Thursday Nov 26, 2020

Thursday, November 26, 2020

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A Thanksgiving Parade, Unfazed by Snow or Wind, Takes On a Pandemic

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Be Thankful & Careful Health Chief, Medical Experts Warn on COVID-19 Cases Spiking During the Holidays; Thanksgiving Must Be Celebrated Only with Close Family Circle Physicians & Surgeons Assn. President: Safety Guidelines Must Be Followed

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Testing Among Police to Enforce Executive Order on Thanksgiving Homeless Finds No Positive and Throughout the COVID-19 Cases Holiday Season P5

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Thursday, November 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

GOOD MORNING

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November 26, 2020

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

Health secretary warns on possible hike in COVID-19 cases amid holiday celebrations

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ealth Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano warned Wednesday that a hike in COVID-19 infections may occur during the Christmas season and the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend as families get together for festivities.

Ironically, random testing among the homeless found no positive cases of the infection, a result that was explained by the fact that homeless individuals are usually isolated.

Alluding to the fact that the island is still on an orange alert level, González Feliciano urged families to avoid having get-togethers with individuals other than those in the family nucleus on Thanksgiving.

“Thanksgiving is celebrated [today]. … We have made it clear that there should be no parties,” the Health chief said, “in order to reduce the possibility that an outside person could spread the virus.”

“COVID is still with us,” he said.

González Feliciano said the tradition of celebrating Thanksgiving “has not died,” but insisted it is necessary that parties and celebrations remain small and within close-knit families, preferably limited to family members residing under the same roof.

He added that he does not foresee changes or more restrictions to stop the spread of the virus.

Meanwhile, a research project to determine the prevalence of COVID-19 among the homeless obtained surprising results.

Some 1,475 molecular tests for COVID-19 in vulnerable homeless populations in several island towns revealed the unexpected finding that no homeless person tested positive for the coronavirus.

“To date, in the ‘Housing and Homeless Health’ initiative, a total of 1,475 molecular tests have been conducted on homeless people, employees that provide direct service to homeless people, and people from different vulnerable populations, especially older people, people with substance abuse and behavioral health problems,” said Francisco J. Rodríguez Fraticelli, executive president of the Coalition of Coalitions for the Homeless of Puerto Rico, adding that the testing yielded negative results.

The fact that not a single homeless person tested positive for COVID-19 may have several explanations, Rodríguez Fraticelli said.

“While the general population continues to be exposed and the number of infections and deaths related to COVID-19 increases, the homeless and vulnerable populations are already isolated and marginalized as part of the rejection and discrimination they suffer due to their situation,” he said.

That rejection and marginalization has served as protection from the society that rejects them, Rodríguez Fraticelli said. The homeless have also been oriented on COVID-19 and are taking action.

“Now they are the ones who stay away from crowds of unprotected people, staying away from people when they ask for money on the streets, turning to non-profit organizations to ask for masks,” he said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Physicians & Surgeons Assn. president: Thanksgiving should only be celebrated with close family circle amid COVID-19 case rise Víctor Ramos insists that safety guidelines must be followed to keep all family members alive

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

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mid the rise in COVID-19 cases and intensive care unit hospitalizations due to the disease caused by the coronavirus, medical experts urged citizens on Wednesday to celebrate Thanksgiving Day with only their close family circle to prevent the virus from spreading further.

“This is very simple. If we want all of our family members [to be alive and present] for next year and other events, and not have to grieve someone’s absence, we must cooperate this year,” Puerto Rico Physicians & Surgeons Association (CMCPR by its Spanish initials) President Víctor Ramos told the Star, adding that he doesn’t wish for any person to be “grieving the loss of someone in later years and every weekend because of not doing things right.”

As for people who have travelled to Puerto Rico from the United States to visit family members despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting that the island is “on a very high level of COVID-19” and urging citizens to “avoid all travel,” the pediatrician said travelers should have their negative COVID-19 test and remain in quarantine for 14 days to prevent greater risks.

“In reality, by traveling, they are not preventing any tragedies; the United States has a case uprise similar to Puerto Rico in 46 out of 50 states,” Ramos said. “Many people didn’t travel to Puerto Rico during their summer vacations; others came from the States, which is what began the community transmission.”

Ramos said the CDC recommendation extends to the U.S. mainland as “there are states that have a 56 percent positivity rate, others with 50, 26 -- these are alarming rates.”

“People should avoid traveling, but we know that’s not going to happen,” he added.

Cruz María Nazario, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Puerto Rico’s Graduate School of Public Health, said the best way to celebrate Thanksgiving Day is “staying at home and avoiding going into closed spaces with crowds of people.”

“It’s the time to take advantage of how to celebrate life without infecting others, without increasing the number of cases and deaths,” Nazario said. “I believe that we must stimulate people to design strategies to prevent spreading.”

As for strategies, Nazario said the safest way is to celebrate the holiday virtually.

“The youth have so many mechanisms, such as social networks, that can help conduct a virtual holiday, where they can share and joke around with family members and friends without being too close,” the epidemiologist said.

Puerto Rico Physicians & Surgeons Association President Víctor Ramos Nazario said that if anyone were to gather with family members, the best bet was celebrating it outdoors, not having more than 10 guests, not inviting people who aren’t close relatives to the gathering and using face masks at all times.

“There has to be access to hand washing or hand sanitizers available for the guests,” the epidemiologist said as she urged people not to share their food and to keep the gathering brief as infection risk increases over time.

“You could set up two tables, six feet apart from each other,” she said. “Unlike before, where everyone picked up food with their used utensils, guests should bring their own food, set it on their table and not share either the meal or the cutlery. Close encounters while dining should not be promoted as they lead to spreading.”

Nazario also suggested that music should be at low volume so that guests don’t have to speak loudly, as that leads to expelling more saliva droplets.

“We are at a time of crisis in Puerto Rico. Now, the crisis can take place if you have to go to a hospital and the resources for getting medical attention become unavailable,” she said. “Imagine arriving at a hospital with your mother or any other family member, and a hospital worker tells you: ‘We can’t help you. There are no beds available.’ That has happened in Italy, Spain and many parts of the United States.”

The epidemiologist further told the Star that “we have to be thankful that we are not ill, we have to be grateful that we can do what’s right to not infect others, we have to be grateful that we can wear face masks to protect each other if one of us carries the virus.”

Spike in cases has been occurring since October; mass testing should be accessible to prevent ‘greater crisis’ Ramos, meanwhile, said the latest rise in COVID-19 cases was not unexpected as infections have been increasing since late October due to political events and other occasions where people have not practiced safety guidelines as they have gathered in crowded spaces.

“It’s not just politicians, politicians, politicians,” the CMCPR president said. “They might have been irresponsible, but they weren’t the only contributors to the case spike.”

Although Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced denied that a lockdown was up for consideration, Ramos told the Star that “lockdowns are always an option.”

“We know that lockdowns work, and I know that people like to say otherwise, but we have seen that when countries have decreased cases dramatically it has been when they declared lockdowns,” he said, mentioning New Zealand as one of the countries that has addressed the global pandemic successfully and reactivated their economic sector.

Ramos noted further that due to the earlier lockdown issued in March, “there were basically no coronavirus cases in June.”

The Star asked what measures should be taken to find balance between the island’s health and economy should another lockdown be ordered. Ramos said that even though he understands the economic sector’s concern amid the pandemic, as even medical offices have faced a dramatic loss in income, “we are projecting a public health reality, which is also a general reality.”

“In the case that we have no other options left, we must go for it,” he said, referring to another islandwide lockdown.

Nazario said mass testing for COVID-19 should be a priority.

“Severe cases will keep arriving at hospitals, leading to a greater crisis,” the epidemiologist said. “If we don’t take the right measures, cases will keep going up. Because there aren’t many tests being conducted, many people are walking around who might be positive for the coronavirus and have no symptoms; therefore, they think that they’re incapable of infecting others.”

Meanwhile, she called out the government’s emergency management.

“The government looks like they don’t care about doing something about it to control the pandemic,” Nazario said, adding that the Harvard University COVID-19 Dashboard shows Puerto Rico’s islandwide positivity rate at around 17 percent.

“If we arrive at Christmas with this high [positivity] rate, there will be another rise in COVID-19 cases,” she said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

5

Puerto Rico police ‘ready’ for Thanksgiving, Black Friday and the rest of the holidays

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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he Puerto Rico police will be enforcing Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced’s executive order over the long holiday weekend and into the holiday season to the full extent of the law, police spokesman Lt. Elvin Zeno said earlier this week.

“Police will intervene with unauthorized parties and we call on people not to meet in large groups as it has been shown that that is how the COVID-19 virus has been spread,” Zeno told the Star late Tuesday. “The regular police and the preventative police bureau will be patrolling the entire island.”

However, Zeno said the police are making a special request for the full cooperation of the public since the police force is shorthanded with some 400 police officers in quarantine because of the COVID-19 virus.

He said the police will intervene if parties are under way in plain view or if neighbors complain about crowded parties.

He acknowledged that police will have a difficult time intervening with parties on private property.

“Obviously if they have a party inside a house, it will be hard for us to tell if there are too many people there,” Zeno said.

Zeno said that with cooperation of the Puerto Rico National Guard, the police will be able to conduct preventive patrols across the island and in the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra.

The National Guard will be stationed mostly in the metropolitan areas and will call the regular police forces to intervene in any crime that they witness, Zeno said.

The Maritime Police Force will be patrolling the beaches as will the regular police patrols, he said.

“They will be vigilant to make sure that people at beaches are practicing sports and not just gathering, as dictated by the governor’s executive order,” Zeno said.

The police will also be on their toes to spot any businesses that violate the executive order stipulation requiring businesses to limit their capacity to 30 percent of the space in the store or restaurant.

Zeno encouraged the public to call the police with any information on violations of the law or the governor’s executive order at (787) 343-2020.

Hidroeléctrica de la Montaña: P3A is holding up proposals to manage plants

By THE STAR STAFF

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he Cooperativa Hidroeléctrica de la Montaña held a virtual protest Wednesday against Puerto Rico’s Public Private Partnership Authority (P3A), which the cooperative says is holding up its proposal to manage and renew the hydroelectric plants at the Caonillas and Dos Bocas lakes.

A year after qualifying for a proposal to manage the hydroelectric plants at the aforementioned lakes, the Cooperativa Hidroeléctrica de la Montaña is still waiting for government permits to start operating the Hidroenergía Renace Consortium.

According to the cooperative, the delay by the P3A and the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) is preventing residents of Adjuntas, Jayuya and Utuado from having clean, costeffective and resilient electricity.

“Our people have high hopes for this project but the government is not working with the necessary coordination or efficiency,” said Ineabelle Medina González, secretary of the cooperative’s board of directors.

González said the P3A is not moving forward with the hydroelectric

plant revitalization project because it is presumably waiting for the integrated resource plan to be approved by the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau (PREB).

For its part, the PREB says it is waiting for the action plan for PREPA’s

hydroelectric plants, although it does not have the capacity or the staff to complete such a plan.

“While all this is happening, there are four proponents already identified and qualified by the P3 Authority,

including our cooperative, unable to submit a proposal due to lack of action from the P3 Authority and PREPA,” said C.P. Smith, executive director of the cooperative. “If this continues, unfortunately, the Caonillas and Dos Bocas hydroelectric plants will not be in operation in the immediate future. It is time for the government to end this paralysis and take action recognizing the limits of PREPA and the options that proponents can offer to develop a good Action Plan for the PREB.” Through the cooperative model and with expert partners in renewable energy, the cooperative has achieved community support to insert itself into the energy transformation of Puerto Rico, González noted. It proposes to rescue the hydroelectric plants and rebuild them to supply electric power to several towns in the island’s central mountain range with cost-effective renewables.

“The communities of Adjuntas, Jayuya and Utuado want to be resilient and not again go through the nightmare they lived for long months of being without electricity after the passage of Hurricane Maria [in 2017],” González said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Bar Assn. marks Elimination of Violence Against Women Day with focus on call for a state of emergency declaration

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

I

n recognition of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the Puerto Rico Bar Association on Wednesday reiterated its full support for the demand of women’s organizations for the declaration of a state of emergency in Puerto Rico, given the alarming number of cases of gender violence in its multiple manifestations.

“As jurists who continuously participate in the variou areas of the system that try to administer justice, we know first-hand the impact that violence has on women, their daughters and sons, and on society in general,” said Bar Association President Daisy Calcaño.

“The government agencies that are supposed to address the problem have been far from doing so as the necessary priority,” Calcaño said. “The fight against discrimination, whose most stark manifestation is emotional, sexual, and physical violence up to the point of femicide, has been in the hands of non-profit organizations that offer shelter, protection, emotional support, advice, legal representation, and prevention and education activities, with very little support from the government, but a lot of community solidarity.”

She added that the declaration of a state of emergency would open the door for allocating economic, human, educational, investigative and support resources.

With that in mind, she said the Bar Assocation also agrees with feminist and human rights organizations that education with a gender perspective is the key to eradicating the prejudices and stereotypes that are promoted by a macho and patriarchal ideology and are the basis of violence against women.

“Gender-based violence includes hate crimes against the LGBTTQI+ community, within which six transfeminicides have been perpetrated this year, most of which have not been solved,” Calcaño said. “Impunity has to end.”

“The Women’s Commission of the [Bar] Association encourages its [membership] and the Puerto Rican people in general to join the different activities called by women’s organizations to, in remembrance of the three Dominican sisters Minerva, Patria and María Teresa Mirabal, assassinated on November 25, 1960 by the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, repudiate sexist violence and reiterate our commitment to fight for gender equality and the human rights of women,” Calcaño said, extending an invitation to a forum on the subject that the Bar Association will hold on Dec. 10.

Bar Association President Daisy Calcaño

Local businesses highlight diversity on Small Business Saturday

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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iscover Puerto Rico has joined forces with the local platform for e-commerce products, Brands of Puerto Rico, to highlight the diverse businesses of the island and help Puerto Rican entrepreneurs market their products to the world, to mark “Small Business Saturday” this weekend.

“Knowing Puerto Rico is an experience that must be lived with all the senses since the island has a diverse culture, impressive art, exquisite aromas and delicious flavors,” said Brad Dean, CEO of Discover Puerto Rico, in a written statement. “Whether you crave a getaway to discover the island, aspire to a new cultural experience, or simply miss the island’s charm, Brands of Puerto Rico is the place to go, offering 147 Puerto Rican products. Each of the local products you find on their platform tells a different story and by supporting these small businesses

you are becoming part of their story.”

Through this effort, Discover Puerto Rico has included a destination page on its website and on its Facebook channel, featuring locally made products that are available through Brands of Puerto Rico.

Under the concept “Small Companies.

Great Stories,” both organizations are promoting unique products that include art, coffee, food and more, along with the

stories behind each of those products.

“Since the beginning of the pandemic, our business has gone from being an online novelty store to a unique proposition that ships classic and hard-to-find products to Puerto Ricans abroad such as sobao bread and even sofrito. Currently, we are the sole digital point of sale for many small brands and local artisans,” said Alan Taveras, CMO of Brands of

Puerto Rico. “This joint marketing effort to celebrate ‘Small Business Saturday’ is the perfect opportunity to promote and invest directly in the Puerto Rican economy. Through our partnership with Discover Puerto Rico, we are celebrating our products and brands and showing potential visitors what we have to offer. Together, we will demonstrate the best of what Puerto Rico has to give.”

The destination page on the Discover Puerto Rico website launched last week. The Brands of Puerto Rico website will also have a presence regarding the initiative and will give a 10 percent discount to all purchases made on Saturday, Nov. 28.

Both organizations will promote “Small Businesses, Great Stories” to their database and will work to continue supporting Puerto Rican entrepreneurs.

Small Business Saturday is a shopping holiday in America, celebrated on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, which is one of the busiest shopping times of the year.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

7

Evidence builds that an early mutation made the pandemic harder to stop

By JAMES GLANZ, BENEDICT CAREY and HANNAH BEECH

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s the coronavirus swept across the world, it picked up random alterations to its genetic sequence. Like meaningless typos in a script, most of those mutations made no difference in how the virus behaved.

But one mutation near the beginning of the pandemic did make a difference, multiple new findings suggest, helping the virus spread more easily from person to person and making the pandemic harder to stop.

The mutation, known as 614G, was first spotted in eastern China in January and then spread quickly throughout Europe and New York City. Within months, the variant took over much of the world, displacing other variants.

For months, scientists have been fiercely debating why. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory argued in May that the variant had probably evolved the ability to infect people more efficiently. Many were skeptical, arguing that the variant may have been simply lucky, appearing more often by chance in large epidemics, like Northern Italy’s, that seeded outbreaks elsewhere.

But a host of new research — including close genetic analysis of outbreaks and lab work with hamsters and human lung tissue — has supported the view that the mutated virus did in fact have a distinct advantage, infecting people more easily than the original variant detected in Wuhan, China.

There is no evidence that a coronavirus with the 614G mutation causes more severe symptoms, kills more people or complicates the development of vaccines.

Nor do the findings change the reality that places that quickly and aggressively enacted lockdowns and encouraged measures like social distancing and masks have fared far better than the those that did not.

But the subtle change in the virus’s genome appears to have had a big ripple effect, said David Engelthaler, a geneticist at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona.

“When all is said and done, it could be that this mutation is what made the pandemic,” he said.

The first outbreaks of the virus would have spread around the world even without the mutation, believe most researchers,

including Engelthaler. The original variant spotted in Wuhan in late 2019 was already highly contagious, he said. But the mutation appears to have made the pandemic spread farther and faster than it would have without it.

One study found that outbreaks in communities in the United Kingdom grew faster when seeded by the 614G variant than when seeded by its Wuhan ancestor.

Another reported that hamsters infected each other more quickly when exposed to the variant. And in a third, the variant infected human bronchial and nasal tissue in a cell-culture dish far more efficiently than its ancestor.

Kristian Andersen, a geneticist at Scripps Research, La Jolla, said the research did show that the variant is more transmissible, but he believes the difference is subtle.

Even so, Andersen said that the variant’s higher transmissibility could help explain why some countries that were initially successful in containing the virus became susceptible to it later. The virus may have been “harder to contain than the first time around,” he said.

“What you used to do may not be quite enough to control it,” Andersen said.

“Don’t necessarily expect that the enemy of two months ago is the enemy you have the next time.”

Around the world, the emergence of 614G has generated both serious scientific debate and largely political blame dodging.

Government officials in Vietnam and Thailand, which fared well in containing the ancestral strain despite an influx of Chinese visitors early in the year, have suggested that the later outbreaks may have been partly the result of the 614G virus.

Thailand has kept both variants of the virus under control over the past year through the strict quarantining of returnees, a ban on foreign tourists, masks and other measures, said Thira Woratanarat, an associate professor in the faculty of medicine at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

Still, he said, resurgences in the region are concerning.

“We have seen several countries, like Vietnam, South Korea and Japan, that seemed to have it under control,” Thira said. “But then there was a second wave.”

In Vietnam, he said, the virus with the 614G mutation was first confirmed in the

A COVID-19 intensive care ward at at Papa Giovanni XXIII hospital in Bergamo, Italy, March 21, 2020. One mutation near the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic did make a difference, multiple new findings suggest, helping the virus spread more easily from person to person and making the pandemic harder to stop. central coastal city of Danang after about 100 days with no reported cases of local transmission. An outbreak quickly spread to 10 cities and provinces. In Singapore, he said, the mutated virus spread in crowded dormitories for migrant workers.

“When the mutated virus lives in big groups, it spreads faster and makes it much more difficult to control,” he said.

But other researchers said that a lack of proper containment measures, not the mutation, is largely to blame for resurgent outbreaks.

“The reason this is spreading is people are not having enough measures in place,” said Kari Stefansson, founder and chief executive of deCODE Genetics, a leading genome analysis firm based in Iceland. “It seems like extraordinarily poor politics to blame the inadequacies on the virus. They should be picking on someone their own size, not this tiny virus.”

In one of the new studies, a British team of researchers had an advantage shared by no one else: They were able to draw upon the largest national database of coronavirus genome sequences in the world. The researchers collected new evidence that, at least in the United Kingdom, the variant took over because it indeed spreads faster.

“When we look at clusters, the G variant grows more quickly,” said Erik M. Volz, a researcher at the Medical Research Council Center for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London and the leader of the study.

The data collected by the COVID-19 Genomics U.K. Consortium allowed the team to observe the growth of infected clusters as a kind of horse race. Side by side, did clusters of 614G infections grow faster than infections involving the ancestral variant?

The 614G variant clearly won the race, the analysis found. The precise rate remains uncertain, but the most likely value gives 614G roughly a 20% advantage in its exponential rate of growth.

The virus will continue to change, and while most of those changes will be mere typos, some may be more meaningful, Engelthaler said.

“There will be the possibility of additional alterations that change the nature of the pandemic,” he said.

Already, Engelthaler said, he has seen strong indications of such alterations in his own unpublished data tracking the spread of different variants in Arizona.

“We have to listen to what the virus is telling us,” he said.

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Thursday, November 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

$15,000 fine after secret Hasidic wedding draws thousands of guests

A video of a wedding in Brooklyn circulated widely on the internet, leading city officials to issue a fine.

By LIAM STACK

T

housands of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered to celebrate a wedding inside a cavernous hall in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood earlier this month, dancing and singing with hardly a mask in sight.

The wedding was meticulously planned, and so were efforts to conceal it from the authorities, who said that the organizers would be fined $15,000 for violating public health restrictions.

The wedding, organized Nov. 8 by leaders of the Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, is the latest incident in a long battle between city and state officials and members of the ultra-Orthodox community, who prize autonomy, chafe at government restrictions and have frequently flouted guidelines like mask-wearing and social distancing.

In October, state officials announced a series of restrictions in several neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens with large Orthodox Jewish populations after the positive test rate for COVID-19 in those areas rose above 4%. Many residents protested the restrictions, which included closing nonessential businesses and limiting capacity at houses of worship.

While positive test rates in several of these areas have decreased since the restrictions were implemented, tensions between city officials and area leaders have continued.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the fine Monday night after video of the wedding — and a florid account of the event and extensive efforts to conceal it appeared in a Hasidic newspaper — drew backlash online. He said additional penalties could be imposed on the organizers.

“We know there was a wedding,” the mayor told local news network NY1. “We know it was too big. I don’t have an exact figure, but whatever it was, it was too big.

There appeared to be a real effort to conceal it. Which is absolutely unacceptable.”

Representatives for the Satmar community did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

“We’ve been through so much,” de Blasio added.

“And in fact, the Williamsburg community in recent weeks responded very positively, did a lot more testing and was being very responsible. This was amazingly irresponsible, just unacceptable. So there’s going to be consequences right away for the people who let that happen.”

On Sunday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo called the event “a blatant disregard of the law” and “disrespectful to the people of New York.”

State officials ordered the Satmar community in Orange County to cancel a series of weddings planned for Monday night, but it was unclear if the group complied with that order.

The wedding in Brooklyn, which lasted for more than four hours, was held at Yetev Lev D’Satmar synagogue in

Williamsburg and celebrated the marriage of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, grandson of Satmar Grand Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum. The bride was publicly identified by her initials, B.K., and the name of her father, Rabbi Yitzchok Horowitz.

Her full name could not be determined.

Last month, Satmar leaders canceled another wedding in Williamsburg, which they said expected 10,000 guests, that was to be held for the grandson of Aaron Teitelbaum’s brother and longtime rival, Grand Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum.

An account of the wedding was published Nov. 11 by Der Blatt, a Yiddish-language newspaper closely aligned with Satmar leadership in Williamsburg.

It described the wedding as “an experience for which words do not suffice” and “a celebration the likes of which we have rarely had the good fortune to experience,” according to a translation provided by Hasidic activists.

The newspaper also said it knew about the wedding in advance but had participated in an elaborate scheme to hide the event “so as not to attract an evil eye from the ravenous press and government officials, who have in the past exploited the present situation to disrupt alreadyplanned simchas,” a Hebrew word for a joyful event.

“All notices about upcoming celebrations were passed along through word-of-mouth, with no notices in writing, no posters on the synagogue walls, no invitations sent through the mail, nor even a report in any publication, including this very newspaper,” according to the newspaper.

The Hasidic community in New York City has been gripped with tension in recent months over restrictions meant to combat the coronavirus pandemic, which has left few families in many of these insular neighborhoods untouched by sickness and death.

A range of factors have lead to the pandemic’s heavy toll in the community, experts say, including unsuccessful government outreach, widespread misinformation over herd immunity and the effectiveness of masks, what the city has described as the insufficient quality of education in subjects like science and a long-standing wariness of outsiders that has grown out of a history of religious oppression.

Those tensions spilled onto the street last month when violent protests erupted in Brooklyn over new health restrictions. Face masks were burned in the street, and a Hasidic mob attacked three Jewish men, including two Hasidic Jews accused of disloyalty to the community.

Those tensions, and a fear of turncoats, were alluded to darkly in the Satmar newspaper’s account of the wedding.

“Despite having organized this simcha with minimal public notice, the days leading up to the wedding were nonetheless filled with tension,” it said, “not knowing what the next day, or the next moment, will bring, which disgruntled outcast might seize this opportunity to exploit even what hasn’t been written or publicized, to create an unnecessary uproar, and to disrupt the simcha, God forbid.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

9

How de Blasio backed himself into a corner on closing schools

By ELIZA SHAPIRO

I

t was just hours before Mayor Bill de Blasio would reveal that New York City had reached a test positivity rate that would trigger the shutdown of the entire public school system, and he was coming under intense pressure to find a way to keep schools open.

A group of parents was furiously circulating a petition calling on the mayor to relent and promoted it with the hashtag #KeepNYCSchoolsOpen. Leading public health experts had loudly registered their skepticism of the city’s plan to close schools before indoor dining. Local lawmakers joined in, demanding that de Blasio reverse course.

But even as he put off announcing his decision for hours, de Blasio and his team were reaching out to union leaders and principals to let them know he would stand by his pledge to them to close schools when the city hit a 3% positivity rate. When Gov. Andrew Cuomo called to offer a strategy to keep the schools open at least for a few more days, the mayor rebuffed him.

By 3 p.m., de Blasio went before the cameras and made the decision official: Barely eight weeks after the system opened in an ambitious attempt to help the city rebound from the devastating impact of the pandemic, classrooms would once again be emptied.

An examination of de Blasio’s decision shows that, for all the apparent last-minute suspense, it actually was all but preordained.

A mayor who had long fashioned himself a champion of the city’s educators — but who had lost the confidence of many teachers and principals over his halting effort to reopen the schools for the fall — felt he had no choice but to stand by a policy for closing schools that was among the strictest in the country.

The mayor had already pushed teachers by making New York the first big American city to reopen schools. So the mayor’s team worried that reversing course would risk a revolt from city educators that might have doomed the prospect of any in-person learning for the rest of the school year. And de Blasio hoped that sticking with the 3% rule would prove to educators, and to the city’s powerful teachers’ union, that he was still in their corner.

It didn’t work out that way.

“I think there is a real sense among educators that this administration is not able to meet this moment,” said Paula White, the executive director of Educators For Excellence-New York, which represents thousands of city teachers. “What we are hearing consistently is just a complete lack of trust.”

The entire reopening process, from the summer until now, has so damaged the city’s links to educators that the president of the United Federation of Teachers recently told The New York Times he would work to alter the current system of mayoral control over city schools. And even the shutdown decision did not do much to restore the trust of many rank-and-file educators.

“I would not have been surprised if he had broken this promise, because I feel like most of the other ones were broken,” said Rebecca Overbagh, an elementary schoolteacher in Manhattan.

Adding to the mayor’s isolation is the fact that the school closures have also infuriated many parents whose children had returned to classrooms this fall and have been criticized by public health officials who said the decision was not sufficiently based in science.

In a news conference last week, the mayor acknowledged frustration from all corners of the city — including from educators.

“What we saw after September was a workforce that wanted

Kristy Etheridge adjusts the face masks on her son Noah, 4, left, and friend Ollie Hallock, 5, in Brooklyn on Nov. 13, 2020. Parents in New York have pleaded with Governor Andrew Cuomo to overrule the mayor and keep schools open. to be in the schools,” he said. “One of the interesting things I think has not been represented sufficiently in the public discourse is how intensely teachers felt the impact of being around kids again.”

“They felt,” he added, “it was their mission.” Indeed, some teachers and principals have lamented that schools are closing so soon after they reopened.

De Blasio’s decision to shut the schools dates back to July, when he was embroiled in a last-ditch attempt to gain political support from educators to reopen the schools. At the time, he proposed the 3% threshold to demonstrate his seriousness about keeping schools safe for teachers and students.

But teachers’ and principals’ exasperation with him had begun rising much earlier. In March, they questioned him when he hesitated to close schools even as the virus was spreading rapidly throughout the city.

Annie Tan, a special-education teacher in Brooklyn, said she won’t soon forget being asked in early March to make sure her fifth grade students washed their hands frequently throughout the day — only to find that her school’s bathrooms lacked soap.

Tan said that was the first of many signs that teachers’ concerns were not being adequately addressed.

The mayor “has been completely disrespectful of all parties,” she said. “It would have gone a long way for him and the chancellor to apologize for what happened in March and take steps to restore things.”

Even when schools were open this fall, many of those issues were not entirely resolved.

Communication was also a major point of friction. Educators said they were often not consulted about key aspects of the reopening plan and found out about crucial changes from the media, rather than from the city. The union representing the city’s principals, which typically avoids controversy, held a unanimous vote of no confidence in de Blasio in September and called on the state to take over the reopening effort from the mayor altogether.

It was an astonishing turn of events for a mayor who has long said that education is his top priority, and who speaks frequently about what he considers his deep connection to the public school system, through his experience as a former city public school parent and local school board member.

In an August interview, de Blasio said he feels “solidarity with educators” and compared his track record on education to that of his predecessors, former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

“I celebrate our educators all the time, that was not true for almost 20 years in this city,” the mayor said. “I don’t think the foundational mutual respect and understanding has been lost, because it has been built over such a long amount of time,” he added.

Though de Blasio’s effort to reopen schools has at times faltered, the push set him apart from big-city mayors who have continued to delay reopening as opposition has mounted in their own communities. The mayor has described reopening schools for the city’s mostly low-income students and their parents as a moral imperative.

The fallout of the mayor’s decision last week is not limited to City Hall. Parents spent days pleading with Cuomo to overrule the mayor and keep the schools open, and The Wall Street Journal reported that Cuomo spent last Wednesday looking for ways to allow the city to use different metrics to continue in-person instruction.

And the UFT, which supported the 3% number and encouraged the mayor to stick with it — despite a consensus view that the schools were operating relatively safely — is now facing fresh scrutiny from parents.

Sensing the blowback, Michael Mulgrew, the union’s president, has in recent days begun to say that he does not support citywide school shutdowns and would prefer a geographic approach.

But since that position was made public starting only the morning after de Blasio closed schools, the message appears to be a way for the union to negotiate in public about the next round of rules over school reopening, and perhaps to shield itself from further criticism.

Mulgrew has also sought to redirect anger about the messiness of the reopening effort from the union back to the mayor.

Now, the union leader, long skeptical of mayoral control, will fight to change that governance system in 2022, when its current extension expires in the State Legislature. De Blasio, who is term-limited, will leave office at the end of 2021. Mulgrew does not want to return to a school board, but will push for a version of mayoral control that gives educators more power.

Conflict between the city and labor unions is hardly new.

But the fight over how to reopen schools has been driven to an unusual degree by the city’s rank-and-file educators, rather than just their union leaders.

In interviews, some teachers who said they once welcomed de Blasio’s approach to education expressed disappointment with his management of reopening.

“I was excited about him and I voted for him,” said Alexis Neider, who teaches at the Neighborhood School, a public elementary school in the East Village. “Definitely, my views have changed. It’s just failure after failure. The mismanagement of the schools in New York City during this pandemic, I don’t even think I have a word for it, it’s so grand, it’s so epic.”

10

Thursday, November 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Five ways that David Dinkins shaped New York City teenagers who were later exonerated.

It was a time of great racial strife in New York City, and Dinkins issued a call for unity.

Stacy Lynch, the daughter of Dinkins’ chief political strategist, Bill Lynch, said her father often talked about how difficult it was to lead with that message of reconciliation.

“You had entire neighborhoods in the city that didn’t believe in his gorgeous mosaic,” said Lynch, now an aide to de Blasio.

“The expectation that one person could resolve all of that was unrealistic. What he tried to do was create a space where people could work it out.”

But he also struggled to respond to racial violence in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, after a car in a rabbi’s motorcade killed a Black boy — an episode David Dinkins, center, takes the train from City Hall to Astor Place in New York, that came to define his mayoralty.

Patrick Gaspard, president of the Feb. 5, 1990. During his term, he helped shape the city’s physical infrastructure Open Society Foundations, who served as and started criminal justice initiatives that reduced crime. a senior aide to Dinkins, recalled being a young man who was constantly enraged at

By JEFFERY C. MAYS and EMMA G. FITZCarl Heastie, the speaker of the New the racial injustice that he encountered. But SIMMONS York state Assembly, said Dinkins “was an Dinkins, who was also outraged by racial inexample that although you may be the first, justice, had a different approach. avid N. Dinkins served a single four- you must push open the doors for those Gaspard, who referred to Dinkins as a year term as New York City’s first who will come after you.” “political Jackie Robinson,” recalled one St. and only Black mayor. His tenure Dinkins was a mentor to de Blasio, a Patrick’s Day parade where the crowd hurhas been judged harshly at times, but it was Democrat in his second term who said Din- led beer cans at the mayor along with racial also filled with accomplishments. kins deserved credit for his marriage. He epithets. As he was rushed to his car, a beer Dinkins, who died Monday, had a met his wife, Chirlane McCray, while both can almost struck Dinkins. Gaspard saw a significant influence on the city, shaping its were serving in the Dinkins administration. flash of anger on Dinkins’ face. physical infrastructure and beginning crimi“He was my mentor, he was my “I saw him breathe deeply, compose nal justice initiatives that started to reduce friend, and his steadfast commitment to himself and wave to the crowd,” Gaspard crime. fight for that ‘gorgeous mosaic’ inspires me said. “I know what he wanted to say and the He was remembered as a somewhat every single day,” the mayor said, referring response he wanted to give back but he was reluctant trailblazer and a gentleman who to Dinkins’ motto — and the name of his not going to debase himself or the office.” led the city during a difficult period of fiscal biography — that symbolized the city’s mix He laid the groundwork for a record crisis and racial tension — themes that the of people of different races, faiths and sexual drop in crime city and the nation are currently grappling orientations.

Dinkins added police officers to comwith once again.

Dinkins also had the most diverse ad- bat the city’s troubling murder rate and rai“David Dinkins simply set this city on ministration up to that point. Two women sed taxes to make it happen. a better path,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. became deputy mayors, and he appointed His “Safe Streets, Safe City” plan Here is a look at some of his accom- the city’s first Puerto Rican fire commissio- increased the size of the police force to plishments: ner. For police commissioner, he chose Lee roughly 38,000 officers. Homicides hit an A mentor who inspired others to run P. Brown, a Black veteran of the Atlanta and all-time high on his watch — there were for office Houston forces.

2,245 murders in 1990, including the Dinkins helped inspire a generation He was a racial reconciliator subway killing of a tourist from Utah named Dinkins was elected not long after Brian Watkins. They fell by 13% during his of Black leaders to run for office, including Laurie Cumbo, the majority leader of the Yusef Hawkins, a Black teenager, was tenure to 1,946 in his last year in office and chased and murdered by a white mob declined much more under Rudy Giuliani, New York City Council.

“His campaign inspired and ushered in in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of who succeeded him. the new wave of Black elected leaders, which Brooklyn, and a white jogger was beaMichael Bloomberg, who served then opened up opportunities for all people ten and raped in Central Park, leading to as mayor after him, said Tuesday that to know that they can also lead,” she said. the conviction of five Black and Latino he often reminded people that Din-

D

kins’ successors “stood on his shoulders and built on his legacy.”

“He entered City Hall at a difficult time in New York’s history, and he helped set the city on a course for success — and a reduction in crime — that no one at the time imagined possible,” Bloomberg said.

He improved the National Tennis Center and Times Square Dinkins, an avid tennis player, expanded the National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Queens. Bloomberg later called it “the only good athletic sports stadium deal, not just in New York but in the country.”

Dinkins made other impressions on the city’s physical infrastructure.

He began the remarkable transformation of Times Square, even though Giuliani is often given credit. A key deal with The Walt Disney Co. to rebuild the New Amsterdam Theater on 42nd Street was agreed upon on the last day of the Dinkins administration in December 1993.

Dinkins fought for years to pull together the parties that would spark the revitalization of the area because he knew what it would signal, Gaspard said.

“He knew that it would become a beacon that demonstrated to the world that New York City was open for business,” he said.

He championed policies that helped poor New Yorkers Dinkins was known for programs that helped the city’s poorest residents, including the after-school program known as Beacon centers, and putting health care clinics in medically underserved neighborhoods.

Beacon centers, which were created in 1991 as part of “Safe City, Safe Streets,” offer sports, tutoring and crafts in an effort to keep children out of trouble. The city now has 91 centers.

Dinkins also started an innovative plan to add health clinics in struggling neighborhoods to give poor children another option instead of expensive emergency room visits.

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and one of several candidates hoping to be the city’s second Black mayor, said Dinkins’ successes were not merely symbolic.

“Through his actions on behalf of lower-income people, he was both our effective advocate and confirmation of a long-held hope that our lives mattered to our government,” he said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

11

Markets throw a welcome party of sorts for Biden

By MATT PHILLIPS

A

day after the Trump administration effectively acknowledged the election of Joe Biden, investors showed their relief by pushing the two major stock market indexes to record highs on Tuesday.

It was a welcome party of sorts for Biden, but what investors were really embracing was the end of uncertainty. Biden has vowed to push for more stimulus to bolster the economy. His selection for Treasury secretary, Janet L. Yellen, is well known from her days as Federal Reserve chair. And several new coronavirus vaccine candidates mean that the pandemic could be under control in the months ahead.

President Donald Trump, who on the campaign trail had warned that Biden’s election would lead to stock market armageddon, on Tuesday implied that the day’s highs were his own doing, making an unscheduled stop at a White House briefing to play up the latest gains in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

“The stock market’s just broken 30,000 — never been broken, that number,” said Trump, who has often used the markets as a barometer of his presidency. “That’s a sacred number, 30,000; nobody thought they’d ever see it.” He added: “I just want to congratulate all the people within the administration that worked so hard. And most importantly, I want to congratulate the people of our country, because there are no people like you.”

Trump, who spoke for about 65 seconds, ignored questions from reporters about whether he would concede to Biden.

On Wall Street, the S&P 500 stock index rose 1.6% to a new high of 3,635.41, while the Dow rose 1.5%, closing above 30,000 for the first time.

“We have an enormous amount of certainty that we didn’t have just a few months ago,” said Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco, an investment management firm.

The past few months have been a volatile stretch for investors. After hitting a peak on Sept. 2, the S&P 500 began to fall, and — except for a brief uptick the following month — remained roughly 9% below the peak until the end of October.

One sign of investor anxiety was the volatility displayed in the VIX, an index widely known as Wall Street’s “fear gauge.” The VIX spiked by more than 50% in late October as the virus picked up again and the election approached. A meltdown of technology stocks added to the uncertainty. In the last week in October, stocks fell 5.6%, the biggest weekly drop since March. Still, stocks were up for the year at the end of last month.

And in the weeks since the election stocks have

climbed steadily, primarily because of encouraging vaccine news. Pfizer, Moderna and Astra-Zeneca have all announced that their vaccine candidates showed favorable results in trials. The S&P 500 has risen roughly 8% since the election. Some investors believe that with Biden in the White House, and Republicans likely to retain control of the Senate, they could count on political gridlock to block tax increases that could roil the markets.

“You have a Biden administration likely governed by a split Congress and a conservative Supreme Court so it eliminates some of the most extreme policies either on the right or left,” said Michael Arone, chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisors.

“So markets are celebrating that.”

The good news about vaccines has bolstered stocks that had been hit hard by the outbreak. Stocks of airlines and oil companies have soared this month.

United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines have all climbed by more than 30%. The oil giant Chevron is up nearly 38%. The Russell 2000 — an index of smaller capitalization companies heavily influenced by the shorter-term outlook for the U.S. economy, is up more than 20% this month alone.

But many analysts believe that the market could have done even better without the political uncertainty about the outcome of the election. The president’s baseless claims that there was fraud in the election and that he would ultimately win a second term helped keep a lid on gains by injecting uncertainty into the markets.

The decision on Monday by Emily W. Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, to allow the presidential transition process to move forward made investors feel confident that the election was finally over, Hooper said. “I think that was creating a significant overhang and raised questions about how long this would drag on,” she said.

Markets also appeared to welcome the return of politics as usual under a future Biden administration, and were reassured by the news that Yellen will be Biden’s nominee to head the Treasury Department.

She is a known quantity on Wall Street, well respected for her steady leadership at the head of the central bank, from 2014 to 2018.

“There had been some fear that Biden would pick a Treasury secretary with a strong anti-Wall Street bias,” wrote analysts with High Frequency Economics in a client note on Tuesday. “Janet Yellen isn’t that.”

The markets performed well under Trump for the most part. Since his election in 2016, the S&P 500 has returned more than 80% — including dividend payments. Most analysts credit the administration’s tax cuts — signed into law in 2017 — for a significant part of the gains.

But the last four years have also been a volatile period for markets, with multiple sharp, sudden downturns often linked to policies pushed by Trump, such as his trade war with China, which helped push stocks to a 6% loss in 2018.

This year, the more than 11-year-old bull market collapsed in March, as the S&P 500 dove nearly 34% in a matter of weeks as the virus raged around the globe, before eventually climbing to new highs.

Trump’s style was often at odds with Wall Street’s preferences.

He broke with the tradition of virtually all other recent presidents in using the power of the bully pulpit to browbeat individual companies — including Boeing, Amazon, Ford and General Motors — for decisions he disliked, often sending their shares reeling in real time.

Even those on Wall Street who might have supported some of the president’s policies often said they could do without his constant Twitter missives weighing in on the markets. (Since his election in 2016 the president has tweeted or retweeted roughly 200 messages on the markets.)

“It always bothered me that the president tweeted about the markets,” said Paul Schatz, who manages roughly $90 million in assets for clients largely in New York, Connecticut and Florida. “As an investment adviser in charge of taking care of people’s money, I would rather the president would not wade into those waters.”

12

Thursday, November 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Roiled by election, Facebook struggles to balance civility and growth

In the tense days after the presidential election, a team of Facebook employees presented the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, with an alarming finding: Election-related misinformation was going viral on the site.

By KEVIN ROOSE, MIKE ISAAC and SHEERA FRENKEL

I

n the tense days after the presidential election, a team of Facebook employees presented the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, with an alarming finding: Election-related misinformation was going viral on the site.

President Donald Trump was already casting the election as rigged, and stories from right-wing media outlets with false and misleading claims about discarded ballots, miscounted votes and skewed tallies were among the most popular news stories on the platform.

In response, the employees proposed an emergency change to the site’s news feed algorithm, which helps determine what more than 2 billion people see every day. It involved emphasizing the importance of what Facebook calls “news ecosystem quality” scores, or NEQ, a secret internal ranking it assigns to news publishers based on signals about the quality of their journalism.

Typically, NEQ scores play a minor role in determining what appears on users’ feeds. But several days after the election, Zuckerberg agreed to increase the weight that Facebook’s algorithm gave to NEQ scores to make sure authoritative news appeared more prominently, said three people with knowledge of the decision, who were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations.

The change was part of the “break glass” plans Facebook had spent months developing for the aftermath

of a contested election. It resulted in a spike in visibility for big, mainstream publishers like CNN, The New York Times and NPR, while posts from highly engaged hyperpartisan pages, such as Breitbart and Occupy Democrats, became less visible, the employees said.

It was a vision of what a calmer, less divisive Facebook might look like. Some employees argued the change should become permanent, even if it was unclear how that might affect the amount of time people spent on Facebook. In an employee meeting the week after the election, workers asked whether the “nicer news feed” could stay, said two people who attended.

Guy Rosen, a Facebook executive who oversees the integrity division that is in charge of cleaning up the platform, said on a call with reporters last week that the changes were always meant to be temporary. “There has never been a plan to make these permanent,” he said. John Hegeman, who oversees the news feed, said in an interview that while Facebook might roll back these experiments, it would study and learn from them.

The news feed debate illustrates a central tension that some inside Facebook are feeling acutely these days: that the company’s aspirations of improving the world are often at odds with its desire for dominance.

In the past several months, as Facebook has come under more scrutiny for its role in amplifying false and divisive information, its employees have clashed over the company’s future. On one side are idealists, including many rank-and-file workers and some executives, who want to do more to limit misinformation and polari-

zing content. On the other side are pragmatists who fear those measures could hurt Facebook’s growth, or provoke a political backlash that leads to painful regulation.

“There are tensions in virtually every product decision we make and we’ve developed a companywide framework called ‘Better Decisions’ to ensure we make our decisions accurately, and that our goals are directly connected to delivering the best possible experiences for people,” said Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson.

These battles have taken a toll on morale. In an employee survey this month, Facebook workers reported feeling less pride in the company compared to previous years. About half felt that Facebook was having a positive impact on the world, down from roughly threequarters earlier this year, according to a copy of the survey, known as Pulse, which was reviewed by The New York Times. Employees’ “intent to stay” also dropped, as did confidence in leadership.

BuzzFeed News previously reported on the survey results.

Even as Election Day and its aftermath have passed with few incidents, some disillusioned employees have quit, saying they could no longer stomach working for a company whose products they considered harmful.

Others have stayed, reasoning they can make more of a difference on the inside. Still others have made the moral calculation that even with its flaws, Facebook is, on balance, doing more good than harm.

“Facebook salaries are among the highest in tech right now, and when you’re walking home with a giant paycheck every two weeks, you have to tell yourself that it’s for a good cause,” said Gregor Hochmuth, a former engineer with Instagram, which Facebook owns, who left in 2014. “Otherwise, your job is truly no different from other industries that wreck the planet and pay their employees exorbitantly to help them forget.”

Several employees said they were frustrated that to tackle thorny issues like misinformation, they often had to demonstrate that their proposed solutions wouldn’t anger powerful partisans or come at the expense of Facebook’s growth.

Facebook’s moves to clean up its platform will be made easier, in some ways, by the end of the Trump administration. For years, Trump and other leading conservatives accused the company of anti-conservative bias each time it took steps to limit misinformation.

But even with an incoming Biden administration, Facebook will need to balance employees’ desire for social responsibility with its business goals.

“The question is, what have they learned from this election that should inform their policies in the future?” said Vanita Gupta, chief executive of the civil rights group Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “My worry is that they’ll revert all of these changes despite the fact that the conditions that brought them forward are still with us.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

13 Stocks

Stocks dip on U.S. jobs data, oil climbs further

S

tocks edged back from record highs on Wednesday as Wall Street bumped up against underwhelming economic data, while oil continued to rise and the dollar weakened ahead of comments from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

The U.S. dollar has lost some of its safe-haven luster as traders turn to riskier assets, including some funded in other currencies, following positive news about a COVID-19 vaccine and a seemingly normalizing U.S. transition of power.

Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s reported nomination to Treasury Secretary has emboldened those risk bets and further weighed on the dollar.

“From here, the Fed will prove a mere auxiliary to maximize fiscal impact by ensuring cheap funding,” said John Hardy, head of FX strategy at Saxo Bank.

“The long-term implications of the Yellen nomination are distinctly dollar negative.”

Minutes from the most recent Fed meeting are due later in the session.

The dollar index fell 0.085%, with the euro up 0.14% to $1.1905.

The Japanese yen strengthened 0.06% versus the greenback to 104.37 per dollar, while sterling was last trading at $1.3374, up 0.13% on the day.

On Wall Street, a surprise jump in weekly jobless claims added to signs the recovery in the labor market was stalling as the United States battled a new wave of COVID-19 infections.

MSCI’s broadest gauge of world stocks was last trading down 0.13%, after renewed demand for shares earlier pushed it to a record high of 622.12.

The rally in global stocks is set to continue for at least six months, a Reuters poll forecast on Wednesday.

But on Wednesday the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 196.81 points, or 0.66%, to 29,849.43, the S&P 500 lost 12.19 points, or 0.34%, to 3,623.22 and the Nasdaq Composite added 8.70 points, or 0.07%, to 12,045.49.

“The question is, who wins the battle: the vaccines, or the rising cases in the short term?” said Christopher C. Grisanti, chief equity strategist at MAI Capital Management.

Optimism around vaccine developments and expectations of a recovery in corporate confidence and profitability should also push European stocks to near record highs next year, a separate Reuters survey found.

On Wednesday the pan-European STOXX 600 index lost 0.06% while Japan’s Nikkei rose 0.50% after touching a 29-year high.

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan closed 0.57% lower, with Chinese shares capped by worries about rising debt defaults.

The job market data weighed on Treasury yields.

Benchmark 10-year notes last rose 5/32 in price to yield 0.8668%, from 0.882% late on Tuesday.

Oil continued to rise beyond pre-pandemic levels on bets for a speedy recovery in energy demand.

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14

Thursday, November 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

How South Korea responded to fears over the flu vaccine

A patient getting an influenza vaccine in Seoul, South Korea, in October.

By CHOE SANG-HUN and DENISE GRADY

T

he deaths were mounting, and so were the public’s fears.

South Korea had vastly expanded its flu vaccine program to cover millions more people, to prevent a one-two punch to its health system as the coronavirus spread globally. But as the injections got underway, reports of deaths started popping up.

South Korean scientists quickly determined that the deaths were unrelated to the flu shots. But they worried that if they didn’t stop the panic, the public might shun the vaccines altogether.

So health officials doubled down — and, in the process, gave the world a game plan for when coronavirus vaccines become widely available.

They ramped up efforts to communicate with the public. They disclosed data on what was found. And they quickly got the vaccination campaign back on track, at a time when scientists dealing with COVID-19 are increasingly worried about the rise of the anti-vaccine movement.

“South Korea is doing everything right,” said Dr. Noel T. Brewer, a professor in the health behavior department at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina. “The government is gathering data, giving information to the public quickly and standing up for their vaccination program. That will ensure public trust, and help the program.”

As pharmaceutical makers rush to get a coronavirus vaccine approved, countries around the world are grappling with how to safely and quickly distribute hundreds of millions of doses.

Already, the pandemic has created confusion and distrust in an era when misinformation can spread rapidly — all of which could complicate the global effort toward immunity.

If a long-proven, extensively tested flu shot can spark uncertainty and concern, it could portend challenges for mass inoculations of a brand-new coronavirus vaccine. The potential pitfalls played out on a small scale in South Korea.

The country’s ambitious flu vaccine campaign began Sept. 8, a month earlier than usual.

Health officials announced plans to inoculate 30 million people, 10 million more than last year. But in their haste, problems arose.

A company hired to transport millions of doses of the vaccine had never carried such large quantities of cargo before. The flu vaccines need to stay refrigerated, at between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius (35.6 and 46.4 degrees Fahrenheit). On Sept. 21, photos began circulating online showing boxes of vaccines stacked outdoors, in a parking lot.

Out of an abundance of caution, the government temporarily suspended the program to investigate. On Oct. 6, it concluded that the vaccines were still safe, but nevertheless recalled the 480,000 doses that had been left outside long enough to potentially become ineffective.

Three days later, 615,000 doses of a vac-

cine shipped by another company were also recalled, after white particles were found inside.

The government concluded they were harmless protein particles.

South Korea’s flu vaccine campaign was up and running again Oct. 13. But the public was still wary.

The following week, a family reported that a 17-year-old high school student had died after receiving a flu vaccine. More reports of deaths came rushing in, most involving patients in their 70s and older. By Oct. 22, the reported death count had reached 28 and it was rising by the day. Singapore briefly suspended the use of a South Korean vaccine after the deaths were reported.

As Dr. Jung Jae-hun, a professor of preventive medicine at Gachon University near Seoul, read the news, he felt an urgent need to push back.

Flu vaccines had been tested and safely used for decades in South Korea. If the credibility of the program could be so easily undermined by unsubstantiated claims, he wondered what would happen once millions of people started taking coronavirus vaccines.

“I think this extreme situation was created because we are living through this unusual time of COVID-19 and people are overly sensitive about vaccines,” Jung wrote on Oct. 22, in the first of a series of Facebook posts criticizing the news reports.

He warned that reporting on “post-vaccination deaths” when there was no scientific evidence establishing a connection was like counting how many people had died after eating breakfast.

“If people don’t understand this, it could lead to the proliferation of anti-vaxxers here, like the ones in the West,” he said.

While the government stood by the safety of the vaccines, it also launched an investigation into the deaths, hoping to use science to counter misinformation. If, for instance, all the cases were linked to a particular vaccine or clinic, or if all the deaths were similar, it would raise red flags. Multiple deaths from anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction, would also implicate the vaccine.

But the government’s forensic investigations, which would eventually rule out such connections, didn’t move as quickly as the panic spread.

“Elderly people die every day, of a stroke, of heart attack, but the media reported these deaths as if none of them died on a normal day,” said Dr. Ki Mo-ran, a public health researcher at

the National Cancer Center who sat on the government’s vaccination supervisory group. “As the people waited for the results, anxiety grew, trust fell and the vaccination program suffered.”

To help quell some of the public’s concerns, Jung published an opinion piece in the Journal of Korean Medical Science pointing out that it’s not unusual for some people to die coincidentally from unrelated causes, after receiving a vaccine. He cited a study published in 2013 that showed 23 out of every 100,000 Americans aged between 75 and 84 had died from a variety of causes within a week of taking their vaccines.

Days after Jung’s essay was published, the South Korean government released corresponding national figures. Last year, it said, 1,500 South Koreans 65 or older had died within a week of taking a flu vaccine. None of the deaths were linked to the vaccines. As influenza usually kills 3,000 people each year in South Korea, health officials insisted that the benefits of vaccination far outweighed any risks.

In the weeks since South Korea’s vaccination campaign started, the government has received more than 100 reports of people dying after receiving a flu vaccine. Officials have promptly disclosed the causes, which were unrelated to the inoculations.

Autopsies concluded that the patients often suffered cardiovascular and other diseases, and that all of them died of causes unrelated to vaccines, such as aortic dissection, acute myocardial infarction and cerebral hemorrhage. A medical examiner found poison in the body of the 17-year-old, and the police suspected suicide, although his family insists that he had no reason to kill himself.

“If you just blindly say, ‘oh no, these are not related,’ you’ll build a lot of distrust,” said Dr. Vanessa Raabe, an expert on vaccines and infectious diseases at NYU Langone Health who praised South Korea’s response. “You need to do the science before you say they are not related.”

The flu panic has subsided in South Korea, but only 19 million people have so far received their shots, far short of the government’s target of 30 million. Jung said that, as in the United States, political polarization in South Korea had likely contributed to some of the confusion over the safety of flu vaccines.

“Rather than being divided, we must learn to fight together against the common enemy,” he said. “If we want to reclaim our preCOVID-19 life, going out to eat and drink and traveling abroad, vaccines are our best chance.”

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BLACK FRIDAY

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

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Thursday, November 26, 2020

Outcry in France after police clear Paris migrant camp

By AURELIEN BREEDEN

P

olice cleared out a temporary migrant camp in central Paris, forcing people out of tents, chasing them in the streets and firing tear gas in a crackdown that fueled growing outrage over the government’s tough new security policies.

Housing and integrating migrants living in makeshift camps in Paris, especially on its northern edge, have become a chronic problem. Police regularly clear out hundreds or even thousands of people from such camps.

But the violent evacuation of mostly Afghan migrants Monday evening from the Place de la République was covered widely in the media and struck a nerve, coming as Parliament voted Tuesday to move forward with a new security bill. Critics say the bill would make it harder for reporters or bystanders to film instances of police brutality.

The outcry over the evacuation comes at a time of heightened tensions around President Emmanuel Macron’s broader security policies, which opponents say increasingly restrict civil liberties. Part of that debate has played out after a string of Islamist terrorist attacks over the past few months.

Footage from Monday evening showed that as tensions rose and scuffles broke out with some protesters, police officers trying to clear the square shoved people with riot shields before using tear gas and dispersal grenades, which explode and spray smaller rubber pellets. Police also chased some of the migrants through side streets.

In one video widely circulated on social media, a police officer is seen tripping a fleeing man, who tumbles to the ground.

Another video appeared to show a journalist being cornered in the street by batonwielding officers.

Police officers evacuating the migrants in central Paris.

Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, expressed shock Tuesday in a letter to the French interior minister, accusing police of a “brutal and disproportionate use of force.”

“This unacceptable incident is unfortunately not without precedent,” Hidalgo wrote in the letter, which she shared on Twitter.

Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister, toned down his usual tough talk Tuesday, acknowledging on Twitter that certain images of the evacuation were “shocking” and saying that the Paris police chief had handed him a report documenting “several unacceptable events,” without giving further details on those events.

Darmanin said he had asked an internal police watchdog body to investigate over the next 48 hours and he vowed to make the results of that inquiry public. But critics were not convinced.

“You are importing methods that were developed in Calais to Paris,” Doctors Without Borders responded to Darmanin on Twitter, referring to the northern port city where police have been accused of hostility and mistreatment in their handling of migrants trying to reach Britain from France.

In what has become a seemingly never-ending cycle in and around Paris, police regularly clear out hundreds of migrants and raze their tents and shacks, theoretically to offer them temporary accommodation. But a lack of emergency housing and slow asylum procedures have left many still living under bridges or on vacant lots.

Then Monday evening, roughly 450 blue tents sprouted on the Place de la République. Aid organizations like Doctors Without Borders said that the goal was to protest against authorities’ failure to provide housing for 700 to 1,000 migrants who were left to roam the streets after 3,000 people were cleared last week from a camp in Saint-Denis, a suburb north of Paris.

Aid organizations said that the mi-

grants, many of them young asylum-seekers from countries like Afghanistan, Sudan or Ethiopia, are harassed and chased by police.

On Monday evening, the hundreds of migrants were joined on the Place de la République by left-wing politicians, lawyers and activists. Police quickly encircled the tents and started dismantling them as protesters shouted and jeered.

Most migrants appeared to leave peacefully. But videos showed that police forcefully ejected some of them who refused to exit their tents.

France’s left-wing parties swiftly criticized the evacuation.

“I was stunned by what I saw,” Olivier Faure, head of the Socialist Party, told France Inter radio Tuesday. “We are a country that is supposed to be the country of human rights.”

The ministers in charge of housing and citizenship said in a statement Tuesday that “migrants are people who must be treated with humanity and fraternity,” adding that authorities had freed up temporary housing for 10,000 people since mid-October, with funding for 4,500 additional spots next year.

In 2017, Macron himself said, “I do not want to have men and women on the streets, in the woods, by the end of the year.” But the number of asylum-seekers has increased since then, with nearly 178,000 applicants in France last year, up 9% from 2018.

Critics accuse the government of needlessly toughening its asylum policies.

“It’s up to the state to shoulder its responsibilities and to stop suggesting that we are being invaded, and to mobilize all the necessary resources so that these populations don’t live like rats,” Yann Manzi, the head of Utopia 56, one of the aid groups that helped set up the camp in Paris, told reporters Monday evening.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

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Thursday, November 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Trump Wars II: The Loser Strikes Back

By PAUL KRUGMAN

W

e all knew that Donald Trump would react badly to defeat. But his refusal to concede, the destructiveness of his temper tantrum and the willingness of almost the entire Republican Party to indulge him have surpassed even pessimists’ expectations.

Even so, it’s very unlikely that Trump will manage to overturn the election results. But he’s doing all he can to wreck America on his way out, in ways large and small.

Among other things, his officials are already trying to sabotage the economy, setting the stage for a possible financial crisis on Joe Biden’s watch.

To the uninitiated, the sudden announcement by Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, that he’s terminating support for several emergency lending programs created back in March might not seem like that big a deal. After all, the financial markets aren’t currently in crisis. In fact, defying Trump’s prediction that “your 401(k)s will go to hell” if he were to lose, stocks have risen substantially since Biden’s win.

Furthermore, much of the money allocated to those programs was never actually used. So what’s the problem?

Well, the Federal Reserve, which administers the programs, has objected strenuously — for good reason. You see, the Fed knows a lot about financial crises and what it takes to stop them — and Mnuchin is depriving the nation

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of tools that could be crucial in the months or years ahead.

In the old days, what we now call financial crises were generally referred to as “panics” — like the Panic of 1907, which was the event that led to the Fed’s creation. The causes of panics vary widely; some have no visible cause at all.

Nonetheless, they have a lot in common. They all involve a loss of confidence that freezes the flow of money through the economy, often with dire effects on growth and jobs.

Why do such things happen? Panics don’t necessarily reflect mob psychology, although that sometimes plays a role. More often we’re talking about self-fulfilling prophecy, in which individually rational actions produce a collectively disastrous result.

In a classic bank run, for example, depositors rush to get their money out, even if they believe that the bank is fundamentally sound, because they know that the run itself can cause the institution to collapse.

Which is where public agencies like the Fed come in.

We’ve known since the 19th century that such agencies can and should lend to cash-starved players during a financial panic, stopping the death spiral.

How much lending does it take to stop a panic? Often, not much at all. In fact, panics are often ended simply by the promise that cash will be provided if needed, with no need to actually write any checks.

Back in 2012 there was a runaway financial crisis in much of southern Europe. Countries like Spain saw their ability to borrow collapse and the interest rates on their debt soar. Yet these countries weren’t actually insolvent; Spain’s fiscal position was no worse than that of Britain, which was able to borrow at very low interest rates.

But Spain, which doesn’t have its own currency — it uses the euro — was the subject of a self-fulfilling panic attack, as investors fearing that it would run out of cash threatened to provoke the very outcome they feared. Britain, which can print its own money, was immune to such a crisis.

In July 2012, however, Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank — the Fed’s counterpart — promised to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro, which everyone interpreted as a commitment to lend money to crisis countries if necessary. And suddenly the crisis was over, even though the bank never did end up doing any lending.

Something similar happened here this past spring. For a few weeks in March and April, as investors panicked over the pandemic, America teetered on the edge of a major financial crisis. But the Fed, backstopped by the Treasury, stepped up with new programs offering to buy assets like corporate bonds and municipal debt. In the end, not much of the money was used — but the assurance that the money was there if needed stabilized the markets, and the crisis faded away.

So far, so good. But in case you haven’t noticed, the pandemic is back with a vengeance; hospitalizations are already much higher than they were in the spring, and rising fast.

Maybe the new coronavirus surge won’t provoke a second financial crisis — after all, we now know that a vaccine is on the way. But the risk of crisis hasn’t gone away, and it’s just foolish to take away the tools we might need to fight such a crisis.

Mnuchin’s claim that the money is no longer needed makes no sense, and it’s not clear whether his successor will be easily able to undo his actions. Given everything else that’s happening, it’s hard to see Mnuchin’s move as anything but an act of vandalism, an attempt to increase the odds of disaster under Trump’s successor.

The thing is, until this latest move, it looked as if Mnuchin might be one of the few officials who managed to emerge from their service under Trump without completely destroying their reputations. Well, scratch that: He’s joined the ranks of Trump loyalists determined to trash the nation on their way out the door.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

26 de noviembre Mi prima trajo el pavo...

24 de diciembre y el COVID-19.

NO BAJES LA GUARDIA USA TU MASCARILLA Y MANTÉN LA DISTANCIA

#ElCovid19NoDiscrimina

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Ganaderos de leche piden que cesen alegados ataques contra Oficina de Reglamentación de la Industria Lechera

By THE STAR

E

l presidente del Sector de Leche de la Asociación de Agricultores de Puerto Rico, Manuel Martínez Arbona le salió al paso este miércoles a los comentarios sobre la industria lechera hechos por el secretario de Agricultura, Carlos Flores Ortega, en las vistas de transición, recordando “el antagonismo y falta de comunicación que él mantiene con sectores claves de la economía y con la propia oficina de Oficina de Reglamentación de la Industria Lechera (ORIL)”.

El líder del sector recalcó el apoyo del sector al administrador de ORIL. “El 80 por ciento de los ganaderos endosan el trabajo de la ORIL y el de su Administrador, agrónomo Jorge Campos. Los gobernadores Ricardo Rosselló y Wanda Vázquez lo han mantenido en su posición a pesar de las objeciones del Secretario (de Agricultura). No solo toma decisiones difíciles de manera objetiva e independiente que han llevado a que la ORIL haya prevalecido en todos los foros administrativos y judiciales,” expresó Martínez Arbona en

una declaración escrita.

El presidente del sector refutó los comentarios de Flores Ortega sobre que las discrepancias del método de pago sea un asunto de grandes y pequeños, contrario al método de pago que propuso el Secretario.

“El método de pago se establece luego de un análisis profundo para promover una distribución equitativa de los ingresos generados por la ventas de leche cruda de todos los mercados en beneficio de la mayoría de los ganaderos. Las diferencias en el sistema de pago en nada tienen que ver con el estudio económico exhaustivo, el cual se realiza para determinar cambios en costos cada 4 años con un análisis a nivel de campo. En cambio el sistema de liquidación para el pago de la leche a los ganaderos que promovía el Secretario no tenía base científica y perjudicaba a la inmensa mayoría de los ganaderos del Sector de Leche,” indicó Martínez Arbona.

Cuestionó las motivaciones del secretario de Agricultura para, según expresó, “querer inducir a error al Comité de Transición y crear controversias”.

“El secretario está buscando atornillarse en su puesto,

luego de cuatro años de malas ejecutorias y controversias con los sectores y organizaciones agrícolas del país. No apoya al de aquí pero si favorece a las compañías de afuera lo que es incomprensible”.

Martínez Arbona hizo un llamado a un cambio en el Departamento de Agricultura. “El sector necesita un Secretario que esté enfocado en sacar la agricultura hacia adelante y que no tenga una lucha constante con las organizaciones y sectores agrícolas que representan a los agricultores y ganaderos. El problema principal del Departamento es su cabeza,” concluyó Martínez Arbona.

Museo de la UPR de Mayagüez recibe importante donativo Por THE STAR

E

l MUSA, Museo de Arte del Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez (RUM) de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (UPR), fue una de las 10 entidades de arte y cultura de la Isla invitada por Bloomberg Philanthropies y el Fondo Flamboyán para las Artes, para formar parte del Programa de Arte, Innovación y Administración en Puerto Rico (AIM, por sus siglas en inglés).

“Estamos agradecidos por la oportunidad de formar parte de esta iniciativa y por la ventana de desarrollo que representa. Esta capacitación nos permitirá adquirir habilidades adicionales para dirigir al Museo a una mejor salud fiscal y sustentabilidad, a la vez que contribuye a fortalecer nuestra red profesional”, indicó este miércoles la doctora Zorali De Feria, directora de MUSA, en una declaración escrita.

La iniciativa tiene como objetivo el desarrollo de capacidades proporcionando consultoría y adiestramiento personalizado a las organizaciones seleccionadas en conjunto a su junta directiva y liderato.

“Como parte del Programa, que tendrá una duración de dos años, MUSA tomará parte en seminarios, sesiones de consultoría personalizadas, así como el desarrollo e implementación de un plan estratégico. Como beneficio adicional, recibiremos un honorario de $10 mil que nos ayudará a fortalecer las colecciones, el programa de ex-

posiciones y la programación educativa alineada a estas”, agregó la Directora de MUSA. Las organizaciones seleccionadas para participar en AIM Puerto Rico son instituciones culturales que llevan operando hace, al menos, dos años. Además de MUSA, formarán parte de esta iniciativa: Andanza, la Corporación de la Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, la Corporación del Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico, la Fundación Arturo Somohano, la Fundación Puertorriqueña de las Humanidades, el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, el Museo de Arte de Ponce, el Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico y el Museo de las Américas.

Por su parte, Jorge Haddock, presidente de la UPR y Agustín Rullán Toro, rector del RUM, agradecieron el respaldo filantrópico de ambas entidades.

Rullán Toro indicó que “una educación integral incluye tener presente el componente artístico y cultural.

Nuestro Museo, fundado en el 2016, representa uno de los espacios que tenemos en el campus que promueve el arte en sus diversas manifestaciones. Ha tenido una gran acogida en la comunidad del área oeste y esperamos poder retomar nuestra agenda artística educativa cuando la situación vuelva a la normalidad. Agradecemos el respaldo de estas entidades que reconocen la relevancia del arte, como agente de sensibilización para la humanidad. En tiempos como estos, la filantropía es más importante que nunca”.

Por su parte, Haddock dijo que “como principal centro docente y científico de Puerto Rico tenemos una respon-

sabilidad de aportar al desarrollo integral de nuestra comunidad universitaria y además a las comunidades en la isla. El arte y la cultura son herramientas esenciales para el desarrollo integral del ser humano y la calidad de vida de la sociedad. Por esto, nos llena de orgullo este importante logro para MUSA, ubicado en el Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez, que es un motor social y económico, en especial para la zona, pero así mismo para toda la isla.

Agradecemos a la doctora Zorali De Feria, al rector Agustín Rullán Toro y a todo el personal del RUM, quienes han puesto todo su compromiso y talento para el desarrollo de un gran proyecto social y educativo. Enhorabuena”, indicó el Presidente de la UPR. El Fondo Flamboyán para las Artes es una alianza entre la Fundación Flamboyán, el compositor Lin-Manuel Miranda, su familia y el musical de Broadway Hamilton, que recaudó $15 millones con la puesta en escena del espectáculo en Puerto Rico en enero de 2019 para preservar, fortalecer y amplificar las artes en la isla.

Mientras, el programa AIM de Bloomberg Philanthropies se estableció en el 2011 para fortalecer la capacidad organizacional y la programación de organizaciones artísticas y culturales a través de una combinación de apoyo operativo de varios años y capacitación en administración.

Los desafíos que enfrenta el sector cultural a causa del COVID-19, incluida la pérdida significativa de ingresos de estas organizaciones, recalcan la urgencia de establecer AIM en Puerto Rico.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

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A Thanksgiving parade, unfazed by snow or wind, takes on a pandemic

By JULIA JACOBS

N

ot snow, not rain, not gusting winds or the Great Depression have caused the cancellation of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in its 96year history. On Thursday it seems poised to power through a pandemic.

The other parades of New York City have fallen one by one, as city and state officials determined it would be unsafe to proceed with the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the Pride March and the Puerto Rican Day Parade because they draw such huge crowds. The West Indian American Day Parade on Labor Day was forced to go virtual for similar reasons.

But the Thanksgiving Day Parade is sailing forth, largely because the millions who typically attend have been told to stay home and the event has been scaled down to a television show, albeit one that many view as itself a ritual marker of the holiday.

So the parade route will be one block long, not 2 miles. Those high school bands from around the country will not be marching, and instead of some 2,000 balloon handlers to coordinate, there will only be about 130.

But anyone who thinks staging this year’s parade has been a layup, not a singular feat of logistical legerdemain, has been dipping too deeply into the holiday punch.

Starting in March, the parade planners at Macy’s and NBC, which airs the event, had to rip up the carefully calibrated script and come up with an entirely new blueprint, one that evolved as new questions surfaced day after day.

What are the physics of flying the balloons, typically handled by people, if one uses squat utility vehicles instead?

How, and when, to do coronavirus tests and temperature checks for the 960 people working on the parade?

How to arrange for socially distanced stage numbers that capture the magic of Broadway without endangering anyone’s health?

How to break it to the balloon handlers and the marching bands, some of whom view the parade as somewhere between a lifelong dream and a religious event, that they won’t be involved this year?

The Pikachu balloon is towed past onlookers during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York on Nov. 28, 2019. Macy’s had to rip up its usual script and plan a new parade with the coronavirus in mind.

“What I knew about Thanksgiving Day a month ago is different from what I know now,” said Susan Tercero, who is the executive producer of the event for Macy’s.

“How do you plan something in June that’s going to happen in November when you have no idea where the country is going to be at then?”

History has set a high bar for canceling the parade, which has gone off every year since 1924, except for three years during World War II. “Maybe we were crazy to think this way all along, but I think we just tried to never go there,” said Doug Vaughan, executive vice president of special programs at NBC Entertainment.

Instead, the planners kept in communication with city and state officials and responded as evidence of a second wave of coronavirus cases in New York mounted, reducing the number of participants a second time, from 25% of the typical workforce to 12%. Instead of about 8,000 people working a packed parade route in a normal year, the efforts of 960 people are being spread over three days of filming.

The giant balloons were cut to 12 from 16, the floats to 18 from 26.

Typically, each giant balloon — from

the 49-foot-tall Astronaut Snoopy to the 53-foot-tall Pikachu — is guided by 80 to 100 uniformed handlers. Those numbers were untenable during a pandemic.

So the parade team hatched a plan to offset the weight of the balloon handlers with a formation of five utility vehicles (in a typical year, each giant balloon would have just one of these vehicles anchoring it in the center). The parade’s engineering team used the weight of the vehicle plus two “standard” 175-pound people — a total of 2,985 pounds — to calculate the proper formation of handlers underneath the balloons, said Kathleen Wright, the parade’s production director.

Each of the large balloons will have about 25 humans assigned to them, either walking or riding in the utility vehicles down the blocklong parade route.

One handler who made the cut was Kathy Kramer, a Macy’s employee who has been on the balloon team for 36 years.

She is a balloon pilot who walks backward about 30 yards in front of the balloon and directs the handlers using hand signals and a whistle.

But this year Kramer will be wearing a mask, and she discovered during practice runs that it was too difficult to operate

a whistle, so Macy’s shifted to hand-held electric whistles.

In replacing the absences of the parades of past months, this event will become something of an ode to New York, at one time the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States and a cultural beacon that went largely dark in recent months. So while visitors to Lincoln Center cannot see “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” this year, viewers of the parade will be able to see Ashley Bouder, a New York City Ballet principal dancer, perform as the pink tutu-ed Sugarplum Fairy. Similarly, numbers from four Broadway shows, shuttered since March, were taped in Times Square in advance of Thanksgiving week and will be part of the parade.

And despite the cancellation of the “Christmas Spectacular” at Radio City Music Hall, 18 of the 80 Rockettes will appear in their wooden soldiers costumes with custom-made masks. (That particular Rockettes number was chosen because the dancers have limited contact with one another, which means no kick line.)

Hovering over the hectic planning process has been the sense that New Yorkers, and Americans, need this spirited display of joy at a time when there is much to be sad about.

That mission was also evident in 1963, six days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, when amid nationwide mourning, Macy’s decided against canceling the parade.

The parade went on again in 2001, as New York struggled to recover from the 9/11 attacks. The poignancy of the moment was noted in some patriotic touches: a Lady Liberty float replaced Tom Turkey, for example, and the red and white candy canes in Santa’s sleigh wore ribbons of red, white and blue.

On Thursday, as this year’s parade ends, the planners say they will begin thinking almost immediately about next year’s parade. Will it be another pandemic version, the socially distant, mask-wearing, joyous-but-scaled-down kind, or will it be something people can take their kids to?

“Hopefully,” Vaughan of NBC said, “the 95th anniversary of the parade will look very different from this year.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

‘Saved by the Bell’ review: This time, it’s actually all right

By MARGARET LYONS

R

evivals and reboots are a genre unto themselves, split into the gritty ones, the straight-up continuations, the spinoff-in-reboots’-clothing, the various next generations. This new “Saved by the Bell” slots in next to “Cobra Kai” as a self-aware, self-satirizing but ultimately wholesome revival hoping to overcome the obscurity of its streaming platform with the fame and lingering goodwill toward its returning stars.

It works! The new “Saved by the Bell,” debuting Wednesday on Peacock, is quick and funny, and it achieves a tricky blend of staying true enough to its source material while adapting to the standards of the day.

Like the more earnest revival “Degrassi,” this one follows the descendants of the original gang: The slick Mac Morris (Mitchell Hoog), son of Zack (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and Kelly (Tiffani Thiessen), and the doofy Jamie Spano (Belmont Cameli), Jessie’s son, are among our leads, attending the very Bayside High their parents went to.

Jessie (Elizabeth Berkley) and Slater (Mario Lopez) work at the school now, she as a guidance counselor and he as a gym teacher and coach. Zack is the bumbling governor of California, whose fear of being perceived as incompetent leads to budget cuts, which lead to school closures, which in turn lead to bringing all the students from a shuttered underfunded school to Bayside.

Our new Zack isn’t Mac but rather Daisy (Haskiri Velazquez). She’s the one who does the fourth-wall-breaking timeouts, and she’s the one with the gigantic, ancient cellphone thanks to her mom’s dumb rules. But she’s really more of a Jessie: ambitious and rigidly ethical.

She’s also poor, and she sometimes explains to her rich new classmates what that means. “When you’re poor, you’re worried all the time, even if you’re a kid,” she says.

I wouldn’t call that episode Very Special per se, but it’s how this “Bell” has its corniness and eats it, too, both mocking and happily delivering its lessons. Everyone expects DeVante (Dexter Darden) to play football but instead he auditions for the musical, singing “The Greatest Love of All” over a montage — but, you know, winking.

Strong performances from the new cast balance glibness with the sweeter weall-have-growing-up-to-do machinery. Aisha

(Alycia Pascual-Peña) joins the football team and expects some sexist backlash, so she’s a little disappointed that her teammates are all feelings-circle softies whose motto is “clear eyes, full hearts, full stomachs.” Perhaps we will never truly escape the long, bitchy grasp of “Glee,” distilled here as Lexi (Josie Totah), the transgender queen bee with her own reality show and an endless supply of showbiz zingers, who later learns about the power of empathy.

Lexi’s lines in particular hark back to the showrunner Tracey Wigfield’s previous series, “Great News,” and her work on “The Mindy Project” and on “30 Rock,” which this show also resembles in its sunny cynicism.

While the original “Bell” was explicitly for young viewers, this often seems to be more for the grown-up crowd that reads YA, unless there are a lot of 9-year-olds who know who Harvey Levin is and will get scenes that spoof HBO’s naughty-teenagers drama “Euphoria.”

Mostly this “Bell” zips along with ease and confidence, as unencumbered as the rich kids it mildly criticizes through its NPRinformed lens. The moments of friction come from the adult characters grafted in from the original. Lisa (Lark Voorhies) appears only in a brief cameo, and Gosselaar and Thiessen barely appear until Episode 8, when they reunite with their high school BFFs, and are vacuous and awful. Slater’s delayed maturation is one of the main narrative arcs of the

Haskiri Velazquez plays Daisy, who is the “Saved by the Bell” revival’s new Zack but behaves more like its new Jessie series — and, you know, God bless — but it creates a pocket of anti-nostalgia, not returning to the past but dragging the past into the future.

I don’t have a Skip-It anymore. Why do I still have this?

“Saved by the Bell” has never quite stayed in the early ’90s, where it belonged.

DeVante (Dexter Darden, left) doesn’t want to play football. A.C. Slater (Mario Lopez), who stuck around Bayside to become a high school coach, doesn’t want to grow up.

Its consistent syndication kept it in the popular imagination longer than, say, the similar “California Dreams,” and it went through spinoffs and made-for-TV movies, which are amply referenced here. Then it was endlessly remetabolized through memes, and its references became substitutes for punchlines, a lingua franca of the Oregon Trail generation, ubiquitous enough that a cast reunion became one of the banner achievements of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” in 2015. Were we ever so young? Actually, we were, and actually, we’re not anymore.

As Slater says to his high school girlfriend, now colleague, kids today are “a bunch of Jessies,” and he regrets always telling her to calm down and care less. “You were the only one who knew what was going on,” he says. “Styrofoam is bad, drilling for oil on a football field is bad, a schoolsponsored bikini contest is bad.”

But of course that can’t be brought to its natural conclusion — “Saved by the Bell” was bad — because a lot of us once loved “Saved by the Bell,” and now we want to consider ourselves good. Because we reject dissonance, it can’t be just a so-so relic relegated to the archives. And so here we are, in true Zack Morris and Mac Morris fashion, pulling off the kookiest scheme of all: “Saved by the Bell” is now good.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

23

The best Thanksgiving movies to stream

Steve Martin and John Candy in the 1987 film “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.”

By ERIC PIEPENBURG

T

he Thanksgiving film is not that big of a genre. It turns out watching people pass the yams on-screen is a pale substitute for sharing an actual meal with family and friends.

But this unusual Thanksgiving season, when many people will break with tradition whether they want to or not, cinema can provide a genuinely comforting taste of normal.

Just be careful. Search Google for “Thanksgiving movies” and some results — “The Ice Storm,” “Krisha” — will have the flavor of gravy thickened with resentment and spite.

The good news is that most Thanksgiving films, even those with complicated family dynamics at play, are uplifting entertainment.

May the following options — heavy on comedy and camaraderie — give your spirits a bounce to rival a Jell-O mold centerpiece.

The Family Comedy ‘What’s Cooking?’ (2000) Stream it for free on Tubi.

Gurinder Chadha’s warm ensemble comedy offers a multicultural snapshot of Thanksgiving through the eyes and stomachs of four families — Black, Jewish, Latino and Asian — as they prepare and share Thanksgiving dinner.

The story is anchored by four moms — played

by Lainie Kazan, Alfre Woodard, Mercedes Ruehl and Joan Chen — who try to hold the holiday together despite lingering family tensions and spats over sexuality and cultural assimilation.

Central to all four stories is food, and the camera lovingly ogles ingredients being chopped, spiced and roasted according to the

families’ culinary traditions. It’s best not to watch this one on an empty stomach. In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott called this a “generous and charming” film that “breathes new life into its secondhand premise.”

The Buddy Comedy ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ (1987) Rent it on Amazon, Google Play and Vudu.

This beloved John Hughes comedy is not a Christmas movie, contrary to its candy canecolored advertising. It’s actually an attempt to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday that sends uptight executive Neal Page (Steve Martin) and yokel salesman Del Griffith (John Candy) bumbling their way through the snow and singlebed motel rooms.

Hughes, who died in 2009, had a soft spot for oddball pairings of oddball humans,

and here that affinity shines through in his joyful, jocular script. As the odd couple on an absurdist voyage through the frigid Midwest, Martin and Candy give hilarious, yet touching performances that are master classes in artful horseplay. If the words “those aren’t pillows” don’t brighten your Thanksgiving, you’re a Scrooge.

But it’s peerless comic actress Edie McClurg who briefly steals the show as an unflappable car rental agent who delivers one of the film’s funniest (and unprintable) smackdowns.

It’s safe to assume that without this magnificently profane scene, the film would not have gotten an R rating.

The Animated Romp ‘Free Birds’ (2013) Stream it on Hulu.

Critics didn’t exactly gobble up this computer-animated film about two turkeys (voiced

by Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson) who take a time machine back to the first Thanksgiving in a history-altering quest to prevent turkey from becoming the traditional holiday dish. (“Is Hollywood scheming to turn your little ones into strident vegetarians?” panicked The New York Post.) The movie, directed by Jimmy Hayward, also got mixed reviews for its marketing partnership with Chuck E. Cheese’s and its questionable treatment of Native American characters.

Despite the criticism, this PETA-approved film has a soft spot in the hearts of parents who opt for a meat-free Thanksgiving, and who won’t mind a bedtime chat about where meat comes from. Like a movie about a killer Santa Claus, “Free Birds” scores points for a “Babe”-like rebellious message — who needs turkey for Thanksgiving? — that calls out a hal-

Two turkeys go back to the first Thanksgiving in “Free Birds.”

lowed holiday tradition with kid-friendly sass.

It’s a misfit film that’s a great pick for families — carnivores and vegans alike — who would enjoy, as one critic put it, “one of the strangest and most unlikely family entertainments in a long, long time.”

The Tragicomedy ‘Pieces of April’ (2003) Stream it on Amazon Prime.

This touching indie dramedy stars Katie Holmes as April, a punky black sheep who invites her estranged family from the suburbs to have Thanksgiving dinner with her and her boyfriend (Derek Luke) at her rinky-dink Manhattan apartment. Here’s the thing: April’s cooking skills are better suited to “Nailed It!” than “The Great British Baking Show” and, even worse, her mother (Patricia Clarkson) is dying of cancer and may be celebrating her last Thanksgiving.

Written and directed by Peter Hedges, the film divided critics for relying too heavily on the Dysfunctional Family Holiday playbook.

But the comedy keenly veers from broad and physical to tragic and angry as emotions and mishaps threaten to upend what’s supposed to be a conciliatory family visit. The strong cast, which also includes Oliver Platt, Alison Pill and Sean Hayes, effortlessly finds real humans inside the gags. The film was shot on turn-ofthe-millennium digital video, giving it a scrappy look that will thrill 2000s nostalgia geeks.

The Ensemble Escapade ‘Friendsgiving’ (2020) Rent it on Amazon, Google Play and Redbox.

An old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner calls for turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie.

What it doesn’t need is family, at least not the one you’re born with. That’s the premise behind this new comedy, written and directed

by Nicol Paone, about a wildly dysfunctional “friendsgiving,” a portmanteau that describes a pre-Thanksgiving Day meal shared by friends, usually before they trek home to see the parents.

Kat Dennings and Malin Akerman star as gal pals who break bread with a sexually and racially diverse assortment of eccentric friends, bewildered newcomers and party crashers. In her Times review, Lovia Gyarkye said the film “takes a surprisingly charming and hilarious approach to a traditional holiday.” Watch for Jane Seymour as a sexpot mom on the prowl and cameos from Fortune Feimster, Wanda Sykes and Margaret Cho as wizened “fairy gay mothers.”

24

Thursday, November 26, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Helping children with anxiety in the pandemic

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

Y

es, this is an anxious time, and yes, everyone is anxious, but it is particularly hard to be an anxious kid in an anxious time. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders in children and adolescents (and this was true before the pandemic), and they can be linked to other mental health issues, notably depression.

Anxiety can bring children into emergency rooms, and into psychiatric hospitalizations, and in a time of generally heightened stress and anxiety, parents with anxious kids find themselves worrying especially about the worriers, wondering how to talk with them about the complexities of life in 2020, and trying to assess when worry is, well, worrisome enough to need professional help.

At Boston Children’s Hospital, during the first months of the pandemic and the general shutdown, the volume of children and adolescents coming in to the emergency room with mental health issues decreased, said Patricia Ibeziako, associate chief for clinical services in the hospital’s department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

It picked up in June, and has increased from the summer through the fall, with more coming in for mental health reasons as well as those who came to the hospital for other reasons and had anxiety issues. Stress and anxiety may manifest as worsening health, especially for children with underlying medical conditions.

“The highest volume we’re seeing during the pandemic of children presenting to the hospital setting with mental health issues are those with suicidal ideation and suicide attempts — many have anxiety as well, sometimes underlying anxiety disorders,” Ibeziako said. Adolescents who come in with eating disorders often have anxiety. Children with developmental disabilities have been coming in with agitation and disruptive behaviors reflecting anxiety as the pandemic has disrupted their routines.

Even in an anxious time, anxiety is treatable. “Firstline management for anxiety is therapy,” Ibeziako said.

“Cognitive behavioral therapy is what we use for children and adolescents.” It involves understanding the thought process of anxiety, she said, and how that affects emotions and behaviors, and helping the child reframe or change problematic thoughts.

Some children, depending on the severity of their symptoms, may require medication as well. Children who are severely affected may need therapy in a day program, or a hospital, at least to begin with, while others will do fine with a weekly appointment.

Ideally, children get therapy and medication, if needed, before the anxiety becomes so intense or debilitating that parents consider an emergency room visit. “It would really be great if parents could make outreach to a pediatrician or primary care provider and try to get linked up with a counselor or therapist, start to address this early,” Ibeziako said.

“Bedtime is a lovely time,” one expert says, “but not the best time to have lengthy conversations about things that are on your kid’s mind.”

During this difficult time, some families are thinking, “help is for the people who really need it, but not my kid,” said Rachel Busman, senior director of the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Child Mind Institute in New York, who sees many younger children in her clinical practice. The expansion of telehealth in the pandemic has increased the availability of mental health services for children, she said.

Carolina Zerrate, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia who also works in a school-based mental health program, said that while these are stressful times for all families, “Black and Latinx families have been hit by the virus harder.” She noted that “some families were already in a stressed situation.”

Zerrate suggested that parents model how to express emotions and ask for help and support. Do check-ins by asking open-ended questions, such as “How are you feeling? Why are you feeling that way?” Don’t dismiss their concerns, she said; don’t tell them they’re too young to be worrying. “You’re opening up space for communicating, it’s OK to talk about your feelings, it’s OK to share with your family.”

Seek help, Zerrate said, if you see patterns that significantly interfere with a child’s day-to-day functioning, or if a child seems to be in distress over time and getting worse, and of course, if a child says anything at all about self-harm or suicide.

Before the pandemic, Ibeziako said, school-related

anxiety was a common problem, but what they are seeing now is “tinged with pandemic implications,” reflecting the changes in the school year and the general uncertainty about how long this will go on.

Routines and structure are important, and can help us handle anxiety — they matter for young children, for school-aged children, for adolescents, and for adults as well.

Ibeziako suggested parents monitor what children encounter in what is often now more time spent looking at screens. Similarly, Busman recommended parents be mindful of their own conversations, understanding that children may pick up incomplete information or adult worries. When children ask about what is going on in the world (or in the family), she said, take time to understand what the child knows, and what information is being requested.

Don’t have those conversations late at night. “Bedtime is a lovely time,” Busman said, “but not the best time to have lengthy conversations about things that are on your kid’s mind.” Try calming exercises, she suggested, or visualization, like a mental vacation to a place the child has been.

Remind kids that they have power and agency, Zerrate said, “There are things they can do to keep themselves and their family safe, wash your hands, wear your mask, and we’re good to go.”

The message should be “This is really hard and really complicated, and as a family, we’re going to be able to cope with this and be OK.”

The San Juan Daily Star (12) del inmueble sometido al Régimen de Propiedad HorizonESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE tal denominado CONDOMINIO PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE TORRE DEL CARDENAL que PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA ubica en el Barrio Hato Rey del SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN. Municipio de San Juan, Puerto Rico. Este apartamento tiene BOSCO CREDIT X, un área de construcción total LLC, representado (que incluye además el área de por su Agente de los estacionamientos que se Servicios FRANKLIN describen abajo y del espacio CREDIT MANAGEMENT de almacén también descrito CORPORATION abajo) de DOS MIL CIENTO Demandante vs .

CUARENTA PUNTO TREINTA Y DOS (2,140.32) PIES CUADRAWILLIE ROSARIO ARROYO y su esposa DOS, equivalentes a CIENTO Y OCHO PUNTO MINERVA CRUZ TEJERA NOVENTA OCHENTA Y CUATRO (198.84) y la Sociedad Legal de METROS CUADRADOS . Este Bienes Gananciales apartamento tiene su puerta de compuesta por ambos entrada por el lindero Este, y por Demandados ella se sale al pasillo que conduCIVIL NÚM. SJ2019CV00154 ce al área de ascensores y esca(506). SOBRE: COBRO DE DI- leras y de ahí se sale al exterior.

NERO (Ejecución de Hipoteca Este apartamento tiene un largo por la Vía Ordinaria). EDICTO máximo de SESENTA PIES DE SUBASTA. DIEZ PULGADAS (60’10”) y un Al: Público en General ancho máximo de CUARENTA Y UNO PIES OCHO PULGADAS A: WILLIE ROSARIO ‘8”). Linderos: por el NORTE, ARROYO y su esposa (41 en CUARENTA Y CINCO PIES MINERVA CRUZ TEJERA TRES PULGADAS (45 ‘3”), con y la Sociedad Legal de el área común exterior; por el Bienes Gananciales SUR, en SESENTA PIES DIEZ compuesta por ambos; PULGADAS (60 ‘10”), con la Yo, PEDRO HIEYE GONZALEZ, pared medianera que lo sepaAlguacil, Alguacil de este Tribu- ra del apartamento número Mil nal, a la parte demandada y a los Doscientos Tres (1203); por el acreedores y personas con inte- ESTE, en CINCUENTA Y CUArés sobre la propiedad que más TRO PIES OCHO PULGADAS adelante se describe, y al públi- (54’8”), con el pasillo que le da co en general, HAGO SABER: acceso y la pared medianera Que el día 17 de diciembre de que lo separa del apartamento 2020, a las 9:00 de la mañana, número Mil Doscientos Cinco en mi oficina, sita en el Tribunal (1205); y por el OESTE, en de Primera Instancia, Sala Su- VEINTISIETE PIES ONCE PULperior de San Juan, San Juan, GADAS (27’11 “), con el área coPuerto Rico, venderé en Pública mún exterior. Este apartamento Subasta la propiedad inmueble consta de tres (3) dormitorios, que más adelante se describe uno de ellos “master”, dos (2) y cuya venta en pública subasta baños, uno de ellos “master”, un se ordenó por la vía ordinaria al (1) closet vestidor, tres (3) clomejor postor quien hará el pago sets, un (1) pasillo, lavandería, en dinero en efectivo, giro postal cocina, sala/comedor y balcón. o cheque certificado a nombre Los estacionamientos identificadel o la Alguacil del Tribunal de dos con los números Doscientos Primera Instancia. Los autos y Cincuenta y Seis (256) y Trestodos los documentos corres- cientos Cincuenta y Cuatro (354) pondientes al procedimiento en los planos del Condominio incoado, estarán de manifiesto son áreas privadas asignadas en la Secretaría del Tribunal de a este apartamento. El estacioSan Juan durante horas labora- namiento con el número Dosbles. Que en caso de no produ- cientos Cincuenta y Seis (256) cir remate ni adjudicación en la tiene un área total de CIENTO primera subasta a celebrarse, se CUARENTA Y SIETE PUNTO celebrará una segunda subasta SETENTA Y NUEVE (147.79) para la venta de la susodicha PIES CUADRADOS, equivalenpropiedad, el día 14 de enero de tes a TRECE PUNTO SETEN2021, a las 9:00 de la mañana, TA Y TRES (13 .73) METROS y en caso de no producir rema- CUADRADOS, colindando por te ni adjudicación, se celebrará el NORTE, en OCHO PIES DOS una tercera subasta el día 25 Y CUARTO PULGADAS (8’2 de enero de 2021, a las 9:00 1/4”), con área común ; por el de la mañana, en mi oficina sita SUR, en OCHO PIES DOS Y en el lugar antes indicado. La CUARTO PULGADAS (8’2-1/4”), propiedad a venderse en públi- con el estacionamiento númeca subasta se describe como ro Doscientos Cuarenta y Uno sigue: URBANA: PROPIEDAD (241 ); por el ESTE, en DIECIOHORIZONTAL: Apartamento CHO PIES CERO PULGADAS residencial con el número Mil (18’0”), con el estacionamiento Doscientos Cuatro (1204), loca- número Doscientos Cincuenta lizado en el piso número Doce y SIETE (257); y por el OESTE,

LEGAL NOTICE

@

Thursday, November 26, 2020 en DIECIOCHO PIES CERO PULGADAS (18’0 “), con el estacionamiento número Doscientos Cincuenta y Cinco (255). El estacionamiento con el número Trescientos Cincuenta y Cuatro (354) tiene un área total de CIENTO CUARENTA Y SIETE PUNTO SETENTA Y NUEVE (147.79) PIES CUADRADOS, equivalentes a TRECE PUNTO SETENTA Y TRES (13.73) METROS CUADRADOS, colindando por el NORTE, en OCHO PIES DOS Y CUARTO PULGADAS (8’2 1/4”), con área común ; por el SUR, en OCHO PIES DOS Y CUARTO PULGADAS (8’2-1/4 “), con el estacionamiento número Trescientos Treinta y Nueve (339); por el ESTE, en DIECIOCHO PIES CERO PULGADAS (18’0”), con el estacionamiento número Trescientos Cincuenta y Cinco (355); y por el OESTE, en DIECIOCHO PIES CERO PULGADAS (18’0”), con el estacionamiento número Trescientos Cincuenta y Tres (353). El espacio de almacén con el número Mil Doscientos Cuatro (1204) en los planos del Condominio es área privada asignada a este apartamento . El espacio de almacén con el número Mil Doscientos Cuatro (1204) tiene un área total de VEINTIUNO PUNTO TREINTA Y OCHO (21.38) PIES CUADRADOS, equivalentes a UNO PUNTO NOVENTA Y NUEVE (1.99) METROS CUADRADOS, colindando por el NORTE, en CUATRO PIES NUEVE PULGADAS (4’9”), con el espacio de almacén número Mil Doscientos Tres (1203); por el SUR, en CUATRO PIES NUEVE PULGADAS (4’9”), con el espacio de almacén número Mil Doscientos Cinco (1205); por el ESTE, en CUATRO PIES SEIS PULGADAS (4’6”), con la pared que lo separa de la cisterna; y por el OESTE, en CUATRO PIES SEIS PULGADAS (4’6”), con área común. Este espacio de almacén tiene un alto de DOCE PIES OCHO PULGADAS (12’8”). Este apartamento le corresponde Punto Sesenta y Cinco Mil Cuatrocientos Sesenta y Cuatro por ciento (.65464 %) en los elementos comunes generales del Condominio. La escritura de hipoteca se encuentra inscrita al folio 31 vuelto del tomo 1594 de Río Piedras Norte, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Segunda, finca número 42, 188, inscripción segunda.

-Modificada la hipoteca antes relacionada en cuanto al principal que será ahora por la suma de $341,746.38, vencedero el día 1 ro. de septiembre de 2044, con un pago final de $68 ,349.28, según escritura número 277, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 19 de septiembre de 2014, ante la Notario Público Ana E. Garbea Padró, inscrita al folio 119 del tomo 1623 de Río

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

Piedras Norte, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección Segunda, finca número 42,188, inscripción 3ra. La dirección física de fa propiedad antes descrita es: Condominio Torre del Cardenal, Apartamento 1204 (204), San Juan, Puerto Rico. La Subasta se llevará a efecto para satisfacer a la parte demandante la suma de $260 ,830 .91 de principal, inte reses pactados y computados sobre esta suma al tipo de 5.25% anual, desde el 1 ro. de enero de 2018 y hasta su total y completo pago, contribuciones, recargos y primas de seguro adeudados y la suma de $35,500.00 por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, todas cuyas sumas están líquidas y exigibles. Que la cantidad mínima de licitación en la primera subasta para el inmueble será de $341 ,746.38 y de ser necesaria una segunda subasta, la cantidad mínima será equivalente a 2/3 partes de aquella, o sea, la suma de $227,830.92 y de ser necesaria una tercera subasta, la cantidad mínima será la mitad del precio pactado, es decir, la suma de $170,873.19. 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 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 comparecenc ia de los licitadores, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en San Juan, Puerto Rico, a 18 de noviembre de 2020. EDWIN E. LOPEZ MULERO, ALGUACIL, DIVISIÓN DE EJECUCION DE SENTENCIAS, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN.

25 GENERAL:

Se les notifica que los peticionarios interesan inscribir a su favor el dominio de la finca que se describe a continuación: RUSTICA: Predio de terreno, sito en el Barrio Montellanos, Carr.

159 km. 12.1 de Morovis, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de 92.6327 mc, equivalente a 0.0236 cuerdas, en lindes, par el Norte, con la carretera Puerto Rico 159 (de Morovis a Corozal); al Sur y Este, con Ana R. Colon Perez, al Oeste, con Migdalia Miranda Rivera. Enclava casa de concrete de una sola planta, con techo de zinc, que mide 20 pies de frente par 20 pies de fondo. Por orden del Tribunal, se ordena la publicación de edicto en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, por tres veces, en el termino de 20 días, para que las antes mencionadas personas y todo aquel que se viere perjudicado con dicha inscripción, lo verifique.

Dentro del termino de veinte (20) días contados desde la ultima publicación del edicto, usted debera presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Cases (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr., salvo que se represente par derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaria del Tribunal, enviando su escrito al Tribunal de Primera instancia de Puerto Rico, Sala Superior de Arecibo, P.O. Box 6005, Arecibo, PR 00613 y copia a los abogados de las peticionarios, Lcdo.

Jose A. Salicetti Maldonado, P.O. Box 97, Adjuntas, PR 00601 y Lcdo. Jose Oscar San Miguel, PO Box 27, Ciales, Puerto Rico 00638. Expedido en Arecibo, Puerto Rico hoy 27 de octubre de 2020, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal. VIVIAN Y. FRESSE GONZALEZ ,Sec Regional. YANOLES QUILES ROSARIO, Sec Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE LEGAL NOTICE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE ARECIBO. PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE ANTONIO PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE RIVERA GONZALEZ, ARECIBO

JORGE LUIS ORTIZ CAMACHO T/C/P JORGE ORTIZ CAMACHO, IRIS ENEIDA CAMACHO DELGADO

BIENVENIDA REYES MUÑIZ T/C/P BIENVENIDA REYES

ROE, Y AL PUBLICO EN

A: JOHN DOE, RICHARD

Peticionarios CIVIL NUMERO: AR2020CV01336. SOBRE: EXPeticionarios PEDIENTE DE DOMINIO. NOCIVIL NUMERO: TIFICACION POR EDICTO. ESAR2020CV00343. SOBRE: EX- TADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA PEDIENTE DE DOMINIO. NO- EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EUA TIFICACION POR EDICTO. ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE A: JOHN DOE, RICHARD PUERTO RICO. Ex Parte

(787) 743-3346

NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA ROE, a toda persona ignorada o desconocida SALA DE CAROLINA. ORIENTAL BANK que pueda perjudicar la Demandante V. inscripción solicitada, y JULIO ANGEL RIVERA a toda persona que esté SERRANO, NESHMAIDA ausente cuyo paradero MARIA SANCHEZ se desconoce al tiempo MARTINEZ Y LA de hacerse la publicación SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE del Edicto, y al público en BIENES GANANCIALES general: POR ESTOS Se les notifica que los peticionarios interesan inscribir a su favor COMPUESTA; JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE el dominio de la finca que se describe a continuación: RUSTICA: Situada en el Barrio Frontón, sitio La Altura, de l término municipal de Ciales, compuesta de 8.50 cuerdas, equivalentes a tres hectáreas, treinta y cuatro áreas, y ocho centiáreas de terrenos, con casa vivienda, y en lindes, por el Norte, con Angel Manuel González , al Sur, con Joaquín Rebollo, al Este , con sucesión Gabriel Garáu, y al Oeste con el Río Mudo (también conocida como Quebrada Muro). Enclava estructura residencial con dimensiones de setenta pies (70’) de largo por treinta y seis pies (36’) de ancho aproximadamente, de una planta, toda de cemento y bloques, con tres cuartos dormitorios, un baño, sala, comedor, cocina, marquesina con uno y medio balcones. Por orden del Tribunal, se ordena la publicación de edicto en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, por tres veces, en el término de 20 días, para que las antes mencionadas personas y todo aquel que se viere perjudicado con dicha inscripción, lo verifique. Dentro del término de veinte (20) días contados desde la última publicación del edicto, usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC) , al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr., salvo que se represente por derecho propio , en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal, enviando su escrito al Tribunal de Primera Instancia de Puerto Rico, Sala Superior de Arecibo, P. O. Box 6005, Arecibo, PR 00613 y copia a los abogados de los peticionarios, Ledo. José A. Salicetti Maldonado, P. O. Box 97, Adjuntas , PR 00601 y Lcdo . José Oscar San Miguel, P. O. Box 27, Ciales, Puerto Rico, 00638. Expedido en Arecibo, Puerto Rico, hoy 10 de noviembre de 2020, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal. VIVIAN Y. FRESSE GONZALEZ, Sec Regional. MICHELINE REYES TORRES, Sec Auxiliar.

Demandados CIVIL NUM. CA2020CV02330.

SOBRE: SUSTITUCION DE PAGARE HIPOTECARLO. EMPLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, personas desconocidas que se designan con estos nombres ficticios, que puedan ser tenedor o tenedores, o puedan tener algún interés en el pagaré hipotecario a que se hace referencia más adelante en el presente edicto, que se publicará una sola vez.

Se les notifica que en Ia Demanda radicada en el caso de epígrafe se alega que un pagaré hipotecario otorgado el 1 de julio de 2005, Julio Angel Rivera Serrano y Neshmaida Maria Sanchez Martínez otorgaron en San Juan, Puerto Rico un pagaré hipotecario por Ia suma principal de $155,000.00, con intereses a razón del 5 7/8% anual, a favor de Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria Puerto Rico (hoy Oriental Bank), con vencimiento el 1 de julio de 2035, ante el Notario Raúl J. Vilá Sellés, mediante el afidávit nUmero 35702, se extravió, sin embargo Ia deuda evidenciada y garantizada por dicho pagaré hipotecario no ha sido salda, por lo que Ia parte demandante solicita que se ordene la sustitución del mismo.

En garantía de dicho pagaré el 1 de julio de 2005, Julio Angel Rivera Serrano y Neshmaida María Sanchez Martinez constituyeron hipoteca nUmero 408 ante el Notario RatiI J. Vita Sellés en garantía del pago del pagare antes descrito, presentada al asiento 2020-082781-CR01 el 26 de octubre de 2020, finca 20866, Registro de Ia Propiedad de Carolina, Sección I. La hipoteca que garantiza dicho pagaré grava Ia propiedad inmueble que se describe a continuación: URBANA: PROPIEDAD HORIZONTAL: Apartamento #ll. Apartamento residencial de forma LEGAL NOTICE irregular que está localizado en ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE la Torre II, piso quinto del edifiPUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GE- cio Condominio Coral Beach, NERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBU- situado en Ia Carretera Estatal

#187, kilómetro 0, hectometro 9, esquina a la Calle Boulevard, Barrio Cangrejos Arriba, Carolina, Puerto Rico, que mide 26’8”de largo por su parte más larga, medida desde la puerta de la entrada hacia el fondo, por 18’8” de ancho por su parte más ancha, frente del apartamento que hacen un área de 493.85 pies cuadrados, aproximadamente, equivalentes a 45.90 metros cuadrados. Sus linderos y distancias son las siguientes: por el NORTE, en una distancia de 26’8” con el apartamento 509, separado por pared de carga y conducto de ventilación; por el ESTE, en una distancia de 18’8” con el espacio exterior que mira hacia Ia Torre I, separado por baranda de la terraza; por el SUR; en una distancia de 26’ 8”, con el apartamento #515, separado por pared y conductos de ventilación; y por el OESTE, en una distancia de 17’2” con el corredor comUn separado por pared de carga y puerta de entrada y en una distancia de 1 ‘6” con conducto de ventilación, separado por pared. Las demás dependencias del apartamento se relacionan en el documento. Le corresponde el estacionamiento #78-G. Finca 20866 inscrita al folio 142 del tomo 534 de Carolina, Registro de la Propiedad de Carolina, Sección 1. POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el dfa del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en Ia demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

LCDO. JAVIER MONTALVO CINTRON RUA NUM. 17682 DELGADO & FERNANDEZ, LLC P0 Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 00910-1750, Tel. (787) 274-1414 / Fax (787) 764-8241 E-mail: imontalvo@ delgadofernandez.com Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 17 de noviembre de 2020. Lcda. Marilyn Aponte Rodriguez, Secretaria Regional. IDA FERNANDEZ RODRIGUEZ, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

College football teams change Thanksgiving traditions amid pandemic

By KEVIN DRAPER and ALAN BLINDER

A

t Colorado, the Thanksgiving meal for football players, a ritual since at least the mid-1990s, will not happen. Ohio State’s seniors will miss out on a tradition of Thanksgiving practice. At Virginia, any players who attend a large Thanksgiving gathering could have to quarantine.

College football players across the country are accustomed to playing and practicing through Thanksgiving. But as with everything else during this season like no other, the coronavirus pandemic is forcing some teams to make changes large and small to their well-honed routines.

Public officials are warning this holiday that a potentially lethal combination of widespread travel and large indoor gatherings will rapidly increase the already surging spread of the virus. University administrators are scrambling to offer guidance to students.

John Thrasher, the president of Florida State University, is asking students not to return to campus if they leave for the holiday.

“Students, if you go home for the Thanksgiving break, please stay there until the start of the spring semester,” he wrote in a campuswide email last week. Florida State has two weeks remaining in the semester after Thanksgiving — two weeks Thrasher would prefer those students complete from home.

But his email does not apply to the Seminoles, Florida State’s 2-6 football team, who postponed last weekend’s game against Clemson over virus-related concerns. They face Virginia on Saturday.

“Our team will stay here in Tallahassee and practice before traveling on Friday,” a Florida State spokesman, Robert Wilson, said in an email.

Practicing during Thanksgiving week is typically one of the nuisances of being a college football player, a sacrifice made each autumn often in service of rivalry games. This season, however, skipping past Thanksgiving might be a saving grace for college football, which has already had more than 90 games canceled or postponed because of the coronavirus.

The New York Times contacted all 65 football programs in the Power 5 conferences — the Atlantic Coast (which includes Notre Dame this fall), the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12 and the Southeastern — to ask how they were handling Thanksgiving this season.

Among the 47 that responded, the answers

Ohio State, which has used cardboard cutout fans in the stands during the pandemic, postponed a beloved Thanksgiving practice tradition. were quite similar: They are mostly treating this week like any other coronavirus-inflected week.

The University of Illinois doesn’t have classes during Thanksgiving week, but it is an otherwise normal week for the Fighting Illini, who will host the third-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes on Saturday. Players will be tested for the virus between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. today, practice at 8 a.m. and have a team Thanksgiving meal at 11 a.m., according to Kent Brown, an associate athletic director.

“The schedule isn’t much different than past seasons, although players were able to leave campus to gather for Thanksgiving at a local team member or coach’s house for Thanksgiving before reporting back Friday morning,” Brown said. “But in the past, players never had to test for COVID every morning.”

Colorado has had a game the weekend after Thanksgiving every year since 1996, when the Big 8 became the Big 12. There is traditionally a Thanksgiving meal for players and staff members, but it will be scrapped this year, said David Plati, an associate athletic director at Colorado. The team has dispensed with all communal meals this year.

“The team hasn’t even eaten a meal together — everything has been grab-and-go, even on the one road trip,” Plati said. Active players also have not been allowed to go home since training camp began Oct. 9.

At Ohio State, adapting to the pandemic means postponing a beloved Thanksgiving rite.

The Buckeyes typically have their final regular-season practice on the morning of the holiday. After that weekend’s game, at least in an ordinary year, the only games left are the Big Ten championship (if they qualify, which they have in each of the past three seasons) and at least one bowl game. The Thanksgiving practice usually concludes with Senior Tackle, when each senior addresses the team and then hits a blocking sled or tackling dummy one final time.

Afterward, players who live in or near Columbus can take some teammates home for Thanksgiving, while others have their own families in town or go to a coach’s house.

“This year, however, no one will be going home for Thanksgiving and the team will dine together Thursday [today],” Jerry Emig, an associate athletic director, wrote in an email.

“Senior Tackle won’t take place until later. We fly to Illinois Friday afternoon.”

Most schools said they did not give their players any specific guidance for Thanksgiving, relying on the messages they have conveyed for months. That message, as John Bianco, an associate athletic director at Texas, put it: “They’re constantly reminded by our team medical personnel and coaches to always wear a mask, wash hands, stay at a safe distance and to not be in any large crowds.”

One of the few schools that did give players Thanksgiving travel guidance was Virginia, which updated the travel policy sent to all athletes in October, said Jim Daves, an assistant athletic director.

If a player has a Thanksgiving meal in a hotel with family members without social distancing? He will have to quarantine. If the gathering is small, with mask wearing and social distancing? No quarantining necessary. If a player visits home for just a day and social distancing is followed? No quarantine. But if he somehow finds enough time to go home for more than one day? Quarantine.

Travel- and family-related peril has been ever-present this season. With shorter schedules because of fewer, or no, nonconference games and some leagues starting the season late, as well as unexpected open weekends after games were postponed or canceled, athletic departments have fretted over off-days all season long.

“Quite frankly, it was more of a concern a few weeks ago when we had an open week and the players had several days off,” said Steve Fink, an assistant athletic director at South Carolina.

The coronavirus will threaten the season right until the end. The number of cases is spiking nationwide, and the virus has already killed more than 257,000 people in the United States. If the worst fears of public health officials are borne out, those numbers will only accelerate in December, when players are practicing for the extremely lucrative bowl games but also have unusual amounts of free time.

“Who knows what will happen with any type of bowl game events?” said Steve Roe, an assistant athletic director at Iowa.

Some bowl games have already been canceled. But on Tuesday night, the College Football Playoff’s selection committee released its first rankings of the season. Its semifinal matchups are scheduled for Jan. 1, and the national championship game is planned for Jan. 11.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

27

Without Drew Brees, the Saints rely on an all-purpose back. No, not Taysom Hill.

By MIKE TANIER

(T

rend Watch) With quarterback Drew Brees out for several weeks because of rib and lung injuries, the New Orleans Saints’ Super Bowl hopes rest with a jackof-all-trades who is sometimes dismissed as a mere role player: the all-purpose running back Alvin Kamara.

Sorry, were you expecting the team’s backup quarterback, Taysom Hill? Hill, the gadget specialist and wish fulfillment figure currently filling in for Brees, is certainly critical to the Saints’ success. But Kamara has been their best offensive performer this season, by far, and he has emerged as a worthy candidate for the NFL Most Valuable Player Award.

Through Week 11, Kamara ranked second in the league with 1,179 total yards from scrimmage and 12 combined rushing and receiving touchdowns. His 67 receptions tied him for seventh in the NFL, and led all running backs. Per Pro Football Reference, Kamara leads the league with 619 yards after the catch and 14 broken tackles after receptions. Coach Sean Payton lines him up at running back, various wide receiver positions, kick returner and occasionally as a wildcat quarterback to make the most of his diverse talents.

Kamara’s production has been vital to the Saints in a season in which Brees’ skills have continued their noticeable decline and Michael Thomas has missed six games because of injuries and the alluring siren song of wide receiver misbehavior. (Thomas missed one game for “disciplinary reasons,” reportedly after an altercation with a teammate during practice.)

The Saints’ offense this season has often consisted almost entirely of Brees floating soft tosses into the flats or handing off so Kamara could dodge and juke his way around defenders for significant gains. Yet despite their overreliance on one individual, the Saints are 8-2, in first place in the NFC South and at the front of the conference playoff race.

Kamara isn’t exactly an unsung hero: He’s a three-time Pro Bowl selection and a perennial first-round pick in fantasy football leagues, where his combination

Taysom Hill, the scrambling 30-year-old perma-prospect, worked his way up from the Saints’ practice squad to earn an extended audition as Drew Brees’s replacement. of rushing and receiving production is highly coveted. But his contributions may be undervalued, for a variety of reasons.

Kamara is a “committee back” who shares carries with Latavius Murray. He’s an all-purpose back who is upstaged on statistical leaderboards by rushers whose production is not split into two categories, such as the Minnesota Vikings’ Dalvin Cook (the current leader in scrimmage yards and touchdowns) and the Tennessee Titans’ Derrick Henry (last year’s rushing leader).

Kamara also lacks the folk hero origin story of Hill, the scrambling 30-year-old perma-prospect who overcame multiple collegiate injuries and worked his way up from the proverbial mailroom of the Saints’ practice squad to earn an extended

audition as Brees’ long-term replacement.

Kamara played only a minor role in Hill’s starting debut, rushing 13 times for 45 yards and one touchdown (with zero receptions) in Sunday’s 24-9 victory against the Atlanta Falcons. Payton surprised the Falcons by treating Hill like a real quarterback instead of building a game plan out of read options and easy tosses to Kamara.

Hill surprised his skeptics by looking more like a real quarterback than a Mary Sue written into the Saints’ fan fiction to appeal to the middle-age high school legend demographic.

Hill’s decision process in the pocket boils down to “wait for Thomas to get open and run for daylight if he doesn’t,” but there are a lot of quarterbacks around the NFL who would benefit from similar clarity.

It’s one thing to use unexpected tactics to baffle the hapless Falcons, who earlier in the season mixed up the procedures for handling an onside kick and a live grenade. The Saints face the Denver Broncos’ tighter defense on Sunday, and future opponents (including the Falcons again in two weeks) will be ready to take away the Hill-to-Thomas connection. The Saints will need Kamara more than ever. And then Brees will (probably) return as the playoffs approach, and the Saints will go back to needing Kamara just as much as they always have.

No matter how irreplaceable Kamara may be to the Saints, he remains a long shot for MVP consideration. The last nonquarterback to win the award was Adrian Peterson in 2012, when he rushed for 2,097 yards. The closest all-purpose performers like Kamara to win the award were LaDainian Tomlinson, who had 2,323 scrimmage yards and 31 touchdowns in 2006, and Marshall Faulk, who had 2,189 combined scrimmage yards and 26 touchdowns in 2000. Kamara is on a pace for 1,886 yards and about 19 touchdowns: excellent, but not eye-popping enough to win an award almost exclusively reserved for quarterbacks.

Kamara’s MVP case is far stronger once assumptions about the relative values of quarterbacks and running backs are set aside. He has spent most of the season assisting a fading Hall of Famer whose average throw this season traveled just 5.8 yards downfield (per NFL Next Gen Stats, the second-lowest figure in the league). He’s now tasked with propping up a nondenominational Tim Tebow surrogate. He’s responsible for 31 percent of the offensive yardage for a team that swept Tom Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers and is on a seven-game winning streak. And his dual rusher-receiver role makes him a more effective focal point for a modern NFL offense than workhorses like Cook and Henry.

OK, even accounting for all that, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes may still be a better MVP candidate in 2020. Kamara remains the most valuable player on the Saints. And if he can lead them to the Super Bowl, that’s all that will really matter.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Diego Maradona dead: Argentinian football legend passes away at 60

By RT NEWS

A

rgentinian football legend and winner of the 1986 World Cup, Diego Maradona, has passed away at home in Tigre, just north of Buenos Aires, after suffering a heart attack, according to reports in Argentina.

Maradona, 60, was recovering at home following brain surgery in Buenos Aires, where he was successfully treated for a blood clot on the brain earlier this month.

Last Friday, Maradona was sedated by medics after the former footballer suffered issues related to alcohol dependency following his surgery, with doctors describing the legend as suffering from a „mix“ of serious issues, including cardiovascular and liver issues.

It was stated that Maradona would require constant support, including admission to an alcohol addiction clinic, following his discharge from the hospital.

However, according to Clarin.com, while recovering at home, Maradona suffered a heart attack and passed away shortly afterward.

A legendary career Maradona emerged from the youth ranks in the late 1970s at Argentinos Juniors, where he scored 116 goals in 167 games before signing for one of the country‘s biggest clubs, Boca Juniors.

His talents were soon spotted by Europe‘s top scouts, and he was lured away to La Liga by Barcelona before joining unfashionable Serie A side Napoli in 1984, where he became a legend.

On the international stage, Maradona‘s hot-headed nature was on show as he exploded into the Argentina national team ahead of the 1982 World Cup in Spain. But his temper got the better of him when he was sent off for kicking out at Brazilian player Batista in the knockout stages as Argentina crashed out of the tournament.

Maradona returned four years later with a point to prove, and produced arguably the best tournament performance by a single player in World Cup history as he led Argentina to the top of the world at the 1986 World Cup. His infamous „Hand of God“ goal against hated rivals England elevated Maradona, already an icon in his home-

The Argentina legend - regarded by many as the greatest footballer of all time - reportedly suffered a cardio-respiratory arrest and was left in a serious condition. land, to even greater heights, while his second goal in the game, a mesmerizing run from inside his own half, is still regarded by many as the greatest goal ever scored in the World Cup. His career went on the decline after 1986, but he still led Argentina to the final of the 1990 World Cup. Issues with banned substances marred his appearance four years later in the United States, and gave a glimpse of the troubles that would befall him after his career.

Maradona stayed in the game as a manager, and enjoyed stints with a host of clubs, including Textil Mandiyu, Racing Club, Al-Wasl, Fujairah, Dorados de Sinaloa and, most recently, Gimnasia de La Plata.

He also took charge of the Argentina national team between 2008 and 2010 and led the team into the 2010 World Cup, where they were eventually eliminated in the quarterfinals.

Personal troubles While Maradona‘s successes on the field led to fame and fortune, as well as the reputation as one of, if not the, greatest players to ever play the game, the trappings of success plagued Maradona throughout the latter part of his career and well into his retirement.

Through the mid-1980s until 2004, Maradona battled a cocaine addiction and later in his career struggled with his weight. His struggles with obesity eventually led him to undergo gastric bypass surgery.

He also struggled with alcohol, and was hospitalized in 2007 with hepatitis and effects of alcohol abuse. Then, earlier this year, he was admitted to the hospital where he underwent brain surgery for a subdural hematoma.

JOSÉ BURGOS Técnico Generadores Gas Propano

787•607•3343

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Thursday, November 26, 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

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, November 26, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

You may be in your element as the Moon entwines with edgy Mars, enhancing confidence and energy levels. It can bring out more impatient qualities too, so if you need to hold an important conversation, opt for a measured approach so that you give yourself the best possible chance of success. Looking for entertainment? Thrillers and inspirational movies might do it for you Aries.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Don’t try to go it alone Libra, as the focus on your relationship sector suggests that the more you get others on board, the easier it will be for you. There can also be comfort in getting support from others who are going through the same thing as you. If you need reassurance, then you may be surprised at how many people might empathize, and are willing to chip in with help and advice.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Time for a mini-retreat? The Moon clasps fiery Mars in her arms, making them bedfellows in a private sector of your chart. Make space to enjoy some quiet time when you can fully explore an interest, or get to grips with something that you might not be able to when you are in your normal routine. This could be a time of discovery, when a seed is planted that may blossom over time.

Whether you connect online or off, a chat with friends can make your day and leave you much upbeat. If you have been busy with more intense matters, then you might benefit from doing something that engages your interest or that gets you out. Exercise is great, but opting for light-hearted projects with likeminded people, could satisfy your curiosity and provide a new focus.

As Mars is hotfooting it through your career zone, you may feel quite thrilled as the results of your efforts start to show up, and things begin to fall into place. This can act as a catalyst for further developments as your confidence grows. Looking for companionship? Venus in Scorpio encourages you to liaise with those who share your passions for a hobby or the arts, Cancer.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

This is a day to roll your sleeves up and get things done. If you’ve domestic or other regular tasks to get on with, you can complete them quickly, leaving you time for more enjoyable activities. Keen to get a project or business idea off the ground. If you apply yourself, everything may fall into place, and soon enough, you’ll be up and running. Exercise might be more enjoyable too.

Your motivation can be at a premium, and your enthusiasm for life catching, so that others could find themselves swept along. There is much you can accomplish if you put your mind to it, but your focus may not be so much on regular tasks, as striking out into the unknown and making new discoveries.

You might enjoy pushing yourself and moving beyond your usual limits.

Pouring energy into household tasks or plans can see you accomplishing much, and it might be a way to combine a workout with getting your place shipshape, especially if you have some energy to spare. But today’s lively Moon/Mars aspect, could give you the impetus to get on with something that you’d meant to make a start on for some time, and this can be so satisfying.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Whatever you have on your plate at home or at work, your mind may be elsewhere, longing to take on a challenge that is unlike anything you have tried before. The more obstacles you face, the more eager you might be to get stuck in. Looking to travel? You could be keen to go somewhere completely different, where exciting new discoveries can be made.

Ready for a brainstorming session? If you need creative ideas or solutions, then a dynamic line-up in your sector of planning and communication, can find you ready to connect with like-minded people and get valuable feedback. You may be delighted at what emerges, and how sharing any concerns allows fresh options into the mix. Now, you just need to take some action Aquarius.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

You may be ready to tackle an issue that makes you both emotional and angry at the same time. If you do start talking about it then tears could flow, or other feelings emerge. If this is something you have no control over, then tune out and let it go. Whether you take action on it or release this matter, you’ll have a lot more energy to focus on more pressing matters.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

This can be a good time to invest in yourself, especially if you are looking to enhance your image.

With the Sun in a prominent position encouraging you to step out, feeling great could make the difference between going for those golden opportunities or not. Whether you want to improve your chances of getting a job or want to look good on social media, now is the time.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Thursday, November 26, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

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Ziggy

32

Thursday, November 26, 2020

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