it to a French Nancy Meyers movie.

The screenwriting prize was awarded to Yuji Sakamoto for “Monster.” Directed by Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda, this touching drama centers on a boy whose sudden behavior issues at school escalate with profound consequences. “Monster” features a delicate

The best actress prize went to Merve Dizdar for her role as a teacher in “About Dry Grasses” from Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. This slow-boiling drama centers on a male teacher, Samet, who becomes increasingly bitter about his job teaching in remote Eastern Anatolia. Dizdar’s character, Nuray, helps him through his crisis, a stereotypical role that the actress elevates with warmth and subtlety.

The prize for Un Certain Regard, a section that tends to feature younger directors and what the festival calls “more artistically daring” work than in the main competition, went to “How to Have Sex,” the directorial debut from British filmmaker Molly Manning Walker. The prize for first feature, the Caméra d’Or, was given to “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” from Vietnamese-born director Thien An Pham. The Palme for the best short film was presented to “27,” from Hungarian animator Flóra Anna Buda.

“Anatomy of a Fall” director Justine Triet, right, accepts the Palme d’Or from presenter Jane Fonda on Saturday at the 76th Cannes Film Festival.

The secrets to mammals’ ‘cool things’

By EMILY ANTHES

To learn more about humans, a large international team of scientists spent years tracking down some of the strangest creatures on Earth. They camped out on an Arctic ice floe to collect DNA from the one-tusked narwhal, netted a tiny bumblebee bat in a cave-rich region of Southeast Asia and ventured behind the scenes at a Caribbean zoo to draw blood from the slender-snouted solenodon, one of the world’s few venomous mammals.

Researchers compared the genomes of these mammals with those of a diverse assortment of others, including an aardvark, a meerkat, a star-nosed mole and a human. In doing so, they were able to identify stretches of DNA that have barely changed over eons of mammalian evolution and are thus likely to be vital to human health and functioning.

The genetic database they assembled includes the complete genomes of 240 species, covering more than 80% of the planet’s mammalian families (and including humans). It could help scientists answer a wide variety of questions about other animals, such as when and how they evolved and the biological basis for some of their unusual talents.

“What amazingly cool things can those species do that humans can’t do?” said Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute and a co-leader of what is known as the Zoonomia Project. “We always like to think of humans as being the most special species. But it turns out that we’re really quite boring in many ways.”

The Zoonomia data set has limitations. It contains just one genome per species (with the exception of the domestic dog, which was sequenced twice), and thousands of mammals are missing.

But in a new package of papers, published in Science last week, the Zoonomia team showcased the power of this kind of multispecies data. And it’s just the beginning.

“Sequencing a lot of genomes is not trivial,” said Michael G. Campana, a computational genomics scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, who was not part of the project. “What’s really important is actually making use of these data.”

Here are some of the things that Zoonomia scientists are already doing with it:

Uncovering the Basis of Special Skills

To look for the underpinnings of exceptional animal talents, the scientists sought genetic sequences that had evolved unusually quickly in species that shared a certain trait, such as the ability to hibernate.

In one analysis, the researchers focused on deep hibernators, such as the fat-tailed dwarf lemur and the greater mouse-eared bat, which can maintain low body temperatures for days or weeks at a time. The researchers found evidence of “accelerated evolution” in a variety of

genes, including one known to help protect cells from temperature-related stress and another that inhibits a cellular pathway related to aging.

“Lots of hibernating species also have exceptional longevity,” Karlsson said, leading her to wonder: Do the changes in that gene contribute to their long lives?

The researchers also explored the mammalian sense of smell. Animals have a large assortment of olfactory receptors, each capable of binding to certain odor-causing molecules; species with more olfactory receptor genes generally have a keener sense of smell.

When the Zoonomia team tallied the number of these genes in each species, the African savanna elephant took the top spot, with 4,199. The nine-banded armadillo and Hoffmann’s two-toed sloth followed, while the Central American agouti came in fourth.

The agouti “turns out to have one of the best olfactory repertoires of any mammal, for totally unknown reasons,” Karlsson said. “It’s a reminder of how much diversity there is out there that we don’t know anything about.” (Dogs, she noted, did not prove to be “particularly special” in this regard.)

On the other hand, cetaceans — a group that includes dolphins and whales — have a notably small number of olfactory receptor genes, which makes sense given their watery habitats. “They communicate in other ways,” said Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, a geneticist at the Broad Institute and Uppsala University and the other leader of the

Zoonomia Project.

Illuminating Evolutionary Timelines

Scientists have long debated precisely how and when today’s diverse assortment of mammals came into being. Did the mammalian family tree branch out only after the extinction of the dinosaurs, some 66 million years ago? Or did the process largely take place before the catastrophe?

A new analysis with the Zoonomia genomes suggests that the answer is both. Mammals began to diversify about 102 million years ago, when Earth’s continents were fragmenting and sea levels began rising. “This isolated the predecessors of the modern lineages on different land masses,” said William Murphy, an evolutionary geneticist at Texas A&M University and an author of the paper.

But another burst of diversification came after the extinction of the dinosaurs, the researchers found, when the emergence of new land and the disappearance of the reigning reptiles provided mammals with new habitats, resources and opportunities.

“It’s a really landmark paper,” said Scott Edwards, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, who was not involved in the research. “It’s probably the largest of its kind in terms of trying to put mammals on a time scale.”

The Zoonomia package more broadly is “a monumental set of work,” he added. “It’s going to really set the standard for our understanding of mammal evolution going forward.”

An undated photo provided by Noah Snyder shows an African savanna elephant. DNA from monkeys, bats, whales and many other mammals is helping scientists tackle big questions about physiology, evolution and one very famous sled dog.

36 hours in Buenos Aires, Argentina

tes, which takes up an entire block in the Balvanera neighborhood, has an inelegant nickname — the Toilet Museum. It has the moniker because of its large collection of latrines and ornate urinals, including an enormous room showcasing 20th-century toilets and bidets. But the building itself is a beautiful example of the French influence on the city’s architecture. A visit to its museum, which is free and open Monday through Friday, could take 15 minutes or an hour, depending on how much you care to learn about the history of indoor plumbing.

5:30 p.m. | Shoe Shopping

and imposing as you walk through a tall, wrought-iron gate into a dimly lit room with high ceilings, mahogany-colored walls and crystal chandeliers. But the place is run by friendly, knowledgeable servers who will happily go into detail about the cocktails, which range from traditional Negronis to kitschy inventions such as the Buenos Aires Zombie, a rum cocktail mixed with tropical fruit, absinthe and bitters served in a ceramic replica of the obelisk on Avenida 9 de Julio. Presidente Bar offers a gorgeous setting where dressing up is encouraged but pretentiousness is nonexistent.

The sun sets on Buenos Aires on May 10, 2023. Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, can feel overwhelming, but elegance is everywhere and accessible to visitors.

By MARIA CRAMER

Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, can feel overwhelming. Main thoroughfares like Avenida Santa Fe are noisy and jammed with zooming taxis and groaning buses. The streets can get grimy. But elegance is everywhere and accessible to visitors. Beaux-Arts buildings along Avenida de Mayo recall the grandeur of old Europe. You can find affordable, handcrafted goods at artisan fairs that abound on weekends in neighborhoods such as San Telmo, Recole-

ta and Mataderos. The afterglow of Argentina’s 2022 World Cup victory remains — a spiritual salve for many still suffering from the country’s yearslong inflation crisis. Visitors will find a city where people press on. It is that perseverance that keeps Buenos Aires vibrant and thrilling.

Friday

4:30 p.m. | Beauty in Toilets

One unexpected place to enjoy Buenos Aires’ breathtaking architecture: the city’s water pumping station. The striking 19th-century Palacio de las Aguas Corrien-

In the affluent neighborhood of Recoleta, merchants selling high-quality Argentine leather are within easy walking distance of one another. Visit stalwarts such as Guido on Calle Rodríguez Peña and Lopez Taibo on Avenida Alvear, where the shoes, wallets and purses are handmade and the strong aroma of fine leather hits you as you walk through the door. For funkier shoes with colorful designs on Calle Montevideo, go to Jessica Kessel, which also has a shop on Calle Defensa in San Telmo (shoes from 36,000 pesos). After shopping, grab some buttery, sweet medialunas (Argentina’s spin on croissants) from Corchio on Avenida Las Heras and walk five blocks to Plaza Vicente López, where you will gaze in wonder at an enormous 200-year-old rubber fig tree in the center of the park.

8:30 p.m. | Eat an Argentine feast

To taste your way around Argentina, South America’s second-biggest nation, without taking a long trek, go to Roux, also in Recoleta. While the food isn’t strictly Argentine, chef Martin Rebaudino, who made a name for himself at the nearby fine-dining restaurant Oviedo, sources ingredients from all over the country: The anchovies are from the coastal city of Mar del Plata, the saffron is from the northwest province of Mendoza, and the prawns are from Santa Cruz, in Patagonia. The mollejas, or sweetbreads, served with a large, velvety raviolo that has a truffled egg yolk inside and is topped with foam, are a highlight on a menu full of inventive dishes. The wine list is vast, and the service is impeccable. Dinner for two, without drinks, around 24,000 pesos.

11 p.m. | Drink from an obelisk

After dinner, head less than a mile to Presidente Bar, which might look exclusive

Saturday

9 a.m. | Coffee and Books

The hand-cut pasta at Quotidiano Bar de Pastas on Avenida Callao is so popular with locals that lines form outside on weekdays at lunchtime. But it is also a wonderful spot for breakfast — a large, airy setting of exposed brick and wood paneling where you can start off your day with strong coffee, housemade yogurt and granola, freshsqueezed orange juice, avocado on toast, or flaky, sweet croissants (breakfast with coffee and juice from 700 to 2,150 pesos). After breakfast, stroll two blocks to the bustling Avenida Santa Fe, where you can visit El Ateneo Grand Splendid, a cinema turned bookstore that has kept the old movie house’s high, frescoed ceilings, theater boxes and ornate molding.

11 a.m.

| Stroll a former zoo

The Palermo neighborhood already had three sprawling gardens within walking distance of one another: Jardín Japones, Jardín Botánico and Parque El Rosedal. Add Ecoparque to that list. Once it was the site of a grand, and very sad, city zoo, where iron cages kept lions, tigers and chimpanzees in cruelly small spaces. The zoo closed in 2016, and since then, the new owners have been converting it into a peaceful nature preserve, where peacocks and Patagonian maras — native, fleet-footed rodents — roam free. While more exotic animals have been sent to sanctuaries abroad, some remain, including giraffes that are too large and old to transport and a puma that had been kept illegally as a pet. The zoo’s gorgeous, antique buildings also remain, their stateliness now an elegant contrast to the wild native plants and brush growing along footpaths. Entry is free.

1 p.m. | Gorge on pasta

If there is one food that Porteños (the name for people from Buenos Aires) take almost as seriously as beef, it’s pasta — a reverence rooted in the city’s Italian heritage.

At La Alacena Pastificio y Salumeria, which opened in 2022 just outside Villa Crespo, a neighborhood that borders trendy Palermo but is largely overlooked by tourists, you will find pasta makers behind a counter, expertly rolling out and cutting rigatoni, gnocchi and ravioli, to name a few. Try the housemade focaccia (900 pesos), the polpette al sugo (meatballs in tomato sauce flecked with shards of rich, sharp Parmesan, 2,700 pesos) and fusilli topped with pesto and pomodoro sauce (2,400 pesos). The full kitchen is open only until 4:30 p.m., but the counter stays open until 9 p.m., selling bread, pastries and sandwiches.

3 p.m. | Watch the koi

Work off your meal with a 20-minute walk to Parque Centenario in Caballito. The park, an oasis of trees including tipa and araucarias, sprawling lawns, and a lake filled with koi — the enormous fish that also fill the waterways of Jardín Japones in Palermo — is teeming with locals reading, painting or working out on Saturdays. It also has one of the quirkiest fairs in the city, featuring vendors lined up around its outskirts who sell secondhand clothes, water bottles emblazoned with pictures of Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, and jerseys and socks bearing the names and numbers of Argentina’s soccer heroes. Inside the park, artists sell handmade goods including leather sandals, toys, children’s clothes, intricate wooden puzzles, woolen scarves and jewelry, among other treasures.

7 p.m. | Scope out the market

At Mercat Villa Crespo, a market in an industrial space on Calle Thames, you’ll find shops cooking traditional Argentine fare including empanadas, steak and pasta, as well as cooks steaming dumplings or frying falafel doused in a spicy eggplant sauce. There are plenty of vegetarian options, including vegan ice cream. Alongside the diverse food, there are also wine bars and draft beer stands throughout the cavernous, yet casual and relaxing, space. Open until 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday.

11 p.m. | Listen to jazz in Palermo

Palermo Soho and Palermo Hollywood, two adjoining neighborhoods, are known for their trendy bars and nightclubs that stay open until dawn. But both also feature laidback spots where you can enjoy the city’s nightlife without sacrificing sleep. Borges

1975, a restaurant, bar and bookshop that opened in 2015, has a small, intimate back room that regularly features jazz acts by talented local musicians. During the pandemic, the owners reduced capacity in the club to 40 people, from 65, and kept it that way even after restrictions eased, recognizing that customers were more comfortable sipping Aperol spritzes and espumante (sparkling wine) in a less crowded setting. Tickets are 2,100 pesos.

Sunday 11 a.m. | Go Underground

In San Telmo, you’ll find one of the city’s more unusual museums, El Zanjón, a cavernous mansion that leads to underground water tunnels built in the neighborhood in the 18th and 19th centuries. The house once belonged to a wealthy family, who also kept six enslaved men and women, before it was turned into a tenement home. Little is known about the enslaved residents, except brief, denigrating descriptions that the family logged, such as their approximate age and height. But the museum and its guides, who lead tours in English and Spanish, have made a serious effort to explore the country’s obscured history of slavery with stories and paintings depicting Afro-Argentines of that period. Just around the corner is La Casa Mínima, the narrowest house in Buenos Aires, which is also open to the public for tours (3,500 pesos for nonresidents).

12:30 p.m. | Good Grill

Puerto Madero, a redeveloped dockside neighborhood about a 10-minute walk from San Telmo, has become one of the busiest tourist destinations in the city, thanks to landmarksincluding Puente de la Mujer, a sleek pedestrian bridge designed by the renowned architect Santiago Calatrava, and the ARA Presidente Sarmiento, a museum ship that bobs on the Río Darsena Sur river next to a long line of loud, packed restaurants. Less than half a mile farther along the river, away from the crowd, is Estilo Campo, a fantastic parrilla (an Argentine steakhouse, which literally means open grill) with river views and servers wearing kerchiefs and belts in the style of gauchos, to the delight of tourists. But the expertly prepared chorizo, crispy sweetbreads and juicy skirt steak leave no doubt that you are in an authentic Argentine parrilla, and the wine list is expansive. Lunch for two is about 18,000 pesos.

KEY STOPS

Ecoparque, a former zoo, is now a na-

ture preserve where many animals roam free.

Borges 1975 is a bookshop with a restaurant and bar, as well as an intimate back room that hosts jazz acts every week.

La Alacena Pastificio y Salumeria is a cozy restaurant where you can watch pasta makers rolling and cutting fresh rigatoni, gnocchi and ravioli.

Jessica Kessel is a boutique selling funky, colorful leather shoes, including heels, boots, mules and flats.

WHERE TO EAT

Roux offers inventive fine dining, with produce sourced from all over Argentina.

Estilo Campo, a steakhouse in Puerto Madero, serves expertly prepared chorizo and crispy sweetbreads away from the crowds along the Río de la Plata riverbank.

Mercat Villa Crespo is a food market in a refurbished industrial space selling empanadas, steak, falafel, vegan ice cream and more.

Quotidiano Bar de Pastas in Recoleta draws crowds for its pasta and is also a great spot for breakfast and Argentine pastries filled with dulce de leche.

Presidente Bar, in one of the most affluent parts of the city, is a beautiful drinking spot that manages not to take itself too seri-

ously.

Corchio, which has sweet, buttery pastries and great coffee, is a perfect snack stop as you shop in Recoleta.

WHERE TO STAY

Alvear Palace Hotel in Recoleta remains one of the city’s most elegant hotels, with a rooftop bar that has tremendous panoramic views of Buenos Aires. Doubles from around $370 (hotels generally list prices in U.S. dollars).

Ribera Sur Hotel in San Telmo, the city’s oldest neighborhood, has comfortable, simply designed rooms that start at $95 a night, including an indulgent breakfast. It is two blocks from Calle Defensa, where every Sunday there is an open-air antiques market.

Malevo Muraña Hostel, a cheerful hostel in Palermo with a charming outdoor patio, offers shared dorms from about $40 a person and private rooms that fit up to four people from $140 a night. The hostel is on one of the quieter streets of a neighborhood that becomes very loud at night.

For short-term rentals, Recoleta and Palermo, safe, walkable neighborhoods teeming with boutiques, pasta shops, and cheese and wine shops, are the best locations for exploring such a vast city.

The 19th-century Palacio de las Aguas Corrientes in Buenos Aires, which is the city’s water-pumping station, on May 10, 2023.

LEGAL NOTICE

SERVICE BY PUBLICATION

IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF GWINNETT COUNTY. STATE OF GEORGIA

CIVIL ACTION FILE NO. 21AD-00113-1

IN RE: PETITION OF S.R.C.

For the adoption of a minor child to be known as

SEBASTIAN CARVAJAL REYNA

By Order for the service by Publication dated the 13th day of July, 2022, you are hereby notified that on the 3rd day of August, 2021, BOVIS, KYLE, BURCH & MEDLIN, L.L.C. filed a Stepparent Adoption in the Superior Court of Gwinnett County. Senei Perez desires to adopt his stepson Sebastian Carvajal Reyna. Respondent Sandi Eligio Carvajal Zorrilla and any interested or affected party has the right to appear and file objections and an answer to the Petition by filing with the Superior Court of Gwinnett County in the above referenced action within thirty (30) days of the date of this publication for Stepparent Adoption. WITNESS, the Honorable Georgie Hutchinson, III, Judge of this Superior Court. This 10th day of May, 2023.

-s-

D/Clerk of Superior Court, Gwinnett County

TIANA P. GARNER, CLERK

Attorney:

Lauren Larmer Barrett BOVIS, KYLE, BURCH & MEDLIN, L.L.C 200 Ashford Center North Suite 500 Atlanta, Ga 30338-2668 Telephone:770-391-9100

*

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

CENTRO JUDICIAL DE BAYA-

MÓN SALA SUPERIOR

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante V. SUCESIÓN DE EDNA MARGARITA FONTÁNEZ

BRIGANTY T/C/C

EDNA FONTÁNEZ

BRIGANTY, COMPUESTA

POR “JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE” COMO

POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; EL CENTRO DE RECAUDACIONES DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)

Demandados

Civil Núm.: BY2022CV05348. Sala: 503. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. AVISO DE SUBASTA. El que suscribe, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior, Centro Judicial de Bayamón, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hago saber, a la parte demandada y al PÚBLICO EN GENERAL: Que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia expedido el día 1 de mayo de 2023, por la Secretaría del Tribunal, procederé a vender y venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor la propiedad que ubica y se describe a continuación:

RÚSTICA: Predio de terreno radicado en el Barrio Nuevo del término municipal de Bayamón, Puerto Rico, con cabida superficial de mil metros cuadrados y en lindes por el NORTE, en treintiocho punto treintitres metros con terrenos propiedad de la Sucesión Manuel Martínez; por el SUR, en treinta y cuatro punto cero dos metros con la carretera Estatal ochocientos dieciséis; por el ESTE, en veinte y siete punto ochentisiete metros con el remanente de la finca principal de la cual se segrega; y por el OESTE, en veintinueve metros con terrenos propiedad de Tomás Centeno. Inscrita en la finca número 52,041, al folio 121 del tomo 1,174 de Bayamón Sur. Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección I de Bayamón. Propiedad ubicada, según pagaré, en: KM 8.1 SR-816 Barrio Nuevo, Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Además, el Alguacil que suscribe, hago saber a todos los acreedores que tengan inscritos o anotados sus derechos sobre los bienes hipotecados con posterioridad a la inscripción del crédito del ejecutante, o de los acreedores de cargas o derechos reales que los hubiesen pospuesto a la hipoteca ejecutada y las personas interesadas en, o con derecho a exigir el cumplimiento de instrumentos negociables garantizados hipotecariamente con posterioridad al crédito ejecutado, siempre que surjan de la certificación registral, para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si les convenga o satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, costas y honorarios de abogados asegurados, quedando entonces subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante: Aviso de Demanda de fecha 29 de

mayo de 2019, expedido en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Bayamón, en el caso civil número BY2019CV02869, sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca seguido por Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, contra Sucesión de Edna Margarita Fontanéz Briganty también conocida como Edna Fontánez Briganty, compuesta por Andrés Montes Fontánez y John Doe y Richard Doe como posibles herederos desconocidos, El Honorable Secretario del Departamento de Hacienda del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico; El Centro de Recaudaciones de Ingresos Municipales (CRIM), por la suma de $158,589.92 más intereses y otras sumas, anotado el día 25 de febrero de 2020, al tomo Karibe de Bayamón Sur, finca número 52,041, anotación A. Aviso de Demanda de fecha 21 de octubre de 2022, expedido en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Bayamón, en el caso civil número BY2022CV05348, seguido por Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, contra Sucesión de Edna Margarita Fontanez Briganty también conocida como Edna Fontanez Briganti, compuesta por John Doe y Richard Roe como posibles herederos desconocidos, CRIM, por la suma de $160,715.88, anotado el día 31 de octubre de 2022, al tomo Karibe de Bayamón Sur, finca número 52,041, anotación B. El producto de la subasta se destinará a satisfacer al demandante hasta donde alcance, la SENTENCIA dictada a su favor, el día 9 de febrero de 2023, archivada en autos y notificada el 14 de febrero de 2023, y publicada en periódico de circulación general, “The San Daily Star”, el 16 de febrero de 2023, en el presente caso civil, a saber la suma de $160,715.88 por concepto de principal; generando intereses a razón de 2.50% desde el 1ro de junio de 2018; cargos por demora los cuales al igual que los intereses continúan acumulándose hasta el saldo total de la deuda reclamada en este pleito, y la suma de $16,116.64 para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado; y demás créditos accesorios garantizados hipotecariamente. La adjudicación se hará al mejor postor, quien deberá consignar el importe de su oferta en el acto mismo de la adjudicación, en efectivo (moneda del curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América), giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del alguacil del Tribunal. LA PRIMERA SUBASTA se llevará a efecto el día 22 DE JUNIO DE 2023 A LAS 9:30

Monday, May 29, 2023 22

DE LA MAÑANA, en el cuarto piso, Oficina de Alguaciles de Subastas de Centro Judicial de Bayamón, Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Que el precio mínimo fijado para la PRIMERA SUBASTA es de $161,166.41. Que de ser necesaria la celebración de una SEGUNDA SUBASTA la misma se llevará a efecto el día 29 DE JUNIO DE 2023 A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA, en el cuarto piso, Oficina de Alguaciles de Subastas de Centro Judicial de Bayamón, Bayamón, Puerto Rico. El precio mínimo para la SEGUNDA SUBASTA será de $107,444.27, equivalentes a dos terceras (2/3) partes del tipo mínimo estipulado para la PRIMERA subasta. Que de ser necesaria la celebración de una TERCERA SUBASTA la misma se llevará a efecto el día 6 DE JULIO DE 2023 A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA, en el cuarto piso, Oficina de Alguaciles de Subastas de Centro Judicial de Bayamón, Bayamón, Puerto Rico. El precio mínimo para la TERCERA SUBASTA será de $80,583.20, equivalentes a la mitad (1/2) del tipo mínimo estipulado para la PRIMERA subasta. Si se declarase desierta la tercera subasta, se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si ésta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el Tribunal lo estima conveniente; se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si esta es mayor, todo ello a tenor con lo dispone el Articulo 104 de la Ley Núm. 210 del 8 de diciembre de 2015 conocida como “Ley del Registro de la Propiedad Inmueble del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico”. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquiere libre de toda carga y gravamen que afecte la mencionada finca según el Artículo 102, inciso 6. Una vez confirmada la venta judicial por el Honorable Tribunal, se procederá a otorgar la correspondiente escritura de venta judicial y se pondrá al comprador en posesión física del inmueble de conformidad con las disposiciones de Ley. Para conocimiento de la parte demandada y de toda aquella persona o personas que tengan interés inscrito con posterioridad a la inscripción del gravamen que se está ejecutando, y para conocimiento de todos los licitadores y el público en general, el presente Edicto se publicará por espacio de dos (2) semanas consecutivas, con un intervalo de por lo menos siete días entre ambas publicaciones, en un diario de circulación general en el Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico

y se fijará además en tres (3) lugares públicos del Municipio en que ha de celebrarse dicha venta, tales como la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía. Se les informa, por último, que: a. Que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la secretaría del tribunal durante las horas laborables. b. Que se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes. Se entenderá, que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. EXPIDO, el presente EDICTO, en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy día 09 de mayo de 2023. EDGARDO ELÍAS VARGAS SANTANA, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR PLACA #193, DIVISIÓN DE SUBASTAS, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN WILMINGTON SAVINGS

FUND SOCIETY, FSB, NOT INDIVIDUALLY BUT SOLELY AS TRUSTEE FOR FINANCE OF AMERICA STRUCTURED SECURITIES

ACQUISITION TRUST

2019-HB1

Demandante Vs. SUCESION ROSARIO

RIVERA VELEZ T/C/C

ROSARIO RIVERA T/C/C

ROSARIO RIVERA VELE COMPUESTA POR EDWIN

SANTANA RIVERA; JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES

Demandados

Civil Núm.: SJ2021CV06841. Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: LA PARTE DEMANDADA, AL (A LA) SECRETARIO(A) DE HACIENDA DE PUERTO

RICO Y AL PÚBLICO

GENERAL:

Certifico y Hago Constar: Que en cumplimiento con el Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia que me ha sido dirigido por el (la) Secretario(a) del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de San Juan, en el caso de epígrafe, venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor, por separado, de contado y por moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América y/o Giro Postal y Cheque Certificado, en mi oficina ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de San Juan, el 12 DE JUNIO DE 2023, A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA, todo derecho título, participación o interés que le corresponda a la parte demandada o cualquiera de ellos en el inmueble hipotecado objeto de ejecución que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar número cincuenta y tres A de la Manzana HK de la Urbanización Caparra Terrace, situada en el Barrio Monacillos del Municipio de Rio Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico, compuesto de doscientos cincuenta y siete metros cuadrados con treinta y uno centésimas de metro cuadrado, colindando por el NORTE, en veinte y un metros cincuenta centímetros con la Calle número setenta, antes hoy “Street Number Thirty, S.E.”; por el SUR, en veintiún metros con noventa y un centímetros con los solares número treinta y siete A y treinta siete B de dicha manzana; por el ESTE, en trece metros tres centímetros, con el solar número cincuenta y cuatro B; y por el OESTE, en diez metros sesenta y ocho centímetros, con el solar número cincuenta y tres B de dicha manzana. Enclava en este solar una casa de concreto armado con techo de azotea y piso de losas del país, de una sola planta que constituye una vivienda independiente. Finca número 9,342, inscrita al folio 81 del tomo 247 de Monacillos, Registro de la Propiedad, Sección III. La Hipoteca Revertida consta inscrita al folio 124 del tomo 995 de Monacillos, finca 9,342, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección III, inscripción 12ª. Propiedad localizada en: URB. CAPARRA

TERRACE, 815 CALLE 30 SE, SAN JUAN, P.R. 00921. Según figuran en la certificación registral, la propiedad objeto de ejecución está gravada por las siguientes cargas anteriores o preferentes: Nombre del Titular: N/A. Suma de la Carga:

N/A. Fecha de Vencimiento:

N/A. Según figuran en la certificación registral, la propiedad objeto de ejecución está gra-

The San Juan Daily Star

vada por las siguientes cargas posteriores a la inscripción del crédito ejecutante: Nombre del Titular: Secretario de la Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano. Suma de la Carga: $213,000.00. Fecha de Vencimiento: 17 de noviembre de 2082. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad de la propiedad y que todas las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes al crédito ejecutante antes descritos, si los hubiere, continuarán subsistentes. El rematante acepta dichas cargas y gravámenes anteriores, y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. Se establece como tipo de mínima subasta la suma de $213,000.00, según acordado entre las partes en el precio pactado en la escritura de hipoteca. De ser necesaria una SEGUNDA SUBASTA por declararse desierta la primera, la misma se celebrará en mi oficina, ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de San Juan, el 20 DE JUNIO DE 2023, A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA, y se establece como mínima para dicha segunda subasta la suma de $142,000.00, 2/3 partes del tipo mínima establecido originalmente. Si tampoco se produce remate ni adjudicación en la segunda subasta, se establece como mínima para la TERCERA SUBASTA, la suma de $106,500.00, la mitad (1/2) del precio pactado y dicha subasta se celebrará en mi oficina, ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de San Juan, el 27 DE JUNIO DE 2023, A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA. Dicha subasta se llevará a cabo para, con su producto satisfacer a la parte demandante, el importe de la Sentencia dictada a su favor ascendente a la suma de $95,849.99 por concepto de principal, más la suma de $42,287.44 en intereses acumulados al 1 de junio de 2022 y los cuales continúan acumulándose a razón de 3.193% anual hasta su total y completo pago; más la sumas de $16,716.61 en seguro hipotecario; $3,024.53 en seguro; $425.00 de tasaciones; $460.00 de inspecciones; $705.00 de honorarios de abogado; más la cantidad de 10% del pagare original en la suma de $21,300.00, equivalente al 10% del principal por honorarios de abogado pactados; la propiedad garantiza una cantidad igual por intereses vencidos que se acumulen hasta dicho monto; la propiedad garantiza una cantidad igual por adelanto, si algunos, que tenga que incurrir el acreedor; así como cualquier otra suma que

se haga en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca. Dichas sumas están vencidas, son líquidas y exigibles. La venta en pública subasta de la referida propiedad se verificará libre de toda carga o gravamen posterior que afecte la mencionada finca, a cuyo efecto se notifica y se hace saber la fecha, hora y sitio de la PRIMERA, SEGUNDA Y TERCERA SUBASTA, si esto fuera necesario, a los efectos de que cualquier persona o personas con algún interés puedan comparecer a la celebración de dicha subasta. Se notifica a todos los interesados que las actas y demás constancias del expediente de este caso están disponibles en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante horas laborables para ser examinadas por los (las) interesados (as). Y para su publicación en el periódico The San Juan Daily Star, que es un diario de circulación general en la isla de Puerto Rico, por espacio de dos semanas consecutivas con un intervalo de por lo menos siete (7) días entre ambas publicaciones, así como para su publicación en los sitios públicos de Puerto Rico. Expedido en San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy 5 de mayo de 2023. EDWIN E. LÓPEZ MULERO, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR PLACA #368.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO CENTRO

JUDICIAL DE SAN JUAN SALA

SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante V. SONIA VIVOLA VELEZ

Demandada

Civil Núm.: SJ2022CV08268. Sala: 508. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. AVISO DE SUBASTA. El que suscribe, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de San Juan, San Juan, Puerto Rico, hago saber, a la parte demandada y al PÚBLICO EN GENERAL:

Que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia notificado por el Tribunal el día 4 de mayo de 2023, por la Secretaría del Tribunal, procederé a vender y venderé e4n pública subasta y al mejor postor la propiedad que ubica y se describe a continuación:

URBANA: Solar de forma rectangular que mide doce metros de frente por veintiún metros de fondo, marcado con el número veintiséis de la Manzana “CQ”

Puerto Rico, el día 20 de julio de 2013, ante el Notario Público Roberto M. García Rullán, inscrita al folio 85 del tomo 371 de Camuy, Registro de la Propiedad de Arecibo, Sección Segunda, finca 9,274, inscripción 6ta. La dirección física de la propiedad antes descrita es: RD. 119, KM. 12.1, Barrio Piedra Gorda, Camuy, Puerto Rico. La Subasta se llevará a efecto para satisfacer a la parte demandante la suma de $87,138.76 de principal, interés al 4.5% anual, desde el 1ro. de enero de 2022, hasta su completo pago, más la cantidad de $12,200.00 estipulada para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado; más recargos acumulados, todas cuyas sumas están líquidas y exigibles. Que la cantidad mínima de licitación en la primera subasta para el inmueble será de $115,580.07 y de ser necesaria una segunda subasta, la cantidad mínima será equivalente a 2/3 partes de aquella, o sea, la suma de $77,053.38 y de ser necesaria una tercera subasta, la cantidad mínima será la mitad del precio pactado, es decir, la suma de $57,790.04. De declararse desierta la tercera subasta se adjudicará la finca a favor del acreedor por la totalidad de la cantidad adeudada si esta es igual o menor que el monto del tipo de la tercera subasta, si el Tribunal lo estima conveniente. Se abonará dicho monto a la cantidad adeudada si esta es mayor. 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 y que las cargas y gravámenes preferentes, si los hubiese, 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 hipotecada a ser vendida en pública subasta se encuentra afecta al siguiente gravamen posterior: Embargo Federal a favor de los Estados Unidos de América, por la suma principal de $24,843.53, contra José Pérez Jiménez, seguro social número XXX-XX-0190, Caso No. 388

869 319, Certificación del 25 de octubre de 2019, anotado el 27 de noviembre del 2019 al Sistema Karibe, Registro de la Propiedad de Arecibo, Sección Segunda. La propiedad a ser vendida en pública subasta se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. Podrán concurrir como postores a todas las subastas los titulares de créditos hipotecarios vigentes y posteriores a la hipoteca que se cobra o ejecuta, si alguno o que figuren como tales en la certificación registral y que po-

drán utilizar el montante de sus créditos o parte de alguno en sus ofertas. Si la oferta aceptada es por cantidad mayor a la suma del crédito o créditos preferentes al suyo, al obtener la buena pro del remate, deberá satisfacer en el mismo acto, en efectivo o en cheque de gerente, la totalidad del crédito hipotecario que se ejecuta y la de cualesquiera otro créditos posteriores al que se ejecuta pero preferente al suyo. El exceso constituirá abono total o parcial en su propio crédito. EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto para conocimiento y comparecencia de los licitadores, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en Camuy, Puerto Rico, 17 de mayo de 2023.

WILFREDO OLMO SALAZAR, ALGUACIL REGIONAL. LUIS

E. ROMÁN CARRERO, ALGUACIL CONFIDENCIAL DEL TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE CAMUY.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL

GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE HUMACAO

ORIENTAL BANK

Parte Demandante V.

LUIS RAUL FORTI ISALES

Parte Demandada

Civil Núm.: HSCI201600140.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA.

ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. AVISO DE PÚBLICA SUBASTA. El que suscribe, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Humacao, hago saber a la parte demandada LUIS RAUL FORTI ISALES, Y AL PÚBLICO EN GENERAL, que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia por Embargo liberado el 16 de marzo de 2023, por la Secretaria del Tribunal, procederé a vender y venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor pagadero en efectivo, cheque de gerente o giro postal, a nombre del alguacil del tribunal, la siguiente propiedad [551 THE MARBELLA CLUB, HUMACAO, PR 00791]: HORIZONTAL PRO-

PRTY: Apartment #551 of the Zaragoza Building, which forms part of the Marbella Club II Condominium Regime, located in The Marbella Club at Palmas del Mar, Candelero Abajo ward, Humacao, Puerto Rico. Irregular shaped one story, 2 bedroom unit, with a total construction area of 1,564 square feet, equivalent to 145.35 square meters. Entrance: The main entrance is located on the side of the apartment leading to common areas of the Condominium surrounding the interior

open court of the Zaragoza Building. This apartment occupies part of the fifth floor of the Zaragoza Building. Its boundaries are described as approved by ARPE: By the Southeast; with exterior elements of the Condominium; by the Northest, with building interior patio; by the Southwest, with the common wall that separates it from apartment #550; by the Northeast, with the common wall that separates it from apartment 552. Structure: This unit constains a vestibule with laundry closet and bathroom, a living/dining room, a kitchen, a hall, a master bedroom with a bathroom, walk-in closet, closet and balcony, a bedroom with bathroom, hall, kitchenette area, closet, walk-in closet, and a covered terrace. Limited common elements: This unit has the exclusive use and enjoyment of the following limited common elements of The Marbella Club II Condominium: Storage cage and parking space identified both with #551 located in the basement floor of the Zaragoza Building, with a total area of 12.00 square feet, equivalent to 1.12 square meters and 147.00 square feet, equivalent to 13.66 square meters respectively and Hallway area located in from of the entrance of the unit, with a total area of 60.67 square feet, equivalent to 5. 64 square meters. Elementos comunes generales y elementos comunes limitados: The residential unit has a 1.457% share in the general common elements of The Marbella Club II Condominium and a 1.130% share in the limited Common elements of The Marbella Club II Condominium.

Finca 26756, inscrita al Sistema Karibe de Humacao, Registro de la Propiedad de Humacao. El inmueble antes descrito se encontrará afecto a los siguientes gravámenes: (i) Hipoteca constituida por Luis Raúl Forti Isales, en garantía de un pagaré, aff#.23, a favor de Oriental Bank of Trust, o a su orden, por $733,400.00 al 6.625%, vencedero el 1 de abril 2035, según Esc. #18 en San Juan, a 31 de marzo del 2005, ante Dimaries Broco Irizarry, inscrita al Sistema Karibe de Humacao, finca #26756 inscripción 2da. (ii) DE-

MANDA: Radicada en el Tribunal Superior de Puerto Rico, Sala de Humacao, sobre cobro de Dinero, en el caso civil #HSCI201600140 seguido por Oriental Bank vs. Luis Raul Forti Isales, donde se solicita el pago de la deuda garantizada con la hipoteca relacionada en la inscripción 2da., reducida a $728,824.4 7, anotada al Sistema Karibe, de Humacao, finca #26756, el 10 de septiembre del 2020, Anotación A. (iii) Embargo: Según Orden de embargo del 5 de noviembre del 2019, radicada en el Tribunal

de Primera Instancia, Sala de Humacao, en el Caso Civil #HSCI201600140, sobre cobro de Dinero, seguido por Oriental Bank demandante vs. Luis Raul Forti Isales, demandado, por $728,824.47, anotado al Sistema Karibe, anotación B, el 19 de agosto de 2022. (iv) Embargo: Según Orden de embargo del 5 de abril del 2021, radicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Humacao, en el Caso Civil #HU2019CV01587, sobre cobro de Dinero, seguido por Palmas del Mar Homeowners Association, Inc., demandante vs. Luis Raul Forti Isales, demandado, por $3,960.54, anotado al Sistema Karibe, anotación C y última, el 19 de agosto de 2022. El embargo objeto de esta ejecución es el que ha quedado descrito en el inciso (iii). La hipoteca descrita en el inciso (i) está relacionada a la ejecución del embargo descrito en el inciso (iii), ya que al momento que se dictó sentencia en el caso de epígrafe la hipoteca no estaba inscrita, ésta será cancelada como parte de la escritura de venta judicial producto de la subasta. Se celebrará la subasta para ejecutar el embargo antes mencionado en el inciso (iii) y para con el importe de la misma satisfacer la sentencia dicta el 23 de septiembre de 2019 a favor de la parte demandante por la suma principal de $728,824.47 de principal, más los intereses al 6.625% anual desde el día 1 de agosto de 2005, así como los intereses acumulados y por acumularse a partir de esa fecha y hasta el total y completo repago de la deuda; cargos por demora equivalentes al 5.000% de todos aquellos pagos con atrasos en exceso de 15 días calendarios de la fecha de vencimiento hasta el total y completo repago de la deuda; $73,340.00, es decir, el 10% sobre el principal del pagaré, para el pago de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado como suma pactada a dichos efectos en el pagaré, más intereses al 7% anual, provisto por la Regis 44.3 de las de Procedimiento Civil. La SUBASTA será celebrada el día 22 DE JUNIO DE 2023 A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA ,en la oficina del Alguacil, sita en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Humacao. El precio ofrecido se pagará de contado y en moneda de curso legal o por cheque del gerente librado a favor del alguacil en el mismo acto de subasta y tan pronto se conceda la buena pro al postor agraciado. Que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la secretaría del tribunal durante las horas laborables. Que se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las car-

gas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes. Se entenderá, 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 a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. Por la presente se notifica a los acreedores que puedan tener inscrito o anotado su derecho sobre el bien inmueble hipotecado con posterioridad a la inscripción del crédito del ejecutante o acreedores de cargas o derechos reales que los hubiesen pospuesto a la hipoteca ejecutada y las personas interesadas en, o con derecho a exigir el cumplimiento de instrumentos negociables garantizados hipotecariamente con posterioridad al crédito ejecutado, para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si les convenga o satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, costas y honorarios de abogados asegurados, quedando subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante. Vendida o adjudicada la finca o derecho hipotecado y consignado el precio correspondiente, en esa misma fecha o fecha posterior, el alguacil que celebró la subasta procederá a otorgar la correspondiente escritura pública de traspaso en representación del dueño o titular de los bienes hipotecados, ante el notario que elija el adjudicatario o comprador, quien deberá abonar el importe de tal escritura. El alguacil pondrá en posesión judicial al nuevo dueño, si así se lo solicita dentro del término de veinte (20) días a partir de la confirmación de la venta o adjudicación. Si transcurren los referidos veinte (20) días, el tribunal podrá ordenar, sin necesidad de ulterior procedimiento, que se lleve a efecto el desalojo o lanzamiento del ocupante u ocupantes de la finca o de todos los que por orden o tolerancia del deudor la ocupen. Y, para conocimiento de licitadores, del público en general, y para su publicación de acuerdo con la Ley en un periódico de circulación diaria en la isla de Puerto Rico, y en los sitios públicos de costumbre, expido el presente Aviso bajo firma y sello de este Tribunal. En Humacao, Puerto Rico, hoy día 14 de abril de 2023. JOSÉ RODRÍGUEZ HERNÁNDEZ, ALGUACIL REGIONAL INTERINO, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR, DIVISIÓN DE SUBASTAS, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA DE HUMACAO.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA

SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN COMPU-LINK CORPORATION D/B/A

CELINK

Demandante Vs. SUCESION JOSE

SANCHEZ SANTIAGO

T/C/C JOSE SANTIAGO

T/C/C JOSE SANCHEZ

COMPUESTA POR EDWIN

SANCHEZ SANTIAGO, GLADYS JOSEFINA

SANCHEZ SANTIAGO, ASIA RAQUEL SANCHEZ

SANTIAGO, JOSE

SANCHEZ SANTIAGO, LESTER PAUL

SANCHEZ SANTIAGO, VANESSA SANCHEZ

SANTIAGO, JULIA

ANTONIA SANCHEZ

SANTIAGO; JOHN DOE

Y JANE DOE COMO

POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; GLADYS SANTIAGO

T/C/C GLADYS

SANTIAGO FIGUEROA

T/C/C GLADYS

SANTIAGO CACHOLA

T/C/C GLADYS

SANTIAGO DE SANCHEZ

T/C/C GLADYS

SANCHEZ, POR SI Y EN LA CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES Demandados

Civil Núm.: BY2023CV01941.

Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO

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

A: VANESSA SANCHEZ

SANTIAGO; JOHN DOE

Y JANE DOE COMO

POSIBLES MIEMBROS

DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION JOSE SANCHEZ SANTIAGO

T/C/C JOSE SANTIAGO

T/C/C JOSE SANCHEZ.

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al Tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto.

Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberé presentar

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

Greenspoon Marder, LLP

Lcda. Frances L. Asencio-Guido R.U.A. 15,622 TRADE CENTRE SOUTH, SUITE 700 100 WEST CYPRESS CREEK ROAD FORT LAUDERDALE, FL 33309

Telephone: (954) 343 6273 Frances.Asencio@gmlaw.com

Expedido bajo mi firma, y sello del Tribunal, en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy día 19 de mayo de 2023. LCDA. LAURA

I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. LUISA I. ANDINO AYALA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR DEL TRIBUNAL.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO libre ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA

SUPERIOR DE MANATí

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante Vs. INES MARIA

ROJAS MELENDEZ

Demandada

Civil Núm.: MT2023CV00342. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO (EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: INES MARIA

ROJAS MELENDEZ. POR EL PRESENTE EDICTO se le notifica que se ha radicado en esta Secretaría por la parte demandante, Demanda sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria en la que se alega adeuda la suma principal de $17,499.83, más intereses sobre dicha suma al 6 1/4% anual, desde el día 1ro de noviembre de 2022, hasta su completo pago, más recargos acumulados, más la cantidad de $6,800.00 estipulada para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, así como cualquier otra suma estipulada en el contrato de préstamo, todas cuyas sumas están líquidas y exigibles. La propiedad hipotecada a ser vendida en pública subasta es: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número Tres (3) del Bloque “B” de la URBANIZACIÓN VALLES DE MANATÍ, localizado en el Barrio Coto del término municipal de Manatí, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de DOSCIENTOS

OCHENTA Y CINCO PUNTO

CERO CUATRO (285.04) METROS CUADRADOS; en lindes por el NORTE, en veintiocho punto cero cero (28.00) me-

tros, con el solar número Dos (2) del Bloque “B”; por el SUR, en veintiocho punto cero cero (28.00) metros, con el solar número Cuarenta y Cuatro (44) del Bloque “B”; por el ESTE, en diez punto dieciocho (10.18) metros, con el solar número Ocho (8) del Bloque “B”; y por el OESTE, en diez punto dieciocho (10.18) metros, con la Calle número Uno (1). Enclava una casa construida de concreto armado y bloques para fines residenciales. La escritura de hipoteca se encuentra inscrita al folio 93 del tomo 582 de Manatí, finca número 8,754, inscripción cuarta. Registro de la Propiedad Sección de Manatí. POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los treinta (3 días de haber sido publicado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día de la publicación. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección: https:// unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/ salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. La dirección postal del abogado de la parte demandante es la siguiente:

Lcda. Xana M. Connelly Pagán Bufete Collazo, Connelly & Surillo, LLC

P.O. Box 11550

San Juan, P.R. 00922-1550

Tel. (787) 625-9999

Fax (787) 705-7387

E-mail: xconnelly@lawpr.com

Se le notifica también por la presente que la parte demandante habrá de presentar para su anotación al Registrador de la Propiedad del Distrito en que está situada la propiedad objeto de este pleito, un aviso de estar pendiente esta acción. Para publicarse conforme a la Orden dictada por el Tribunal en un periódico de circulación general. EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto que firmo y sello en Manatí, Puerto Rico, hoy 22 de mayo de 2023. VIVIAN Y. FRESSE GONZÁLEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. SARAY SALGADO, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR DEL TRIBUNAL I.

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO

The San Juan Daily Star

PUERTO RICO

Demandante V. RESUL ROBLES

COLÓN;

ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA

Demandados

CIvil Núm.: FA2023CV00222.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE GARANTÍAS.

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

A: RESUL ROBLES COLÓN. INMATE NUMBER 53132-069. A. LEGAL MAIL OPEN ONLY IN THE PRESENCE OF INMATE, WILLIAMSBURG FCI, 8301 HIGHWAY 521, SALTERS, SC 29590. B. PO BOX 63, PUERTO REAL, PR. 00740-0063.

De: FIRSTBANK PUERTO RICO.

Se le emplaza y requiere que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramaiudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Este caso trata sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Garantías en que la parte demandante solicita que se condene a la parte demandada a pagar: la suma principal de $71,169.57, más la suma de $2,831.19, que incluye intereses según pactados, cargos por demora y otros cargos, que se acumulan diariamente hasta su total y completo pago, más la suma de 10% del principal, por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. Se le apercibe que, si dejare de hacerlo, se dictará contra usted sentencia en rebeldía, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle.

Lcdo. José Antonio Lamas Burgos

Número del Tribunal Supremo 15693

221 Ponce de León Ave., Suite 900, San Juan, PR 00917

Teléfono: (787) 296-9500

Correo Electrónico: jlamas@lvprlaw.com

EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y Sello del Tribunal, hoy 23 de mayo de 2023. WANDA I. SEGUÍ REYES, SECRETARIA. IVELISSE SERRANO GARCÍA, SUB-SECRETARIA.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA

TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE

BAYAMÓN ISLAND PORTFOLIO SERVICES, LLC, COMO AGENTE DE FAIRWAY ACQUISITIONS FUND, LLC

Demandante V. ÁNGEL M. VEGA DETRES

Demandado(a)

Civil: BY2022CV04705. Sala: 505. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO ORDINARIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: ÁNGEL M. VEGA

DETRES - BO. HATO TEJAS CALLE VOLCÁN 88 CARR 871 BAYAMÓN, PR 0096 1-4729. (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 22 de mayo de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 23 de mayo de 2023. En BAYAMÓN, Puerto Rico, el 23 de mayo de 2023. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA. MILITZA MERCADO RIVERA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN ISLAND PORTFOLIO SERVICES, LLC

COMO AGENTE DE FAIRWAY ACQUISITIONS FUND, LLC

Demandante V.

LUIS M. IRIGOYEN RODRIGUEZ

Demandado(a)

Civil: BY2022CV05476. Sala:

501. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: LUIS M. IRIGOYEN RODRIGUEZ.

(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 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 23 de mayo de 2023. En Bayamón, Puerto Rico, el 23 de mayo de 2023.

LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. NEREIDA QUILES SANTANA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL

GENERAL DE JUSTICIA SALA

SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO SAMIRA LY AYALA ROBLES

Demandante V. EX PARTE

Demandado(a)

Civil: CA2021CV03442. Sobre: EXPEDIENTE DE DOMINIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: LAS PERSONAS IGNORADAS A QUIENES PUEDA PERJUDICAR LA INSCRIPCIÓN SOLICITADO, A LOS QUE TENGAN EN LA FINCA DESCRITA MÁS ADELANTE CUALQUIER DERECHO REAL, A LOS ORGANISMOS PÚBLICOS AFECTADOS, Y EN GENERAL, A TODO AQUEL QUE DESEE OPONERSE A LA PETICIÓN.

(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 22 de mayo de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una

sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 24 de mayo de 2023. En Fajardo, Puerto Rico, el 24 de mayo de 2023. WANDA I. SEGUÍ REYES, SECRETARIA. KATHIA FERRER FIGUEROA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE MAYAGÜEZ CARMEN Y MATOS LUCIANO Demandante Vs. SUCESION FRANCISCA

SILVA ARCE COMPUESTA

POR FULANO Y SUTANA Demandada

Civil Núm.: MZ2023CV00746. Sobre: TÍTULO CONTRADICTORIO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: SUCESIÓN DE LA SEÑORA FRANCISCA

SILVA ARCE TAMBIEN CONOCIDA COMO MARÍA FRANCISCA SILVA ARCE COMPUESTA POR FULANO Y SUTANA. DEMANDADOS DESCONOCIDOS.

Por la presente se emplaza y se les notifica que se ha presentado en la Secretaria de éste Tribunal la Demanda del caso de epígrafe sobre Titulo Contradictorio. Se apercibe y advierte a ustedes como personas desconocidas que de no contestar la demanda radicando su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal y notificar copia de la contestación de ésta a la parte demandante por conducto de su abogado el Lcdo. Saúl Zapata Ripolls a PO Box 6086, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico

Monday, May 29, 2023

0681, teléfono 787-450-5850, desde los próximos 30 días a partir de la publicación de este emplazamiento por edicto que será publicado una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general en la isla de Puerto Rico, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia, concediendo el remedio solicitado en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle. Extendido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal hoy 22 de mayo de 2023. LIC. NORMA G. SANTANA IRIZARRY, SECRETARIA REGIONAL II. JOSSIE BOBÉ, SUB-SECRETARIA.

LEGAL NOTICE

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

CONCEPCION ROMAN

Demandante Vs. MARIA E. AYALA ORTEGA

Demandado

Civil Núm.: TA2023RF00037.

Sobre: RUPTURA IRREPARABLE. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, S.S.

A: MARIA E. AYALA ORTEGA. HC-03 BOX 8980, DORADO, PUERTO RICO 00646. POR LA PRESENTE, se le emplaza y requiere para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva a Ia demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días de haber sido diligenciado el emplazamiento, excluyéndose el dIa del diligenciamiento, notificando copia de Ia misma al abogado de Ia parte demandante, cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono, son los que se indican a continuación:

Lcdo. José Alberto Quiñones Lopez RUA 16,009 44 calle Carazo, Suite 1-A Guaynabo, PR 00969-5604 Tel. 787-790-3344 Email: jose@bufetequinoneslopez.com

Si usted dejara de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en Ia demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción lo entiende pertinente. Este caso fue presentado a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC). Deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través de Ia siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar cualquier documento relacionado al caso en Ia Secretarla del Tribunal; con

constancia de haber servido copia de Ia misma (a Ia) abogado (a) de Ia parte demandante o a esta si hubiera comparecido por derecho propio. EXPEDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y eI Sello del Tribunal, hoy día 8 de mayo de 2023. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA. MARTHA E. ROSARIO ROSA, SUB-SECRETARIA,

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE CAGUAS SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante V. SUCESIÓN DE ERIC JAVIER DEL VALLE ARROYO; BETSY DAMARIS DELGADO RAMOS T/C/C BETSY D. DELGADO, COMO HEREDERA DEL CAUSANTE ERIC JAVIER DEL VALLE ARROYO Y COMO DUEÑA REGISTRAL; “JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE” COMO

POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN DE ERIC JAVIER DEL VALLE ARROYO; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIONES DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (C.R.I.M.)

Demandados

Civil Núm.: CG2023CV01090.

Sala: 705. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO

POR EDICTO E INTERPELACIÓN. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, S. S. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO E INTERPELACIÓN DIRIGIDOS

A: BETSY DAMARIS DELGADO RAMOS T/C/C BETSY D. DELGADO, COMO HEREDERA DEL CAUSANTE ERIC JAVIER DEL VALLE ARROYO Y COMO DUEÑA REGISTRAL; “JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE” COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN DE ERIC JAVIER DEL VALLE ARROYO. 202C PASEO

EL VERDE, CAGUAS, PUERTO RICO 00725, Y APT. 3-202 COND. PASEO

EL VERDE, CAGUAS, PUERTO RICO 00725.

Por la presente se le emplaza y notifica que debe contestar la demanda enmendada incoada en su contra dentro del térmi-

no de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del presente edicto. Además, en cuanto a la interpelación de los herederos del causante, a que dentro del término legal de treinta (30) días contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia del causante conforme dispone el Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. §2787. De no expresarse dentro de ese término de treinta (30) días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia, se tendrá por aceptada. También se les APERCIBE a los herederos antes mencionados que luego del transcurso del término de treinta (30) días antes señalados contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia del causante y, por consiguiente, responden por las cargas de dicha herencia conforme dispone el Artículo 957 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. §2785. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio. Si usted deja de presentar y notificar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el Tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, o cualquier otro, si el Tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Los abogados de la parte demandante son: ABOGADOS DE LA PARTE

DEMANDANTE:

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

BERMÚDEZ & DÍAZ, LLP

Edificio Ochoa, 500 Calle De La Tanca Suite 209 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00901 Tel.: (787) 523-2670 / Fax: (787) 523-2664 rdíaz@bdprlaw.com

Expido este edicto bajo mi firma y el sello de este Tribunal, hoy 25 de mayo de 2023. LISILDA MARTÍNEZ AGOSTO, SECRETARIA GENERAL. MARTA E. DONATE RESTO, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE

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

FIRST BANK

PUERTO RICO

Demandante V.

IVELISSE FALCÓN

CAHPARRO

Demandado(a)

Civil: HU2022CV00901. Sobre:

EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA Y COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: IVELISSE FALCÓN CAHPARRO A SUS DIRECCIONES CONOCIDAS: LOT 249D ST. ANTON, HUMACAO, PR 00791, LOT 249 D ST. ANTON RUIZ COMM., HUMACAO, PR 00791, URB. CUIDAD CRISTIANA I-31, HUMACAO, PR 00791, CUIDAD CRISTIANA 63 AVE. PUERTO RICO, HUMACAO, PR 007914814, HC 5 BOX 6828, AGUAS BUENAS, PR 00703. P/C LCDA. MARIE L QUIÑONES TAÑON. (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 18 de mayo de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 24 de mayo de 2023. En HUMACAO, Puerto Rico, el 24 de mayo de 2023. IVELISSE C. FONSECA RODRÍGUEZ, SECRETARIA. MICHELLE GUEVARA DE LEÓN, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE GUAYNABO

FINANCE OF AMERICA

REVERSE LLC

Demandante Vs. SUCESION ARMANDO IZQUIERDO MEILAN T/C/C ARMANDO

IZQUIERDO COMPUESTA POR ERNESTO

ARMANDO IZQUIERDO

ZIPPERLE, JACQUELINE MARIE IZQUIERDO

ZIPPERLE, ARMANDO

JUAN IZQUIERDO FONALLEDAS, PURITERE MORLEY

IZQUIERDO; JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES Demandados

Civil Núm.: GB2021CV00760.

Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: LA PARTE DEMANDADA, AL (A LA) SECRETARIO(A) DE HACIENDA DE PUERTO RICO Y AL PÚBLICO

GENERAL:

Certifico y Hago Constar: Que en cumplimiento con el Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia que me ha sido dirigido por el (la) Secretario(a) del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Guaynabo, en el caso de epígrafe, venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor, por separado, de contado y por moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América y/o Giro Postal y Cheque Certificado, en mi oficina ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Guaynabo, el 6 DE JULIO DE 2023, A LAS 10:20 DE LA MAÑANA, todo derecho título, participación o interés que le corresponda a la parte demandada o cualquiera de ellos en el inmueble hipotecado objeto de ejecución que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar Numero Cinco (5), Bloque A de la Urbanización Villa del Parque, de Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, Barrio Frailes, con un área de trescientos treinta y ocho metros sesenta y siete centímetros cuadrados (338.67 mc), colindando por el NORTE, con la Calle A de la Urbanización Villa del Parque con una longitud de trece metros doscientos centímetros (13.200 m); por el ESTE, con el lote número seis (6) de la misma Urbanización, con veinticinco metros ochocientos diez centímetros (25.810 m) longitud; por el SUR, con terrenos de la Urbanización Muñoz Rivera, lote M veintiocho (M 28) con trece metros doscientos setenta y seis centímetros (13.276 m) longitud; y por el OESTE, con el lote número cuatro (4) de la Urbanización Villa del Parque, longitud de veinticinco metros, treinta y siete centímetros (28.37 m). Enclava una residencia de dos plantas, para una familia. Inscrita al folio 230 del tomo 258 de Guaynabo,

finca 15,607, Registro de la Propiedad de Guaynabo. La Hipoteca Revertida consta inscrita al folio 141 del tomo 1,510 de Guaynabo, finca 15,607, Registro de la Propiedad de Guaynabo, inscripción 9ª. Propiedad localizada en: VILLA DEL PARQUE, A5 CALLE A, GUAYNABO, P.R. 00969. Según figuran en la certificación registral, la propiedad objeto de ejecución está gravada por las siguientes cargas anteriores o preferentes: Nombre del Titular: N/A. Suma de la Carga: N/A. Fecha de Vencimiento: N/A. Según figuran en la certificación registral, la propiedad objeto de ejecución está gravada por las siguientes cargas posteriores a la inscripción del crédito ejecutante: Nombre del Titular: Secretario de la Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano. Suma de la Carga: $375,000.00. Fecha de Vencimiento: 12 de septiembre de 2087. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad de la propiedad y que todas las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes al crédito ejecutante antes descritos, si los hubiere, continuarán subsistentes. El rematante acepta dichas cargas y gravámenes anteriores, y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. Se establece como tipo de mínima subasta la suma de $375,000.00, según acordado entre las partes en el precio pactado en la escritura de hipoteca. De ser necesaria una SEGUNDA SUBASTA por declararse desierta la primera, la misma se celebrará en mi oficina, ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Guaynabo, el 13 DE JULIO DE 2023, A LAS 10:20 DE LA MAÑANA, y se establece como mínima para dicha segunda subasta la suma de $250,000.00, 2/3 partes del tipo mínima establecido originalmente. Si tampoco se produce remate ni adjudicación en la segunda subasta, se establece como mínima para la TERCERA SUBASTA, la suma de $187,500.00, la mitad (1/2) del precio pactado y dicha subasta se celebrará en mi oficina, ubicada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Guaynabo, el 20 DE JULIO DE 2023, A LAS 10:20 DE LA MAÑANA. Dicha subasta se llevará a cabo para, con su producto satisfacer a la parte demandante, el importe de la Sentencia dictada a su favor ascendente a la suma de $173,334.06 por concepto de principal, más la suma de $14,128.73 en intereses acumulados al 1 de junio de 2022 y los cuales continúan acumulándose a razón de 2.402% anual hasta su total y completo pago; más la sumas de $12,615.72 en seguro hipotecario; 1,408.40

en seguro; $425.00 de tasaciones; $220.00 de inspecciones; $1,610.00 de adelantos pendientes más la cantidad de 10% del pagare original en la suma de $37,500.00, para gastos, costas y honorarios de abogado, esta última habrá de devengar intereses al máximo del tipo legal fijado por la oficina del Comisionado de Instituciones Financieras aplicable a esta fecha, desde este mismo día hasta su total y completo saldo. La venta en pública subasta de la referida propiedad se verificará libre de toda carga o gravamen posterior que afecte la mencionada finca, a cuyo efecto se notifica y se hace saber la fecha, hora y sitio de la PRIMERA, SEGUNDA Y TERCERA SUBASTA, si esto fuera necesario, a los efectos de que cualquier persona o personas con algún interés puedan comparecer a la celebración de dicha subasta. Se notifica a todos los interesados que las actas y demás constancias del expediente de este caso están disponibles en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante horas laborables para ser examinadas por los (las) interesados (as). Y para su publicación en el periódico The San Juan Daily Star, que es un diario de circulación general en la isla de Puerto Rico, por espacio de dos semanas consecutivas con un intervalo de por lo menos siete (7) días entre ambas publicaciones, así como para su publicación en los sitios públicos de Puerto Rico. Expedido en Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, hoy 12 de abril de 2023. FRANCES TORRES CONTRERAS, ALGUACIL REGIONAL. ALG. HUGO BASCÓ MEDINA, ALGUACIL PLACA #807.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ CRUZ

Parte Demandante Vs ERNY RODRÍGUEZ CARRASQUILLO; ELMY RODRÍGUEZ CARRASQUILLO

Parte Demandada Caso Núm.: CG2022CV03536.

Sobre: PARTICIÓN DE HERENCIA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: ERNY RODRÍGUEZ CARRASQUILLO; ELMY RODRÍGUEZ CARRASQUILLO.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se les notifica la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 15 de mayo de 2023 este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted en-

terarse 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 24 de mayo de 2023. En Caguas, Puerto Rico, 24 de mayo de 2023. LISILDA MARTÍNEZ AGOSTO, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. JESSENIA PEDRAZA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN TRIAD INVESTMENT, LLC Demandante V. ORIENTAL BANK COMO SUCESOR EN DERECHO DE R-G PREMIER BANK; ROSA

L. ANGUEIRA GONZALEZ Y GERONIMO VALENTIN MONTALVO; RICHARD DOE COMO DEMANDADO DESCONOCIDO Demandado(a)

Civil: BY2023CV00584. Sala: 501. Sobre: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: ROSA L. ANGUEIRA GONZALEZ, POR SI, Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES; Y GERONIMO VALENTIN MONTALVO, POR SI, Y EN REPRESENTACION DE LA SOCIEDAD DE BIENES GANANCIALES. RICHARD DOE COMO DEMANDADO DESCONOCIDO.

(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 25 de abril de 2023, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circula-

ción 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 24 de mayo de 2023. En Bayamón, Puerto Rico, el 24 de mayo de 2023. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. NEREIDA QUILES SANTANA, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE BAYAMÓN

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

Demandante V.

SUCESIONES DE JENNIE RIVERA RODRÍGUEZ Y ÁNGEL THEODORO

DAMIANI TIRADO T/C/C ÁNGEL TEODORO

DAMIANI TIRADO, COMPUESTAS POR: HÉCTOR RAFAEL

DAMIANI RIVERA, SANDRA IVETTE

DAMIANI RIVERA, FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS; DEPARTAMENTO DE HACIENDA DE PUERTO RICO

Demandados Civil Núm.: BY2022CV00281. (401). Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE GARANTÍAS. EDICTO DE SUBASTA. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: PUBLICO EN GENERAL.

El Alguacil del Tribunal que suscribe anuncia y hace constar: A. Que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento que me ha sido dirigido por la Secretaria del Tribunal de Primera Instancia de Puerto Rico, Sala de Bayamón, en el caso de epígrafe, venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor de contado y en moneda de curso legal y corriente de los Estados Unidos de América y cuyo pago se efectuará en efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera

Instancia, todo derecho, título o interés que tenga la Parte Demandada en el bien inmueble que se describe a continuación:

URBANA: Solar radicado en la Urbanización Bayamón Gardens, situada en el Barrio Pájaros 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: Solar veintiséis de la Manzana “U”, con un área de trescientos diez metros cuadrados con cincuenta centímetros. Colinda por el NORTE, con los solares diez y once, distancia de trece metros con cincuenta centímetros; por el SUR, con la Avenida Principal, distancia de trece metros con cincuenta centímetros; por el ESTE, con el solar veinticinco, distancia de veintitrés metros; y por el OESTE, con el solar veintisiete, distancia de veintitrés metros. Contiene una casa de concreto reforzado para una familia. Inscrita al folio 132 del tomo 582 de Bayamón Sur, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección Primera de Bayamón, finca número 26,696. Dirección fisica: 26 U Ave. Principal, Bayamón Gardens, Bayamón, PR. 00957. B. Que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado están de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal durante las horas laborables bajo el epígrafe de este caso. C. Que se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito ejecutante, continuarán subsistentes, entendiéndose que el rematente los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. D. Dicha subasta se llevará a cabo para satisfacer a la parte demandante el importe de la sentencia que ha obtenido ascendente a la suma principal de $129,388.03, la suma de $60,543.40, que incluye intereses según pactados, cargos por demora y otros cargos, que se acumulan diariamente hasta su total y completo pago, más la suma de 10% del principal, por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. La PRIMERA SUBASTA se celebrará el día 3 DE AGOSTO DE 2023 A LAS 10:15 DE LA MAÑANA en la Oficina del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia de Bayamón, por el tipo mínimo de $148,824.00. De declararse desierta dicha subasta se celebrará una SEGUNDA SUBASTA el día 10 DE AGOSTO DE 2023 A LAS 10:15 DE LA MAÑANA en el mismo lugar antes mencionado. El precio para la segunda subasta lo será

2/3 partes del precio mínimo de la primera, o sea, $99,216.00. De declararse desierta dicha segunda subasta, se celebrará una TERCERA SUBASTA el día 17 DE AGOSTO DE 2023 A LAS 10:15 DE LA MAÑANA en el mismo lugar antes mencionado. El precio para la tercera subasta lo será 1/2 del precio mínimo de la primera, o sea, $74,412.00. Y PARA QUE ASÍ CONSTE, y para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general y por un término de catorce (14) días en los sitios públicos conforme a la ley, expido la presente bajo mi firma y sello de este tribunal, hoy 25 de mayo de 2023 en Bayamón, Puerto Rico. MARIBEL LANZAR VELÁZQUEZ, ALGUACIL PLACA #735.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAROLINA REVERSE MORTGAGE FUNDING LLC.

Demandante Vs. DORAL BANK; JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO

POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARE EXTRAVIADO

Demandados

Civil Núm.: CA2023CV01324. Sobre: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARE EXTRAVIADO.

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al Tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto. En dicha demanda se reclama la cancelación un pagaré otorgado el 4 de enero de 2007, ante el Notario Luis Angel Ramírez Vélez, a favor de DORAL BANK, por la suma principal de $50,000.00, sin intereses y vencedero a la presentación. Para garantizar el pago de dicho pagaré se constituyó hipoteca voluntaria mediante la escritura número 2, otorgada el 4 de enero de 2007, ante el Notario Luis Angel Ramírez Vélez sobre el bien inmueble que se describe a continuación:

URBANA: PROPIEDAD HORI-

ZONTAL: Apartamento número B-2. Apartamento residencial de forma irregular localizado en la primera planta del edificio B del Condominio Costa del Sol situado en la Avenida

Los Gobernadores en el barrio Cangrejos Arriba del término municipal de Carolina, Puerto Rico. El área aproximada es de 1040.03 pies cuadrados equivalentes 96.714 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, en 28 pies 11 pulgadas con área exterior común de uso limitado; por el SUR, en 28 pies 11 pulgadas con área exterior común y área de pasillo del edificio; por el ESTE, en 46 pies 11 pulgadas con área exterior común, área exterior común de uso limitado, área de pasillo del edificio y pared medianera que lo separa del apartamento B-1; y por el OESTE, en 46 pies 11 pulgadas con área exterior común y área exterior común de uso limitado. Este Apartamento goza del uso exclusivo de un patio que es elemento común limitado el cual está delimitado por verjas según surge de los planos de la propiedad. Consta de balcón, sala-comedor, cocina, laundry, dos baños y tres dormitorios. La puerta de entrada de este Apartamento está situada en el lindero Este. Le corresponden dos estacionamientos identificados con el mismo número y letra del Apartamento. Este Apartamento tiene una participación de 0.694359851% en los elementos comunes del Condominio. Inscrita al folio 7 del tomo 784 de Carolina Norte, finca 38278, Registro de la Propiedad de Carolina, Sección I. La hipoteca antes descrita consta inscrita al folio 81 del tomo 970 de Carolina Norte, finca 38278, Registro de la Propiedad de Carolina, Sección I, inscripción 8a. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), la cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberé presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

Greenspoon Marder, LLP

Lcda. Frances L. Asencio-Guido

R.U.A. 15,622 TRADE CENTRE SOUTH, SUITE 700 100 WEST CYPRESS CREEK ROAD FORT LAUDERDALE, FL 33309

Telephone: (954) 343 6273 Frances.Asencio@gmlaw.corn Expedido bajo mi firma, y sello del Tribunal, en Carolina, Puerto Rico, hoy 18 de mayo de 2023. KANELLY ZAYAS ROBLES, SECRETARIA. KEILA GARCÍA SOLÍS, SUB-SECRETARIA.

The Miami Heat are in trouble, and it’s (mostly) their fault

By SCOTT CACCIOLA

After the miracle and the madness, Gabe Vincent broke the silence inside the Miami Heat locker room Saturday night by humming along to “Life Goes On,” a ballad by Ed Sheeran featuring Luke Combs. Most of Vincent’s teammates were long gone by then, bound for their Miami-area homes as they faced the collective challenge of figuring out how to rebound from a soul-crushing loss to the Boston Celtics in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals.

But back in the locker room, where an oversize image of the NBA’s Larry O’Brien championship trophy is stitched into the carpet and a series of murals depicting the franchise’s past triumphs line a tunnel leading to the court, the atmosphere was gloomy. The lyrics of a song about heartbreak hardly helped. They seeped from Vincent’s iPhone all tinny and hollow, as if the music were being piped through a radiator:

“It hit like a train, I ran out of words; I got nothing to say, everything hurts.”

“Great song,” Vincent said.

Nothing about this season has been easy for the Heat, and Vincent hinted that perhaps some poetic justice was at work after the Celtics’ 104-103 victory in Game 6, tying the series at three games apiece. Derrick White’s astonishing putback at the buzzer — the ball left his fingertips with about one-tenth of a second to spare — had extended the best-ofseven series and the Celtics’ season, forcing a Game 7 in Boston on Monday night (8:30 p.m. ET, TNT).

The Heat could not have been closer to securing a spot in the NBA Finals against the Denver Nuggets. And then, in an instant, that dream somehow felt very far away.

“It’s almost like it’s supposed to be this way,” Vincent said. “But, you know, go to Boston and get a win.”

Vincent, the team’s starting point guard, made it sound simple, but this series has been a carnival ride. The Heat won the first three games to put themselves on the cusp of history as they attempted to become just the second No. 8 seed to advance to the NBA Finals, joining the 1998-99 New York Knicks. Now, the Celtics are bidding to become the first team to win an NBA playoff series after trailing by three games to none.

“This is one hell of a series,” Heat coach

Erik Spoelstra said. “At this time right now, I don’t know how we are going to get this done, but we are going up there to get it done.”

It was a public vote of confidence after a game full of missed opportunities for the Heat. Where to begin? Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo, their two best players, combined to shoot 9 of 37 from the field.

Butler, in particular, looked downright passive for much of the game. There he was in the second quarter, handling the ball at the top of the perimeter with the shot clock winding down. But instead of driving, Butler shoved a pass to Duncan Robinson, who had little choice but to hoist a runner from 11 feet that grazed the front of the rim. A few seconds later, the Celtics’ Jayson Tatum was at the other end for a layup.

But other plays could haunt the Heat, too. In the fourth quarter, for example, Adebayo grabbed the rim blocking a shot, which was against the rules and led to a 4-point possession for the Celtics.

As a team, the Heat shot 35.5% from the field. They missed hook shots and layups, jumpers and floaters. They still had a chance thanks to Caleb Martin, who slid into the starting lineup and scored 21 points, and Butler, who asserted himself late and was fouled attempting a 3-pointer with 3 seconds

remaining. He made all three free throws for a 1-point lead.

But all that was prologue to the final sequence — a 3-point attempt by the Celtics’ Marcus Smart that rimmed in and out, and White’s putback. The Heat’s Max Strus had been hedging on Tatum, preventing him from getting the ball, but that left White with an open lane to the basket for the follow.

“I thought we had a lot of things covered on that play,” Spoelstra said, “and sometimes things just don’t break your way. I don’t think there’s any regrets on that. It’s just a shame.”

Butler, who scored 15 of his 24 points in the fourth quarter, shouldered the blame.

“If I play better, we’re not even in this position,” he said. “And I will be better. That’s what makes me smile, because those guys follow my lead. So when I’m playing better, I think we’re playing better as a whole.”

After finishing the regular season with a 44-38 record, the Heat landed in the playin tournament and lost their opening game to the Atlanta Hawks. The Heat then trailed the Chicago Bulls by as many as 6 points in the fourth quarter of an elimination game before they went

on a game-winning run to narrowly slip into the playoffs.

But something odd was beginning to percolate inside the Heat: The greater the challenge, the better they played. Facing the topseeded Milwaukee Bucks in the first round, Miami lost two rotation players, Tyler Herro and Victor Oladipo, to long-term injuries, which should have been problematic. But Butler was brilliant as the Heat advanced in five games.

But that version of Butler has been missing as the Heat’s three-game series lead has slipped away. He has been passing up shots, hesitating on drives and turning the ball over. In other words, he looks tired from the grind of a long season.

Now, Miami is facing its greatest test yet. Butler said he planned to decompress by playing a late-night game of Spades.

“I’m not going to let our guys quit,” he said. “I don’t care what nobody says. Everything going to be OK.”

For the Celtics, the No. 2 seed, Game 7 is one more chance for them to salvage their season and make good on their pledge to return to the NBA Finals, one year after losing to the Golden State Warriors. Tatum has been inconsistent, even in victory, routinely going scoreless for long stretches with his season in jeopardy every night. He scored just 6 of his 31 points in the second half of Saturday’s game.

“We’re all aware it’s not time to celebrate,” Tatum said. “We didn’t accomplish anything.”

It was approaching midnight when Butler called guard Kyle Lowry to his locker for a quiet chat. Vincent had vacated the premises, taking his moody music with him.

At the front of the room, a monitor had exactly one item listed on the team’s schedule for Sunday: a 1:30 p.m. flight to Boston.

Miami Heat forward Jimmy Butler made just two shots before the fourth quarter of Game 6 and looked hesitant for most of the game.

Before Carlos Alcaraz was great, he was good enough to be lucky

By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

Carlos Alcaraz is so good, so young, and wins so often that his success has seemed predetermined.

Of course, someone that fast, with hands as soft as an artisan’s and a physique that lands him right in the not-tootall and not-too-short Goldilocks zone of the modern tennis greats, would become the youngest world No. 1 during the 50-year history of the ATP rankings. He has good genes, too. His father was a nationally ranked professional in Spain as a teenager.

So this was preordained for Alcaraz, a 20-year-old champion who comes to Paris this week as the prohibitive favorite to win the French Open, wasn’t it? Maybe not.

As happens so often in sports, and especially in tennis, where early exposure and training are essential, there was an element of luck that helped create the sport’s heir apparent to the troika of Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic that has ruled the men’s game for the better part of the past two decades.

That luck ultimately took the form of a local candy company’s logo, which adorned the shirts Alcaraz wore during his matches from the time he was 10 years old. It was all thanks to happenstance encounters with Alfonso López Rueda, the tennis-playing president of Postres Reina, a Spanish dessert and candy concern known for its puddings and yogurts. López Rueda’s interest in Alcaraz and the support that allowed him to travel Europe and begin competing against older boys in unfamiliar settings may be an explanation for the way Alcaraz, from the beginning of his short career, has almost always displayed a kind of joyous serenity, even as the stage grew bigger and the spotlight hotter.

“Some personalities are just adept at that, some have to learn,” said Paul Annacone, who has coached Federer and Pete Sampras, among others. “He just really seems to enjoy the environment — win, lose, whatever — seems to embrace it.”

The greatest fortune an aspiring tennis player can have, it seems, is to have been born to parents who played the game at the highest level. The pro ranks,

especially on the men’s side, are lousy with nepo babies. Casper Ruud, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Sebastian Korda, Taylor Fritz and Ben Shelton are all the offspring of former professionals. All of them had a racket in their hands at an early age and nearly unlimited access to someone who knew best what to do with it.

For everyone else, some kismet is key.

The skills professional tennis requires are specialized, and the long and expensive process of honing them has to start at a young age. But the player development system in most countries is fractured and happenstance at best, with any school-based programs being mostly limited. Either a family consciously decides to expose a young child to tennis, or the child does not play, at least not seriously.

So it’s hardly a surprise that so many of the creation stories in professional tennis seem to involve a sliding-doors moment.

Frances Tiafoe probably does not end up as a Grand Slam semifinalist if his father, an immigrant from Sierra Leone, becomes a maintenance man in an office park instead of at a local tennis club.

Djokovic had the good fortune of meeting Jelena Gencic, one of the top coaches in Serbia, when he was 6 years old and she was giving a tennis clinic on the courts near his parents’ restaurant in Kopaonik, in the Serbian mountains near Montenegro.

Arthur Ashe was traveling in Cameroon in 1971 when he spotted an 11-yearold schoolboy with raw talent to burn. He put in a call to his friend Philippe Chatrier at France’s tennis federation and told him he best come have a look. That boy was Yannick Noah, the last Frenchman to win the French Open.

As with the others, Alcaraz’s preternatural gifts and skills played the biggest role in his good fortune. When he got the chance to impress, he did, but first luck had to deliver an opportunity.

The story of that opportunity begins with Alcaraz’s grandfather’s decision decades ago to develop tennis courts and a swimming pool at a hunting club in El Palmar, a suburb of the city of Murcia. It would have been cheaper to put in all hard courts, but the Spanish love the red clay. So Grandpa Alcaraz (another Carlos) made sure to include those courts with the development.

Now flash forward to a dozen years ago. López Rueda is the tennis-mad CEO of Postres Reina, which is based in Caravaca de la Cruz. But López Rueda doesn’t just like tennis; he likes to play tennis on red clay. He lives in the same region as the Alcaraz clan, and the best and most accessible clay courts for him are at a club in El Palmar, so he plays there, said Jose Lag, a longtime Postres Reina executive and an Alcaraz family friend, who spoke on behalf of his boss, López Rueda.

At the club he became friendly

with Alcaraz’s father and played as the doubles partner of his uncle. Also, López Rueda’s son, who is three years older than Alcaraz, had the same coach, Kiko Navarro, who could not stop raving about the talents of Carlito. One day López Rueda agreed to watch the boy play, and it was unlike anything he had ever seen. Carlito had everything, but his family’s resources were limited. His father was a tennis coach and administrator at the club, and his mother was busy raising the boy and his younger siblings.

López Rueda agreed to lend the family 2,000 euros to travel to a tournament, but then he started to think bigger and decided to get his company involved in supporting this local boy who was already capable of beating taller, stronger and older competition.

Postres Reina had long supported local basketball and soccer teams, but tennis was López Rueda’s favorite sport and the company had never sponsored an individual athlete. Alcaraz became the first, wearing the company logo on his shirts.

The company’s support, which lasted through Alcaraz’s early teenage years, allowed him to continue to access to the best coaching in his region and to travel throughout Europe to play in the most competitive tournaments.

“It was done not as a marketing interest,” Lag said. “It was only to help him. We never thought he would be No. 1.”

Seeing Alcaraz’s success, IMG, the sports and entertainment conglomerate, signed him at age 13, providing even more access, notably to his current coach, former world No. 1 Juan Carlos Ferrero.

There is a fair chance that Alcaraz would have eventually become a top player had López Rueda never seen him. Spain’s tennis federation, which has one of the world’s best talent development pipelines, probably would have caught wind of him before too long.

Max Eisenbud, the director of tennis at IMG, said in any tennis success story the most important ingredient is a solid family willing to take a long-term view toward a child’s success.

“That is the secret recipe,” Eisenbud said during a recent interview, but he acknowledged that financial assistance for a family that needs it can certainly help.

Success has many fathers. In Alcaraz’s case, he was born to an actual tennisplaying father, and then the local candy company swooped in to help.

Sudoku

How to Play:

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

Sudoku Rules:

Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword

Crossword #5P28T9BY

Wordsearch

Down

1. Musical star Verdon

2. ____ Alto

3. Venus de Milo's lack

4.

Answers on page 30

Aries (Mar 21-April 20)

Things are really looking up for you, as Jupiter moves into your sign until October. The planet of good fortune was last here twelve years ago, so it doesn’t come your way very often. During this time, you’ll be expansive, exuberant and enthusiastic, and your optimistic outlook can help you handle challenges that once seemed difficult to cope with. For you Aries, the sky’s the limit!

Taurus (April 21-May 21)

Resolving lingering difficulties and clearing away emotional baggage, may become something you’ll want to do more of. From today, a benevolent and helpful energy encourages you to increase your efforts to be more self-aware. This can include exploring spiritual beliefs or trying out meditation or yoga. Ready to live to your full potential? A life coach might help, Taurus.

Gemini (May 22-June 21)

Jupiter’s presence in Aries from today, might positively influence your social life and help you to bring your dreams and wishes to pass. Over the months ahead, the events you attend and the people you meet can guide you towards fresh opportunities, and ways to make your best ideas a reality. Whether online or off, new contacts may be conduits of useful information and fun.

Cancer (June 22-July 23)

You are capable of big things, and over the coming weeks and months you might find yourself accomplishing many of them. With wisdom-orientated Jupiter moving through your sector of goals and career from today for some months, you may get a promotion or a prized position could be yours. And you can enjoy increased recognition for all your hard work, Cancer.

Leo (July 24-Aug 23)

It’s up, up and away, as buoyant Jupiter enters your travel zone until October. This is the time when you may get an attack of wanderlust or catch that travel bug with a vengeance. You’ll be keen to jet off to new places and soak up the sun. Study, and the desire for a qualification, could also be something that you’re keen on. You’ll thrive when you’re bold and leave your comfort zone.

Virgo (Aug 24-Sep 23)

Jupiter’s move into your sector of money, business and transformation, ushers in a new phase. You might see benefits in all of these areas, as well as in psychological matters and deep emotional bonds. You’ll be more confident and at ease around subjects that many find it difficult to discuss. This will help you make a success of important projects and key relationships, Virgo.

Libra (Sep 24-Oct 23)

Relationships and partnerships may have extra sparkle from today, as cheerful Jupiter moves into your sector of relating, bringing opportunities through interactions with others. It will remain here for some months, and could coincide with an uplifting time for key bonds and partnerships. Be warned though Libra, as you might feel restless if your relationship is cramping your style.

Scorpio (Oct 24-Nov 22)

Dynamic energies can encourage you to be proactive when it comes to getting ahead at work, or regarding goals and personal ambitions. You’ll be bolder too Scorpio, and ready to set your sights higher than before. Energy wise, you could be like a dynamo, and this will get stronger later in the month. Feel like doing more exercise? Go ahead, as it may do you so much good.

Sagittarius (Nov 23-Dec 21)

Keen to do those things you enjoy? Whether it’s sport, outdoor activities or creative hobbies, you’ll be happy to indulge. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll want to experiment with various ideas and see where they lead. At this time, you could create a viable business. Jupiter’s presence in your leisure zone from today, also connects you with opportunities for a true love adventure.

Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 20)

Home and family life can become an adventure, as growth-orientated Jupiter moves into your domestic sector for a long stay. Its lively presence could bring on feelings of restlessness, that might inspire you to move to a new area with better amenities, or perhaps expand your present home. Ready to add to your family or perhaps welcome a pet? This is the time to go ahead.

Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)

Your friends and contacts list may be about to get bigger, as a positive energy begins to influence your sector of communication, networking and socializing. From today, you could be fascinated by new interests, especially those linked to the Internet and social media. You’ll soon find yourself in contact with people who are links in a golden chain of positive events, Aquarius.

Pisces (Feb 20-Mar 20)

Jupiter’s move into your financial zone, can expand your options over the months ahead. While this upbeat planet can bring small sums out of the blue, it could pave the way for bigger opportunities. Willing to work hard and to think out of the box? If you are, you might enhance your income. Keep tabs on your spending Pisces, as money may slip through your fingers.

Speed Bump