Wednesday Nov 11, 2020

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

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Kamala Harris and the Suit That Made History

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Despite Ballots Chaos, SEC Chairman Defends ‘Transparency’ of the Process Content Unclear. Materials, Ballots, the Island’s Future?

Who Knows

Photo by Pedro Correa Henry

Briefcases Full of Shame

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Pierluisi: Appearance Trump Appointee Standing of More Ballot Containers Between Biden’s Team Will Not Affect Gubernatorial and Smooth Transition Race Results P5 P8

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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Wednesday, November 11, 2020

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November 11, 2020

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Indicted lawmaker Alonso Vega resigns under pressure

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ormer New Progressive Party Rep. Néstor Alonso Vega resigned Tuesday from his at-large House seat.

Speaker of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives Carlos Méndez Núñez had demanded his resignation after FBI officials arrested Alonso Vega over an alleged kickback scheme.

According to court records, Alonso Vega will be able to remain under conditional liberty after paying a bond that the court imposed on him after his indictment by a federal grand jury.

The first-term legislator submitted a $1,000 bond.

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Another $9,000 was insured through his firm, so he didn’t have to pay for it in cash.

While his case lasts, Alonso Vega will have to comply with the monitoring requirements, such as taking DNA samples, not violating state or federal laws and reporting any change of residence or telephone number, among others.

According to the indictment, Alonso Vega faces nine federal charges, including receiving illegal commissions (kickbacks) in a type of bribery scheme similar to those for which former legislators Nelson del Valle and María Milagros Charbonier were also accused.

He also faces charges for wire fraud and theft of federal funds from the government of Puerto Rico.

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Wednesday, November 11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Unopened ballot containers keep popping up at SEC Chairman defends election’s ‘transparency’ while acknowledging ‘disorganization’

By PEDRO CORREA HENRY Twitter: @PCorreaHenry Special to The Star

T

en … 40 … 100 ... 115 ... 120 … 134 ... 163 ... 174 … and 184 ballot containers (at press time). Will more appear later?

State Elections Commission (SEC) Chairman Francisco Rosado Colomer said Monday that this was the current number of unopened ballot containers that “appeared” inside the vaults at Roberto Clemente Coliseum in Hato Rey. Rosado Colomer said that even though it remains unknown what is inside each ballot container, he said the contents belonged to the Early and Absentee Voting Administrative Board (JAVA by its Spanish acronym) and would be included in the general scrutiny that was postponed until today, along with around 13,000 added-by-hand votes, 3,000 unreturned mail-in votes, 2,500 absentee votes, 2,000 inmate added-by-hand votes, and an unidentified number of both added-by-hand votes from hospitals and regular votes.

“I don’t know how many votes there are. I don’t do the voting trend,” Rosado Colomer said. “I can say that there are many votes in there [to count].”

Meanwhile, Rosado Colomer defended the purity of the electoral event, insisting that the development will not taint the final results.

“One thing is transparency and another is disorganization. Transparent, we are; disorganized too,” the SEC chief said. “Within the disorganization that we have, we are trying to organize it with the same transparency. Because I go back and repeat, throughout the process, there were representatives of all the parties. About [people] saying there was negligence, I know that there was a lack of organization.”

He said further that JAVA needed “re-engineering, more resources, and more assistance” given that the SEC received up to 227,000 early voting requests, and he recognized the challenges that election officials have been facing throughout the process.

“All the votes will be counted. In the scrutiny, the last vote is counted. Although it is true that there is disorganization in some vaults, it is no less true that we all performed the function and were on hand to physically verify, without being told the ‘he said, she said’ that was going on,” Rosado Colomer said. “What has happened here has been the handling of an excessive volume of ballots that we did not expect, with … a short amount of time to adjust.”

He did not say if the disorganization was due to the current Electoral Code. Critics have said that the definition of early voting was too broad.

“At the end of the [electoral] event, we already counted 14 ballot containers that were unopened from the Trujillo Alto precincts 103 to 110. There were many ballots that were unfinished; there have been many numbers that, as a

Photo by Pedro Correa Henry

commission, have not pleased us,” Rosado Colomer said.

“As we were moving JAVA out [of the coliseum to move in electoral operations], we have identified, unfortunately, disorganization with the management of the materials within the vaults.”

Meanwhile, the SEC chairman admitted that the ballot containers that were found were “badly located, badly organized,” which transformed the general scrutiny from “a minute block into vote counting.”

“How many votes are there? We do not know. There are containers that have three ballots and others that have 500; when we finish counting, which will be the first activity that the scrutiny director [attorney Ferdinand Ocasio] determined to work on first, then we will begin with the minute block,” he said. “This will be audited.”

Meanwhile, Citizens Victory Movement (CVM) Electoral Commissioner Olvin Valentín, after days of calling out anomalies during the scrutiny process that turned out to be true, said he filed a motion with the SEC ”to request to stop the scrutiny process until an investigation can be carried out to determine the origin and chain of custody of the ballot containers.”

His request was denied.

“I wanted to put on record my observation and raise the flag on that at the beginning of this scrutiny, knowing that there are doubts as to the origin of these ballot containers,” Valentín said.

Meanwhile, even though New Progressive Party (NPP) Electoral Commissioner Héctor Joaquín Sánchez called for everyone to step away from partisan behavior, he blamed the CVM for destabilizing the election with its complaints.

“The only party that opposed closing the event was the NPP. We wanted every last vote to be counted,” Sánchez said. “Meanwhile, the opposition, specifically the CVM, who did not oppose this action, is now demanding other things.”

As for the self-proclaimed candidates-elect, some of whom are arguing that a preliminary certification authorizes them to begin a transition process, Rosado Colomer said “there’s a bit of education that needs to be done” and that such certification “doesn’t claim winners.”

“A preliminary certification is not a final certification; candidates can claim [to be] elected candidates when they get a final certification from the SEC,” he said. “The former Electoral Code said that we had up to 72 hours to certify candidates so the comptroller could begin offering workshops and proceed to transition procedures. Article 10.8 speaks about preliminary results; the SEC has not certified any candidate as the winner.”

However, Valentín told the Star that the article cited by the SEC chairman is incorrect because it comes from the repealed Electoral Code, while in the new law, Article 10.8 states the terms for recalls.

“Using preliminary results [to claim victory] gives voters a false impression that there are winners, that there are closed contests, that every vote was counted, [when in fact] there are thousands of votes left to scrutinize; therefore, issuing preliminary results is an irresponsible move because it misinforms citizens,” Valentín said.

Earlier in the day, Popular Democratic Party (PDP) Electoral Commissioner Nicolás Gautier said on Radio Isla that “there are mechanisms to establish an audit and to determine if the ballot containers were there or someone put them there.”

“There is a need for some audits that we are going to start doing,” he said. “Audits based on the number of requests.

Audits based on the information that the voter returns to us when he returns his ballot to us. Audits based on the home vote list when you go to the voter’s house to take the vote.”

Later, Gautier told the Star that after watching what transpires during the general scrutiny, which might last up to a month, he will sit down and think about what decisions he will take as an electoral commissioner, as the law provides options after the event concludes. When the Star asked why he signed preliminary certifications since they are being used to claim seats, after expressing uncertainty during the electoral event, the PDP electoral commissioner replied “I could sign 10 preliminary certifications, but that won’t certify anyone’s victory.”

“It’s completely inappropriate to say you’re a candidateelect because every vote hasn’t been counted,” he said.

Rosado Colomer, meanwhile, said citizens have two options at the SEC’s official website, one to review the results from election night and another one for the general scrutiny.

However, when the Star logged in to verify, at press time, the website elecciones2020.ceepur.org only had the election night results uploaded and did not have a second link available for the general scrutiny.

Meanwhile, as for electoral complaints, U.S. Attorney for the District of Puerto Rico W. Stephen Muldrow said his office has passed along complaints from the Nov. 3 event to the FBI. Earlier, on Nov. 5, Muldrow told members of the press that the office was receiving complaints from the electoral event confidentially.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

5

Pierluisi believes ballot containers found at SEC will not change (preliminary) results of gubernatorial race

By THE STAR STAFF

G

overnor-elect Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia on Tuesday rejected assertions that more than 170 ballot containers found at the State Elections Commission will change the preliminary results of the gubernatorial race.

“Basically the [ballot containers] have nothing to do with the candidacy for governor. They are ballots for other races, not for the governor’s race,” Pierluisi said at a press conference.

“The only thing that is pending to be counted for the candidacy for governor are the votes added by hand that are likewise counted by hand. It is impossible for there to be a change in the result at the level of the candidacy for governor and the same goes for the resident commissioner’s race.”

“What can happen is that when counting what has not been counted there may be changes in races where the margin of difference is very narrow,” he added.

Pierluisi was speaking at a news conference to announce that the government transition process is slated to start next week.

Meanwhile, in response to a question about calls for the island Education Department to have a protocol ready for the resumption of face-to-face classes, he said that over the past year, hundreds of students have not been able to receive an education because they don’t have either internet or laptops, and that can’t continue to be the case.

“I believe that today it is not possible to decide what the date will be for schools to reopen gradually and partially. Today, I cannot make that decision,” Pierluisi said. “What I have claimed for a long time is that there must already be a plan and clear protocols as to how the public education system in Puerto Rico is going to be reopened gradually and partially and even regionally. When is that [reopening] going to take place?

That is what cannot be decided now.”

Pierluisi spoke favorably of private schools that have established their protocols, but the government has prohibited them from returning to in-person instruction.

“I know that there are private schools that have been prepared and that they have their protocols and that they are asking for approval,” the governor-elect said. “I am not making that decision right now, but I think that the secretary of Health and the secretary of Education should establish what the mechanism or protocol is so that a private school that is properly prepared and that is requesting to reopen can begin to have face-to-face education.”

Pierluisi requested that the Education Department publish such a plan if it has one.

“My recommendation is that a full press conference be held in which it is revealed how this would be done for the good of all so that the people, the teachers and the parents of the children are informed,” he said. “Do it. They should do it now.”

Pierluisi said he is confident that the incoming federal government will give him “the benefit of the doubt” in terms of monitoring the handling of federal funds so that they can be disbursed.

“Because of my career and because of the credibility that I have earned, because of the years I served in Congress, I know that they will have some deference with me, so that this government can start without major obstacles,” he said.

“On the contrary, they will do what is possible to facilitate it.”

Pierluisi noted that he has already had conversations with the White House federal coordinator, Peter Brown, and officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Regarding the permanence of the federal monitors appointed to the island as a result of corruption cases, the governor-elect said he will wait for the public policy of President-elect Joseph

Biden on the matter.

When asked about the pending Financial Oversight and Management Board appointments, the governor-elect said he will wait to see if outgoing President Donald Trump makes the appointments, or if they are left to Biden.

“I know that the process is ongoing,” he said. “It remains to be seen if the president will make any appointment from the shortlists that were submitted to him. We will know that in the near future.”

Except for the one oversight board member designated by Trump, Justin Peterson, the remaining members of the federal entity created by the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act have completed their terms and are waiting for replacements to be appointed.

Community leaders express dismay over distrust in electoral results

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

C

ommunity leaders from various municipalities in and outside of San Juan expressed dismay on Tuesday at what they said is a general distrust in the electoral results and in democratic processes in general.

“We, the leaders of different communities, are very concerned about fraud, the way it affects Puerto Rican democracy, and the way in which the importance of these situations has not been given to them because we are saying that they are mere irregularities,” said Carmen Villanueva Castro, a community leader of the South Hill Brothers Community of Río Piedras in San Juan.

Leaders from the Caño Martín Peña, Barrio Obrero Marina and Trastalleres communities in Santurce, Buena Vista in Hato Rey, Valle Hill in Canóvanas, Río Blanco in Naguabo and Buenos Aires in Caguas, among others, joined to express their shared concerns.

“We demand that any case of deceased people who have requested a vote in advance or while bedridden be immediately referred to the pertinent authorities, and that any vote cast fraudulently be verified and invalidated,” Villanueva Castro said. “Furthermore, we demand that the State Elections Commission immediately publish the lists of those who voted in the 2020 elections so that we can identify as citizens that there are no similar cases in our communities.”

The community leaders said such actions are necessary to bolster trust in the institutions whose purpose is to ensure the political will of the majority of voters, and those that have the ministerial duty of criminally prosecuting such prohibited conduct as crime in the penal and electoral codes.

They were making their statements, they said, in the context of reports in the press and on social networks involving denunciations of actions that, if true, constitute electoral fraud.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Legislator to fiscal board: Approve salary increase for nurses

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

N

ew Progressive Party Rep. José Enrique “Quiquito” Meléndez demanded Tuesday that the members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board comply with Law 136, which would grant a salary increase to nurses in Puerto Rico.

The proposed salary increases fluctuate between about $250 and $500 per month, depending on the experience and training of the health professional.

Meléndez, who authored the measures to guarantee salary increases, said “this law was approved by the Legislature in a unanimous vote and signed by the governor of Puerto Rico [Wanda Vázquez Garced].”

“It seems that the [oversight] board has not learned that Puerto Rico has a government with a mandate from the people,” Meléndez said. “These health professionals are the people who risk their lives every day trying to save thousands of citizens who show up at hospitals or emergency centers infected by the COVID-19 virus. We have lost doctors and other healthcare professionals to this

deadly virus. The least we can do for them to appreciate their sacrifice is to do justice to their pay scale.”

The legislator said the central government in coordination with the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority is working to identify the $2 million that would be needed annually to comply with the law.

“Puerto Rico is suffering a talent crisis in the health field because many profession-

als are moving to other destinations within the United States because the salary scales and fringe benefits are much higher than in Puerto Rico,” Meléndez said. “And as a government we have to do everything possible to retain our professionals and make Puerto Rico attractive.” “[Oversight board executive director] Mrs. [Natalie] Jaresko’s statements show the lack of sensitivity and empathy she has toward these professionals who risk their lives against

COVID-19,” the lawmaker added. “The $2 million that would be needed annually to responsibly meet [the salary requirements of] the nurses of Puerto Rico is not even five percent of the $60 million from the Puerto Rico budget that the fraternity of the members of the board carry in their pockets for luxuries, trips, hotels, contracts and salaries.”

Meléndez reiterated that “[t]hese nurses are the same ones who save the lives of employees, lawyers, contractors and investors of the fiscal control board when they fall ill with COVID-19 in Puerto Rico.”

“As a legislator, alongwith the government, I will do everything in my power to retain these professionals on our island,” he said, “whether the fiscal control board likes it or not.

“My recommendation to Mrs. Jaresko is that she take the $2 million out of the board’s annual budget and give it to these health professionals. Otherwise, step aside and let the government of Puerto Rico do its job of identifying the money and meeting all the demands as it has done so far. Including all the obstacles that you have imposed on us, so that we can move Puerto Rico forward.”

Federal assistance fuels island’s recovery from Tropical Storm Isaias

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

M

ore than $1.8 million in federal disaster assistance is helping fuel the recovery of Puerto Rico residents and businesses that suffered damage in Tropical Storm Isaias from July 29 to July 31.

As of Nov. 8, the Federal Emergency Management

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Agency’s (FEMA) Individuals and Households program had approved $513,834 in housing assistance to repair disasterdamaged homes and pay for temporary housing. Another $512,767 was approved under FEMA’s Other Needs Assistance program, which provides funding for disaster-related expenses and serious needs including medical, dental, transportation, moving and storage expenses.

Additionally, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) approved more than $819,500 in low-interest disaster loans to 34 homeowners, renters and businesses.

After Puerto Rico received a major disaster declaration for Isaias on Sept. 9, a total of 847 eligible individuals and households in the designated municipalities of Aguada, Hormigueros, Mayagüez and Rincón applied for FEMA disaster assistance.

Disaster Legal Services, a partnership between Puerto Rico Legal Services, the American Bar Association Young Lawyers Division, DisasterLegalAid.org and FEMA, received $5,000 in FEMA funding for administrative support for volunteer attorneys who assist survivors.

The program provides free legal help with various disaster-related problems. Among them: filing FEMA appeal forms, completing insurance claims for doctor and hospital bills, and resolving disputes with home repair contracts and contractors.

As the recovery operation moved forward, FEMA opened four disaster recovery centers in the designated municipalities under COVID-19 safety measures.

The Mayagüez center remains open until Nov. 13 for residents to speak to specialists in person and update their applications. The center will suspend operations today for Veterans Day. As of Nov. 8, there had been 1,300 visits to the recovery centers.

The deadline to apply for FEMA assistance and SBA physical damage loan applications was Nov. 9. The deadline for businesses to submit economic injury disaster loan applications to SBA is June 9, 2021.

FEMA specialists remain on the island to support recovery efforts and are still a phone call away. The FEMA Helpline at 800-621-3362 (FEMA) or (TTY) 800-462-7585 remains open for questions or updates to an application. Press 2 for a Spanishspeaking operator. Lines are open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

7

Who’s going to tell him? Republicans shy from asking Trump to concede

By CATIE EDMONDSON

S

ince he was elected, President Donald Trump’s relationships with Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill have mostly fallen into one of two categories: the unbreakable bond with his most ardent followers who defend him at all costs, and the tenuous, strained alliance with the rest who share his agenda but often cringe privately at his language and tactics.

Neither group is particularly well suited for the chore of trying to persuade Trump, who refuses to concede the election, that it is time to step aside — or at the very least, to stop spreading claims about the integrity of the nation’s elections that are contrary to considerable evidence. And there is little chance that Trump, who has been perplexed and sometimes enraged by the Republican institutionalists who might normally be expected to play such a role, would listen if they did.

The dynamic helps explain why, days after President-elect Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election, even Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, was unwilling to recognize the result. Instead, senators have tiptoed around — or in some cases blindly run past — the reality of Trump’s loss, and the lack of evidence to suggest widespread election fraud or improprieties that could reverse that result.

“There is no bipartisanship to speak of, in terms of how many members are willing to speak up — and would it matter to him? Would he listen?” said William Cohen, a former senator and House member from Maine who was one of the first Republicans to break from his party and support the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon. “Trump doesn’t care a whit about the House or Senate, and he rules by fear. He still can inflame his supporters — there are 70 million out there. He still carries that fear factor.”

By Monday evening, a club of only a few Republican senators known for their distaste for Trump — Mitt Romney of Utah, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — had acknowledged Biden’s victory.

McConnell, who is poised to be the top Republican in Washington during the coming Biden administration, threw his support behind Trump, declining to recognize Biden’s victory as he argued Trump was “100% within his rights” to challenge the outcome.

Far from attempting to influence the president’s thinking, most Republicans have gone out of their way to avoid seeming to dictate what he should do.

President Trump has spread claims about the integrity of the election that are at odds with extensive evidence, but congressional Republicans have been reluctant to confront him.

“I look forward to the president dealing with this however he needs to deal with it,” Sen. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican on McConnell’s leadership team, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, even as he noted that it “seems unlikely” that the outcome would change based on Trump’s legal claims.

Some of the Trump’s acolytes, on the other hand, have rushed to advance his baseless theories of fraud. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia, both of whom are facing runoff elections in January, demanded the resignation of their state’s top election official, a fellow Republican, after he said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the state’s elections.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, also insisted that Trump was right to contest the results of the election.

“Every legal challenge must be heard,” McCarthy said. “Then and only then does America decide who won the race.”

In 1974, as Nixon faced the Watergate scandal and the strong likelihood of impeachment and conviction, a cadre of powerful Republican lawmakers marched to the White House and one by one, naming lawmakers in their own party

who were prepared to vote to convict him, told him it was time for him to go. The message was clear, and Nixon announced his resignation the next day.

Expect no such reckoning for Trump, said Timothy Naftali, founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and a professor at New York University.

“It’s very difficult for Republicans whose leader got 71 million votes, the most by any Republican standard-bearer ever, to simply just turn their backs on him,” Naftali said. “The issue is now not so much Trump as loyalty to Trumpism. And I think that’s why you see the contortions now.

If you’re a Republican and you get this wrong, you’re going to be primaried out.”

There is a more immediate concern for the party, too. With Perdue and Loeffler facing elections whose outcomes are likely to determine control of the Senate, Republicans are reluctant to do anything to dampen the enthusiasm of their conservative base. Any hint that leaders were prodding Trump to exit the stage could provoke a Twitter rampage from the president that could turn his supporters against the party at a critical time.

“The Republican Party hemorrhaged seats in 1974 after Watergate, after the nearimpeachment of a Republican president,” Naftali said, while they appear on track to gain House seats this year after Democrats’ impeachment of Trump. “So what is the lesson for politicos? The lesson is not to run away from Trump.”

Still, some Republicans have argued in recent days that it is crucial for members of their party to push back in a measured way against the president’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud.

On Monday, 31 former Republican members of Congress — many of them outspoken critics of the president — denounced Trump’s allegations in an open letter that called on him to accept the election results.

“We believe the statements by President Trump alleging fraud in the election are efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the election and are unacceptable,” wrote the group, led by former Rep. Tom Coleman of Missouri. “Every vote should be counted and the final outcome accepted by the participants because public confidence in the outcome of our elections is a bedrock of our democracy.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Trump appointee stands between Biden’s team and a smooth transition

By MICHAEL . SHEAR, MAGGIE HABERMAN and MICHAEL CROWLEY

T

ransition officials for President-elect Joe Biden called on a top Trump administration appointee Monday to end what they said was unwarranted obstruction of the money and access that federal law says must flow to the winner of a presidential election.

The officials, speaking on background to reporters Monday night, said it was nearly unprecedented for Emily W. Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, to refuse to issue a letter of “ascertainment,” which allows Biden’s transition team to begin the transfer of power.

By law, Murphy, the head of the sprawling agency that keeps the federal government functioning, must formally recognize Biden as the incoming president for his transition to begin.

It has been three days since news organizations projected that he was the winner of the election, and Murphy has still not acted.

The transition officials said her inaction was preventing Biden’s teams from moving into government offices, including secure facilities where they can discuss classified information.

The teams cannot meet with their counterparts in agencies or begin background checks of top Cabinet nominees that require top-secret access.

A White House official pointed out, as several Trump allies have, that the transition after the 2000 presidential election was delayed by the court fight between the campaigns of Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas over several weeks. The official said it would be strange for President Donald Trump to send some kind of a signal to allow the transition to start while he is still engaged in court fights.

But Biden’s aides said that the dispute in 2000 involved one state with only about 500 ballots separating the winner and loser, far less than in the current contest. In every other presidential race for the past 60 years, the determination of a winner was made within 24 hours, they said — even as legal challenges and recounts continued for weeks.

They said that they were considering “all options,” including potential legal action, to push Murphy to let the transition begin.

Murphy, who described herself as “a bit of a wonk” at her Senate confirmation hearing in October 2017, and also said that she was “not here to garner headlines or make a name for myself,” so far has chosen to side with the White House and Trump, standing between Biden’s team and a smooth transition.

The president refuses to concede the elec-

tion and has his campaign contesting results in multiple states. Most Republicans have declined to recognize Biden, much less appointees like Murphy. And so the transfer of power that must take place is in limbo.

A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about whether Trump was willing to let Murphy begin the transition without a concession from the president, as his court fights play out.

Leslie Dach, who was to lead the transition for the Department of Health and Human Services had Hillary Clinton won the presidency in 2016, said that despite the advance work done

by Biden’s team during the campaign, nothing could supplant having direct access to agencies, and that is impossible without Murphy.

“I think this is Trump sending a clear signal to everybody still standing in the administration that you’ve got to still follow his grievances,” Dach said.

The stalling of the transition is part of an overarching refusal to acknowledge the election results by the Trump administration.

Officials in the White House presidential personnel office, known as PPO, have signaled that they will fire political appointees who search for new jobs outside of the administration during this time, according to two people briefed on the internal discussions. And on a call with USAID staff members Monday, officials described the election as still happening, according to a recording obtained by Axios.

In a letter Sunday from the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, veterans of

previous administrations warned, “While there will be legal disputes requiring adjudication, the outcome is sufficiently clear that the transition process must now begin.”

Aides to Biden have been working for months to develop fine-tuned transition plans to help the president-elect quickly make good on his campaign promises. Those review teams made up of people knowledgeable about each federal agency are critical.

Murphy has the legal authority to “turn on” the transition, releasing the $6.3 million in federal funds budgeted for the effort, making office space available and empowering team members to visit agency offices and request information.

Aides to Biden said that they expected Murphy to act within a few days, but that they were bracing for the possibility that political pressure from the president and his Republican allies would prevent that. In a statement on Twitter on Sunday, Jen Psaki, a transition official, gently prodded Murphy to make the announcement.

“Now that the election has been independently called for Joe Biden, we look forward to the GSA Administrator quickly ascertaining Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the President-elect andVice President-elect,” Psaki wrote. “America’s national security and economic interests depend on the federal government signaling clearly and swiftly that the United States government will respect the will of the American people and engage in a smooth and peaceful transfer of power.”

Biden’s transition officials were more pointed Monday night, effectively saying that the Trump administration was reneging on promises

Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Agency, testifies before Congress in Washington on March 13, 2019. Her tenure at the GSA, which she has run since December 2017, has not been without controversy.

made over the past six months to ensure a proper transfer of power if Biden won.

The officials said that they signed three separate memorandums of agreement — including one signed by Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff — that laid out the access and money Biden’s team would receive in the days after the election. None of that has been allowed to proceed, they said.

The coronavirus pandemic has made office space less critical for the Biden transition team, which has been mostly meeting remotely for the past several months and will continue to do so, according to a transition official. There is a skeleton staff at the office space that was provided by the government before the election.

But once Murphy signals that the transition can begin, that office space will be expanded and equipped with computer systems that give the new administration access to classified systems and information, in addition to a secure location to have secret conversations.

If that does not happen in the coming days, the Biden administration has other options.

Transition officials have private office space they can continue to use, and Biden and his team will continue to operate remotely. When the president-elect met with his pandemic advisory board Monday, he was in Delaware and the board members were on a big screen, calling in from their homes or offices.

The bigger issue would be access to the agencies and the information they need to begin carrying out Biden’s agenda. But people familiar with Biden’s transition said there was a partial workaround: Many of the people still working in the federal agencies were close to Biden’s advisers and might be willing to work with them to provide the unclassified information they need.

But that would not solve the problem of gaining access to classified information, which could affect the ability of Biden’s national security team to prepare itself for emergencies that it may have to confront once in office. Transition officials said one specific limitation at the moment is that Biden does not have access to a secure State Department facility that is normally used to route calls from foreign leaders hoping to congratulate the newly elected president.

Biden has been making those calls, but has not been allowed to use the State Department as has been the practice after previous elections.

Trump and his allies have criticized Democrats and the news media for projecting Biden as the winner before legal challenges and recounts have been completed. But historically, the “ascertainment” decision by the GSA administrator has not waited for the outcomes of such challenges.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

9

Trump fires Mark Esper, Defense Secretary who opposed use of troops on U.S. streets

By HELENE COOPER, ERIC SCHMITT and MAGGIE HABERMAN

P

resident Donald Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper on Monday, upending the military’s leadership at a time when Trump’s refusal to concede the election has created a rocky and potentially precarious transition.

Trump announced the decision on Twitter, writing in an abrupt post that Esper had been “terminated.”

The president wrote that he was appointing Christopher C. Miller, whom he described as the “highly respected” director of the National Counterterrorism Center, to be the acting defense secretary. Miller will be the fourth official to lead the Pentagon under Trump.

Two White House officials said later Monday that Trump was not finished, and that Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, and Gina Haspel, the CIA director, could be next in line to be fired. Removing these senior officials — in effect decapitating the nation’s national security bureaucracy — would be without parallel by an outgoing president who has just lost reelection.

Democrats and national security veterans said it was a volatile move in the uncertain time between administrations, particularly by a president who has made clear that he does not want to give up power and that he would be reasserting his waning authority over the most powerful agencies of the government.

“President Trump’s decision to fire Secretary Esper out of spite is not just childish, it’s also reckless,” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash. and the chairman of the House Armed Services Defense Secretary Mark Esper at the White House on Sept. 11, 2020. Esper was fired by President Donald Committee. “It has long been clear that President Trump cares Trump on Monday, Nov. 9, 2020, the latest casualty in the president’s revolving door of top national secuabout loyalty above all else, often at the expense of competence, rity officials who fell on the wrong side of their boss. and during a period of presidential transition, competence in government is of the utmost importance.”

Friends and colleagues of the new acting secretary praised it already. White House officials disagreed.

Two senior administration officials noted Monday that Miller’s Army Special Forces background and counterterrorism Esper, 56, a former secretary of the Army and a former Trump enjoyed firing people and had only two more months to credentials but expressed surprise that he had been elevated to Raytheon executive, became defense secretary in July 2019, do so. Esper’s dismissal also gave the president the chance to such a senior position, even in a temporary capacity. Miller does after Trump withdrew the nomination of Patrick M. Shanahan, reclaim some of the postelection headlines, which have been not have the stature to push back on any precipitous actions that the acting defense secretary, amid an FBI inquiry into allegations dominated by President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Trump might press in his final weeks in office, colleagues said. from Shanahan’s former wife that he had punched her in the At the Pentagon, Esper’s departure means that Miller would “A move like this probably sends a chill through the senior stomach. Shanahan denied the accusations.

— if he lasts — see out the end of the Trump administration. De- ranks of the military,” Nicholas J. Rasmussen, a former top couShanahan had been standing in for Jim Mattis, who refense Department officials have privately expressed worries that nterterrorism official in the Bush and Obama administrations, signed as defense secretary in 2018, citing his own differences the president might initiate operations, whether overt or secret, said in an email. “Not because of anything about Chris Miller with the president. against Iran or other adversaries during his last days in office. personally, though it’s a highly unconventional choice, to be Esper had taken pains to hew to the Trump line during his Esper’s downfall had been expected for months, after he sure. But simply because a move like this contributes to a sense tenure. But concern over invoking the Insurrection Act to send took the rare step of disagreeing publicly with Trump in June of instability and unstable decision-making at exactly the time troops to quell civil unrest across the country was deep in the and saying that active-duty military troops should not be sent when you want to avoid sending that kind of message around Pentagon. Under heavy public criticism, Esper ultimately broke to control the wave of protests in U.S. cities. the world.” with the president.

The defense secretary was aware that he was likely to be Miller, 55, is a former Army Green Beret who participated Trump has referred to Esper as “Mr. Yesper.” Ironically, it fired, but Pentagon officials said he hoped to continue serving in the liberation of Kandahar early in the war in Afghanistan. He was the defense secretary’s public break with the president during as long as possible to try to sustain orderly leadership of the also previously served as the top counterterrorism policy official a news conference in June that infuriated Trump to begin with.

Defense Department. Although Esper had a resignation letter in the National Security Council in the Trump White House. After Those comments came after Esper had accompanied Trump on prepared, his allies said he did not think anything was imminent that job, he briefly served in a top counterterrorism policy role his walk across Lafayette Square outside the White House, where from Trump on Monday. at the Pentagon this year. protesters had been tear-gassed, prompting condemnation from But the president expressed his ire in the Oval Office on It was only in August that Miller replaced Russ Travers, who former military and civilian Defense Department officials.

Monday morning, and the White House gave Esper only a few was the acting head of the counterterrorism center.

By midsummer, Esper was walking a fine line to push back minutes’ advance notice of his firing.

When Esper broke with Trump in June on deploying active- on Trump’s other contentious positions involving the military.

In a two-page letter to Trump obtained by The New York duty troops to U.S. cities, the secretary’s spokesman tried to walk The Pentagon, without once mentioning the word “ConfeTimes, Esper said, “I serve the country in deference to the Cons- back the damage, telling The New York Times that Trump did not derate,” announced in July that it would essentially ban displays titution, so I accept your decision to replace me.” want to use the Insurrection Act either, or he would have invoked of the Confederate flag on military installations around the world.

10

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

U.S. tried a more aggressive cyberstrategy, and the feared attacks never came They give credit to Nakasone and Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security. Krebs spent the past two years persuading states and social media companies to bolster their defenses against attacks.

Once the election is officially certified, the military will complete its “after action” reports. The most interesting will most likely be classified. But in interviews with a variety of key players, a few lessons are already emerging.

The first is that Nakasone’s aggressive new posture — which Cyber Command describes with terms like “persistent engagement” and “defend forward” — may be working. The phrases refer to going deep inside the computer networks of adversaries, whether that means the Internet Research Agency, the Russia-based group that mounted the 2016 influence campaigns; the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency; or Iran’s increasingly active cybercorps.

Once inside, Cyber Command can use its access to hunt for operations that are being planned — or to conduct what amount to preemptive strikes.

The United States has launched such strikes before, of course, against Iran’s nuclear program, North Korea’s missiles and, during the 2018 elections, the Internet Research Agency, which ran the influence campaign that aided Trump in 2016.

Christopher Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Secu- But there was no significant cyberretaliation, at least that berity Agency testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington on May 14, 2019. came public, ordered by the Obama administration surrounding the 2016 election, even though the administration knew

By DAVID E. SANGER and JULIAN E. BARNES easy task of bouncing his messages back into the echo cham- that Russian actors were stealing data and scanning voter registration systems. ber of social media.

This time Nakasone did not wait for much evidence to rom its sprawling new war room inside Fort Meade, not “A lot of the disinformation that voters consume originafar from Baltimore-Washington International Airport in tes from within our own country,” said Jeh C. Johnson, a secre- roll in before acting. He went after Trickbot, a widely used Maryland, U.S. Cyber Command dived deep into Russian tary of homeland security under President Barack Obama. “All set of tools written by Russian-speaking criminal groups that he believed could be used to lock up registration systems or and Iranian networks in the months before the election, tempo- foreign adversaries need to do is aid and abet and amplify.” rarily paralyzing some and knocking ransomware tools offline.

Trump and his allies, it turns out, were the chief pur- computer sites of secretaries of state, which count ballots.

So did Microsoft, which obtained court orders against Then it stole Iran’s game plan and, without disclosing veyors of the kind of election misinformation that the FBI, the intelligence coup behind the theft, made public a part of the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. intelligence Trickbot. Together, the military and private sector actions, which Tehran’s playbook when the Iranians began to carry it out. officials were warning about. He was also the one actor they appear to have been largely uncoordinated, disrupted the netNow, nearly a week after the polls closed, it is clear that could not mention, much less try to neutralize. That was left work of the criminal groups in October, leaving them hampered all the warnings of a crippling cyberattack on election infras- to the online platforms, mostly Twitter, which placed warnings in any potential attacks against election infrastructure.

Officials familiar with the operations say there were also tructure, or an overwhelming influence operation aimed at on many of his posts. attacks directed at a Russian state-run group called Energetic American voters, did not come to pass. There were no breaIn an Election Day conversation with journalists, Gen. Bear, or Dragonfly, that has long been inside American elecches of voting machines and only modest efforts, it appears, Paul M. Nakasone, commander of Cyber Command and dito get inside registration systems. rector of the National Security Agency, said he was “very con- tric utilities and has redirected its hacking skills toward state Interviews with government officials and other experts fident in the actions that have been taken against adversaries and local governments.

Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who helped lead a bipartisan suggest a number of reasons for the apparent success. over the last several weeks and several months to ensure they effort to draw lessons from the rising tempo of cyberattacks, One may be that the United States’ chief adversaries are not going to interfere in our elections.” were deterred, convinced that the voting infrastructure was so He said the National Security Agency was also watching said Cyber Command’s more active approach had an effect.

“I have felt for years what was lacking in our cyberdehardened, Facebook and Twitter were so on alert, and Cyber for efforts by foreign adversaries to prod extremist groups to fense was a deterrent,” King said. “And we are getting closer Command and a small group of American companies were so violence — a concern that remains. to having that deterrent. I want our adversaries to have to think on the offensive that it was not worth the risk.

Yet over the subsequent few days, before the election But there is another explanation as well: In the 2020 was called in favor of Joe Biden, Nakasone and other officials hard about what they are going to do because they know theelection the distinction between foreign and domestic interfe- avoided questions about whether their commander in chief re is going to be some results that will be a cost to be paid.”

Nakasone would not confirm specific operations. But he rence blurred. From early in the campaign, President Donald was feeding the very forces they were working to defeat.

Trump did more to undermine confidence in the system’s inteIn interviews, Democrats and Republicans who have said he would take his victories in small doses, by knocking grity than America’s rivals could have done themselves. been deeply involved in the effort to harden American de- adversaries offline, even temporarily, to make it hard for them And in the aftermath, Trump’s baseless accusations, am- fenses and put the United States on offense say it is possible to launch an attack. “I look at it more as are we imposing a plified by conservative news media outlets, have only intensi- that the country is beginning to figure out what works to deter degree of costs that is making it more difficult for them to do their operations?” he said. fied, leaving the Russians and the Iranians with the relatively cyberattacks.

F

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

11

Growing discomfort at law firms representing Trump in election lawsuits

By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG, RACHEL ABRAMS and DAVID ENRICH

L

ike many big law firms, Jones Day, whose roots go back to Cleveland in the late 1800s, has prided itself on representing controversial clients There was Big Tobacco. There was the bin Laden family. There was even the hated owner of the Cleveland Browns football team as he moved the franchise to Baltimore.

Now Jones Day is the most prominent firm representing President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as they prepare to wage a legal war challenging the results of the election. The work is intensifying concerns inside the firm about the propriety and wisdom of working for Trump, according to lawyers at the firm.

Doing business with Trump — with his history of inflammatory rhetoric, meritless lawsuits and refusal to pay what he owes — has long induced heartburn among lawyers, contractors, suppliers and lenders. But the concerns are taking on new urgency as the president seeks to raise doubts about the election results.

Some senior lawyers at Jones Day, one of the country’s largest law firms, are worried that it is advancing arguments that lack evidence and may be helping Trump and his allies undermine the integrity of American elections, according to interviews with nine partners and associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.

At another large firm, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, based in Columbus, Ohio, lawyers have held internal meetings to voice similar concerns about their firm’s election-related work for Trump and the Republican Party, according to people at the firm. At least one lawyer quit in protest.

Already, the two firms have filed at least four lawsuits challenging aspects of the election in Pennsylvania. The cases are pending.

The latest salvo came on Monday evening, when the Trump campaign filed a suit in federal court in Pennsylvania against the Pennsylvania secretary of state and a number of county election boards. The suit — filed by lawyers at Porter Wright — alleged that there were

Activists painted a “Count Every Vote” mural outside Jones Day’s San Francisco offices in San Francisco, Nov. 6, 2020. “irregularities” in voting across the state.

While it is not clear which law firms will be filing the suits, Jones Day has been one of Trump’s most steadfast legal advisers.

As Trump campaigned for president in 2016, a Jones Day partner, Donald McGahn, served as his outside lawyer, leading recount fights in critical states. McGahn later became Trump’s White House counsel, before returning to Jones Day. At the time, some senior lawyers at Jones Day objected to working closely for a polarizing presidential candidate, according to three partners at the firm. They grimaced at the sight of McGahn standing with Trump onstage after he won the New Hampshire primary in February 2016. A month later, the firm hosted a meeting at its Capitol Hill office with Trump and Republican lawmakers as he sought to win over the party establishment.

The firm’s work for Trump has also garnered it unfavorable public attention.

“Jones Day, Hands Off Our Ballots,” read a mural painted on the street outside the law firm’s San Francisco offices late last week.

During the Trump presidency, Jones Day has been involved in some 20 lawsuits involving Trump, his campaign or the Republican Party, and it worked

for the Trump campaign on government investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The work has been lucrative. Since 2015, Jones Day has received more than $20 million in fees from the Trump campaigns, political groups linked to Trump and the Republican National Committee, according to federal records. Jones Day lawyers said that was a small portion of the firm’s overall revenue.

In addition to McGahn, a number of other partners at the firm joined the Trump administration. Noel Francisco became Trump’s first solicitor general. Eric Dreiband is an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department.

After the election, as Trump’s reported lead in Pennsylvania was evaporating, Jones Day and Porter Wright petitioned the Supreme Court to segregate all ballots received after Nov. 3. Pennsylvania, they wrote in their brief, “may well determine the next President of the United States.”

A prominent Republican lawyer, John M. Gore, is helping to lead the effort at Jones Day. He previously served as an assistant attorney general in Trump’s Justice Department.

On Friday evening, Justice Samuel Alito ordered election officials in Pennsylvania to keep late-arriving ballots sepa-

rate and not to include them in announced vote tallies. (Pennsylvania’s secretary of state had already given the same guidance.)

Six Jones Day lawyers said that given the small number of late-arriving ballots involved in the litigation, and the fact that they already had been segregated, the main goal of the litigation seemed to be to erode public confidence in the election results.

Jones Day did not respond to a request for comment.

The outcry at Porter Wright, which like Jones Day was founded in the 1800s in Ohio, appears more intense.

In the past week, the firm has filed multiple lawsuits in Pennsylvania, trying to poke holes in the reliability of the election results on behalf of the Trump campaign and the RNC, among others. Porter Wright has received at least $727,000 in fees this year from the Trump campaign and RNC, according to federal records.

Over the summer, some lawyers at Porter Wright were dismayed to learn that the firm would be representing the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania, according to three current and former employees.

Chief among their concerns: How could lawyers, whose profession is based on the rule of law, represent someone who they felt had frequently tried to flout it? One lawyer said he was concerned that the firm might be asked to try to delay the election. Another said he quit in response to the decision to represent Trump in Pennsylvania.

At two meetings, associates at Porter Wright told the firm’s partners that they objected to the work for the Trump campaign, according to the three current and former employees. They were told that the assignment was limited to the election in Pennsylvania. That assurance struck some attendees as hollow, since the state might decide the election.

Robert J. Tannous, the firm’s managing partner, declined to comment in detail on the work for Trump. He said, “Porter Wright has a long history of representing candidates, political parties, interest groups and individuals at the local, state and federal levels on both sides of the aisle, and as a law firm will continue to do so.”

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Wednesday, November 11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Federal reserve’s emergency loan programs at center of political fight

By JEANNA SMIALEK and LAN RAPPEPORT

A

political fight is brewing over whether to extend critical programs that the Federal Reserve rolled out to help keep credit flowing to companies and municipalities amid the pandemic-induced recession.

The dispute has the potential to roil financial markets, which have calmed significantly since the Fed announced in March and April that it would set up backstops in response to market turmoil spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.

Those programs expire on Dec. 31, and it is unclear whether the Trump administration will agree to extend them.

The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin must together decide whether they will continue the programs — including one that buys state and local bonds, another purchasing corporate debt and another that makes loans to small and medium-size businesses. The officials will probably make that decision by early to mid-December, according to a senior Treasury Department official.

The Fed might be inclined to keep the efforts going, but Mnuchin, whose Treasury Department provides the funding backing up the programs, has signaled that he would favor ending the one that buys municipal bonds. And he is under growing pressure from Republicans to allow all five of the Treasury-backed programs to sunset.

Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, R-Pa., who could soon lead the Senate Banking Committee, is arguing that the Fed and Treasury do not have the legal authority to extend new loans or buy new securities beyond this year without congressional approval, according to a person familiar with the matter.

While that view is disputed by legal experts, Toomey also believes it was Congress’ intent for the relief programs to end on Dec. 31.

The programs’ expiration could come at exactly the wrong moment, as the U.S. faces an expected surge in coronavirus cases this winter and as fiscal stimulus measures that Congress passed in the spring fade. While lawmakers have toyed with passing a new relief bill before next year during the lame-duck session of Congress, President Donald Trump’s election loss makes the outcome highly uncertain.

“Cliffing the programs at year-end would be ill advised, opening markets up to a year-end disruption,” said Scott Minerd, the global chief investment officer at Guggenheim Partners, who expects the programs to be extended.

Mnuchin has made clear in responses to congressional questioning that he does not favor extending the municipal bond program. While Mnuchin’s comment was specific to that effort, a senior Treasury official laid out reasons for allowing the others to end, mainly centered on a belief that the worst of the economic crisis has passed and the programs should not be a replacement for support from Congress.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has not agreed to extend the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending programs beyond Dec. 31, prompting concern among those who say the programs are still needed.

But the programs are mostly designed as backup options: The financial terms for buying state and local debt, for instance, are not generous enough to compete in a market functioning well, and the corporate bond program is now making only small-scale purchases. Their main purpose has been to reassure investors that the central bank is there as a last-ditch option if conditions worsen.

Lawyers generally agree that the Fed and Treasury can extend the programs without Congress — the way they are structured means that the Treasury has already made loans to the Fed, which then uses that money to insure against risk as it buys bonds and makes loans.

The law that provided the funding allows such “existing” loans made from the government appropriation to remain outstanding.

Democrats also disagree with Toomey’s take.

“It’s clear that the Fed and the Treasury have the authority to extend the facilities, and they should,” said Bharat Ramamurti, a Democratic member of the Congressional Oversight Commission, which oversees the programs. “There is continuing need for municipalities and smaller businesses, and there is a significant chance of market disruption if these facilities are not extended.”

Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Mark Warner of Virginia and Chuck Schumer of New York — all powerful Democrats — sent Powell and Mnuchin a letter last week saying that the law “is clear that these facilities can be extended” on the Treasury and Fed’s authority and that “failing to signal the agencies intent now creates undue uncertainty and threatens the programs ability to promote economic recovery.”

If a coronavirus vaccine is rolled out in the coming weeks, the Treasury Department may be less inclined to extend the programs. Trump could also block a reauthorization by pressuring Mnuchin, leaving Joe Biden with fewer economic stimulus tools at his disposal.

There are some signs that the programs could expire without causing a catastrophe. Markets are functioning normally now, having calmed after the Fed signaled that it would set up the backstops. It might be that investors have overcome the panic of the spring and no longer need a backup option from the Treasury and Fed. But it is also possible that the comfort and security provided by a Fed backstop is still needed.

Millions of people remain out of work, the service sector continues to be hard hit, and state and local governments are facing budget shortfalls, albeit smaller ones than some had initially projected. Further shutdowns, even localized ones, amid rising coronavirus cases could cause a reversal in risk taking that roils markets once more.

“Some market participants have asserted that the expiration” of the municipal program “may be a nonevent since its existence is not essential for market functioning any more,” market analysts at Citigroup wrote in a recent research note. “These assertions are wrong, in our view.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

13 Stocks

S&P 500, Nasdaq retreat as tech stocks lose favor

T

he S&P 500 and the Nasdaq fell on Tuesday as investors favored sectors that suffered most during the pandemic over those that benefited from virus lockdowns and social distancing due to optimism that a COVID-19 vaccine would help the economy rebound.

The heavyweight technology .SPLRCT, communication services .SPLRCL and consumer discretionary sectors .SPLRCD dropped sharply while investors moved to small cap stock indexes and sectors such as energy .SPNY, industrials .SPLRCI and consumer staples .SPLRCS. Also chip stocks such as Nvidia NVDA.O were a drag on the technology sector as Apple Inc AAPL.O introduced its first notebook computer with an Appledesigned microprocessor.

“One of the reasons tech is down is the same reason everything else is up. It’s the reopening trade. To the extent the economy can reopen sooner rather than later the stay-at-home stocks won’t be as valuable,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at The Leuthold Group in Minneapolis.

Amazon.com Inc AMZN.O, Facebook Inc FB.O and Microsoft Corp MSFT.O, which have boomed during this year’s work-from-home trend and powered Wall Street to new highs, extended Monday’s losses, weighing on the tech-heavy Nasdaq.

Trading was choppy as some investors monitored for election uncertainty after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo became the latest Republican to suggest that President Donald Trump would not concede the White House to Democrat Joe Biden.

But Leuthold’s Paulsen said most market participants have been largely ignoring the Trump administration’s complaints about the election outcome because they have not produced any evidence of a problem with vote counts.

At 2:55 p.m. EST, the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 243.9 points, or 0.84%, to 29,401.87, the S&P 500 .SPX lost 3.47 points, or 0.10%, to 3,547.03 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC dropped 142.29 points, or 1.21%, to 11,571.50.

The main U.S. indexes had hit intraday peaks on Monday after Pfizer Inc PFE.N said the vaccine it has been developing with German partner BioNTech SE BNTX.O was 90% effective against COVID-19.

U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar said on Tuesday that if Pfizer submits its interim COVID-19 vaccine to health regulators as quickly as expected, the U.S. government expects to start vaccinations in December.

Biden hailed the vaccine progress but cautioned that it would be “many more months” before widespread vaccination is available. Meanwhile, daily new U.S. cases topped 100,000 for the sixth straight day.

Value-linked stocks .IVX, which tend to outperform coming out of a recession, added 1.2%, while growth stocks .IGX were down 0.98%.

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14

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

After Trump’s tariffs and insults, Canada is relieved at Biden’s win

Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the U.S. vice president, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada in Ottawa in December 2016.

By CATHERINE PORTER

O

n a snowy evening in December 2016, a month after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada held a rare farewell state dinner for the departing vice president, Joe Biden. It was like a tearful goodbye between two old friends.

“We are more like family. That’s the way the vast majority of Americans feel about Canada and Canadians,” Biden said to a hall packed with politicians in Ottawa. “The friendship between us is absolutely critical to the United States.”

He ended with a toast: “Vive le Canada.

Because we need you very, very badly.”

After four years of surprise tariffs, stinging insults and threats from Trump, a giddy jubilation and sense of deep relief spread across Canada on Saturday with the news that Biden had won the presidency. Many Canadians hope to return to the status of cherished sibling to

the United States, and that the president-elect’s personal connection to Canada, and that of his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, will help heal the wounds.

“With Biden, we see the United States as having a centrist conciliator, a friend to Canada, and somebody we can be relaxed with and have genuine disagreements with without being disagreeable,” said Frank McKenna, a former Canadian ambassador to the United States.

He added that people in his yoga class Monday said “Namaste for Joe Biden.”

“People have been walking on eggshells for four years for fear of annoying the president or his sycophants,” he said.

Over the weekend, Trudeau made a congratulatory call to Biden. “We’ve worked with each other before, and we’re ready to pick up on that work and tackle the challenges and opportunities facing our two countries — including climate change and COVID-19,” the prime minister wrote on Twitter, citing two issues where he has deep disagreements with Trump.

Both Biden and Harris have personal connections to Canada. At that state dinner four years ago, Biden noted that his first wife, Neilia, had Canadian family roots, and said that both his sons dreamed of becoming “Mounties,” members of Canada’s national police force.

He recalled that when Neilia and their baby daughter Naomi were killed in a car accident in 1972, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, reached out to him personally “and commiserated with me.”

Harris spent her formative teenage years in Montreal, after her mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer specialist, got a job working at McGill University and the Jewish General Hospital. Students and teachers gathered on the steps of her alma mater, Westmount High School, on Monday with “Congratulations Kamala” signs. Quebec’s premier, François Legault, noted on Twitter that she had “spent part of her youth in Montreal.”

“We hope to see you soon. You will always be welcome in Quebec,” he wrote.

Few countries had as much at stake in the U.S. elections as Canada. The two countries share the world’s longest border, and two-thirds of Canada’s population lives within 60 miles of it. Roughly three-quarters of Canada’s exports head to the United States, and before the pandemic, many Canadians crossed over regularly to shop, vacation or visit.

As Trudeau says frequently, sometimes with obvious restraint, the relationship with the United States is Canada’s most important, but it is also one that has suffered serious damage in the past four years.

The previous five presidents made a point of traveling to Canada for a state visit within a few months of taking office, and each visited multiple times. Trump went only once as president, for the 2018 Group of 7 meeting, and lashed out at Trudeau as he left, calling the prime minister “very dishonest and weak.”

By then, he had slapped tariffs on the country’s steel and aluminum, claiming national security concerns, which most Canadians found deeply unfair and insulting. Trudeau relied on quiet diplomacy and a team of surrogates who built alliances with people around Trump, and eventually Canada reached a critical new trade deal with the United States and Mexico.

But Canadian feelings toward Trump continued to sour, plummeting to the lowest view of any president over the past 20 years. Recent polls show that as many as 4 in 5 Canadians hoped Biden would be elected president. In an editorial, The Globe and Mail, a leading newspaper, said, “Our downstairs neighbors have gone long enough without an adult in the White House.”

Jagmeet Singh, leader of Canada’s leftleaning New Democratic Party, said at a news conference last week, “It would be better for the world if Trump loses.”

The 5,525-mile border between the United States and Canada has been closed since March, when the number of daily new coronavirus infections took off in both countries.

Despite the huge economic and personal implications, the vast majority of Canadians support keeping it shut until the United States reduces its infection rate, which is now triple Canada’s.

“The single biggest thing that matters to Canada is whether Biden will be able to bring the virus under control,” said Janice Stein, founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Given how polarized the United States remains, that seems unlikely, she said.

“The politicization of the pandemic is not going to go away,” Stein said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

15

Trump’s fury feeds Moscow and Beijing accounts of U.S. chaos

By ANTON TROIANOVSKI

F

or years, state propaganda in both Russia and China has painted Western democracy as dangerously chaotic compared to what it described as the safety and stability of the countries’ authoritarian systems.

With President Donald Trump’s unfounded allegations that Democrats stole last week’s presidential election, Moscow and Beijing got a fresh chance to claim vindication.

Russia seized that chance, while China was more restrained, perhaps reflecting cautious optimism that a Presidentelect Joe Biden could stabilize relations with the United States.

Neither country, however, congratulated Biden for winning the election, a silence that in itself served to underline the messiness of American democracy.

A spokesman for President Vladimir Putin of Russia couched the delay as a technical matter of diplomatic protocol, and pledged that Putin would be ready to work with “any elected president of the United States.” The spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters that the Kremlin would wait until Trump’s court challenges to the election results run their course.

“We believe it would be proper to wait for an official announcement” of the results, he said. “There are certain legal procedures pending that were announced by the current president.”

Chinese officials are awaiting Trump’s official concession

before congratulating Biden, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggested Monday.

The delayed recognition of Biden as president-elect was striking after a weekend during which leaders from around the world congratulated Biden on his electoral victory — even close allies of Trump like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. In Russia, it was clear that the Kremlin saw the tumult in Washington as an opportunity to criticize the United States rather than to try to improve ties.

On the flagship weekly news program on state TV Sunday night, host Dmitry Kiselyov said the election showed the United States to be “not a country but a huge, chaotic communal apartment, with a criminal flair.” On a political talk show, a lawmaker, Oleg Morozov, said American democracy had deteriorated to the point that “one can manipulate it, tune it, tamper with it to achieve a certain result.”

In Russia, elections are tightly scripted affairs, with challengers to the ruling party winning in very rare cases and popular opposition politicians generally unable to get on the ballot. But on Monday, Ella A. Pamfilova, the head of Russia’s Central Election Commission, took her turn at sounding off on the superiority of Russian governance. She said she had studied mail-in voting and decided against using it in Russia because it was too vulnerable to cheating.

“This anachronism in its American version opens up boundless possibilities for potential fraud,” she told Tass, a state-

run Russian news agency — echoing one of Trump’s favorite claims, though no evidence of such fraud has emerged. “It turns out I was right. What’s going on now in the United States is the best illustration of that.”

The Kremlin may well miss Trump. While the president never delivered on Russian hopes of rapprochement between Washington and Moscow, his America-first foreign policy dovetailed with the Kremlin’s desire to weaken the Western alliance and to expand Russian influence around the world.

Biden, by contrast, has vowed to take a tougher line on Russia and to rebuild ties with America’s traditional allies. Some Russian analysts have noted potential silver linings to a Biden presidency, including a greater potential to work with Washington on matters of common interest like arms control and Iran’s nuclear program. But that optimistic narrative has been far from front-and-center on Russian state media in the last week.

For China, the calculus is even more complicated, and state media’s response to Biden’s win has been more measured.

Biden would be “more moderate and mature” than Trump on foreign affairs, Global Times, a fiercely nationalistic tabloid, said. Still, the president-elect seems determined to leave in place many of Trump’s harshest measures, and China’s leaders appear to have concluded that the United States will remain irreconcilably opposed to the country’s rise.

Southern Daily, an official newspaper for the southern province of Guangdong, said that while Biden would most likely treat Russia, not China, as the biggest foreign threat to the United States, “we don’t have to have illusions.”

“One thing is for sure, things will never return to the way they were before,” the newspaper’s post on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, continued. “The world is not the world it was before.”

Job Opportunity

President Donald Trump waves to supporters as he leaves Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., Nov. 7, 2020. Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election resonate on Russian state media, while both Russia and China have painted American democracy as volatile and vulnerable.

16

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Facing military debacle, Armenia accepts a deal in Nagorno-Karabakh war

By ANDREW E. KRAMER

P

rime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia signed on Monday a Russian-brokered settlement to end the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, surrendering disputed territory and bowing to other demands as he faced a battlefield defeat.

The agreement signed by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Pashinyan calls for Armenia’s army to withdraw from the Nagorno-Karabakh region and to be replaced by Russian peacekeepers.

Under the deal, the warring sides were to halt fighting and prepare for the peacekeepers’ arrival. Three earlier cease-fires, negotiated by Russia, France and the United States, have collapsed.

But the agreement Monday suggested a more permanent, sweeping redrawing of the security map of the

Speaking of the settlement, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia, said, “I personally made a very hard decision for me and all of us.”

southern Caucasus, a volatile region wedged between Turkey, Russia and Iran. The settlement sealed a role in the region for an increasingly assertive Turkey, which backed Azerbaijan in the war that began in September.

“I personally made a very hard decision for me and all of us,” Pashinyan wrote in a statement announcing the agreement. “It’s not a victory, but there’s no defeat.”

Indeed, the agreement ends a quarter-century of Armenian military control over the remote, mountainous region that is a touchstone of Armenian national identity.

Russia will now guard the borders.

The Nagorno-Karabakh region has a mostly Armenian population but it fell within the Soviet-drawn borders of Azerbaijan. The enclave declared independence before the Soviet breakup.

For the Azerbaijanis, the settlement opens the prospect that at least some of the hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people who lost their homes in a separatist war that ended in 1994 could return to the region.

That war ended with the shoe on the other foot: a ceasefire seen as catastrophic but inevitable for Azerbaijan after Armenian military victories.

Putin said the new agreement requires both the Armenian and Azerbaijani armies to stop at their currently occupied positions. That cements in place the Azerbaijani capture on Sunday of a strategic town, known as Shusha to Azerbaijanis and Shushi to Armenians. It is the secondlargest town in the region and overlooks the separatist capital of Stepanakert, just about six miles away.

Armenia has also lost control of the access road needed for military supplies to reach the mountain enclave, starving its defenders of hope of holding out if the fighting continued.

“I made the decision as a result of a deep analysis of the military situation,” Pashinyan wrote. He said the deal was “the best solution in the situation.”

Within hours of the announcement, protests broke out in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital. A crowd broke into the government building and ripped Pashinyan’s nameplate off the door of the prime minister’s office, Russian television news showed.

“Where is Nikol? Where is that traitor?” the intruders screamed.

Putin said the agreement was “in the interests of people of Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

On Monday, Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry apologized for what it said was the accidental shooting-down of a Russian military helicopter, killing two crew members, an incident that had threatened to draw Russia more deeply into the conflict.

For decades, Armenia had drawn support for its defense of the Nagorno-Karabakh region from a large diaspora in Southern California, France and Russia. Azerbaijan has relied on backing from Turkey, an ominous turn of events to Armenians who say the Turks have never accepted responsibility for atrocities committed during and after World War I. Distracted by the presidential election, the United States played only a limited role in the diplomacy over the past month.

The separatist government in Nagorno-Karabakh had for more than 25 years presided over seven occupied Azerbaijani districts outside the Soviet-era borders of the enclave. These were eerie, depopulated regions of deserted villages and ruined stone houses. Armenia defied United Nations resolutions calling for the return of the residents; holding, it seemed, the military advantage, the country had steadfastly refused any settlement allowing their return.

Now, the deal signed on Monday delivers to Azerbaijan much of what the country has sought for years in negotiations, including the return of internally displaced people.

Along with withdrawing its army from the enclave, Armenia agreed to surrender control of small ethnic Armenian areas inside Azerbaijan but not in Nagorno-Karabakh; to open a transport corridor for Azerbaijan through Armenia to the Azerbaijani region of Nakhichevan; and to allow the United Nations to oversee the return of the internally displaced people.

The capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, Stepanakert, was saved from what appeared to be imminent military attack but will rely on Russian peacekeepers for its defense.

The peacekeepers will deploy for five years and also guard the access road over a mountain pass known as the Lachin Corridor, and an approximately three-mile-wide buffer zone along its length, according to the agreement.

Underscoring the loss of Shusha, or Shushi, the agreement calls for a new section of access road to be built around the now Azerbaijani-controlled town, a dramatic loss for the ethnic Armenian cause in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

17

Evo Morales returns to Bolivia to cheers — and worries

By MARIA SILVIA TRIGO and ANATOLY KURMANAEV

B

olivia’s maverick former president, Evo Morales, made a triumphant return to his homeland Monday, a year after his failed attempt to keep power tore the nation apart and sent him into exile.

Morales, the country’s longest-serving leader, was greeted by brass bands and hundreds of cheering supporters as he walked across the border from Argentina on the dusty and frigid Andean plateau, accompanied by the neighboring country’s president, Alberto Fernández, and a retinue of close allies.

But beyond the jubilant reception, Morales finds a wary nation anxious to move beyond the political turmoil unleashed by his divisive bid for a fourth presidential term and focused on overcoming a crippling pandemic and economic crisis.

None of the national leaders of Morales’ socialist political party, which returned to power this month following a calm presidential election, came to greet their mentor at the border.

Neither Bolivia’s new president, Luis Arce, nor the vice president, David Choquehuanca, both former ministers in Morales’ governments, mentioned him in their acceptance speeches Sunday.

Arce had made clear during the campaign that Morales would play no part in his government, if he won — and he went on to handily beat a field of right-leaning candidates who had historically opposed Morales.

On his return to Bolivia, Morales echoed the promise, telling supporters that he would dedicate himself to labor activism, where he began his political career.

“I will share my experience in the union struggles, because the fight continues,” he said at the border crossing Monday. “As long as capitalism exists, the people’s fight will continue, I’m convinced of this.”

After the turbulent months that followed Morales’ departure, when partisan clashes blocked the streets and mistrust in government grew, Bolivia held a rerun of last year’s presidential elections.

The race, which many were afraid would devolve into violence or uncertainty, had a high turnout and a relatively peaceful conclusion, which many Bolivians attributed to a broad desire for stability.

But the return of a leader who had tried a number of tactics to remain in power, including changing the constitution and stacking the electoral board with supporters, provoked alarm among many, particularly the government’s opponents. The nation remains deeply divided, and the fragile balance reached during the elections could unravel, some fear.

In the prosperous eastern region of Santa Cruz, protesters went on strike last week and pledged not to recognize the new pro-Morales government, saying there had been fraud, but without providing evidence.

“We are worried about his arrival and we reject it,” said Marcelo Pedrazas, an opposition lawmaker, referring to Morales.

Notably, Morales remains the head of the country’s largest and most organized political party, Movement to Socialism, or MAS, giving him an important platform to potentially pressure Arce’s government, said Marcelo Silva, a political scientist at

Evo Morales, center, waves to supporters in Villazón, southern Bolivia, on Monday after crossing into the country from Argentina. the San Andres Main University in La Paz. “Luis Arce is trying to mark a sharp separation between his administration and his political party,” he added. “But it’s impossible to separate the actions of the leader of the ruling party from the actions of the head of government.”

Morales also remains the leader of Bolivia’s powerful cocagrowing labor unions, an intensely loyal and well-organized social movement that over the past two decades has rapidly mobilized tens of thousands of members to support its leader in times of crisis.

Few in Bolivia believe that Morales, one of the most successful Latin American politicians of his generation, and who is still adored by a large part of the country’s Indigenous majority, will stick to his stated plans of cultivating grassroots union leaders and farming trout.

When his legal time in office drew to a close, he argued that people had demanded that he continue to lead Bolivia, and he got allied judges to rule that constitutional term limits violated his human rights.

But his decision to run for a fourth term in office in October 2019 backfired. After the vote’s validity was called into question, Bolivians poured into the streets in protest, and security forces withdrew their support.

Morales had called his resignation a military coup and took to social media from his exile in Argentina to undermine the right-wing caretaker government that replaced him.

“The Bolivian right wing, financed by North American policies, tried to stop our process of change,” Morales, dressed

in a traditional Andean poncho, told ecstatic supporters in the border town of Villazón on Monday, as they chanted “Evo! Evo! Evo!” and showered him with flowers.

“We have recovered the democracy without violence,” he said.

His return, though expected, is likely to complicate the governing task of Arce, Morales’ former finance minister, who won the presidency on the platform of democratic rejuvenation and moderate economic agenda. Arce received 55% of the vote last month, compared with 47% obtained by Morales last year, signaling a desire by many Bolivians to embrace his party’s project but also move beyond the polarization that characterized recent years.

Around 40 people died in the social unrest that followed Morales’ bid for a fourth term. The caretaker government that replaced him did little to heal the divisions, jailing dozens of Morales’ officials and supporters and replacing Indigenous symbols and state ceremonies with a conservative Catholic tone.

The political tensions have been exacerbated by the pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis. Bolivia has seen one of the highest coronavirus mortality rates in the world, and its economy is expected to shrink 8% this year, pushing tens of thousands back into poverty.

Morales’ return now risks undermining Arce’s efforts to bring the nation together to overcome the crisis, some analysts said.

“What citizens want now is to work, they want normalcy,” said Silva, the political scientist. “They don’t want more political turmoil.”

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Wednesday, November 11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Joe Biden’s radical humility

By FRANK BRUNI

Y

ou no doubt saw or heard at least some of Joe Biden’s pitch-perfect victory speech last weekend, but what about the victory video that his campaign released hours earlier, just after CNN and other networks declared him the president-elect?

It’s a gorgeous two minutes of music (a rendition of “America the Beautiful” by Ray Charles) and images, precisely none of which show Biden. He cedes the frame and the moment entirely to Americans themselves — to Black Americans, white Americans, Native Americans, disabled Americans, young Americans, old Americans — and to the landscapes in the lyrics of the song.

The video made clear that we, not he, were the focus, the story, the point of all of this. His speech hours later similarly elevated the first person plural over the first person singular, which was singularly transcendent under Donald Trump.

Largely to draw a contrast with Trump, Biden ran one of the humblest presidential campaigns I can recall. He claimed victory in the presidential race last weekend with the same radical humility. And that tonic of a tone could be crucial to his agenda.

His sweepingly ambitious goals include a major expansion of health care, a titanic effort to combat climate change, yet another change in the tax code and much,

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much more. But he’s wisely fashioning all of that as a public, not a personal, quest, and he’s casting himself as servant, not lord. The best way to ask for the moon is modestly.

That approach — call it the New Humility — was evident in a small detail on Monday morning. He released a written statement about Pfizer’s reported progress toward an effective coronavirus vaccine, and its second sentence extended congratulations to “the brilliant women and men who helped produce this breakthrough.” He directed attention away from, not toward, himself.

He added this: “It is also important to understand that the end of the battle against COVID-19 is still months away.” There was none of Trump’s overreach, the kissing cousin to his self-congratulation. Biden was giving it to us straight. He was giving it to us humble.

It’s often said that people aren’t capable of big change when they’re older. But Biden has changed, in ways as poignant as they are prudent. I sometimes don’t recognize this version of him.

He used to have a way of sucking the oxygen out of a room. He couldn’t shut up. If you gave him the microphone, he thrilled to it, wouldn’t surrender it, sang an aria that turned into a whole damned opera.

A bunch of us Times columnists had lunch with him at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2012 and came away commenting on how spirited, upbeat and warm he was, but also on how he talked and talked and talked.

The following year, he visited the Times Building in Manhattan and sat down with a small group of editors and writers. He talked even more. We were lucky to get in a question every 10 minutes.

But something happened between then and now. He got older. He suffered great loss with the death of his son Beau. And Trump happened, too, providing the country with an example of hubris so monumental — and self-fascination so malignant — that any sane and sensitive observer would recoil from it, look for traces of those toxins in himself and purge them, especially if volunteering to be the antidote to that egomania.

Biden’s campaign verged on self-effacing even before the pandemic compelled a retreat from the campaign trail and a shedding of all the pomp that a presidential bid typically entails.

In those early primary debates, while Biden’s rivals talked past their time limits, he’d cut himself off, coloring dutifully within the lines. Technically, physically, he was always in the center of the stage. Effectively, he was anywhere but.

He positioned himself not as the heir to the Democratic tradition or as a messiah charting the party’s future but as a transitional figure. What could be humbler than that?

Sure, this was strategic, but it would have rung hollow had it not been matched by his bearing.

His climatic remarks at the Democratic National Convention in August seemed to be the work of a team of people who had hung the most famous line from Trump’s boast to Republicans four years earlier — “I alone can fix it” — on the wall of their writing room and resolved to produce its antonym.

The convention itself was distinctive for how it kept turning the camera around so that voters, not Biden, dominated the frame. When there were Biden-centric testimonials, they described him not in heroic terms but simply as a decent, honest man.

“He was making clear that he wouldn’t rule as some self-obsessed despot,” I wrote then. “He wouldn’t rule at all. He’d govern. It’s a different, humbler thing.”

The assumption that Biden won’t seek a second term as president reflects more than his age, 77. (He’ll be 78 before Inauguration Day.) It reflects his bearing, too. There’s little greed or gluttony in it.

It reflects an ethos that was embedded deep into this campaign, that is carrying over into this transition and that manifests itself in all sorts of ways. Jill Biden’s decision to continue her teaching job even as first lady: That’s part and parcel of the New Humility.

So was Biden’s reticence after Election Day, as he modeled and urged patience with vote counting and steered clear of any tit-for-tat with Trump.

The New Humility means that he and his aides aren’t trying to monopolize the headlines by turbocharging chatter about who might get which cabinet positions but instead sending signals that this is a process, and a sober one at that.

And the New Humility shaped the opening stretch of Biden’s victory speech. “Folks,” he said, “the people of this nation have spoken. They’ve delivered us a clear victory, a convincing victory, a victory for we, the people. We’ve won with the most votes ever cast on a presidential ticket in the history of the nation, 74 million!” We. The people.

“I’m humbled by the trust and confidence you’ve placed in me,” he added. Humbled. Trust. This new presidency will force us to dust off an old vocabulary.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

19

En Señas TV estrena por WIPR Por THE STAR IPR presenta el programa En Señas W Tv, un curso de lenguaje de señas televisado, dirigido a todo público que in-

terese aprender las destrezas básicas para comunicarse con personas Sordas. El programa estrenará el lunes 16 de noviembre, a las 9 de la noche.

Este programa es parte del proyecto de teleeducación #EnCasaAprendo, junto al Departamento de Educación. “En Puerto Rico existe una población de sobre 200,000 personas sordas y por ello, la creación de este programa tiene como fin fomentar el interés, en niños, jóvenes y adultos, de aprender esta forma de comunicarse con una comunidad y de esta forma fomentar la inclusión, informó Eric Delgado, Presidente de la Corporación de Puerto Rico para la Difusión Pública.

“La comunidad Sorda y de intérpretes estamos muy emocionados del comienzo de éste programa donde conoceremos sobre la comunidad Sorda, su cultura y su lenguaje. Al final del curso pretendemos, que todos sintamos en la confianza de poder hablar con una persona Sorda

y le pierdan el miedo a las señas” expresó Sara Camilo, intérprete de leguaje de señas y administradora de National Interpreters, agencia que provee servicio de interpretación de señas.

En el programa contaremos con dos maestros Sordos y dos intérpretes de lenguaje de señas quienes nos llevarán por diversas situaciones que nos enseñarán sobre la cultura de los Sordos.

“Esto nos emociona, en gran manera, porque por muchos años se ha estado hablando de la comunidad sorda en Puerto Rico y la importancia de su inclusión. Por fin tendremos un espacio donde nosotros, como pueblo, podamos adquirir unas destrezas básicas y así comunicarnos con nuestros conciudadanos”, expresó el Secretario de Educación, Dr. Eligio Hernández Pérez.

Sintoniza su estreno este lunes, 16 de noviembre, por WIPR TV (6.1 – San Juan, WIPM 3.1-Mayagüez, Liberty por el 6 o 206 HD, Direct TV 166, Dish 6) WLII TV 11.3 – San Juan, Caguas, WSUR TV 9.3 – Ponce, WOLE TV 12.3 – Aguadilla, online streaming por www.wipr.pr/envivo y por Facebook Live de WIPR

Ofrecerán talleres educativos a personal de hogares de adultos mayores para el manejo de casos de COVID-19 Por THE STAR Departamento de Salud junto al Puerto Rico HurriEbliclcane Hub (PRHRH), programa del Puerto Rico PuHealth Trust (PRPHT), ambos adscritos al Fideico-

miso para Ciencia Tecnología e Investigación de Puerto Rico (FCTIPR), convocan a los Hogares de Adultos Mayores en la Isla a inscribirse en una serie de talleres educativos sobre las medidas de prevención contra el contagio del COVID-19 en esta población. La iniciativa está dirigida a los dueños, administradores, profesionales de salud y el personal de los centros de adultos mayores y pudiera incluir un estipendio de hasta $6,000 por centro, que cualifique. El entrenamiento se ofrecerá en múltiples sesiones virtuales y comienza el viernes, 13 de noviembre de 2020.

Esta iniciativa utilizará la metodología del Proyecto ECHO, un proceso de aprendizaje, basado en casos concretos. El objetivo es aumentar el acceso a los expertos para facilitar el intercambio de conocimientos entre participantes y recursos. La filosofía del Proyecto ECHO es que “todos enseñamos y todos aprendemos” porque se genera un espacio en donde se discuten las experiencias reales de los participantes, que se utilizan como aprendizaje, para mejorar las prácticas actuales.

“Este ciclo de conferencias representa una herramienta vital para los Hogares de Adultos Mayores ya que tendrán acceso a expertos que les ayudarán a desarrollar estrategias sobre cómo manejar la pandemia y prevenir la propagación en sus centros de trabajo” afirmó el Dr. Lorenzo González, Secretario de Salud de Puerto Rico. “Tenemos que proteger a nuestros ancianos, que son la población más vulnerable en esta cadena de contagios”, concluyó.

Esta es la cuarta edición del Proyecto ECHO que se llevará a cabo en Puerto Rico, y se espera que alcance el éxito de las ediciones realizadas en el pasado sobre otros temas. En esta ocasión será dirigida a los Hogares de Adultos Mayores y tendrá como objetivo facilitar el intercambio de conocimientos entre colegas, participantes y recursos. El Proyecto ECHO es una red de más de 250 socios que operan 600 programas en Estados Unidos y Puerto Rico y se especializan en brindar capacitación, asistencia técnica y tutoría en áreas variadas de atención médica, salud mental, desastres, comunidad y salud pública, entre otros.

“El Proyecto ECHO se suma a una serie de iniciativas que hemos implementado para proveer los recursos necesarios a las comunidades para enfrentar

desastres y la pandemia del COVID-19. Esperamos una amplia participación para beneficio de nuestros adultos mayores y así poder salvar vidas”, expresó Leslie Maas Cortés, directora del Hurricane Hub. Información de participación Las conferencias a los empleados de los hogares para adultos mayores tendrán una duración de seis meses. Las sesiones comienzan el 13 de noviembre de 2020 hasta la semana el 23 de marzo de 2021.

Requisitos El principal requisito para participar en estos entrenamientos es tener un hogar de adultos mayores registrado en Puerto Rico.

Por otro lado, los hogares que están registrados como Centros de Servicios de Medicaid y Medicare (CMS) cualifican para recibir un estipendio de $6,000 luego de completar el programa.

Para recibir el estipendio es requisito que los CMS cuenten con dos empleados esenciales que completen al menos 13 del total de 16 sesiones.

Los centros de adultos mayores que deseen participar de estos entrenamientos pueden inscribirse en https://bit.ly/3pnmPPc. Si es un centro registrado como CMS favor llene la siguiente encuesta aquí: https://bit.ly/3oJ5K1z. Para más información sobre esta iniciativa favor comunicarse a: infoprhrh@prpht. org.

Para conocer los servicios del Hurricane Hub acceda a nuestro portal https://prsciencetrust.org/prhrh/.

Solicite su entrenamiento de capacitación en desastres y varios temas relacionados, libre de costo, aquí: https://prsciencetrust.org/asistencia-tecnica.

20

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

A rock bond celebrates joyful noise

Dave Grohl and Nandi Bushell after meeting for the first time on a video call in November 2020. The Foo Fighters leader and the English prodigy struck up a competitive friendship on social media that has brought them, and thousands of music fans, immense joy.

By JEREMY GORDON

Y

ou didn’t need to know every note of Nirvana’s angst-rock classic “In Bloom” to marvel at the spectacle of a little girl drumming along to the song in perfect synchronization last November, her face scrawled over with joy and passion.

The internet is an open playing field for regular people performing impressive feats, and over a couple of years, Nandi Bushell, a resident of Ipswich, England, had attracted a solid audience by expressively covering famous songs by a genre-diverse range of artists including the White Stripes, Billie Eilish and Anderson .Paak. Sometimes her father, John, and brother, Thomas, accompanied her, but Bushell was the star, combining technical virtuosity with bright-eyed showmanship (and some enthusiastic yelling).

The sight of Bushell wailing away immediately impressed Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer who played “In Bloom” on the band’s 1991 breakthrough album, “Nevermind.” Grohl is not a social media user, and he only learned about the viral clip when the album’s producer, Butch Vig, sent it to him.

“I watched it in amazement, not only because she was nailing all of the parts, but the way that she would scream when she did her drum rolls,” Grohl said in a recent video interview. “There’s something about seeing the joy and energy of a kid in love with an instrument. She just seemed like a force of nature.”

That said, he experienced it like any piece of content — you watch it, you enjoy it, you pass it on and then move on. But toward the end of the summer, another one of

Bushell’s videos made its way to Grohl via a flood of texts from friends around the world.

This time, Bushell had prefaced her cover of the 1997 Foo Fighters song “Everlong” with a direct challenge to a drum-off. The rules of a drum-off aren’t formally sanctioned by any governing body, but Bushell’s exhilarated facial expressions and mastery of the song’s breakneck pace meant Grohl was in for a battle, should he choose to accept.

In a separate video interview, Bushell offered a very simple reason for why she decided to call out Grohl: “He’s a drummer, ’cause he drummed in quite a few bands, so why not?” Bushell is 10 years old, and the clarity of her logic — her favorite word might be “epic” — was blessedly refreshing. Grohl is her favorite drummer, and when asked why, she answered, “He thrashes the kit really hard, which I like.”

At the same time, Grohl is also a married father of three gearing up to release Foo Fighters’ 10th studio album, “Medicine at Midnight,” in February, which corresponds with the band’s 25th anniversary. “The one thing we hadn’t really ever done was a danceable party record, and those two things used in the same sentence as the Foo Fighters could be really terrifying,” he said, before citing dance albums by rock artists, such as David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and the Rolling Stones’ “Tattoo You.” Despite his full docket, and after enough peer pressure, Grohl rose to the challenge with a performance of “Dead End Friends” by Them Crooked Vultures, one of those many bands he’s played in over the years. “At first I thought, ‘I’m not going to hit her with something too complicated, because I want this to be fun,’” he said. “I’m not a technical drummer; I am

a backyard keg-party, garage jam-band drummer, and that’s the way it is.”

Nonetheless, Bushell volleyed back another astute and overjoyed performance in two days. Grohl conceded defeat, and since then the two have continued playing music for each other. He recorded an original song about Bushell (sample lyric: “She got the power/She got the soul/Gonna save the world with her rock ’n’ roll”); Bushell returned the favor with her own song, “Rock and Grohl.” Cumulatively, the videos have attracted millions of views across YouTube and Twitter, making it a truly rare uncomplicated feel-good story from the last few months.

Part of the appeal is the way their bond transcends generation and geography. Grohl has been musically active since the 1980s, whereas Bushell started drumming when she was 5, in 2015. There’s also something fundamentally charming about a 51-year-old white, male, longtime Angeleno bonding with a 10-year-old multiracial Brit through the power of social media, over a style of music that supposedly matters less than ever.

Rock ’n’ roll is commonly considered to be in cultural decline — in a 2014 review of the Foo Fighters album “Sonic Highways,” The New York Times pop music critic Ben Ratliff declared, “Rock doesn’t lead the discourse anymore.” That diagnosis has grown only more pronounced in more recent years as genres more suited to streaming have flourished, and yet here’s video proof that rock’s elemental pleasures haven’t fully lost their allure among a younger set.

Of course, the pair’s virtual friendship has also taken off during the coronavirus pandemic, which has nearly unilaterally shut

down live music around the world and deeply winnowed creative opportunities for working musicians. In a normal year, Foo Fighters would be on tour, and Bushell would still be attending the weekly jam nights around Ipswich, where she honed her skills by playing with adult musicians. Instead they, as well as millions more musicians and music fans, are largely confined to their home and immediate social sphere.

For Grohl, the challenge helped reorient his priorities during this bizarre year. “What I realized was more than any sort of technical contest, this was something that was bringing people a lot of joy at a time where everyone could use a little bit,” he said, adding, “it actually changed the way I look at what my band does in this time.”

Since the challenge began, Foo Fighters have recorded stripped-down live sets and comical fake commercials, all with the goal of maintaining their connection to their audience. “If that’s going to bring people five, 15, 20 minutes of happiness in one day, then that’s what we should be doing,” he said.

Bushell’s father, John, expressed a similar sentiment: “It’s a wonderful experience and our hearts, as parents, are lifted just as much as the people who are watching the videos.”

Toward the end of the interview with Grohl, Bushell joined the video call to finally meet her hero. “I feel like I’m meeting a Beatle,” Grohl said when her face popped onto the screen. (Another coincidence: Both drummers were first attracted to the instrument after listening to the actual Beatles.) The two had never interacted directly before, and as you might expect, Bushell was a little star-struck.

But Grohl is regarded as one of the friendliest people in music, and before long, she was showing him around her home, with appearances from the whole family.

Eventually they made plans to write a song together (a fast-tempo one, per Bushell’s request) and play onstage whenever Foo Fighters are allowed to tour in Britain. “But it has to be at the end of the set because you’re going to steal the show,” he said.

As for the next step of the challenge, the ball is in Grohl’s court. “I had an idea for how to respond to your last song, but I haven’t done it yet,” he said. “It’s a big project. I don’t want to give it away, but it’s a good one.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Bushell replied.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

21

Biden video uses artist’s vision to project a unified country

By ZACHARY SMALL

T

he Biden campaign approached artist Lorraine O’Grady in August. O’Grady had used empty, golden frames to capture the joys of community togetherness at the 1983 African-American Day Parade in Harlem, framing the people as art. The event was preserved in photographs.

Inspired by the kind of unity O’Grady’s project conveyed, the Democratic candidate’s campaign sought to borrow her concept for a similar message, intended to ease a divided nation. This is how, two months before the election, with O’Grady’s blessing, the campaign created a two-minute film. It landed on the internet Saturday, shortly after the networks projected a victory for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

It opens with a rendition of “America the Beautiful” by Ray Charles as the camera pans countryside vistas and the Philadelphia skyline. Person after person is captured inside the shiny frames as Americans celebrate the diversity of a country that includes musicians and fishermen, hairdressers and surfers.

“The translation of my ideas is almost direct,” O’Grady said in an interview.

“Biden is saying the same thing to the country that I was saying to the art world,” she said. “We are a very large and diverse community and we all need to be included.”

Grady, who is 86, and the descendant of Jamaican immigrants, taught dadaism and futurism at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and became known for her avant-garde conceptual work.

She said on her website that she created “Art Is …” in answer to an acquaintance who noted “avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with Black people.” O’Grady decided to bring avant-garde art into the largest Black space she could think of, the 1 million or more people at the parade. “The concept was that, as people were being framed, they were being acknowledged as art in themselves,” she said.

It’s rare for presidential campaigns to unveil new promotional materials after an election has already been won.

The video, which has been viewed more than 39 million times on Twitter, was posted on the Biden website and the campaign’s social media channels as a clear indicator that the president-elect recognizes how deeply partisan rancor has split the country he is charged with leading.

“Normally I can say that there are a lot of historical precedents, but I really struggle to find an example of this kind of political messaging once the campaign ends,” said Kathryn Brownell, a historian at Purdue University who researches political advertising. “This seems to highlight the challenge that President-elect Biden faces in trying to unify the country in a media landscape that’s divided, polarized and partisan.”

According to the artist, campaign officials said they were inspired by her 1983 performance, called “Art Is…,” after having see photographs of the work in last year’s exhi-

bition, “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” at the Broad Museum in Los Angeles.

One of them, Andrew Gauthier, the Biden campaign’s video director, said he found the work powerful. “I remember tearing up a bit afterward,” he said in an interview.

Gauthier said that creating the promotion involved more than 20 videographers across the country and three producers. The campaign would not disclose how much the video cost and said the plan was to keep it on social media channels and not the paid airwaves.

O’Grady, who has been busy — a book of her collected writings was recently published and she has been preparing for a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum — was not directly involved in filming the promotion. However, Alexander Gray Associates, the gallery that represents the artist, did provide some feedback to the campaign by calling attention to the many landscapes of Harlem included in the original work, which was O’Grady’s nod to the history of landscape painting. The artist’s concept is directly referred to in the Biden video by a character who snaps her own images of a Los Angeles neighborhood.

“A piece like this is so easy for advertisers to appropriate,” said the dealer Alexander Gray, who said he appreciated that the campaign had recognized

O’Grady as the creator of the concept.

Throughout the campaign, Biden received support from celebrated visual artists. Carrie Mae Weems, Ed Ruscha and Shepard Fairey were among those who contributed art to an advocacy campaign over the summer aimed at inspiring voters to reject the current presidential administration. Many of the artworks incorporated the refrain “Enough of Trump” into their displays. Ruscha said, in an interview in July, “This is my way of throwing my hat in the ring, and it’s because I don’t see any social progress in these last four years.”

The work that inspired the video, “Art Is …,” has become O’Grady’s defining piece. The original staging involved bringing ornate picture frames to Harlem’s African-American Day parade and having attendees pose inside them. Fifteen actors wearing white helped stage the work, which is now remembered primarily through the photographs that documented the event. Those pictures are regarded as a celebration of Black joy and depict neighborhood residents partying and posing for the camera.

“The whole task was to bring an awareness to the segregated, lily-white art world,” O’Grady explained. “Here are people capable of responding to avant-garde art — and this was way before selfies.”

Lorraine O’Grady’s “Art Is… (Man With a Camera),” 1983/2009, a still photograph from the original performance art piece created at the African-American Day parade in Harlem.

FASHION The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, March 4, 2020 11, 2020 Wednesday, November 20 22

The TheSan SanJuan JuanDaily DailyStar Star

Kamala Harris in a white suit, dressing for history

By VANESSA FRIEDMAN

O

n Saturday night, when Kamala Harris stepped onto the stage and into history at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, as vice president-elect of the United States, she did so in full recognition of the weight of the moment, and in full acknowledgment of all who came before. She is so many firsts: first woman to be vice president, first woman of color to be vice president, first woman of Southeast Asian descent, first daughter of immigrants. She is the representation of so many promises finally fulfilled, so many hopes and dreams.

How do you begin to express that understanding, embody the city shining on a hill? For the next four years, that will be part of the job.

She said it — “while I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last” — and she signaled it, wearing something she had not worn in any of her moments of firsts since she joined Joe Biden as his No. 2 (or, indeed, in the months before when she was running for the Democratic nomination herself): a white pantsuit with a white silk pussybow blouse. The two garments have been alternately fraught and celebrated symbols of women’s rights for decades, but which over the last four years have taken on even more potency and power.

The white pantsuit: a nod to the struggle to break the final glass ceiling, stretching from the suffragists through Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and the women of Congress. A garment in a color meant, as an early mission statement for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage published in 1913 read, to symbolize “the quality of our purpose.” Latterly redolent with frustration; now, finally, transformed into a beacon of achievement.

The pussy-bow blouse: the quintessential working woman’s uniform in the years when they began to flood into the professional sphere; the female version of the tie; the power accessory of Margaret Thatcher, the first female British prime minister. And then, suddenly, a potentially subversive double entendre in the hands of Melania Trump, who wore a pussy-bow blouse after her husband’s “grab ’em by the pussy” scandal.

Now, again, reclaimed.

The point was not who made the clothes; it wasn’t about marketing a brand (though, on the subject of “building back better,” the suit was by Carolina Herrera, an American business). The point was that to wear those clothes — to make those choices — on a night when the world was watching, in a moment that would be frozen for all time, was not fashion. It was politics. It was for posterity.

And it was the beginning of what will be four years in which everything Harris does matters. Obviously, what she wears is only a small part of it. But in her first-ness, in her ascent to the highest realms on power, she will become a model for what that means. How, as a woman, as a Black

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris speaks in Wilmington, Del., Nov. 7, 2020. When Kamala Harris stepped onto the stage and into history at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., as Vice President-elect of the United States, she did so in full recognition of the weight of the moment, and in full acknowledgment of all who came before. woman, you claim your seat at the highest table. Clothes are a part of that story. In some ways, they are how those at faraway tables connect to it.

As Dominique and François Gaulme wrote in the 2012 book “Power & Style: A World History of Politics and Style,” clothing, from its earliest origins, was developed “to communicate, even more clearly than in writing, the social organizations and distribution of political power.”

And when the person possessed of that power is a pioneer, when she is defining a new kind of leadership, understanding those lines of communication and how to employ them is key. Not because she is a woman, but because she will be the first female vice president.

Hillary Clinton came to understand this, over a career in which at first she seemed to dismiss fashion and then, as first lady, to resent it, before finally embracing it as a useful tool.

It began when she joined Twitter in 2013 with a biographical note that included the descriptors “pantsuit aficionado” and “hair icon,” along with “FLOTUS,” and “SecState.” When she started her Instagram account in 2015, her first post was a photo of a clothing rail with an assortment of red, white and blue jackets and the caption “Hard choices.”

During an Al Smith dinner before the 2016 election, she joked that she liked to refer to tuxedos as “formal pantsuits.”

She weaponized her clothing as necessary.

This is an option of which Harris herself is well aware.

She has embraced the political pantsuit tradition presaged

in 1874 at the first National Convention of the Dress Reform League, when, as reported in The New York Times, one attendee declared: “This reform means trousers. They are freedom to us, and they afford us protection! Trousers are coming.” But she did not partake in the Crayola-colored pantsuit tradition of the generation before: Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel.

Though Harris has been lauded for her love of Converse (and talked about her Chuck Taylors more than any other item of clothing), and for her Timberlands, when it comes to professional situations, she has usually favored a uniform of dark colors — black, navy, burgundy, maroon, gray — with matching shell blouses, pumps and pearls.

Those were the suits she wore at the Democratic National Convention and at the debates.

Often they were by New York designers (Prabal Gurung, Joseph Altuzarra), but they never looked overly fashion. They looked serious, prepared, no-nonsense. She even wore a black suit to the 2019 State of the Union, when many of her fellow congresswomen had banded together to wear white.

So her choice, this time, to finally join that tradition could not have been an accident. (Her two young grandnieces, one of whom had recently featured in a YouTube video talking about her desire to be president, also wore white.)

It was deliberate. Not to credit that is to give her less credit than she is due.

Perhaps, rather, it is a signal of what to expect. That she will go on as she has, with practical, elegant suits that don’t get in the way of her day or require much response from the peanut gallery. (We, in turn, can get back to Kimye.) That the details — the pearls, the pumps, the sneakers — will matter.

And that then, every once in a while and when the situation and theater calls for it, she will deploy a sartorial surgical strike that hits everyone where it counts.

House Democratic women wearing white, the color of the suffrage movement, pose for a group photo before the start of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address at the Capitol in Washington, Feb. 5, 2019.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

23

Eli Lilly’s antibody treatment gets emergency FDA approval

By KATIE THOMAS and NOAH WEILAND

T

he Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency authorization of a COVID-19 antibody treatment made

by Eli Lilly that is similar to a therapy given to President Donald Trump shortly after he contracted the coronavirus.

The decision, announced Monday by the agency, is likely to be seen as a valuable tool to treat patients with COVID-19 at a time when the pandemic is raging across the United States, hospitals are overwhelmed and doctors have few options to treat the disease.

Eli Lilly said that its treatment, called bamlanivimab, should be administered as soon as possible after a positive coronavirus test, and within 10 days of developing symptoms. The authorization applies only to people newly infected with the virus, and the agency said it should not be used in hospitalized patients. It is authorized for people who are ages 12 and older and at risk for developing a severe form of COVID-19 or being hospitalized for the condition. The FDA said that included people who were over age 65 and obese — a key group that early studies have shown can benefit the most from the treatment.

“It’s a great day for science and medicine — sort of a feat of what’s possible,” said Dr. Daniel M. Skovronsky, chief scientific officer of Eli Lilly. The company and its collaborators, including the National Institutes of Health, he said, were able “to create a new drug, manufacture it, test it in clinical trials, and get it authorized for use in just seven months.”

In October, the company announced that it had reached a $375 million deal to sell 300,000 doses of the treatment to the U.S. government.

The emergency authorization for Eli Lilly raised immediate questions about who would get access to the treatment at a time when emergency authorizations for coronavirus vaccines might still be weeks or months away. The news came on the same day that Pfizer announced positive early results from its coronavirus vaccine trial. That vaccine might get emergency authorization sometime this year, but even then it would not be available to most Americans until well into 2021.

In a statement Monday, Alex Azar, the health secretary and a former executive at Eli Lilly, said the FDA’s emergency authorization for bamlanivimab was a “step forward” in “bridging us to the rollout of safe and effective vaccines.”

Eli Lilly has said that it expects to have enough doses to treat up to 1 million people by the end of the year, and that it will be able to significantly increase production thereafter. But that means that even in the best-case scenario, there won’t initially be enough to curb a virus that is now infecting more than 110,000 people a day in the United States.

“It’s kind of the best times for these therapies to enter, because they can have an impact,” said Dr. Walid F. Gellad, who leads the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh.

“It’s also the worst time because we don’t have enough doses, and it’s going to add to the backlog of testing.”

Skovronsky said the company has been working “nonstop” since March to manufacture as many doses of the treatment as possible, without knowing if it would be successful. “It’s something I wish we had infinite supplies of medications of, for sure.”

Eli Lilly will begin shipping the treatment to national distributor AmerisourceBergen, which will allocate it with help from the federal government. AmerisourceBergen also helped distribute the antiviral drug remdesivir, the first drug that the FDA approved to treat COVID-19. The company said that decisions about distribution would be overseen by the federal government and would be based on the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in each state or territory for the previous seven days. Each week, state health departments will then decide where those doses should go.

For months, outside researchers have been closely watching the development of antibody treatments. And top White House officials have been agitating for faster progress. At one point over the summer, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, lashed out at drug officials on Operation Warp Speed, the administration’s vaccine and therapy development program, for what she saw as sluggishness in setting up clinical trials for antibody treat-

A pharmacist in Chandler, Ariz. prepares an injection during a trial for Regeneron’s antibody treatment, Aug. 12, 2020. The Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency authorization of a COVID-19 antibody treatment made by Eli Lilly that is similar to a therapy given to President Donald Trump shortly after he contracted the coronavirus. ments, according to one senior administration official.

The president and two of his top advisers — Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law — have called Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the FDA commissioner, to press for speed in agency reviews, two other senior officials said.

Although neither Regeneron nor Eli Lilly has completed its antibody trials, evidence so far suggests that such treatments work best early in the course of the disease, before the virus has gained a foothold in the body.

The FDA’s emergency authorization covers only a single antibody treatment developed by Eli Lilly, but the company is also developing a combination of two antibodies that has shown that it could be more effective in reducing the viral load in patients. In an early analysis, the two-antibody combination reduced the hospitalization of newly infected patients by about 5%. Eli Lilly has said it plans to apply for emergency authorization for the combination treatment this month, but will only have about 50,000 doses of that therapy before the end of the year.

Early evidence shows that the antibody treatments do not work well once

people are sick enough to be hospitalized.

Eli Lilly stopped giving its treatment to hospitalized patients in a government-run trial, because the company said it did not seem to be helping them. And Regeneron paused enrolling the sickest hospitalized patients in one of its trials.

In issuing the emergency authorization, the FDA said that the treatment had not been shown to benefit hospitalized patients and that monoclonal antibodies like bamlanivimab might be associated with worse outcomes when given to hospitalized COVID-19 patients who need high-flow oxygen or mechanical ventilation.

This creates a problem for distributing the treatment, because it is only for people who are not hospitalized, yet those people must be infused intravenously by a health care provider. Getting it to the right people will require quick turnarounds in testing, as well as coordination among federal, state and hospital officials — many of the same challenges that have complicated the U.S. response to the pandemic.

Under the federal agreement with Eli Lilly, the treatment will be available at no cost to patients, though health care providers can charge to administer it.

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LEGAL NOTICE

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AS CERTIFICATE TRUSTEE OF BOSCO CREDIT II TRUST SERIES 2017-1”, BY FRANKLIN CREDIT MANAGEMENT CORPORATION AS SERVICER Plaintiff v.

to do so, judgment by default will be rendered for the relief demanded in the complaint, and the court shall proceed to an adjudication without further notice. Date: 11/02/2020. MAIRA ANTONGIORGI-JORDAN, ESQ., CLERK OF COURT. VIVIAN DIAZ, Signature of Clerk or Deputy Clerk.

Wednesday, November 11, 2020 blecerse recurso de revisión o JUAN. apelación dentro del término de BOSCO CREDIT X, 30 días contados a partir de la LLC, representado publicación por edicto de esta por su Agente de notificación, dirijo a usted esta Servicios FRANKLIN notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publiCREDIT MANAGEMENT cación de este edicto. Copia de CORPORATION esta notificación ha sido archiDemandante vs. vada en los autos de este caso, SUCESION DE HECTOR con fecha de 30 de octubre de JULIAN COLON 2020. En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico , el 4 de noviembre de RODRIGUEZ, compuesta 2020. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA por sus hijo HECTOR SANCHEZ, Secretario. LUREJULIAN COLON RIVERA IMY ALICEA GONZALEZ, SeNESTOR JOHAN COLON cretaria Auxiliar.

UNKNOWN HEIRS, LEGAL NOTICE FORCED HEIRS, DEVISEES, GRANTEES, Estado Libre Asociado de PuerASSIGNEES, LIENORS, to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriCREDITORS, TRUSTEES DE mera Instancia Sala Superior AND ALL OTHER de BAYAMON. PARTIES CLAIMING BOSCO IX OVERSEAS, LEGAL NOTICE AN INTEREST BY, LLC, BY FRANKLIN Estado Libre Asociado de PuerTHROUGH, UNDER OR CREDIT MANAGEMENT to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL AGAINST THE ESTATE CORPORATION AS DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriOF EDUARDO ORTIZ mera Instancia Sala Superior SERVICER DE LEON, DECEASED de BAYAMON. Demandante v. ; CARMEN L. LOPEZ SUCESIÓN DE YOLANDA THE MONEY HOUSE, INC. Demandante v.

MORALES; CENTRO HIRALDO ALVELO FULANDO DE TAL Y DE RECAUDACION DE COMPUESTA POR SU MENGANO DE TAL INGRESOS MUNICIPALES HIJO, JOSÉ OMAR Demandado(a) (CRIM) CALDERÓN HIRALDO, Civil: Núm. BY2020CV02146.

Defendants.

FULANO Y MENGANO SALA 504. Sobre: CANCELADefendant DE TAL, COMO CION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIACivil No. 19-CV-1733 (ADC).

POSIBLES HEREDEROS DO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENSUMMONS BY PUBLICATION. TENCIA POR EDICTO. DESCONOCIDOS Y To: UNKNOWN HEIRS, A: FULANDO DE TAL Y SU VIUDO JOSE M. FORCED HEIRS, MENGANO DE TAL BAEZ NIEVES EN DEVISEES, GRANTEES, (Nombre de las partes a las que se LA CUOTA VIUDAL ASSIGNEES, LIENORS, le notifican la sentencia por edicto) USUFRUCTUARIA EL SECRETARIO(A) que susCREDITORS, TRUSTEES Demandado(a) cribe le notifica a usted que el AND ALL OTHER Civil: Núm. CT2019CV00183. 27 de octubre de 2020, este PARTIES CLAIMING AN SALA 402. Sobre: COBRO DE Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, INTEREST BY, THROUGH, DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE Sentencia Parcial o Resolución UNDER OR AGAINST THE GARANTÍA. NOTIFICACIÓN en este caso, que ha sido debiESTATE OF EDUARDO DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. damente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enA: JOSE OMAR ORTIZ DE LEON CALDERÓN HIRALDO terarse detalladamente de los Consta inscrita al Folio 219 del de la misma. Esta notomo 244 de Rio Piedras Norte, COMO MIEMBRO DE términos tificación se publicará una sola Finca número 692, de Registro LA SUCESION DE vez en un periódico de circulade la Propiedad de San Juan, YOLANDA HIRALDO ción general en la Isla de PuerSeccion Segunda. The said to Rico, dentro de los 10 días ALVELO FULANO Y property is subject to a mortsiguientes a su notificación. Y, gage which secures payments MENGANO DE TAL COMO siendo o representando usted of a mortgage note payable to POSIBLES HEREDEROS una parte en el procedimiento Doral Bank or its order for the DESCONOCIDOS DE sujeta a los términos de la Senprincipal sum of $281,000.00, YOLANDA HIRALDO tencia, Sentencia Parcial o Reinterest at 6.25% per annum solución, de la cual puede estaALVELO from October 1 1, 2018 and until full payment, plus $28,100.00 for attorney fees and costs, which mortgage appears to be recorded at page 70 of volume 1477 of Rio Piedras Norte, Property Number 692, Registry of the Property of Puerto Rico, Second Section of San Juan, 34th Inscription. Plaintiff intends to file a Lis Pendens on this property. This Court has entered an order providing for summons by publication in accordance with the provisions of Rule 4.7 of the Rules of Civil Procedure for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. THEREFORE, notice is hereby given to you so that you may appear and answer the complaint within thirty (30) days after publication of this summons, and in case of failure

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

(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 30 de octubre de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede esta-

(787) 743-3346

blecerse 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 2 de noviembre de 2020. En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico, el 2 de noviembre de 2020. F/LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria. F/VIVIAN J. SANABRIA, Secretaria Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCÍADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN

RIVERA; FULANO DE TAL y ZUTANO DE TAL, como herederos desconocidos con posible interés; JULIA CECILIA RIVERA, también conocida como JULIA CECILIA RIVERA DE COLON, por sí y en cuanto a la cuota viudad usufructuaria; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (“CRIM”)

Demandados CIVIL NÚM. SJ2019CV03344 (604). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO (Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria). EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

Al: Público en General A: A LA PARTE DEMANDADA; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, por tener embargos anotados a su favor por las sumas de $5,687.20 y $3,062.88

Yo, Edwin E. Lopéz Mulero, Alguacil de este Tribunal, a la parte demandada y a los acreedores y personas con interés sobre la propiedad que más adelante se describe, y al público en general, HAGO SABER: Que el día 3 de diciembre de 2020, a las 10:30 de la mañana en mi oficina, sita en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de San Juan, San Juan, Puerto Rico, venderé en Pública Subasta la propiedad inmueble que más adelante se describe y cuya venta en pública subasta se ordenó por la vía ordinaria al mejor postor quien hará el pago en dinero en efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del o la Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado, estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal de San Juan durante horas laborables. Que en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta a celebrarse, se celebrará una segunda subasta para la venta

The San Juan Daily Star de la susodicha propiedad, el día 10 de diciembre de 2020,a las 10:30 de la mañana y en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación, se celebrará una tercera subasta el día 17 de diciembre de 2020 a las 10:30 de la mañana en mi oficina sita en el lugar antes indicado. La propiedad a venderse en pública subasta se describe como sigue: URBANA: Solar sito en el Barrio Monacillos de Río Piedras, marcado con el número Tres (3) de la Manzana “HE” de la URBANIZACIÓN PUERTO NUEVO, con un área superficial de DOSCIENTOS NOVENTA Y UNO PUNTO TREINTA Y SIETE (291.37) METROS CUADRADOS. En lindes por el NORTE, SUR, ESTE y OESTE, con terrenos propiedad de la Everlasting Development Corporation, y dando frente al Norte, con la calle denominada número Sesenta y Seis (66) de la Urbanización a la cual hace esquina. En este solar enclava una casa de bloques de cemento y hormigón reforzado, que consta principalmente de dos dormitorios, sala-comedor, cocina y cuarto de baño. La escritura de hipoteca se encuentra inscrita al folio 195 del tomo 929 de Monacillos, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Tercera, finca número 7,925, inscripción décimo séptima. -Modificada la hipoteca antes relacionada en cuanto al principal que será ahora por la suma de $143,762.23 al 6.50 % anual y su vencimiento será para el día 1ro. de septiembre de 2044, según escritura número 447, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 30 de septiembre de 2014, ante el Notario Público Héctor M. Lugaro Figueroa, inscrita al folio 202 del tomo 1089 de Monacillos, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Tercera, finca número 7,925, inscripción 19a. La dirección física de la propiedad antes descrita es: Urbanización Puerto Nuevo, Número 3, Manzana HE (ahora 1044, Calle 2 SE), San Juan, Puerto Rico. La Subasta se llevará a efecto para satisfacer a la parte demandante la suma de $108,854.56 de principal, intereses al 6.50% anual, desde el 1 ro. de noviembre de 2018, hasta su completo pago, más la cantidad de $13, 725.00 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 $137,250.00 y de ser necesaria una segunda subasta, la cantidad mínima será equivalente a 2/3 partes de aquella, o sea, la suma de $91,500.00 y de ser

necesaria una tercera subasta, la cantidad mínima será la mitad del precio pactado, es decir, la suma de $68,625.00. La propiedad se adjudicará al mejor postor, quien deberá satisfacer el importe de su oferta en moneda legal y corriente de los Estados Unidos de América en el momento de la adjudicación 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 a los siguientes gravámenes posteriores: Embargo Federal, por la suma de $5,687.20 contra Héctor Colón, Seguro Social número xxx-xx-5448, Notificación número 318676918, Certificación del 7 de agosto de 2018, presentado y anotado el día 4 de septiembre de 2018, al Asiento 2018-006532-FED del Sistema Karibe. Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Tercera. Embargo Federal, por la suma de $3,062.88 contra Héctor Colón, Seguro Social número xxx-xx-5448, Notificación número 318676418, Certificación del 7 de agosto de 2018, presentado y anotado el día 14 de septiembre de 2018, al Asiento 2018-006531-FED del Sistema Karibe. Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Tercera. La propiedad a ser vendida en pública subasta se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto para conocimiento y comparecencia de los licitadores, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en San Juan, Puerto Rico, a 5 de noviembre de 2020. EDWIN E. LOPEZ MULERO, ALGUACIL, DIVISIÓN DE EJECUCION DE SENTENCIAS, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO L IBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN.

COOPERATIVA DE AHORRO Y CREDITO DE MEDICOS Y OTROS PROFESIONALES DE LA SALUD (MEDICOOP) Demandante vs.

ANDRES MELENDEZ DEDOS y su esposa GAYLE ANNE AUGER KERRIGAN y la Sociedad Legal de Bienes Gananciales compuesta

The San Juan Daily Star

por ambos

Demandados CIVIL NÚM: SJ2019CV06806 (506). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO (Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria) “INREM”.

EDICTO DE SUBASTA.

Al: Público en General A: ANDRES MELENDEZ DEDOS y su esposa GAYLE ANNE AUGER KERRIGAN y la Sociedad Legal de Bienes Gananciales compuesta por ambos; DEPARTAMENTO DE HACIENDA- ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO por tener embargo anotado a su favor por la suma de $603,423.80

Yo, Edwin E. Lopez Mulero, Alguacil de este Tribunal, a la parte demandada y a los acreedores y personas con interés sobre la propiedad que más adelante se describe, y al público en general, HAGO SABER: Que el día 3 de diciembre de 2020, a las 10:00 de la mañana en mi oficina, sita en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de San Juan, San Juan, Puerto Rico, venderé en Pública Subasta la propiedad inmueble que más adelante se describe y cuya venta en pública subasta se ordenó por la vía ordinaria al mejor postor quien hará el pago en dinero en efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del o la Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia. Los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al procedimiento incoado, estarán de manifiesto en la Secretaría del Tribunal de San Juan durante horas laborables. Que en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta a celebrarse, se celebrará una segunda subasta para la venta de la susodicha propiedad, el día 10 de diciembre de 2020, a las 10:00 de la mañana y en caso de no producir remate ni adjudicación, se celebrará una tercera subasta el día 17 de diciembre de 2020, a las 10:00 de la mañana en mi oficina sita en el lugar antes indicado. La propiedad a venderse en pública subasta se describe como sigue: URBANA: PROPIEDAD HORIZONTAL: Unidad designada Oficina número trescientos tres (303), localizada en el piso número tres (3) del CONDOMINIO TORRE SAN FRANCISCO, ubicado en la Calle de Diego número trescientos sesenta y nueve (369) de Río Piedras, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Esta unidad tiene una forma sustancialmente rectangular y cubre un área neta privada de aproximadamente MIL VEINTISEIS PIES CUADRADOS CON SEIS MIL DOSCIENTOS CINCUENTA DIEZMILESIMAS

DE OTRO (1,026.6250. pc), equivalentes a NOVENTA Y CINCO METROS CUADRADOS CON TRES MIL SETECIENTOS TREINTA Y CINCO DIEZMILESIMAS DE OTRO (95.3735 me). En lindes por el NORTE: en dos (2) distancias que suman veinticinco pies (25’) lineales con oficina número trescientos cuatro (304) del mismo piso y en parte con el pasillo central del piso; por el SUR: en tres (3) distancias que suman veintiocho pies (28’) lineales, con pared exterior del Edificio; por el ESTE: en cuatro (4) distintas distancias que suman cuarenta pies seis pulgadas (40’ 6”) con la oficina número trescientos dos (302) del mismo piso y en parte con el pasillo central del piso; y por el OESTE: en cuatro (4) distintas distancias que suman cuarenta pies seis pulgadas (40’ 6”) con pasillo exterior del edificio. Porcentaje: Elementos comunes generales cero punto ocho dos tres dos por ciento (0.8232%). Elementos comunes limitados: diez punto siete cero cuatro por ciento (10.704%). Consta inscrita al Sistema Karibe, finca número 32726 de Sabana Llana, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan. Dirección Física: Condominio Torre San Francisco Oficina 303, 369 Calle De Diego, San Juan, Puerto Rico. La Subasta se llevará a efecto para satisfacer a la parte demandante la suma de $260,741.05 de principal, intereses pactados y computados sobre esta suma al tipo de 7.5% anual desde el 1 de noviembre de 2017 y hasta su total y completo pago, contribuciones, recargos y primas de seguro adeudados y la suma de $27,200.00 por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado; todas estas sumas están vencidas y son líquidas y exigibles. Que la cantidad mínima de licitación en la primera subasta para el inmueble será de $272,000.00 y de ser necesaria una segunda subasta, la cantidad mínima será equivalente a 2/3 partes de aquella, o sea, la suma de $181,333.34 y de ser necesaria una tercera subasta, la cantidad mínima será la mitad del precio pactado, es decir, la suma de $136,000.00. 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,

Wednesday, November 11, 2020 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 a los siguientes gravámenes posteriores: ---Embargo a favor del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, contra Andrés Meléndez Dedos y Gayle Anne Auger Kerrigar, por la suma de $603,423.80, por contribución sobre Ingresos, según Certificación del 8 de febrero de 2016 del Departamento de Hacienda, anotado el 25 de agosto de 2016 al tomo Karibe de Sabana Llana, finca número 32, 726, anotación A. Anotado también el 23 de febrero de 2016 al asiento 2016-001576-EST del Sistema Karibe, según Certificación de fecha 8 de febrero de 2016 expedida por el Departamento de Hacienda. 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 registra! y que podrán 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 San Juan, Puerto Rico, a 5 de noviembre de 2020. EDWIN E. LOPEZ MULERO, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR, ALGUACIL, DIVISION DE EJECUCION DE SENTENCIAS TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE Mayagüez.

PR RECOVERY ANO DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC DEMANDANTE vs.

JOSUÉ CINTRÓN CARBONELL, ÁNGELA M. REYNOSO ACOSTA & LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR

AMBOS

ORIENTAL BANK AND

CALLE MANUEL RAMON MAYAGÜEZ, PUERTO RICO A: ÁNGELA M. REYNOSO ACOSTA, POR SI Y EN REPRESENTACIÓN DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES: URB BELLA LOMAS 640 CALLE MANUEL RAMON MAYAGÜEZ, PUERTO RICO

A: JOHN DOE/ RICHARD DOE

DEMANDADOS TRUST; JOHN DOE y CIVIL NÚM.: MZ2020CV00338.

RICHARD DOE SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO. Demandados EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICCIIVL NUM. DO2020CV00177.

TO. SALA; SOBRE: Cancelación A: JOSUÉ CINTRÓN o Restitución de Pagaré ExCARBONELL, POR SI Y traviado. EDICTO. ESTADOS EN REPRESENTACIÓN UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIDE GANANCIALES: BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO URB BELLA LOMAS 640 RICO. S.S.

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza y requiere para 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), la 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. 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 sin más citarle ni oírle, si el tribunal en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. El sistema SUMAC notificará copia al abogado de la parte demandante, el Lcdo. José F. Aguilar Vélez cuya dirección es: P.O. Box 71418 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00936-8518, teléfono (787) 993-3731 a la dirección jose.aguilar@orf-law.com y a la dirección notificaciones@orflaw.com. EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y el sello del Tribunal, en Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, hoy día 29 de octubre de 2020.

En Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, el 29 de octubre de 2020. Lcda.

Norma G. Santana lrizarry, SECRETARIA. f/Rebeca Medina Figueroa, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA REGION JUDICIAL DE BAYAMÓN SALA SUPERIOR DE DORADO.

CENTURION INSURANCE AGENCY, INC. por sí y como parte interesada Demandante V.

Quedan notificados que la demandante de epígrafe ha radicado en este Tribunal una Demanda contra ustedes como co-demandados en la que se solicita la cancelación de un Pagaré Hipotecario a favor de Oriental Bank and Trust, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $112,500.00 e intereses al 4.95% anual y vencimiento el 1ro de diciembre de 2008, mediante la Escritura Número 731 otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico ante la notario público Lymarie Jiménez López. El mencionado Pagaré Hipotecario grava el inmueble que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número doce (12) del Bloque “H” de la Urbanización Quintas de Villamar antes Quintas de Dorado, situada en el Barrio Higuillar de Dorado, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de trescientos dieciocho punto setenta y cinco metros cuadrados (318.75 mc). En lindes por el NORTE, en una distancia de doce punto setenta y cinco metros (12.75 m), con la calle número dos (2); por el SUR, en una distancia de doce punto setenta y cinco metros (12.75 m), con el solar número treinta y siete (37); por el ESTE, en una distancia de veinticinco metros (25.00 m), con el solar número once (11); por el OESTE, en una distancia de veinticinco metros (25.00 m), con el solar número trece (13). Enclava una casa de concreto reforzado destinada a vivienda. Consta inscrita al folio cincuenta (50) del tomo ciento cincuenta y nueve (159) de Dorado, finca número siete mil ochocientos noventa (7,890), Registro de la Propiedad, Sección IV de Bayamón. Se les advierte que el presente Edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y se le requieres para que contesten la Demanda de epígrafe dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación del edicto, radicando el original de su contestación en el Tribunal correspondiente y notificando con copia de la misma a la parte demandante a la siguiente dirección: BUFETE APONTE & CORTÉS, LLC. LCDA. ERIKA MORALES MARENGO PO Box 195337 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00919-5337 Tel. (787) 302-0014 / (787) 239-5661 / Email: emarengo16@yahoo.com

25

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 presente por derecho propio. Se le apercibe que de no hacerlo, el Tribunal podrá dictar Sentencia en rebeldía concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy día 30 de octubre de 2020. LCDA. LAURA L SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Regional. Sandra I. Cruz Vázquez, Secretaria Servicios a Sala.

LEGAL NOTICE Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de Ponce.

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante V.

FRANCISCO MICHELI MALDONADO

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 representado 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 2 de noviembre de 2020. En Ponce, Puerto Rico, el 2 de noviembre de 2020. LUZ MAYRA CARABALLO GARCÍA, Secretaria Regional. f/HILDA J. ROSADO RODRÍGUEZ, Secretaria Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

Demandado Civil Núm.: PO2020CV00126.

Salón: 0601. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VIA ORDINARIA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: FRANCISCO MICHELI MALDONADO P/C JAIME RUIZSALDAÑA PMB 450 400 Calle Calaf San Juan, PR 00918 Tel. : (787) 759-6897 legal@jrslawpr.com

(Nombre de las partes a las que se les notifica la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que 20 de octubre de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE SAN JUAN SALA SUPERIOR.

PUERTO RICO RECOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC Demandante v.

CARIBBEAN COMMUNICATIONS SOLUTIONS, INC., et. als.

Demandados CIVIL NUM. SJ2019CV11723.

SALA: 506. SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO, EJECUCION DE GARANTIAS. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO.

A: LUIS IVÁN ALEMÁN ALEMÁN, WILMA GONZÁLEZ PADILLA y la SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR

San Juan

AMBOS

POR EL PRESENTE EDICTO se le notifica que la s par tes demandantes de epígrafe han radicado en este Tribunal una demanda en su contra por la causal de Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Garantías. Se le emplaza conforme a la Regla 4.5 y 4.6 de las de Procedimiento Civil, mediante la publicación de un solo edicto en un periódico de circulación general diaria en la Isla de Puerto Rico, a los efectos de que se presente cualquier alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este Edicto, excluyéndose el día de la publicación. Us ted 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, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Se le advierte que, si no contesta la demanda o deja de presentar una alegación responsiva, radicando el original de dicha alegación responsiva en este Tribunal y notificando copia de es ta al abogado de la part e demand ante, dentro del referido término, el Tribunal podrá anotarle la rebeldía y dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra , concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Favor de notificar copia de su cont estación al: LCDO. LUIS J. VILARÓ VÉLEZ: PO Box 3638 12, San Juan , PR 00936-38 12 Tel.: 787-753-2160 luisvilaro@gmail.com EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en San Juan, Puerto Rico, a 13 de octubre de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria. Jessica Soto Pagan, Sec Serv a Sala.

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Wednesday, November 11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Saying he was a ‘scapegoat,’ Jeff Luhnow sues the Astros

By TYLER KEPNER

J

eff Luhnow, the former general manager of the Houston Astros, is free to work again in Major League Baseball. His one-year suspension — punishment for the team’s sign-stealing scandal — expired at the end of the World Series, as did suspensions for former Astros manager A.J. Hinch and former bench coach Alex Cora.

But while Hinch and Cora have already returned as managers — Hinch for the Detroit Tigers, Cora for the Boston Red Sox — Luhnow has remained in exile. Now he has sued the Astros in Harris County (Texas) District Court, seeking the $22 million remaining on his contract when owner Jim Crane fired him in January. The suit claims that a “flawed report that had been negotiated with Crane” by Commissioner Rob Manfred was an invalid basis for his firing.

“The Astros’ termination of Luhnow is an attempt — like the Commissioner before them — to make Luhnow the scapegoat for the organization while the players and video-room staff who devised and executed the schemes went unpunished,” the suit said. “Even more egregiously, most of the culprits in the sign-stealing scheme remained employed by the club. The Astros concocted grounds to fire Luhnow ‘for Cause’ in order to save more than $22 million in guaranteed salary.”

The Astros and Major League Baseball had no comment on the lawsuit as of Monday afternoon, and Luhnow referred questions to his lawyer, John Potter, of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLC in San Francisco.

“He believes that he’s entitled to the payments under the contract, but even more important than that, he wants to clear his good name,” Potter said.

“He had an unimpeachable, impeccable record for decades and he was widely respected for his integrity. What transpired, unfairly in our view, tarnished his integrity. More than anything else, he wants to set the record straight so people can really understand what happened with respect to the sign stealing.”

The Astros hired Luhnow in December 2011, attracted by his adherence to data and his willingness to challenge conventional methods of finding talent, as he had done as scouting director for the St. Louis Cardinals. The Astros were the worst team in the majors then, and Luhnow kept them that way for two more seasons, loading up on prospects who would soon help transform the team.

By 2015, they had made the playoffs, and in 2017 they won their first World Series, outlasting the Los Angeles Dodgers while winning eight of their nine home games in the postseason. They returned to the World Series in 2019 but lost to the Washington Nationals, who won all four games played in Houston.

Last November — with on-the-record confirma-

Jeff Luhnow was suspended by Major League Baseball and fired by the Houston Astros as a result of the team’s cheating scandal. In a lawsuit, Luhnow claims he was unaware of the cheating. tion from former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers — The Athletic reported that the Astros had stolen signals throughout 2017 by reading the catcher’s signs off a television monitor and banging a trash can to alert batters of the next pitch. The activity continued even after MLB had warned all teams against electronic spying.

Manfred granted immunity to players who were on the team at the time in exchange for cooperation with his investigation, and while he fined Crane $5 million and docked the Astros four draft picks, he was roundly criticized for neither punishing the players nor stripping the Astros of their title.

The lawsuit claims that Manfred “let the ringleader keep his position in exchange for providing information that would implicate Luhnow” and goes on to identify Tom Koch-Weser, who is listed as the team’s director of advance information, as the mastermind.

Manfred, the suit said, ignored more than 22,000 text and chat messages from Koch-Weser.

“Tellingly, none of these messages sent or received by Koch-Weser included Luhnow or suggested that he had any awareness of the activity,” the suit states, adding that Koch-Weser “even texted his colleagues ‘don’t tell Jeff’ ” and emphasized that Luhnow was never aware of or involved in the scheme.

Luhnow did, however, have knowledge of a system called Codebreaker that used an algorithm to decode sign sequences and was mentioned in a PowerPoint presentation in 2016. But the suit said this effort was only undertaken after games were completed, not in real time, and that Manfred acknowledged it was not a rules violation. As for an August 2017 email the league used to implicate Luhnow, the suit said that while it refers to “dark arts,” it does not mention electronic in-game sign stealing.

The suit contends Koch-Weser was the only witness to implicate Luhnow and that Koch-Weser “lied repeatedly” to save his job. The suit said that Luhnow gave proper warnings to staffers about following the rules on electronic equipment and that it was unrealistic to expect him to be aware of the activities of everyone on his staff.

The Astros signed Luhnow in May 2018 to a contract extension worth $31 million, plus performance bonuses and a profits interest in Houston Baseball Partners LLC. Several teams have open leadership positions in baseball operations, including the New York Mets, the Los Angeles Angels, the Miami Marlins and the Philadelphia Phillies, but Luhnow, who is writing a book, has not surfaced publicly as a candidate for any opening.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

27

Count Tiger Woods out? Not at Augusta National

By BILL PENNINGTON

T

he most mesmerizing moment of Tiger Woods’ seismic 2019 Masters victory featured the intimidating stillness of a silent stare. Standing defiantly on the 12th green with arms folded across his chest during the final round, Woods glared pitilessly at his closest rivals.

Seconds earlier, Woods had shrewdly and conservatively traversed the tiny yet treacherous creek protecting the pivotal green, safely positioning his golf ball 30 feet from the hole. Rash and unwary, his playing partners, Francisco Molinari and Tony Finau, plunked their balls into the water. With an air of condescension, Woods walked alone up to the plateau green and, from the opposite side of the creek, looked down on Molinari and Finau as they dolefully dropped new golf balls — futile first steps in an unsuccessful rally.

By the time the players left the green, Woods was tied for the lead and on his way to a stunning victory.

Want to know if Woods, even after 19 erratic months, can successfully defend his Masters title this week? The answer is in his knowing stare during the crucible of the 2019 tournament.

“It was a pure Tiger power moment,” Trevor Immelman, the 2008 Masters champion, said last month, recalling the scene.

“It was the perfect example of how he uses his vast Masters experience. Tiger went to the green and looked back just to say, ‘I may be 43 years old, but I’m still the man around here.’”

Savvier about the secrets to succeeding at Augusta National Golf Club than any other player in this year’s field, Woods has not only won the Masters five times, he has finished in the top five seven other times in his 22 tournament appearances. Even when his game is not sharp or when he competes after a long layoff — or both — Woods has usually managed to contend at Augusta National.

There is no better example than the 2010 Masters, when Woods returned from a five-month exile necessitated by the scandal of his marital infidelities. Despite stinging rebukes from fans and from the Augusta National chair at the time, Billy Payne, Woods stayed in the hunt until the final holes, finishing tied for fourth.

“I would never count Tiger Woods out at the Masters because he loves and knows Augusta so well, and that triggers very positive vibes,” said Bernhard Langer, who has won the Masters twice and tied for eighth

Tiger Woods has won the Masters five times and finished in the top five seven other times. He is savvier about succeeding at the Augusta National Golf Club than any other player in this year’s field. at the tournament in 2014, when he was 56. “It’s that kind of place, and Tiger has 25 years of memories to draw from.”

But in a sports year different from any other in modern times, Woods has been a far less daunting presence because of his balky lower back, which has been surgically repaired four times. Playing infrequently, Woods has turned in several sparkling rounds when his swing was fluid and his movements supple. But it has been just as common to see Woods limping 24 hours later, with one hand pressed against a back warped by reshaped bone and scarred tissue, toiling fruitlessly in pain.

In July, after one such uneven performance in consecutive rounds of the Memorial Tournament, Woods explained the hour-by-hour unpredictability of his back.

That morning, he felt limber when he woke up, but a few hours later was too stiff to take a full golf swing. “It’s going to happen more times than not,” he said, smiling.

This is Woods’ new reality, which includes the understanding that if he is going to win the three more major golf championships needed to tie Jack Nicklaus’ record total of 18, or match Nicklaus’ record six Masters titles, it will probably have to happen in the next few years.

With the clock ticking this season, Woods has struggled. In the six tournaments he has entered since the PGA Tour resumed

in June after a three-month layoff caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Woods has not finished higher than a tie for 37th. In the five majors he has played since his 2019 Masters victory, he has missed the cut three times, tied for 21st and tied for 37th.

Nonetheless, his much younger colleagues on the PGA Tour, as well as his contemporaries in the champions-only Augusta National locker room, uniformly consider him among the favorites this week. So do online betting sites.

“The whole world saw what Tiger did in the final round last year when he methodically chased down every name ahead of him on the leaderboard,” said Gary Woodland, the 2019 U.S. Open champion.

“It was proof of his talent but also showed the depth of his invaluable experience on that golf course.”

Since the Masters is the only major championship played annually at the same course, familiarity with the layout has always been a considerable advantage. In an interview late last month, Nick Faldo, a three-time Masters champion, said he thought the experience of playing in the tournament multiple times could be worth four to eight strokes across the four rounds of the event.

“Putts that appear to break 2 feet actually break 8 feet, and a brilliant shot that lands 1 yard from the hole but on the

wrong side of that hole ends up 4 yards over the green,” said Faldo, who will be an analyst for CBS at this year’s tournament. “Everybody tries to keep the ball below the hole, but when you’re 185 yards away that’s not always going to happen. So you better learn to be comfortable putting down slopes so steep your ball might roll back into the fairway. The mental strain you’re under is constant.”

Rory McIlroy, the world’s fifth-ranked player, said Augusta National’s challenges were so subtle they could not be explained but instead had to be experienced. The 14th hole, for example, is the only one on the property without a bunker, but its green is deceptively devilish.

“The putt up the hill on the 14th green is the slowest putt on the entire course,” said McIlroy, who added that few players realize how hard they must stroke the ball until they leave it 10 feet short of the hole two or three times.

Adding to the challenge this year will be a first: a Masters in November instead of in its traditional role as an April rite.

Not surprisingly, Woods is one of the few leading players who has played multiple rounds at Augusta National in November.

“It’s been cold, the ball doesn’t go very far,” he said last month of those outings.

Also, from spring to fall, the prevailing wind tends to shift. “If you get the north wind that time of year,” Woods said, “it can be awfully difficult and long, and very different than what we normally play in April.”

In recent months, it has been obvious that cold weather exacerbates the fragility of Woods’ back, and that has added to the belief that his window of championship greatness is closing.

“There will come a time when Tiger won’t be one of the favorites,” said Immelman, who is a CBS golf analyst. “However, I don’t think that time is right now. He still has different powers than the rest of us and an amazing ability to rise to the occasion regardless of the conditions.”

Phil Mickelson, Woods’ oldest major rival in the field, has wondered in recent weeks if the wind and chill of November might favor a golfer whose strength is precise iron play rather than length off the tee.

Mickelson pointed to the 2007 Masters, which was played in squally weather and won by Zach Johnson, whose forte is accuracy and consistency.

It is worth noting that Woods finished second that year, two strokes behind Johnson.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Tom Brady and the Buccaneers were blown out. Was it an Antonio Brown curse?

By KEN BELSON

T

he matchup had been anticipated all season: Tom Brady and Drew Brees, two sure-shot Hall of Fame quarterbacks nearing the ends of their careers, facing off in prime time Sunday. The fact that their teams, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the New Orleans Saints, are battling for control of the NFC South only raised the stakes.

This is the NFL, though, where troublesome personalities on the field sometimes steal the show, or at least a lot of the attention. In this case, it was the debut of Antonio Brown with the Buccaneers.

Brown, an All-Pro wide receiver returned to the field for the first time in 16 months after tumultuous breakups with three teams, self-destructive explosions on social media and several lawsuits, one of which led to an eight-game suspension. Another one — a lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault and rape — may go to trial as soon as next month.

If that were not problematic enough, his return to the field came with the full-throated endorsement, if not machinations, by Brady, who had bonded with Brown during a brief stint with the New England Patriots and is even lending him a room in his Tampa-area mansion.

In the end, Tampa needed a receiver and was willing to look past any off-field transgressions, though Sunday they appeared to need a lot more as the Saints blew them out, 38-3, and Brown caught only three passes.

Yet Brown’s return to the NFL — after all his legal troubles, his threats to retire and his bad-mouthing of former employers — raised fresh questions about the league’s tolerance for players who act poorly off the field, particularly when it includes accusations of violence against women, an issue that has dogged the league for years.

The NFL professes to hold players accountable when they damage the league’s brand. And, indeed, the league suspended Brown for eight games this season — a hefty penalty by its standards — and Brown could be suspended again depending on what is disclosed during his lawsuit.

But in allowing Brown to suit up yet again, the league risks tacitly normalizing his behavior, which has included fights with a general manager, livestreaming embarrassing video in his team’s locker room and a grievance over which helmet he could wear.

Under the cloak of offering second chances, teams often look past a player’s behavior if he has something to offer on the field. Undeniably, Brown, 32, has been

immensely talented. His 68 touchdown receptions since 2013, even after sitting out a season and a half, are still the most among active receivers.

Teams want to win championships and bet that fans and sponsors will also look past players with checkered lives. In that light, Brown is simply another hired gun, albeit one with a trail of burned bridges, hired to get the Buccaneers to the promised land. He joins other mercenaries like Brady, who signed a $60 million, two-year contract in March; Brady’s favorite tight end, Rob Gronkowski, who came out of retirement; and running back Leonard Fournette, who spent three rocky years with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

“Discipline in the NFL has an inverse relationship to a player’s talent on the field,” said Nellie Drew, director of the Center for the Advancement of Sport at the University at Buffalo School of Law. In other words, the more talent, the more likely a team looks the other way.

The Buccaneers provided all the usual caveats, some of which required backflips and contortions. Coach Bruce Arians said in March he had no interest in Brown. Now that the team has several injured receivers — and a star quarterback who wanted him — Brown seemed like a better fit. Arians added that there was no inconsistency between his well-deserved record of hiring women and signing a player accused of sexual assault.

Arians noted that Brown had not been convicted of any crimes. (Brown pleaded no contest to felony burglary and battery charges after an altercation with a truck driver, an episode that led to his eight-game suspension.) Arians said that Brown was in “great shape,” had been “positive” and was “moving forward.” Arians and other coaches on the Buccaneers know Brown from their days together with the Pittsburgh Steelers and would provide support.

Even so, Arians suggested Brown would be on a short leash.

“I think let the court system do its job,” Arians said. “I mean allegations, I’ve been around a lot of players facing allegations that weren’t true. Some were. So let the court system handle it, and if it’s found out to be true, he won’t be with us.”

In some ways, Brown is getting less scrutiny than he would in a normal season.

Because of the pandemic, fewer fans are in stadiums, so there is less chance of Brown being booed.

Reporters are not allowed in clubhouses this year, so there are no television cameras camped out at his locker. All interviews are done by video conferencing, and team per-

Antonio Brown making one of three catches on Sunday night in a loss to the New Orleans Saints. Questions about his off-field behavior made him a focus of the game. sonnel control who asks questions and how long interviews last.

Last week, Brown, who wore a “TB12” cap denoting Brady’s health and wellness company, told reporters that Brady was instrumental in his return and had introduced him to motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

Brown said he has been “working on myself within and without” and “not listening to the naysayers.”

Still, he hoped to “win them over in my actions, how I move forward and how I handle my business.”

Television broadcasters have a different task when discussing Brown because they have a game to produce, too.

“Nothing should really overwhelm the game except the game itself,” said Fred Gaudelli, producer of ‘Sunday Night Football’ at NBC Sports. “Brown will be covered but not at the expense of the game.”

On Sunday night, NBC used its pregame show to delve into Brown’s circumstances because there were no unscripted interruptions that might occur during the game. The pregame show, though, has half and sometimes one-third as many viewers as the game.

Mike Tirico, the show’s host, introduced the discussion on Brown as “the latest chapter in a saga that has lasted for nearly two years.” He reeled off a list of Brown’s transgressions and travails, including run-ins with

his quarterback in Pittsburgh, injuring his foot in cryotherapy sessions, getting fined tens of thousands of dollars for missing workouts and his release by the Patriots after allegations of sexual misconduct.

Hosts went on to assess whether the “Antonio Brown experiment” would “work” in Tampa. “This has to work for him or he’s out of chances,” Michael Holley said. “And by the way, he’s staying at Tom Brady’s house. That has to work out, right?”

Tony Dungy, a former coach, said that Brady’s sponsoring Brown was critical. “Tom Brady, being your quarterback, a veteran, and he vouches for him, and comes to you and says, ‘Coach, we need this guy,’ that definitely impacts your decision-making.”

Rodney Harrison, a former teammate of Brady’s, said the 43-year-old quarterback was “the perfect person to manage Antonio Brown” because he would hold the receiver accountable. Harrison never said what that meant.

Before kickoff, the sideline reporter, Michele Tafoya, summed up Brown’s problems again. But then it was on to football. Brown’s troubles were discussed again only before halftime.

“We’ll see as we move forward,” said Al Michaels, the announcer. “But Bruce Arians making it pretty clear, he toes the line or that’s the end of that.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

29

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

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

(Mar 21-April 20)

Your partner and other family members want to know your plans for the rest of the year.

There is a reason behind this question so don’t be reluctant to reveal what you are hoping to achieve. You’re ready to dig your way out of a difficult situation and there are plenty of people who will give you their support along with some practical assistance.

Taurus

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

(April 21-May 21)

It’s important not to get the wrong idea about a suggestion or offer put to you early in the day. This could be read in two ways. Despite what you might think, nothing underhand or deceitful is going on behind the scenes. The last thing you want to do is turn a supporter into a rival.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

There’s a spirit of joy and laugher in the air which is uplifting. All the excitement seems to be getting to you, too, when you feel more carefree and creative. You’re mixing with a variety of interesting people online or in person.

Use this as an opportunity to spread the word about an important cause.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

You find it surprisingly easy to get around problems. Your ideas on how to resolve problems caused by new restrictions will seem ingenious. The moment you come across a confusing issue, allow your thoughts free rein.

You will find a way to resolve the matter that satisfied all parties.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

It won’t be easy to get some people to believe what you are saying. This is annoying when you are being honest in your answers and specific about your intentions. Dealing with a Doubting Thomas is exhausting and eventually you will realise the only way to be happy is to spend some time on your own.

A lot of effort has been put into the necessity of the safety of arrangements and plans now being put into place. It is essential that those at the top engage with people and explain the reasons behind their thinking. The experts don’t have all the answers but they’re doing their best to keep everything and everyone safe.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

You may have had nothing on your mind other than spending your time burning up energy on housework and other routine tasks. Even so, it could be a good idea to accept any invitation that gets you out of the house. A trip to a place you don’t visit very often will lead to an opportunity that fills you with excitement.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

The only way to get ahead now is to take the spotlight. You have the knowledge and skills to achieve a worthwhile goal. Let others see what you are made of. Being at the centre of attention isn’t your favourite spot but it will only be temporary. Step out of the shadows.

A friend or neighbour’s sudden anger about an issue you hadn’t considered too serious will take you by surprise. You hadn’t realised they had any interest in this matter. Discussions will get heated as once someone has said their piece you will have a few words of your own that are itching to be said.

A young relative has been looking to you for advice and you’ve been doing your best to encourage them to stand on their own two feet.

Now you’re wondering whether you have been too harsh and you feel you could and should have been more understanding. Offer your support and you will make their day.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You feel much better than you have done recently. Health is slowly improving and mentally you’re more able to concentrate on complicated issues. If there have been strained relationships you will be the first to extend an olive branch. It is important to you that you resolve your differences.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Something you have to do may not be your cup of tea but you won’t get away with pulling out of this commitment. You may have offered to fill in for an absent colleague or to take on some extra work and now you wish you hadn’t. It might help soften the blow if you think about the extra cash this will bring in for Christmas.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

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