Monday Nov 9, 2020

Monday, November 9, 2020

San Juan The

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Star

Nogales, with Armor On, Is Ready to Defend People’s Rights at the Capitol P5

Will Biden’s Promises to PR Fall Short?

Post-Election Concerns Become Reality as COVID-19 Cases Spike P3

PREPA Could Pay Over $100 Million More to LUMA P6

Observers: Election of 46th President Might Bring Good News, But Future of PROMESA and Status Change Depends on How the Congress Ends Up

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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Monday, November 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

GOOD MORNING

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November 9, 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.

Upturn in COVID-19 cases post-election week raises red flag in public health community

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Physicians & Surgeons Association: Puerto Rico is looking at 500 new cases daily

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

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fter the gatherings that took place during election week, confirmed cases of COVID-19 have gone up, and the public health community has raised concerns.

Physicians and Surgeons Association of Puerto Rico President Víctor Ramos said Sunday that “we’re probably at the worst moment of the pandemic” as coronavirus cases haven’t dropped off since early September.

“For two months, we were seeing that COVID-19 cases would neither increase nor decrease, which was not good because we want to see cases go down,” Ramos said. “However, last month [October] and this week, we increased from 200 cases per day to almost 500 cases per day. We were never at that level.”

As for political events prior to and including election day and afterwards, Ramos said that if you include activities such as political rallies, campaign closings, celebratory activities, and even the crowding at polling centers, they will have a toll on increasing COVID-19 cases.

“Although people behaved by maintaining physical distance and wearing their face masks, they were exposed for many hours, and some people got too close to greet and kiss others that they hadn’t seen for a while,” he said.

“Any activity, whether it is political or not, that promotes crowding will lead to infection.”

The pediatrician also told the Star that the case spikes have led to more hospitalizations and fewer available intensive care unit beds; however, the situation has led to there being more general hospital beds available because, he said, “more people fear going to hospitals.”

“People think that COVID-19 lives by itself, and all people think about is COVID, COVID, COVID, but people don’t see that the coronavirus lives within an environment,” Ramos said. “We are going to have [in hospitals] COVID-19 patients, patients with unbalanced chronic illnesses, and patients with other infectious diseases that are beginning to spread such as influenza, mycoplasma and dengue.”

Meanwhile, Cruz María Nazario, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico’s Graduate School of Public Health, said the local government faces an “impressively” similar issue to the one the United States is facing because “they copy everything, particularly the bad [from the States], and we have witnessed a critical upturn in cases as we face 3,000 cases per week.”

“On any other occasion, we would be saying that we are facing an enormous crisis, a gigantic public health issue, but I don’t know why there’s this attitude of staying silent from the government; they look like they don’t want to talk or expose themselves to uncomfortable questions,” Nazario said. “If you have from 3,000 to 4,000 cases per week, estimates made by other organizations show that there

Department of Health, in collaboration with the Municipal Case Investigation and Contact Tracing System, offered free drive-thru antigen tests to detect COVID-19 at the Buchanan toll on the José de Diego Expressway in Guaynabo. are 10 times more cases than what is reported, therefore, if there are 3,000 confirmed cases in a week, 30,000 people would be infected with COVID-19.”

The epidemiologist called for the island Department of Health to “do more molecular testing and release results swiftly in less than 24 hours” to prevent future spreading.

“The responsibilities of both the Health Department and the Puerto Rican government have not been questioned by anyone; they keep insisting that we, citizens, are the ones that should be responsible,” Nazario said. “And even though I do agree that we have to play our part, what I don’t agree with is that the Department exists only to release numbers every day.”

Health Dept. provides free drive-thru antigen tests at Buchanan toll Earlier in the day, the Department of Health, in collaboration with the Municipal Case Investigation and Contact Tracing System, offered free drive-thru antigen tests to detect COVID-19 at the Buchanan toll on the José de Diego Expressway in Guaynabo.

Health Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano said in a written statement that “the initiative is intended to impact asymptomatic people who are carriers of the virus without knowing it.”

“For this reason, the tests will be available to anyone who is interested in taking them and will be administered free of charge,” González Felciano said. “The effort will be replicated during the following weekends, at all tolls on the island.”

As for the executive order, whose current version reaches its deadline on Friday, Ramos told the Star that meetings are ongoing between Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced, the medical community and the economic sector.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

Biden’s promises to PR will fall short without congressional majority, observers say

By THE STAR STAFF

J

oe Biden’s election as the 46th president of the United States may bring good news to Puerto Rico but will not result in the island’s admission as a state or in changes to the federal Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), the law that created a bankruptcy process for the island, unless Democrats get a clear congressional majority, observers said Sunday.

“Those things he can do by executive order for Puerto Rico, he will do them, but things that require congressional approval will be difficult to do,” said John Mudd, a bankruptcy attorney.

While Democrats kept control of the House but with a smaller majority, they may only achieve a majority in the Senate only if they win two seats in a runoff election in Georgia to create an evenly divided upper chamber in which Vice President Kamala Harris would hold the tie-breaking vote.

The Senate is deadlocked in a 48-48 split.

“Puerto Rico’s admission as a state is possible if Democrats get the Senate,” former Puerto Rico Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock, one of the most senior Democrats in the local chapter of the Democratic Party and a superdelegate

at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.

McClintock as well as Mudd expect no changes to the federal PROMESA law as the Republican-controlled Senate would be reluctant to give them the green light.

McClintock said governor-elect Pedro Pierluisi should expect a “more aggressive” Financial Oversight and Management Board if President Trump finally appoints three members to fill vacant positions and replace some of the current members.

In his platform for Puerto Rico, Biden promised to support efforts to more effectively address the debt burdens hampering Puerto Rico’s economy.

He also promised to reverse the policy of fiscal austerity imposed by the oversight board, support an audit of the debt, and ensure that low- and moderate-income people and pensioners are protected in any debt restructurings.

“Nothing that has to do with PROMESA will happen [with the GOP keeping control of the Senate],” Mudd noted.

Biden has pledged that Puerto Rico will receive the federal disaster reconstruction funding that it urgently needs to support the long-term recovery of Puerto Rico and increase its ability to withstand any future storms. Specifically, he will

Vice president-elect Kamala Harris and president-elect Joe Biden. accelerate access to promised reconstruction funding while ensuring transparency and accountability for public funds. Biden also promised to forgive disaster relief loans to Puerto Rico municipalities so they can recover faster. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has lent roughly $300 million to 76 Puerto Rican towns.

Biden has also said he will address historically low Medicare Advantage payment rates and their

consequences to the island’s health system by directing the secretary of Health and Human Services to develop and recommend payment reforms and enhancements to the program. He has also said he will ensure Puerto Ricans have adequate access to the Nutritional Assistance Program.

Biden has also promised to help improve Puerto Rico’s economy. Asked about the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) directive for Puerto Rico to find an alternate source of revenue to the 4 percent tax imposed on U.S. subsidiaries through Act 154, Mudd said he doubts the IRS will continue to allow companies to receive credit against their federal taxes because the estimated $2 billion paid by the firms “is more than what the federal government allocates for Medicare.”

Asked if Biden will follow President Trump’s policy of bringing manufacturing from China to Puerto Rico, McClintock said the policy of the island government will be to promote legislation introduced in Congress by Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González Colón.

He was referring to legislation that will bring manufacturing to Puerto Rico by promoting the job growth and capital investments in Distressed Zones.

Is it over? Pierluisi thanks supporters, Delgado concedes

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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overnor-elect Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia thanked his supporters Sunday for the votes that his candidacy received and emphasized his desire to work “in unity and in common cause for Puerto Rico.”

“These are times to unite wills and purposes, to face the promising future with the positivity that our island possesses. I receive this mandate from the people with great humility, but above all, with the commitment that I come to do the right thing, to give Puerto Rico the government of excellence that I promised them and that they deserve,” Pierluisi said in a written statement. “There are more causes that unite us than those that divide us, and I am betting that all of the elected leaders will have the political maturity necessary to work together for Puerto Rico. We do not have time to waste in everything we have to do for Puerto Rico to recover and move toward progress, and for that we will need everyone to achieve it.”

The pro-statehood leader thanked his electoral team for their work, stating that “my triumph is yours too.”

“I am infinitely grateful for all the commitment, professionalism and hard work that the electoral team has done to enforce the

right of each voter to cast their vote and have it counted,” Pierluisi said.

Popular Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate Carlos “Charlie” Delgado Altieri, meanwhile, conceded defeat Saturday night.

With 100 percent of the votes counted, Pierluisi, of the New Progressive Party (NPP), obtained 406,830 votes while Delgado received 389,896 -- a difference of 16,934 votes.

Since the difference between the two is greater than five percent, it will not be necessary to recount the votes.

“I congratulate the governor-elect of Puerto Rico, Pedro Pierluisi. I wish you every success in your new assignment,” Delgado said in a written statement. “The country needs consensus, dialogue and convergence so that we can face the great challenges of the future.

I thank all those people who gave me their trust, and honored me with their vote. Thank you for believing in me.”

Meanwhile, the governor-elect of Puerto Rico also celebrated Joe Biden’s triumph in the United States presidential election.

“Biden is an experienced and committed public servant who is going to lead our Nation forward. I will work closely with him and with Vice President Kamala Harris for the benefit of all Puerto Ricans,” the NPP president said.

“Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González and I have a mandate from the people who favored statehood with more than 52 percent of the votes [in last Tuesday’s statehood ‘Yes or No’ referendum] and we will fight together because that will must be respected.”

“Biden has already said he favors statehood for Puerto Rico because, like me, he is convinced that Puerto Ricans deserve the equal rights that we are entitled to as American citizens,” Pierluisi added. “We will have an ally of statehood and Puerto Rico in the White House.”

Preliminary certification of the 2020 general elections by officials from the State Elections Commission (SEC) began on Saturday night with the certification of the preliminary results, the SEC said in a written statement.

Governor Wanda Vázquez and governor-elect The final results and certification will Pedro Pierluisi emerge only after the general scrutiny or count

is conducted, which will begin next week.

Once the candidates are notified of the partial or preliminary results, if a count proceeds, they will have 72 hours to deliver a list of observers to the SEC. After 72 hours, the SEC may begin the count, regardless of whether the candidates submit the observer lists or not.

One of the main reasons for issuing preliminary certifications is to start the 72 hours that restrict or limit the start of a count, according to Articles 10.7 and 10.8 of the Puerto Rico Electoral Code of 2020.

Election night results are published in the Election Results Disclosure Section of the SEC website. Those results are preliminary.

“We emphasize that the final results are those that arise once the totality of the votes are counted in the scrutiny,” the SEC statement said.

“In the scrutiny, the … Hospital [early vote], the [provisional manual election day] Vote … and the [manual] InmateVote will be counted.”

Also part of the scrutiny are absentee and early votes by mail that arrive through the final day of the scrutiny with a postmark no later than Nov. 3, 2020, and early votes from ballots rejected by any electronic counting machine whose records could not be reconciled at the close of the event results, among others, the SEC said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

5

Mariana Nogales Molinelli aspires to be the people’s sword and shield CVM lawmaker-elect commits to safeguarding people’s rights at the Capitol

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

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fter years of watching out for citizens fighting for justice on the streets of Puerto Rico and safeguarding their civil rights, Citizens Victory Movement (CVM) at-large representative-elect Mariana Nogales Molinelli says she is committed to bringing the power of the people into the Puerto Rico Legislature.

“I have been congratulated by people who saw me at protests, people who I helped get out of police stations, people who I represented in cases; that makes me happy, it brings tears to my eyes because it is moving how that support translated into votes,” Nogales Molinelli said as she became the at-large House representative-elect with the third most votes in the 2020 general elections.

As for her campaign to bring the struggles from the island’s streets into the Legislature, the Puerto Rico Secular Humanists founder said the purpose is to work “for the defense of the people, of ensuring that people’s rights are not violated.”

“I will work with various initiatives, such as access to public information, [and] I will commit to making any legislative information or bills accessible as people have the right to acquire, examine and submit comments,” Nogales Molinelli said. “If the Legislature is stubborn and persists in maintaining secrecy, then I will take every step, either in court or any other forum, to broadcast that information.”

Nogales Molinelli said citizen participation in largescale legislation is key to promoting transparency.

“Recently, both the new Civil Code and Electoral Code were approved with little to no participation from

of Justice and other forums, and prosecute those who were responsible for the debt,” she said. “Later, in the assessment, it can be determined which parts of the debt are illegal, odious, or can be eradicated. But the people have the right to know, and the way the people can recognize it is through a debt audit.”

As for women’s rights and LGBTQIAP+ rights, Nogales Molinelli told the Star that she would re-evaluate the Women’s Advocate Office with other human rights organizations and create “another organism, that has yet to be named, that would be a human rights protection and advocacy organization jointly for the rights of women and the LGBTQIAP+ community.”

Meanwhile, the former 2016 resident commissioner candidate for the since dissolved Working People’s Party said other legislative bills that are on her drafting table CVM at-large representative-elect Mariana Nogales will focus on issues such as climate change, clean energy, sustainability, public transportation, urban revitalization Molinelli and environmental protection.

“We must recognize that we are exposed to climate the people. We have to make sure that citizen participation happens,” she said, adding that her office doors will change and we must evaluate and re-evaluate so much be open to citizens from all sectors. “I’m also committed current legislation, such as the Land Use Plan, since it was to speaking with both our legislative caucus members written in 2015 and didn’t anticipate the changes brought and legislators from other political parties to promote the after hurricanes Irma and Maria,” Nogales Molinelli said.

“We must make changes that have been overdue for depeople’s interests.”

Regarding corruption, Nogales Molinelli said a fo- cades and that we can’t take for granted because climate rensic public debt audit will be one of her main focuses change represents an increase in temperatures, in the as it has been the CVM’s mission since its foundation in intensity of tropical storms, in the sea level, and we might March 2019. Likewise, she said she will also confront the expect great effects in the next 50 years. This evaluation federal Financial Oversight and Management Board to also considers strengthening the Department of Natural protect public pensions and essential services such as the and Environmental Resources, which is vital for me.”

As for what’s next, the at-large legislator-elect said she University of Puerto Rico and the public school system.

“We have to know what happened, who were the ones will focus on advocating for earthquake-resistant public involved, who committed corruption and illicit activities. schools and ensure federal recovery funds “do not fall We know that the crimes of public officials do not [expire], into the hands of corruption so children can come back so we can always make those referrals to the Department to school safe and sound.”

CVM rips SEC’s ‘customary’ lack of transparency in certifying elections

By THE STAR STAFF

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itizen Victory Movement (CVM) Electoral Commissioner Olvín Valentín Rivera charged Sunday that the State Elections Commission (SEC) “lies” when certifying that all the votes were counted and awarding candidacies.

Valentín Rivera said the SEC’s practice when there are votes to be counted is to report polling stations at zero and then count them in the general vote count.

“The results that the State Elections Commission is certifying are simply false,” Valentín Rivera said in a written statement. “It is not true that 100 percent of the [polling stations] have been counted or closed. At the SEC there is a bad habit of closing schools as if there were no votes in them and then counting them during the general vote count. Just because that’s the practice historically doesn’t mean it’s a good one. This type of

action seriously damages the legitimacy and transparency of the electoral process in Puerto Rico.”

The CVM official also stated that in the case of the race for mayor of San Juan and that of House of Representatives District 3, where CVM candidate Eva Prados Rodríguez is fighting for a seat in the lower chamber, there are still thousands of votes to be counted.

“Here we are talking about 4,000 manually added votes missing and several polling stations missing from the count in which there could be thousands and thousands of votes, including, among them, many of those rejected by the machines on election day,” Valentín Rivera said.

The CVM electoral commissioner also said that, although these practices may have become custom at the SEC, now that the CVM is part of that entity, they will not allow it.

“Without a doubt, the actions of the SEC are part of

the usage and custom there,” Valentín Rivera said. “But the CVM was not in this body before. Now that we are, we are not going to allow it. That is why I refused to legitimize the certification of preliminary results with my signature.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

Ex-PDP presidents question Hernández’s proclaiming himself speaker of the House

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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ormer Popular Democratic Party (PDP) presidents Victoria Muñoz Mendoza and Héctor Luis Acevedo on Sunday questioned the actions of Rep. Rafael “Tatito” Hernández Montañez, who proclaimed himself speaker of the House with the support of a group of PDP legislators.

In a written communication, Muñoz Mendoza, a former senator, and Acevedo, a former mayor of San Juan, said “[t]he raison to be of political parties is to unite wills for collective causes beyond individual ones.”

“It is with the principle in mind of doing justice to the hope of others that the Popular Democratic Party was created and it was with this procedure that it directed a pilgrimage of progress and quality of life to the people who live in the fields and towns of Puerto Rico,” they said.

The former officials said the PDP offered “a powerful lesson to their two main political parties on November 3, 2020, taking from their candidacies and programs more than two-thirds of their votes.”

PDP Rep. Rafael “Tatito” Hernández “The honorable Popular Democratic Party president Charlie Delgado, with good judgment, called for introspection and evaluation of those results and instructed [party lawmakers] to suspend the processes of selecting the legislative leadership until the vote counting and internal discussion of what had hap-

pened concluded. Every day has its desire,” said the PDP leaders, who added that at the beginning of the discussion process on Friday a group of community representatives, even without being certified or having been summoned to select the legislative leadership as required by regulation, proceeded to challenge the party president and tried to proceed on its own account to proclaim leadership positions.

“We believe this act is contrary to the principles of this party, by putting positions above the causes that are our essence and estimating individual interests above collective ones,” the PDP leaders said. “This action deserves our strong repudiation and our call to regain respect for the institutions and values that give meaning to a political community.”

Muñoz Mendoza and Acevedo added that “our people categorically rejected this type of legislative action that weakens the people’s esteem for their institutions.”

“You have to value and understand the goals of this party and its loyalties to great causes over your own,” they said. “That generosity of understanding was the seed and the sowing that gave us life and will give us a future.”

PREPA could pay over $100 million more to LUMA if contract does not meet tax exemption requirements

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) may have to pay over $200 million and not $100 million in fees to LUMA Energy if the contract does not meet required tax exemptions.

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), which is already in bankruptcy to restructure $9 billion in debt, may have to pay $100 million more than what it currently pays to its transmission and distribution (T&D) administrator, LUMA Energy, if the management contract fails to include certain federal tax exemptions.

The contract with the private operator has to meet the requirements of the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Revenue Procedure 2017-13. That IRS provision contains a so-called safe harbor under which the IRS can conclude that a management contract does not result “in private business use of property financed with governmental tax-exempt bonds under the tax code or cause the modified private business use test

for property financed with certain qualified bonds to be met.”

To meet the safe harbor requirement, the 15-year term of the LUMA Energy contract “including all renewal options, must be no greater than the lesser of 30 years or 80 percent of the weighted average reasonably expected economic life of the managed property.”

It appears that the contract does not meet the requirement so far, according to information that came out during a recent PREPA meeting because the T&D system that is managed by LUMA is already too old.

Tomás Torres, the consumer representative on PREPA’s board, asked Wayne Stensby, LUMA Energy’s president and chief executive officer, about statements made by the law firm Nixon & Peabody in a legal opinion.

The law firm could not say whether the management contract was exempted from the requirements of Revenue Procedure 2017-13 because it needed the opinion of an engineering report to certify the economic life of the managed property.

Nixon & Peabody did say that the engineering firm selected to conduct the study must find the economic life span of the managed property is at least 19 years for the contract to be exempted from Revenue Procedure 2017-13.

After an exchange in which Stensby said he did not have the engineering report but would provide it at the official start of the contract, sometime next year, Torres replied that it would be too late by then.

Torres noted that under the management contract signed June 22, PREPA must pay LUMA Energy $100 million a year in addition to the management fees.

Section 3.9 of the document states the contract will

be construed to comply with Revenue Procedure 2017-13 but if that does not occur, the service fee must be adjusted by adding $7 million per month and the maximum incentive fee payable to LUMA will be adjusted by adding $1.3 million for a total of about $106 million a year.

That amount would be on top of the service fees, which are $70 million in the first year but will go up to $105 million in the fourth year of the 15-year contract.

That means Puerto Rico would be paying more than $200 million to LUMA Energy, Torres noted.

Whether PREPA will be able to afford the higher fees remains to be seen since the power utility is in bankruptcy.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

7

Biden, now president-elect, calls for end to ‘grim era of demonization’

By KATIE GLUECK and THOMAS KAPLAN

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oe Biden addressed the nation for the first time as presidentelect Saturday night, delivering a message of unity and trying to soothe the extraordinary divisions that defined the last four years in American politics.

“Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now,” he said.

In remarks before a drive-in audience in Wilmington brimming with longtime friends from Delaware, his home state, he directly appealed to the tens of millions of Americans who backed President Donald Trump’s reelection, seeking to make good on his central campaign promise of bringing the country together.

“For all those of you who voted for President Trump, I understand the disappointment tonight,” Biden, speaking at the conclusion of his third run for the presidency, said. “I’ve lost a couple times myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance. It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again.”

He added, “This is the time to heal in America.”

Biden’s optimistic speech, flecked with references to faith and American history, came 48 years to the day after he was first elected a senator from Delaware. He spoke from a flag-bedecked stage outside the Chase Center on the Riverfront, an event center near the Christina River, where he invoked themes that shaped his presidential campaign.

The message, as it was throughout the campaign, was rooted more in a sense of values than in an especially ideological viewpoint, an approach that helped him build a broad coalition throughout the campaign but will be tested in partisan Washington.

Yet Biden grew impassioned as he insisted that for all of the tensions in the country, Americans still wanted to see their leaders find common ground. He promised to bring steady leadership and experience to meet the staggering crises facing the nation, most prominently the coronavirus.

“What is our mandate?” he said. “I believe it’s this: Americans have called upon us to marshal the forces of decency, the forces of fairness, to marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time.”

Sen. Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, spoke first, telling voters that they had chosen “hope and unity, decency, science and, yes, truth.”

She invoked her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who came to the United States from India at the age of 19, and paid tribute to the women “who throughout our nation’s history have paved the way for this moment tonight.”

“While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she said. “Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”

In his 15-minute speech, Biden noted the history-making nature of Harris’ election, and he sketched out a vision for taking on the pandemic, which has gripped the nation and killed more than 237,000 people in the United States.

After a campaign in which he emphasized the importance of political compromise, he implored Republicans and Democrats to work together — although some in his party have viewed his

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), left, and then Vice President Joe Biden, right, enter the House Chamber before President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Jan. 12, 2016. outlook as outmoded and unrealistic in an age of deep political polarization.

And after running for the White House stressing the need to restore what he called “the soul of America,” he urged the country to come together.

“I pledge to be a president who seeks not to divide but unify,” Biden said at the outset of his speech, calling for togetherness.

Onlookers, some of whom had been waiting for hours to see him, sat on the rooftops of cars, waved red and blue glow sticks and leaned on their horns to demonstrate their support.

And the audience, Biden said, included a number of Delaware dignitaries — and, ever the former senator himself, he greeted several of them by name.

After he concluded, Biden, Harris and their families remained onstage — and some of them danced — as an elaborate fireworks and drone light show unfolded. “Biden,” “President Elect,” “46” and “Harris” flashed across the Wilmington sky.

Biden had already appeared outside the Chase Center once this past week, in the early hours of Wednesday, when in brief remarks he said he was “on track to win this election.” In the days that followed, he limited himself to short and measured public statements as he and his team waited for news organizations to call the race and many of his supporters grew anxious.

Before he spoke, Biden addressed his campaign staff in a private video call, during which he thanked them for their efforts and insisted on the importance of engaging Americans who had supported Trump.

“I would urge you to reach out, you know, that person who had that Trump sign in their lawn next door or down the street,” he told his team. “Reach out to them. Tell them: ‘This isn’t personal.

This is about getting together and restoring the basic values we’ve had for generations and generations here in America.’”

Biden also acknowledged the vast challenges confronting the nation and the huge responsibilities facing his team.

“The rest of the country is looking to us, the rest of the world is looking to us,” he said. “So we’re going to make sure that both the country is moving toward being united and the world that’s in disarray, the message is: America’s back.”

On Saturday, Biden spoke with former President Barack Obama, who congratulated him, as well as with the top Democrats in Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York. At one point, Schumer held up his phone so Biden could hear people cheering for him in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile, Biden’s advisers and allies were giving serious thought to the transition period, for which they have been planning for months.

Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a national co-chair of Biden’s campaign and a possible future member of Biden’s administration, made clear that combating the virus would be a top priority of the president-elect’s in the coming days.

“He has a chance to take a breath, but I’m not sure that he will, because I know he’s so concerned about COVID,” Richmond said. “He’ll be up in the morning working on America’s COVID response.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

‘A long time coming’: Black women celebrate Harris’ ascension

A group of women danced in Atlanta on Saturday after the announcement of the results in the presidential election

By RICK ROJAS, AUDRA D.S. BURCH, EVAN NICOLE BROWN and RICHARD FAUSSET

W

hen Yolanda Latimore, the owner of a Macon, Georgia, advertising agency, makes a list of those who showed her how to survive and thrive as a Black woman, she begins with her 91-yearold grandmother, Clarise Bonner, a former sharecropper who lacked a formal education yet ran a small business while also raising a family.

But on Saturday, Latimore, 46, was making room in her personal pantheon for Kamala Devi Harris, the running mate of President-elect Joe Biden. Soon, Harris will become the first woman — and the first Black woman — to become vice president of the United States.

At a time when a range of racial and gender barriers have been shattered by earlier trailblazers, Latimore said that Harris’ ascension to the highest levels of power was particularly important, giving Black girls everywhere a reminder that anything is possible.

“I know that it won’t solve all problems, but it definitely will raise the spirit and the drive of Black women,” Latimore said, adding that she was “just so glad to see something like this happen.”

Along with the jubilance and celebrations across the nation Saturday over the victory of the Biden-Harris ticket, Harris’ pathbreaking course prompted explosions

of joy within explosions — of pride, elation, relief and a sense of hard-fought accomplishment. The sentiment was shared by women generally, and Black women specifically.

“This has been a long time coming — a woman of color, an HBCU representative,” said Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, who has known Harris for about a decade, referring to historically Black colleges and universities; Harris graduated from Howard University, perhaps the most vaunted of them.

Bottoms added that the achievement was “particularly poignant” coming at the end of a year that has included the continuing coronavirus pandemic, the killing of George Floyd and other Black men and women during encounters with the police, and a national reckoning over systemic racism and police brutality.

“Communities of color have been figuratively and physically under attack,” she said. “I think that representation is what this country needs. It is more important than ever that we have representation at the White House, at the table.”

Mayor London Breed of San Francisco echoed that sentiment.

“It’s pretty incredible,” she said Saturday.

“And I am so excited not just because Kamala Harris is my friend, but because of what she represents for women in general and what this means in terms of our role in politics and how women — especially women of color — are

finally being taken seriously.”

The moment was also indelible for those who have known Harris, 56, for much of her life. Hers is a life that began in the Bay Area, as the child of immigrant academics from India and Jamaica, and included a high school experience in Montreal, Quebec; college amid the fertile Black intellectual loam of Howard, in Washington, D.C.; and a long, complex political career both on the West Coast and in the Senate.

Carole Porter, a close friend who hosted two fundraisers for Harris during the primary race last year, lived around the corner from Harris’ childhood home in Berkeley, California. The girls — who first met at the neighborhood bus stop — rode the bus together each morning to a more affluent area. In 1970, Harris joined the second elementary school class in Berkeley to be desegregated by busing.

To pass the time, they played games like Miss Mary Mack and cat’s cradle and sang Jackson 5 tunes. “We didn’t know that we were in the middle of this social moment,” said Porter, who remembered Harris as studious and disciplined. “We just knew we had to get up really early for school and it was a long way from home.”

By high school, they had lost touch.

They later reconnected while Harris was a student at Hastings College of the Law at the University of California in San Francisco.

Porter, now 56 and a health care information technology team leader who lives in Richmond, California, learned that Harris had officially become the vice president-elect in a text from a mutual friend. “It’s a wrap,” it read, in part.

“I started to cry — I immediately thought of her mother, Shyamala,” Porter said, referring to Shyamala Gopalan Harris, an Indian immigrant who died of cancer in 2009. “I thought of the West Berkeley flatlands, this small, immigrant, people of color, redlined neighborhood we grew up in.”

“I thought of Shyamala going to work as a researcher and denied opportunities,” Porter said, but she “continued to fight.”

“Out of all of that,” Porter continued, “we all rose, and Kamala rose to become the vice president of the United States. She came from this fertile, activist environment. But the thing I want people to understand is the work it took to be where she is. She went against the tide. She had people who did not want her voice in the room. She had people shutting the door. And look where she is now.”

After the presidential race was called, Carol Moseley Braun, 73, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate, found herself making a mental list of the Black women who had come before Harris. They were Black women who conquered firsts: Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisholm, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Barbara Jordan. Then, she began to pray.

“I thanked the Lord for this dream come true,” said Braun, a Democrat who was elected in 1992 to represent Illinois in the Senate. “I believe Joe Biden is exactly what the country needs to heal, and Kamala as his second-incommand is the exactly the right person to help him. There were so many women who paved the way for this to happen, so many who sacrificed, so many shoulders.”

In Atlanta on Saturday, a celebration was underway on Auburn Avenue, the traditional and spiritual heart of the city’s African American community. It sits beneath a towering mural of John Lewis, the pioneering civil rights leader who represented Congress for 33 years before his death in July. Some rode up on bicycles and toasted glasses of champagne.

Others broke into song.

“It’s opened so many doors for so many little girls who feel like they have been silenced or told they couldn’t be who they are,” said Nikema Williams, who has been elected to succeed Lewis, as she stood in a parking lot below the mural. “So as a Black woman in politics, this means the world.”

Of Lewis, Williams said: “I know that he is somewhere doing a happy dance.”

Harris, like Williams, is also a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Soon, two dozen other sorority members formed a circle under the mural and burst into one of their sorority’s signature songs: Hearts that are loyal And hearts that are true By merit and culture We strive and we do Things that are worthwhile ...

Charisma Deberry, a spokeswoman for the Omega Omicron Omega chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha, in San Diego, said Harris’ victory “validates the American dream for me.”

“Throughout my life, I’ve always been teased for being ‘bossy,’ assertive and ‘talking white,” Deberry said, “because I had big goals and vision for my life. Today, I am proud to be a bossy Black woman. Just like the vice president of the United States, Sen. Kamala Harris.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

9

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Biden’s win, House losses, and what’s next for the left

By ASTEAD W. HERNDON

F

or months, Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez has been a good soldier for the Democratic Party and Joe Biden as he sought to defeat President Donald Trump.

But on Saturday, in a nearly hourlong interview shortly after Biden was declared the winner, Ocasio-Cortez made clear the divisions within the party that animated the primary still exist. And she dismissed recent criticisms from some Democratic House members who have blamed the party’s left for costing them important seats. Some of the members who lost, she said, had made themselves “sitting ducks.�

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

We finally have a fuller understanding of the results. What’s your macro takeaway?

Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore. But whether we’re going to pick ourselves up or not is the lingering question. We paused this precipitous descent. And the question is if and how we will build ourselves back up.

We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues. We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.

But we also learned that progressive policies do not hurt candidates. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also

know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.

To your first point, Democrats lost seats in an election where they were expected to gain them. Is that what you are ascribing to racism and white supremacy at the polls?

I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating DCCCrun campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns.

Some of this is criminal. It’s malpractice. Conor Lamb spent $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election. I don’t think anybody who is not on the internet in a real way in the year of our Lord 2020 and loses an election can blame anyone else when you’re not even really on the internet.

And I’ve looked through a lot of these campaigns that lost, and the fact of the matter is if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fundraising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the

week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. And not a single one of these campaigns were firing on all cylinders.

Continues on page 10

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Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke outside her campaign office in the Bronx on Election Day.

10

Monday, November 9, 2020

insurgents, you would think that you may want to use some of those firms. But instead, we banned them. So the DCCC banned every Well, Conor Lamb did win. So what are single firm that is the best in the country at you saying: Investment in digital advertising digital organizing. and canvassing are a greater reason moderate The leadership and elements of the Democrats lost than any progressive policy? party — frankly, people in some of the most These folks are pointing toward Repuimportant decision-making positions in the blican messaging that they feel killed them, party — are becoming so blinded to this right? But why were you so vulnerable to anti-activist sentiment that they are blinding that attack? themselves to the very assets that they offer.

If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not I’ve been begging the party to let me on the internet, if your main points of reliance help them for two years. That’s also the damn are TV and mail, then you’re not running a thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how election, I offered to help every single swing anyone could be making ideological claims district Democrat with their operation. And when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign. every single one of them, but five, refused my Our party isn’t even online, not in a help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing real way that exhibits competence. And so, district people that I helped secured victory yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, or are on a path to secure victory. And every because they weren’t even on the mediums single one that rejected my help is losing. where these messages were most potent. Sure, And now they’re blaming us for their loss. you can point to the message, but they were So I need my colleagues to understand also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks. that we are not the enemy. And that their base There’s a reason Barack Obama built an is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black entire national campaign apparatus outside Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for All of the Democratic National Committee. And is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate winning an argument. It’s that if they keep or continue that, we lost House majorities. going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re Because the party — in and of itself — does just setting up their own obsolescence. not have the core competencies, and no What is your expectation as to how amount of money is going to fix that. open the Biden administration will be to If I lost my election, and I went out the left? And what is the strategy in terms and I said: “This is moderates’ fault. This is of moving it? because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on I don’t know how open they’ll be. And Medicare for All.” And they opened the hood it’s not a personal thing. It’s just, the history of the party tends to be that we get really excited about the grassroots to get elected. And then those communities are promptly abandoned right after an election.

I think the transition period is going to indicate whether the administration is taking a more open and collaborative approach, or whether they’re taking a kind of icing-out approach. Because Obama’s transition set a trajectory for 2010 and some of our House losses. It was a lot of those transition decisions — and who was put in positions of leadership — that really informed, unsurprisingly, the strategy of governance.

What if the administration is hostile?

If they take the John Kasich view of who Joe Biden should be? What do you do?

Well, I’d be bummed, because we’re going to lose. And that’s just what it is. These transition appointments, they send a signal.

They tell a story of who the administration credits with this victory. And so it’s going to Joseph R. Biden Jr. speaking on Friday. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said his relationship be really hard after immigrant youth activists helped potentially deliver Arizona and Nevada. with the party’s progressives would hinge on his actions.

From page 9

on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election? They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.

Is there anything from Tuesday that surprised you? Or made you rethink your previously held views?

The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realizing what work we have to do.

We need to do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country. Because if we keep losing white shares and just allowing Facebook to radicalize more and more elements of white voters and the white electorate, there’s no amount of people of color and young people that you can turn out to offset that.

But the problem is that right now, I think a lot of Dem strategy is to avoid actually working through this. Just trying to avoid poking the bear. That’s their argument with defunding police, right? To not agitate racial resentment. I don’t think that is sustainable.

There’s a lot of magical thinking in Washington, that this is just about special people that kind of come down from on high.

Year after year, we decline the idea that they did work and ran sophisticated operations in favor of the idea that they are magical, special people. I need people to take these goggles off and realize how we can do things better.

If you are the DCCC, and you’re hemorrhaging incumbent candidates to progressive

The San Juan Daily Star It’s going to be really hard after Detroit and Rashida Tlaib ran up the numbers in her district.

It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them or even acknowledge their turnout.

If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.

You are diagnosing national trends.

You’re maybe the most famous voice on the left currently. What can we expect from you in the next four years?

I don’t know. I think I’ll have probably more answers as we get through transition, and to the next term. How the party responds will very much inform my approach and what I think is going to be necessary.

The last two years have been pretty hostile. Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.

Is the party ready to, like, sit down and work together and figure out how we’re going to use the assets from everyone at the party?

Or are they going to just kind of double down on this smothering approach? And that’s going to inform what I do.

Is there a universe in which they’re hostile enough that we’re talking about a Senate run in a couple years?

I genuinely don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to be in politics. You know, for real, in the first six months of my term, I didn’t even know if I was going to run for reelection this year.

Really? Why? It’s the incoming. It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy. When your own colleagues talk anonymously in the press and then turn around and say you’re bad because you actually append your name to your opinion.

I chose to run for reelection because I felt like I had to prove that this is real. That this movement was real. That I wasn’t a fluke. That people really want guaranteed health care and that people really want the Democratic Party to fight for them.

But I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

11

For millions deep in student loan debt, bankruptcy is no easy fix

By RON LIEBER and TARA SIEGEL BERNARD

W

ith two mortgages, three children and $83,000 in student loan debt, the financial strain finally became too much for George Johnson and Melanie Raney-Johnson.

New bills kept piling up: The couple had to buy another car when Johnson wrecked one in a snowstorm, but their insurance didn’t fully pay off the damaged vehicle. Old debts never seemed to get any smaller, either: A mortgage modification they spent months working on fell through when the bank lost their paperwork.

And their student debt, an albatross born of aspiration, grew heavier each month.

Bankruptcy was the only way out.

“It was not an easy decision,” Raney-Johnson said of filing for bankruptcy in 2011. “It was a feeling of despair, for sure.”

Bankruptcy gives more than 700,000 debtors a fresh start every year. Bills for credit cards and medical expenses can be wiped away by a few strokes of a judge’s pen, and debts that don’t vanish are reduced.

But student loan debts don’t go away as easily. For decades, politicians have slowly made them harder to discharge, while differing standards in courts across the country mean debtors’ chances can depend on where they live.

The few debtors who attempt it are subjected to a morality play unlike anything else in the world of personal finance: so-called adversary proceedings, where they must lay themselves bare in court as opposing lawyers question how much they pay for lunch or give to their church.

The Johnsons tried anyway. They had borrowed about $45,000 for Johnson’s degree in sociology at the University of Saint Mary in Kansas and Raney-Johnson’s pursuit of a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Davis. Unable to pay, they had received permission to put off their payments, but their balance nearly doubled as interest charges continued to pile up.

Johnson lost his job after they filed for bankruptcy and, unable to afford a lawyer, Raney-Johnson prepared their case. She remembers how she felt when they arrived at the Robert J. Dole Federal Courthouse in Kansas City, Kansas, on a sunny September day seven years ago.

“My heart was beating, and I was sweating,” said Raney-Johnson, now in her mid-40s and a billing supervisor for a federal agency.

In 2015, the year the Johnsons got their ruling, 884,956 personal bankruptcy cases flowed through the courts. Only 674 sought to discharge student debt, according to a recent analysis by Jason Iuliano, assistant law professor at Villanova University.

The New York Times reviewed dozens of cases in which a judge issued a published opinion — the

Noelle DeLaet, who left school with $110,000 in debt, in Lincoln, Neb., on Oct. 16, 2020. DeLate says she has sent out hundreds of resumes but couldn’t get a better-paying job.

Bankruptcy Class of 2015 — to understand the pains and payoffs five years later. Some debtors are on a better course. But for others, the struggles never went away — or came back after they thought they were free.

Rising costs, rising debts Bankruptcy begins with debt, and student loans are the second-biggest form of household debt in the United States. More than 43 million borrowers hold over $1.6 trillion in student loans, a sum that has more than tripled in 13 years. It exceeds what Americans owe on credit cards or auto loans and trails only mortgages.

Sixty-two percent of students who graduated from nonprofit colleges in 2019 had student loan debt, according to an Institute for College Access & Success analysis. Their average balance was $28,950 — not including borrowing by their parents.

Many struggle mightily to pay: Before the government’s coronavirus relief efforts paused federal student loan payments, 7.7 million borrowers were in default, and nearly 2 million others were seriously behind.

The solution has been a public-policy patch job.

About 8 million additional borrowers use incomedriven repayment plans, which can be challenging to enter. And while the plans lower payments, borrowers accrue interest on the unpaid difference. The debt is eventually forgiven — usually after 20 or 25 years — but the forgiven amount is taxable income.

A related program forgives the federal student loan

debts of public-service workers, tax free, after 10 years, but it has been deeply troubled. Borrowers have made payments for years only to learn they were in the wrong kind of payment plan. It got so bad that Congress had to create a separate pot of money to try to fix it.

The election could give momentum to a change: President-elect Joe Biden — who supported a 2005 law that made private student loans harder to discharge — has vowed to change the loan rule back if elected.

But few Republicans have voiced support for a plan to change bankruptcy rules. A House bill has one Republican co-sponsor, Rep. John Katko of New York, but the Senate’s version, led by Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, has only Democratic support.

All that student debt poses a problem. Its weight, experts say, has macroeconomic effects, dragging on homeownership and small-business formation. But the fallout goes beyond simple economics.

There is also a mental toll.

‘No way out’ Noelle DeLaet earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 2008 — the teeth of the Great Recession. She tacked on another year for a degree in English to make herself more attractive to employers. Perhaps in publishing, she thought.

She left school with $110,000 in debt: roughly $27,000 from the federal government and the rest in private loans co-signed by her mother. The $810 monthly bill, set to climb when the payment plan on one private loan expired, soon overwhelmed her.

Continues on page 12

An undated photo provided Noelle DeLaet shows her at left at her high school graduation with her mother, who was also pursued by creditors over her daughter’s student loan payments.

12

Monday, November 9, 2020

From page 11 DeLaet, now 34, landed in the child welfare field as a foster care review specialist in Lincoln, Nebraska — rewarding but not lucrative. She sent out hundreds of résumés for better-paying jobs and pleaded with her lenders to reduce her payments. Soon, the creditors started in on her mother and put her on the verge of bankruptcy, too.

DeLaet’s breaking point came in May 2012 when she ran up against the $4,000 limit on her credit card while trying to buy a burrito at a Mexican grocery. She felt so helpless at times that she considered suicide.

“I looked all over Google for some sort of support group for others going through this,” DeLaet said. “I felt like there was no way out.”

When DeLaet squared off in court against her student-loan creditors, they quibbled with the $12 she spent each month on recycling. She should have tried harder for a promotion, they argued. Or moved somewhere else for more money.

Judge Thomas Saladino bristled at that idea. In his opinion, he wrote that she lived in the state’s secondlargest city, “as good a place as any to seek a betterpaying job.”

The judge discharged about $119,000 in private loans, and an additional $23,000 was forgiven by one of her lenders. But her $27,000 in federal loans stuck: She’s paying those back through an income-driven repayment plan costing about $260 a month. Because she works at a nonprofit, her debt should eventually disappear via the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

For DeLaet, the process was worth it: She has married her boyfriend, had two children and bought a home. Her mother is an “amazing” grandmother, she said, although they still cannot discuss the past.

“It is an untouchable subject,” she said.

Rumors and rules The transformation in the bankruptcy rules began in 1976, with unfounded rumors.

A handful of legislators claimed to have heard about a parade of young doctors and lawyers who were trying to game the system and shed their debts while embarking on lucrative careers. The lawmakers toughened the rules, largely preventing borrowers from seeking a discharge within five years of graduation. The rules only got tougher over the next three decades.

Borrowers must show that their student loans are an “undue hardship” — a standard interpreted differently depending on where you live. Some judicial circuits, including those in Nebraska, where DeLaet filed, have the judge review a “totality of the circumstances” for the debtor and make a decision.

Other jurisdictions employ a less flexible standard, the Brunner test, named for the case that established it. Judges must answer three questions affirmatively to discharge the debt. First, has the debtor made a goodfaith effort to repay the loans? Second, is the debtor unable to maintain a minimal standard of living while making the payments? And, finally, is the debtor’s situation likely to persist?

But even jurisdictions that use the Brunner test

apply it differently. Some require the judge to find that the borrowers have a “certainty of hopelessness” in paying off their debt. Other jurisdictions do not.

Here, the Johnsons may have benefited from geographic good fortune.

‘Virtual lifetime servitude’ Lawyers for the Educational Credit Management Corp. — a nonprofit that collects defaulted loans on behalf of the federal government — examined how the Johnsons spent their $2,100 monthly income.

Every expense was scrutinized, including RaneyJohnson’s $35 monthly union dues, her $100 retirement contribution and $215 to repay loans from her retirement plan. None, the nonprofit’s lawyers argued, were necessary to maintain a “minimal standard of living.”

In his opinion, written more than a year after hearing arguments, Judge Robert Berger disagreed. He wrote that the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Kansas, had shifted from the most rigid interpretation of the three-part test, which he described as “an unfortunate relic.”

Berger wasn’t sure how the Johnsons were subsisting at all based on their income, and he said courts shouldn’t rely on “unfounded optimism” about a debtor’s future.

“It is disconsonant with public policy and bankruptcy’s fresh start to leave debtors in virtual lifetime servitude to student loans,” he wrote.

The judge discharged their student loans: $83,000 in debt, wiped away.

“I was ecstatic,” Raney-Johnson said of the moment she received the decision letter. “I probably said some curse words.”

The San Juan Daily Star Their good fortune didn’t last.

Back to haunt them In 2016, the Johnsons learned their loan discharge was being appealed by lawyers for Educational Credit Management Corp.

Paradoxically, they were worse off because their financial situation had improved: Raney-Johnson earned a promotion, and Johnson, now in his mid-40s like his wife, found a stable government job. A year after discharging their loans, Berger concluded that the couple could now “easily” maintain a minimal standard of living and reinstated their debt — which had ballooned even more because of interest charges.

Preparing to send their own children to college, the Johnsons requested another forbearance. Their balance continues to grow: It’s roughly $104,000 today.

Raney-Johnson took the final class she needed for her biology degree over the summer. But the debt was already piling up for the next generation. Their oldest, a college sophomore, expects to owe about $45,000 when she graduates. Their middle child, a high school senior, is looking at colleges now. Raney-Johnson said she and her husband, who are putting about $5,000 a year toward their daughter’s tuition, would try to remain in forbearance for now.

In August, they received a notice about an income-driven repayment plan, which would start out costing about $550 a month. From there, the cost depends on many factors, including job changes, raises and eligibility for forgiveness programs. If they’re able to get into the public service program, the debt could go away a decade after they start paying. If not, the bills could continue coming for about 20 years, right around the time the Johnsons will be trying to retire.

Pamela Monroe in Fayetteville, Ark., on Oct. 22, 2020. Monroe lives in a retirement community, where she found peace once she received a disability discharge for much of her student debt.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

13 Stocks

Small caps join market rally but pandemic could derail them U

.S. small caps joined in the broad market rally in the days after Election Day as investors priced in the likelihood of a divided Washington with Democrat Joe Biden president and Republicans maintaining their Senate majority.

Yet some investors and analysts warned that smaller companies may lose steam as the coronavirus pandemic shows no signs of slowing down. Chief among their concerns: that smallcaps will bear the brunt of aggressive measures Biden could adopt to combat the pandemic, without benefiting from a large stimulus bill if Senate Republicans block his efforts there.

Major networks on Saturday declared Biden the winner of the presidential election, offering some certainty after days of conflicting reports about who might run the White House next term.

Democrats could win more sway over the Senate if Georgia’s two contested seats go to a January runoff as is now expected. That might lead some investors to price back in the possibility of spending bills that would benefit small-caps.

However, smaller companies remain likely to bear the brunt of the pandemic, which is reaching record levels in the United States.

“A more aggressive response from a President Biden could be a risk for small caps,” said Sylvia Jablonski, managing director at Direxion.

“The best scenario for small caps is a full reopening of the economy with manageable levels of COVID before a vaccine comes out and some form of stimulus with a supportive Fed. The worst case is a lot less stimulus than we hoped for with a full shutdown or something close to it,” she said.

The Russell 2000 index of small cap stocks is up 4.8% since Nov. 3, compared with a 6% gain in the large cap S&P 500 index over the same time. Over the last five years, the Russell is up 37.1%, compared with a 67.2% jump in the S&P 500.

U.S. coronavirus cases surged by at least 129,606 on Friday, according to a Reuters tally, the third consecutive record daily increase as the virus sweeps the United States. Twenty of the 50 states reported record increases on Friday, the same as Thursday.

Spiking case counts in Europe have led to reinstatement of economic lockdowns and other restrictions there. France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands have announced new curbs, while U.K. lawmakers voted for a monthlong lockdown.

“The implications of the ongoing second COVID-19 wave in Europe and the third wave in the U.S. remains uncertain and the results of the vaccine trials by the end of this month remain an important catalyst,” analysts at Barclays wrote in a note Thursday, recommending that investors remain hedged against a steep decline in U.S. small-caps.

Small caps may remain volatile in the week ahead as Congress resumes negotiations on a stimulus bill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has balked at passing a $2.2 trillion bill supported by House Democrats, but said Nov. 4 that he was open to some support for state and local governments supported by Democrats and that there was a “need to do it by the end of the year.”

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14

Monday, November 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Biden victory brings sighs of relief overseas

By MARK LANDLER

F

or a world that held its breath as Americans went to the polls last Tuesday, the triumph of Joe Biden over President Donald Trump provoked many emotions, but above all, a profound sigh of relief.

As news of Biden’s victory reverberated from Europe and the Middle East to Asia and Latin America on Saturday, foreign leaders showered him with congratulations. Diplomats and commentators expressed gratitude, satisfaction and even jubilation that a new president would bring a much-needed return to normalcy — something that vanished alarmingly the day Trump took office.

“Welcome back America!” the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said in a Twitter message to Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, hailing Canada’s historic friendship with the United States, said, “I’m really looking forward to working together.” President Emmanuel Macron of France said, “We have a lot to do to overcome today’s challenges.

Let’s work together!” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany declared, “Our transAtlantic friendship is irreplaceable, if we want to overcome the great challenges of our time.”

For many world leaders, the importance of this election was as much about removing Trump as ushering in Biden.

The former vice president is a familiar fixture on the global stage, a centrist Democrat who is likely to restore the traditional habits and methods of American power abroad. Trump, who held no office before the presidency, has been a great disrupter, leaving alliances in tatters and casting into doubt the liberal international order that the United States helped build after World War II. “I feel optimistic for the first time in quite a long time,” said Simon Fraser, a former head of Britain’s Foreign Office.

“I’m not expecting a radical change in American foreign policy, but I do expect a change in body language and tone, and a shift away from unilateralism to collaboration with allies.”

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, did not wait for the race to be called, tweeting Friday evening, “The

“Basica Supporters of President Donald Trump gather outside the Pennsylvania Capitol in Harrisburg, Penn., after the Associated Press announced Joe Biden as President-elect, Nov. 6, 2020. world can be a dark place at times just now — but today we are seeing a wee break in the clouds.”

Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, whom Trump has treated as an ideological twin because of his populist tactics and championing of Brexit, issued a more restrained statement, but singled out Harris for her “historic achievement” as the first woman elected vice president.

“The U.S. is our most important ally,” he said, “and I look forward to working closely together on our shared priorities from climate change to trade and security.”

For allies in Europe, the relief was palpable. Trump backed Brexit because he saw it as a way to undermine the European Union. He levied tariffs on European exports, pulled out of the Paris climate accord and hectored France and Germany about not paying enough to support NATO. Even European leaders who tried to establish a rapport with Trump, like Macron, eventually gave up. Diplomats said these leaders hoped now to reset the trans-Atlantic relationship, particularly since Biden is expected to emphasize repairing frayed ties with Europe.

“You will be able to have a coherent conversation with a normal guy,” said Gérard Araud, a former French ambassa-

dor to Washington, who sat in on often discursive exchanges between Trump and Macron.

Araud said the arrival of Biden — a “nice guy, a smiling guy,” as he put it — would have emotional resonance for many Europeans, particularly older ones, who struggled to reconcile Trump’s unyielding “America First” vision with the generous, if imperfect, country they knew in the postwar period.

“They need to love America,” he said. “There is a sentimental relationship with America, which the Americans always underestimate.”

Few Europeans, however, believe that America will ever return to the intense global engagement that characterized it at the peak of its power. The deep divisions in American society and the close election suggested to some that the United States under a Biden presidency would remain inward-looking and preoccupied by domestic issues.

Le Monde, one of France’s leading newspapers, said in an editorial this week that “Trumpism” was a “lasting heritage of American politics,” not an accident or brief “interlude.”

For countries that prospered under Trump, Biden’s victory drew more muted reactions.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, a staunch ally of Trump who had a chilly relationship with his predecessor, Barack Obama, appeared to be waiting for official results before congratulating Biden.

There was no immediate reaction from Arab leaders like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, some of whom cultivated close ties with Trump.

Turkey’s strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaks with Trump about once a month — a relationship that has helped the country avoid sanctions and heavy fines. News organizations close to the Erdogan government have openly supported Trump and grew bitter at signs of his losing.

In Afghanistan, officials have been rooting for a Biden victory and the rollback of Trump’s policies, namely the gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops under a February peace agreement with the Taliban, signed in Qatar.

Iran, too, sought hope in a new beginning. Many Iranians rejoiced at the defeat of a president who devastated their economy with sanctions, escalated tensions to the brink of war and assassinated a top general.

“Trump and his followers are collapsing into history’s trash can while our Iran still stands,” said Ali Gholizadeh, a political analyst from Mashhad Tehran.

Not everybody welcomed the change.

In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has presided over what he has dubbed an “illiberal state,” the far-right Volner Party said it would rally in front of the U.S. Embassy in Budapest against “possible electoral fraud in the U.S. presidential election and in solidarity with President Donald Trump.”

Shortly after the American news media called the race for Biden, “Biden” became the top trending topic on Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-like platform.

Hu Xijin, the editor of China’s nationalistic tabloid Global Times, said Trump had “yet to show a gesture of preparing to accept defeat,” adding that “American society is now highly divided, which creates the soil for further political derailment.”

But Hu’s outlet, Global Times, tweeted soon after that “Biden’s win could offer some ‘breathing room’ for China-US relations.’”

The San Juan Daily Star

Coronavirus pandemic reaches new heights in Europe

By ALLISON McCANN and LAUREN LEATHERBY

M

ore Europeans are seriously ill with the coronavirus than ever before, new hospital data for 21 countries shows, surpassing the worst days in the spring and threatening to overwhelm stretched hospitals and exhausted medical workers.

New lockdowns have not yet stemmed the current influx of patients, which has only accelerated since it began growing in September, according to official counts of current patients collected by The New York Times. More than twice as many people in Europe are hospitalized with COVID-19 than in the United States, adjusted for population.

In the Czech Republic, the worst-hit nation in recent weeks, one in 1,300 people is currently hospitalized with COVID-19. And in Belgium, France, Italy and other countries in Western Europe, a new swell of patients has packed hospitals to levels last seen in March and April. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Doctors and nurses could be forced to choose which patients to treat, who would live and who would die,â&#x20AC;? Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the House of Commons on Monday. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am afraid the virus is doubling faster than we could ever conceivably add capacity.â&#x20AC;?

Many politicians, including Johnson, waited to impose full lockdowns, resisting early signs that the situation was getting worse.

Those delays may now be proving costly.

Countries across Europe are scrambling to find solutions. Swiss authorities approved deploying up to 2,500 military personnel to help hospitals handle rising infections in the country, while others like France have postponed non-emergency surgeries. And in Belgium, staff shortages have led some hospitals to ask doctors and nurses who have tested positive for the virus but who donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have symptoms to keep working.

Even if new control measures are effective in tamping down the spread of the virus, it may take weeks before they ease the burden on hospitals. People entering hospitals now may have been sick for a week or more after they were exposed.

Public health officials face additional hurdles during this wave.

Colder weather brings people indoors, which may make the virus easier to spread. And many people have tired of restrictions after enduring them for most of a year, complicating enforcement efforts.

In a tense exchange at the National Assembly on Tuesday, Olivier VĂŠran, Franceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s health minister, described French hospitals filling up and young patients in critical condition. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the reality,â&#x20AC;? VĂŠran said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;If you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to hear it, get out of here.â&#x20AC;?

Europeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s current wave of infection is due in part to the relative normalcy it experienced this summer. Unlike the United States, where the epidemic rose to a second peak in July and set records this month, travelers moved around Europe, college students returned to campus and many large gatherings resumed, all while the virus kept spreading.

There is hope that no place will experience the level of death that Bergamo, Italy; New York City and Madrid suffered this spring.

How the virus spreads is better understood now, and treatments have improved, giving sick people a better chance of survival. Testing has expanded across Europe, allowing countries to identify outbreaks earlier, when they are easier to contain.

But experts say increased COVID-19 patients mean increases in deaths, which have already started to pick up in many countries, are inevitable.

Monday, November 9, 2020

15

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Monday, November 9, 2020

As Hong Kong law goes after ‘black sheep,’ fear clouds universities down on political dissent, has even altered universities’ physical landscapes. hen Harry Wu, a professor of medical humanities at The University of Hong Kong recently dismantled a wall of the University of Hong Kong, gave a lesson last fall protest posters that students erected last summer. At the Chinese about doctors’ responsibilities in society, he focused University of Hong Kong, a thicket of barbed wire now envelops on a real-world example: the volunteer medics treating protest- a bridge where clashes had erupted between students and police. ers and police in the anti-government demonstrations convulsing Government officials have been open about their intent to the city. subdue the once-freewheeling campuses, even as they insist that But this semester, after China imposed a new national se- academic freedom remains intact. Hong Kong’s chief executive, curity law on Hong Kong, Wu hastily reworked his lesson plan. Carrie Lam, said last month that the city’s education secretary He included photographs of the protests in his lecture slides, but would meet with university presidents to discuss how they would did not explicitly address them. Before uploading the slides to roll out the law at their institutions.

“If they no longer have the ability to meet the requirea university portal after class, he deleted the photographs altogether. ments, then law enforcement of course will have to go in and “It’s right in front of your eyes, but you don’t have any op- resolve it,” she said.

The scrutiny is part of a wider campaign to control educaportunity to talk about this in class,” he said.

As China tries to quell the political upheaval in Hong Kong, tion. The Education Bureau has offered to review textbooks, and the city’s universities — ranked among the best in Asia, if not the last month it stripped a primary schoolteacher of his teaching world — have become potent symbols of the shrinking space for credentials for discussing Hong Kong independence. Beijing’s top dissent or even discussion. official in Hong Kong has called on the government to bolster Politically active professors have been fired or denied con- “patriotic education.”

The impact on universities could be particularly important tracts, in what they call retribution for their criticism of the government. Students are requesting more secure platforms for sub- to the government given their historical role as incubators of somitting assignments. Scholars are reconsidering whether Hong cial movements.

Kong is a viable home for their careers.

Student unions led the monthslong pro-democracy proEven seemingly politically neutral fields, like medicine, tests in 2014 known as Occupy Central. The idea of occupying have become potential minefields. Wu plans to move to Taiwan Central, the city’s business district, was proposed by a University next year. of Hong Kong law professor, Benny Tai, who was fired for his The new law, which gives Beijing the broad power to crack involvement in that movement this July.

Students were also among the most devoted protesters during last year’s demonstrations, which were sparked by a now abandoned bill that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China. Two of the most violent confrontations between protesters and police unfolded on college campuses, including a two-week siege at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Academics are increasingly worried about Beijing’s influence.

Even before this year, professors who supported democracy were denied promotion. In late 2019, the government retracted $200 million in funding for three universities, which one of the schools’ leaders said was retribution for student involvement in the protests.

The security law, enacted this summer, specifically orders Students at the University of Hong Kong, where a wall the government to increase supervision over universities. Lam of protest posters that students erected last summer was has promised to root out “black sheep” who “bring politics into recently dismantled. the classroom.”

By VIVIAN WANG

W

“The message is loud and clear that the government is watching what the universities are doing,” said Johannes Chan, the former dean of the University of Hong Kong law school.

The result is a pervasive air of suspicion. As some faculty and students feel increasingly observed, they themselves have turned a more distrustful eye on their institutions.

More than 4,000 people signed a petition last month opposing the University of Hong Kong’s selection of two professors from Tsinghua University in Beijing for top administrative posts, citing fears the appointments would erode academic independence. They pointed to a Tsinghua webpage that listed one of the nominees as a Communist Party member, which was scrubbed after media inquiries.

A University of Hong Kong official called the allegations unsubstantiated.

The coronavirus pandemic has heightened the unease by forcing most classes to be held online. Some students and professors worry the format leaves them vulnerable to surveillance.

When Chow Po Chung, a professor of political philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, gave a recent online talk on the philosopher John Rawls’ book, “A Theory of Justice,” none of the several hundred attendees turned their cameras on. Many used false names.

A student asked if she could submit a paper to him directly, rather than uploading it to a portal used to detect plagiarism. She said she didn’t know if the portal was secure.

While he believed it was, he has concerns of his own. In previous years he has taught a class that explored the feasibility of secession, drawing on Quebec or Scotland. Now he wonders whether those conversations might be forbidden.

“Before, you thought of this as an academic discussion,” he said. “It didn’t have that kind of meaning.”

The sensitivities can cut both ways in this highly polarized atmosphere. Some academics described fears of offending students with different political views.

Petula Ho, a professor of social work at the University of Hong Kong, said she found it difficult to offer critiques — even supportive ones — of the protest movement. She said students had castigated her for discouraging clashes with police.

Some professors have looked outside the classroom to teach more freely. Since being fired, Tai has begun hosting private talks on how to defend the rule of law.

“If you do not allow people to talk about these sensitive concepts in universities, in schools, then students will not just learn from schools and formal curriculums,” he said. “What we can do is to use social media, civil society, to continue the work.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

17

‘It’s like falling in love’: Israeli entrepreneurs welcomed in Dubai

By ISABEL KERSHNER

F

or years, Israeli entrepreneurs slipped in and out of the United Arab Emirates incognito, traveling on second passports or doing business through third parties.

So when more than two dozen Israeli hightech executives turned up in Dubai recently, it was hard to miss them. Chatting away in Hebrew, they traipsed across the marbled expanses of the Dubai Mall and up to the VIP observation deck atop the iconic Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.

It had been less than six weeks since the Emirates and Bahrain, another Gulf Arab country, signed agreements to normalize relations with Israel and open up embassies. But this high-profile delegation of Israeli innovators was making a conspicuous entrance even before direct flights and other formal protocols had been established.

Their visit was an early outgrowth of a courtship between two sides that have been adversaries — at least publicly — for decades.

But the speed with which the once-covert relationship burst into the open surprised even veteran insiders: The rancor of more than seven decades of Arab-Israeli conflict seemed to melt away in a matter of days.

When the Israeli executives delivered their pitches to major investors from Abu Dhabi, the Emirati capital, in a plush hotel ballroom late last month, the two sides clicked. The Emiratis sat attentively at round tables in gleaming white robes and headdresses, listening to presentations about cybersecurity and artificial intelligence and mingling during breaks.

To the amazement of the Israelis, the Emiratis seemed most interested in a presentation by Taly Nechushtan, chief executive of Innovopro, a food tech company that extracts a plant-based protein from chickpeas.

“Who’d have thought?” Nechushtan said afterward, amused to have caused such a stir with a regional staple that is the main ingredient of hummus. But the Israelis had arrived at a moment when the coronavirus pandemic had disrupted trade and exposed one vulnerability of the United Arab Emirates: It imports up to 90% of its food.

“I think we were all hungry,” quipped Abubaker Seddiq Al Khoori, chief executive of investment house Abu Dhabi Capital Group, adding that the vegan food sector fit well with his group’s investment strategy.

The Emirati investors also showed keen

Erel Margalit, an Israeli venture capitalist and former lawmaker, meets with Arif Amiri, the chief executive of a Dubai trade hub in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Oct. 27, 2020.

Speaking on television in visionary terms, Margalit said that after London, Paris and New York, the place Israeli entrepreneurs most longed to reach was their own region.

“We are hoping to be able to do together something that is grand,” he added.

Margalit, the founder and chairman of JVP, a Jerusalem-based venture capital fund, had chartered a private plane from Tel Aviv to Dubai and filled it with businesspeople and reporters for the four-day visit.

His entourage included executives from 13 of the fund’s hottest portfolio companies, most of whom were visiting Dubai for the first time. Some were veterans of elite intelligence and technological units in the Israeli military.

On the flight over, he described the Emirates as a potential gateway to vast new markets with billions of people. Beyond the potential for investment of Emirati oil riches in Israeli companies, he envisaged a deeper partnership of Israel’s cutting-edge technology with the Emiratis’ knowledge and reach based on a long history of doing business from the Middle East to Africa and South Asia.

Once they arrived, it quickly became apparent that the Israeli delegation and the Emiratis were well-matched in terms of ambition and enterprise.

A welcome letter slipped under the hotel room doors of the Israeli guests bore the Hebrew greeting “Shalom aleichem.” Signed by the local chairman of the hotel’s ownership, it also invited them to be in touch to explore business opportunities together.

interest in a sensor presented by Yehonatan Ben owned Dubai TV to appear as a guest on “MesHamozeg, the founder of Agrint, an agriculture sage for Peace,” a program aired in Arabic and intelligence company. The sensor “listens” to English, and anchored by Youssef Abdulbari, palm trees and allows early detection of wee- a popular presenter. It was filmed against a vils that can eventually destroy the trees from panoramic backdrop of the Dubai and Tel Aviv skylines. the inside.

Abdulbari said off-camera that it was the The United Arab Emirates has more than 40 million date palms, about a third of the world’s first time they had hosted an Israeli.

“You can say it’s like falling in love,” Abtotal. In a promising sign of future cooperation, a potential client invited Ben Hamozeg, whose dulbari said, describing the buzz in the studios sensor has been under testing for a year in the and the intriguing sense of novelty.

Emirates through an American subsidiary, to visit his private farm.

Another of the Emirati investors, Mohamed Mandeel, chief operating officer of Abu Dhabi’s Royal Strategic Partners group, said he felt a sense of kinship with the Israelis. He recounted how he had taken a DNA test and found a match for his rare Babylonian gene in Tel Aviv.

“If we set aside the religious ideologies and 70 years fueled by conflict, wars and the media, we end up with human beings,” he said in an interview. “We share the same food, the same DNA, the same look,” he added, describing the Israelis as “cousins.”

Dazzled by the skyscrapers of Dubai rising up, Las Vegas-like, from the desert and warmed by the friendly embrace, the Israelis said the encounter felt like a dream come true, unlike any they had experienced in the Arab world before.

Erel Margalit, the Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit, an Israeli venture capitalist and former lawmaker, arrives in Dubai, and former lawmaker who led the delegation, United Arab Emirates, Oct. 25, 2020. was invited to the studios of the government-

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Monday, November 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Victory for Joe Biden, at last

By THE NYT EDITORIAL BOARD

H

aving peered into the abyss of autocratic nationalism, the American people have chosen to step back from the brink. The ballot counting will continue for a few days yet, but the math is what it is: Joe Biden will have the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, and likely many more. President Donald Trump’s four-year assault on our democratic institutions and values will soon end.

The contest generated intense passions. In a year marked by the incalculable loss of life and the economic devastation of a pandemic, Americans turned out to vote in numbers not seen for generations, starting weeks before Election Day. Trump still knows how to draw a crowd — albeit not always to his advantage. In the end, it was Biden who captured more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history, while Trump captured the second-most votes in U.S. history.

The tally comes with disappointment on both sides: for Biden supporters, who hoped for a more resounding repudiation of Trumpism and for a Senate ready to enact their agenda, and for Trump

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Joe Biden, after a presidential campaign event in Gettysburg, Pa., Oct. 6, 2020. Mr. Biden has made clear he wants to work across the aisle. That is his nature and his political brand. supporters, who hoped for another four years and to chasten their critics. Fortunately for America, Biden promises to be a president for both sides — a welcome shift from a leader who has spent his tenure dividing the electorate into perceived fans and enemies.

While the coming weeks will most likely bring unexpected moves and more dangerous disinformation from Trump, it is worth taking this moment to raise a glass and breathe a sigh of relief. America gives its citizenry the ultimate responsibility for holding leaders accountable, for deciding what kind of nation this will be. The broad endorsement of Biden’s message of unity and healing is cause for celebration. Americans have embraced that optimism and Biden as their next president.

Now the real work begins.

Come January, Biden will take office facing a

jumble of crises. His predecessor is leaving America weaker, meaner, poorer, sicker and more divided than four years ago. Recent events have laid bare, and often exacerbated, many of the nation’s preexisting conditions: from the inadequacy of our health care system to the cruelty of our immigration policies, from entrenched racial inequities to the vulnerabilities of our electoral system. Biden has pledged himself to big thinking and bold action in tackling these challenges.

The electoral map suggests recovery will be neither quick nor easy. It is not yet clear what the precise composition of the Senate will be, but Republicans may hold the chamber. The government, like the nation, would remain divided.

Biden has made clear he wants to work across the aisle. That is his nature and his political brand.

But today’s political climate is not the same as it was 50, or even five, years ago. Even as he seeks consensus, the new president must be prepared to fight for his priorities. Now is no time for timidity.

The American public should be prepared to do its part. People of good will and democratic ideals must not lose interest simply because Trump leaves center stage. They need to remain engaged in the political process and demand better from their leaders if any progress is to be made.

Trump’s message of fear and resentment resonated with tens of millions of Americans. Trumpism will not magically disappear. If anything, its adherents will very likely find renewed energy and purpose in marshaling a new resistance movement committed to undermining and delegitimizing the incoming administration.

Republicans will have to decide whether they will continue to wallow in political nihilism, or rise to meet the challenges of the moment. How Republicans respond to this loss, whether they seek to stoke or to cool partisan passions, will help determine the nation’s — and their party’s — path forward.

With the perspective of time, the Trump era is likely to be viewed as an extended stress test for the American experiment. The president did his best to undermine the nation’s democratic foundations.

They were shaken, but they did not break. Trump exposed their vulnerabilities but also their strength.

It now falls to Biden to improve and safeguard those foundations, to help restore faith in our democracy and ourselves — to make America greater than ever before.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

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Analizan regreso a las clases de manera parcial en las escuelas Por THE STAR

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a gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced dijo en la tarde del domingo que evalúan para este próximo semestre escolar dar las clases de manera híbrida, o sea, unos días en los planteles y otros desde las casas de manera virtual.

“Por el momento (las clases) siguen virtual, pero vamos a seguir trabajando con mira a que el nuevo semestre pueda ser presencial”, dijo

Vázquez Garced en una transmisión en directo de un rotativo por Facebook.

La gobernadora explicó que trabajan en un programa de vigilancia de estudiantes, maestros y personal de las escuelas para retornar a las clases de manera presencial varios días de la semana.

Vázquez Garced explicó que el Departamento de Salud trabaja en el programa de vigilancia.

Asociación de Maestros reitera su compromiso con la educación especial Por THE STAR

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e una matrícula oficial de 284 mil estudiantes de escuelas públicas, 105 mil alumnos pertenecen al Programa de Educación Especial, por lo que la Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico (AMPR) expresó este domingo que está alerta para que cada día los educadores posean las herramientas esenciales que redunden en un mejor servicio para los niños y jóvenes.

Al conmemorarse el Mes de la Educación Especial, la AMPR hizo un llamamiento especial a los padres, tutores o encargados de los menores que estén muy pendientes de si éstos muestran alguna señal que dé indicio de problemas de aprendizaje en las siguientes áreas: atención, memoria, autocontrol o metacognición, indicó la entidad en declaraciones escritas.

El niño puede enfrentar, también, retraso en ciertas áreas del lenguaje, específicamente en el desarrollo del vocabulario, discriminación auditiva, estructura gramatical, longitud de las frases o tener velocidad más lenta. Del mismo modo, presentar bajas expectativas de éxito y altas de fracaso, baja autoestima o motivación y dificultad en adaptación social o trastornos de conducta.

El primer paso que debe darse al identificarlo en la etapa escolar o previo a ésta, es informarlo de inmediato a la Región Educativa o Centro de servicio de Educación Especial y/o escuelas para las evaluaciones correspondientes y garantizar una vida estudiantil más plena. Una vez se ha determinado que el niño es elegible para recibir los servicios de educación especial, se preparará un Programa Educativo Individualizado (PEI), documento escrito que especifica las necesidades educativas y de otros servicios relacionados a los que el niño tiene derecho. “¡Es responsabilidad de todos! Los padres o tutores son los primeros responsables! Así mismo, nuestros educadores deben estar atentos para identificar cualquier signo. ¡Queremos niños (as) autosuficientes!”, dijo Elba Aponte Santos, presidenta de la AMPR. Aponte Santos resaltó que “es trascendental estar pendiente al desarrollo de los estudiantes.

En ese aspecto, me encuentro tranquila porque nuestros maestros están capacitados. Contamos con profesionales comprometidos y con auténtica vocación. En el caso de los maestros de educación especial sobresalen, además, por su gran sensibilidad para atención personalizada, espíritu de servicio, disciplina y amor al prójimo”.

Resaltó que los educadores que atienden directamente a esta población -con discapacidad física, auditiva o visual, con dificultades emocionales, de comportamiento o aprendizaje- han completado un bachillerato en educación y certificación en Educación Especial, en muchos casos maestría, cursos doctorales o educación continua.

Entre las principales funciones de los maestros de educación especial sobresalen la elaboración de planes individualizados, adaptando el contenido de las materias curriculares y la forma de impartirlas, y la redacción de informes de evaluación y el registro de la evolución del niño. Estos profesionales recurren a métodos de enseñanza especiales, como el lenguaje de signos para estudiantes con deficiencias auditivas o el sistema

Braille para aquellos con deficiencias visuales, dijo Aponte Santos.

“Un maestro no solo imparte el pan de la enseñanza. ¡Su responsabilidad es mayor! Al tener esto presente, hacemos un llamado a todas las instituciones para que al fin se les brinden las herramientas esenciales que faciliten sus múltiples funciones que son de gran impacto en nuestra sociedad…Para los maestros de educación especial, la atención debe ser doble por parte del gobierno y la comunidad. Por eso, establesco que es importante brindo especial atención para garantizar a nuestros niños la mejor educación y ajuste a la sociedad. También, reitero mi compromiso y solidaridad con los maestros de educación especial”, precisó.

Parte fundamental en la evolución de un niño es su familia inmediata o encargados, por lo que la AMPR está atenta a que su matrícula les ofrezca el asesoramiento y orientación adecuada de forma continua.

Para que los estudiantes con discapacidades -hasta los 21 años- puedan recibir servicios educativos apropiados a sus necesidades, el Departamento de Educación junto a los padres o tutores deben velar porque se cumpla con los servicios especializados. Esté informado de que en el caso de infantes de cero a dos años les aplica el Programa de Intervención Temprana, administrado por el Departamento de Salud.

Hay que garantizar en todo momento que los servicios educativos, así como otros necesarios y relacionados a su condición, se ofrezcan de la forma menos restrictiva posible y en la alternativa más cercana a la población de corriente regular.

“Mi admiración a los maestros de educación especial y garantía de luchar por sus derechos. A los padres o encargados, reitero mi compromiso de mejor atención cada día para que sus hijos sean autosuficientes… A nuestros estudiantes, las gracias por confiar en sus maestros como sus primeros guías, junto a sus padres”, culminó diciendo Aponte Santos.

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Monday, November 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘Shaft,’ ‘Dirty Harry’ and the rise of the supercop

Richard Roundtree in the movie “Shaft,” directed by Gordon Parks.

By WESLEY MORRIS

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nybody sifting through the 1970s for American movies’ most definitive year might start with ’72: “The Godfather,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Deliverance,” “Pink Flamingos,” “Deep Throat.” Or ’75: “Jaws,” “Nashville,” “Dolemite,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Shampoo,” “Barry Lyndon.” Or ‘77: “Star Wars,” “Saturday Night Fever,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Annie Hall.”

My vote goes to 1971. Not because the movies were better — the top draw was, depending on the source, either a studio musical about a Jewish shtetl wedding (“Fiddler on the Roof”) or a grubby, independently made beatem-‘up set around a school on an Arizona Indian reservation (“Billy Jack”). 1971 was the year that Gene Hackman strolls into a Brooklyn bar and goes to town on its Black clientele during an interlude in “The French Connection.”

It’s the year President Richard M. Nixon’s campaign threats of law-and-order governance had, at last, come flagrantly true at the movies, the year the American supercop was born.

Everybody knows him: so exasperated by the bureaucracy of police work that breaking the law becomes his way of upholding it. He’s just north of middle age, drunk, white, monomaniacal, trigger-happy; never caped yet stylish in his turtlenecks, sweater vests, pork pie hats and visible holster; and, in his way, handsome,

roguishly. While everybody else is going by the book, the supercop declares himself illiterate.

He arrives after late-’60s smashes like “In the Heat of the Night” and “Bullitt,” thrillers in which the cops were keeping incompetent or venal company in the form of their fellow officers. These were strong, straight-arrow types forced into deviations from standard procedure — Sidney Poitier slapping a racist, murder-suspect moneybags in “In the Heat of the Night”; Steve McQueen taking the heat for hiding a witness from a crooked senator in “Bullitt.” The

fight then was against corruption.

By 1971, corruption had become proof of obsessive dedication and hyper-competence — a means to an end. Warner Bros. released “Dirty Harry” starting that December and invented, by way of Clint Eastwood, a one-man counter-countercultural strike force whose “Do ya feel lucky, punk?” speeches are the character’s version of Miranda rights. The San Francisco Police Department is too mired in procedure, second-guessing and sheer slowness for Harry Callahan. The calm with which he glides toward a bank robber he just shot, in one of the opening sequences, belongs in one of those David Attenborough nature specials.

The arguably decent cops work for themselves — in “Klute,” in “Shaft,” fighting crime that didn’t (or couldn’t) interest regular law enforcement. The sense of paranoid conspiracy that eventually defined the decade was already in the air by 1971. So was what often got called ultraviolence. That spring, moviegoers got a scandalizing load of “Straw Dogs,” in which a milquetoast math-nerd (Dustin Hoffman) has a near-erotic awakening after slaying the men who tortured him and raped his wife.

The graphically assaultive nature of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” shocked people — critics especially — in part because it was unclear (to some moviegoers) whether Kubrick intended the violence as comedy. But his film hooked droves of people, too. These movies were hits.

“Billy Jack” feels like an exception. It’s the worst of these crowd pleasers. It clunks and clops. The director, Tom Laughlin, who was

Tom Laughlin stars as the title character in “Billy Jack,” a sleeper smash in 1971.

white, also plays the movie’s title character, a youngish, leathery former Green Beret who polices an Indian reservation and is supposed to be half-Navajo himself. It’s the second in a series of popular Billy Jack films — and a prototype for whatever Chuck Norris was about to get up to in Texas: full of wood, bare feet and flying dust. Here, Billy’s defending the reservation’s school for wayward pacifists from the capitalist bullies in the nearby town.

The acting is trapped between obnoxious and earnest. Worse, the last shot crests with the kids giving Billy a Black power salute as he turns himself in. Still, there’s something here.

There are the dueling impulses of the Vietnam era as epitomized by Billy’s gun-toting hapkido expertise and the students’ disdain for violence.

There’s a scene in which the kids debate the town council about its abuse of law and order. The film feels like it’s about being caught between two lifestyles — the hippies’ and Nixon’s. It’s about the need for a kind of action movie valiance that, by 1971, is dead in a way and never entirely returns.

Not long before “Billy Jack,” you can see the movies trying to lure the supercop’s prototype from the brink of heartlessness. In “Bullitt,” McQueen pauses the legendary car chase to make sure a fellow who’s been thrown from his motorcycle is at least still alive. Nobody in the “The French Connection” cares about any of that. Its ruthlessness demolishes property and consciences alike.

The movie is about a car full of drugs that’s been shipped to lower Manhattan from the French Riviera and, for reasons no one has ever persuasively explained to me, left parked on the street. But, as far as I’m concerned, it’s also about this bar Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Hackman) shakes down at about the half-hour mark. It’s a small, dim, busy enough place. And in he barges, with his sidekick “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider). Doyle unplugs the jukebox and identifies himself, not as a detective with the New York City Police Department. But this way: “Popeye’s here!” Like he owns the joint.

At his command, everybody migrates to the wall, producing this sad array of circumstantial resignation (here we go again). Admittedly, as Doyle sweeps beneath the bar counter and turns up pill bottles and baggies, a couple of the faces do seem anxious-looking if not outright guilt-stricken; and two gentlemen are sent into phone booths, which appears to be Doyle and Russo’s thing. One small-time suspect is actually an informant — with a mussed, drooping Afro — who offers platonic dope about a big

The San Juan Daily Star shipment coming in. He doesn’t have much else for Doyle. When they’re through, Doyle wants to know where he would prefer to be socked, lest the other customers suspect something.

That little scrap of dirt means little to the wider plot. It’s corroborative. You could cut that scene and still have the same thrilling movie.

But the thrill wouldn’t be quite the same. You’d miss the dueling liberties at work here, the way the supercop can do as he pleases, how the bar patrons must do as he says. You’d miss the exclamatory alacrity of what Hackman achieves in this scene — shouting and prowling and flirting, like a peacock, like a rooster. Like a star.

(Doyle won Hackman an Oscar; the movie was voted best picture.)

I have always watched this scene in awe of Hackman’s command of that tiny space.

But the last few times I’ve seen it, my eyes are drawn to the lineup, essentially in salute as he struts his exit. Doyle’s departure isn’t dissimilar to the one that ends “Billy Jack.” This one is cockier. Most of the people lining the wall are men. But on the end, farthest from the entrance, is a Black woman in a patterned purple dress, leaning on a table. Doyle passes her and barks aloud for the whole bar to hear, “Get that hair done before Saturday.” She keeps her head turned away from him, so as to protect herself from the stench of his insult. I imagine her wanting to die, nonetheless, of embarrassment and disgust. What did she do? Was this flirtation? Was it ownership? Her hair, by the way, looks fine.

It’s not unreasonable to presume that director William Friedkin and editor Gerald B. Greenberg won their Oscars in large part for the movie’s definitive car-versus-train sequence.

But what if they also won for the proprietary truth of this?

Imagine getting a steady diet of moments like that or one in which Russo lights up a different bar full of Black men. Imagine a steady diet of mistreatment and criminalization that always seems disconnected from the main drugcartel or serial-killer plot. Imagine being grist for somebody else’s realism, evidence of the supercop’s superiority — busywork while he’s out there trying to fry bigger fish. Sport. The poster for “The French Connection” is more propagandistically succinct: “Doyle,” it reads, “is bad news but a good cop.” You don’t say.

But 1971 was also the year a Black audience could get used to a brief alternative, a respite from serving as trash for cops to take out.

That spring, Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” began its odyssey toward becoming a sleeper sensation. Where Laughlin seems resistant to disillusionment, Van Peebles throws disillusionment an orgy.

People cite this is as the film that unleashed Black, do-it-your-damn-self moviemaking in this country — a cheap, amateurish, inarguably strange chase picture about a fugitive

Monday, November 9, 2020

cop-killer, whom Van Peebles plays as if he’s waiting for an actor with a more radical sense of damnation or professionalism to take over.

Everything collides contrapuntally: pool sticks and bodies; women and men; police and Black people. It’s a mess. Scraps of the avant-garde (Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger) are smushed together with what certain people think French movies are.

Parts of it seem lifted right out of Jules Dassin’s marvelously strange, inadequately cherished “Uptight,” from 1968. Parts of it are consciously taking a stab at “Easy Rider,” and Poitier’s ultimately agreeable half of “The Defiant Ones.” Parts of it are close to porn. Every minute of it was meant for Van Peebles’ people: “This is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the man,” reads one of the titles that plays over a still shot of Van Peebles in the middle of some listless running. So it was a mess Black Americans needed somebody to make.

It’s reasonable that an audience sitting through “The French Connection” would have been preexhilarated by “Sweetback” and by “Shaft,” which opened in June of that year and felt like another antidote to what Popeye is pushing.

The clamoring for it in Black communities was intense. It reportedly grossed a million dollars at a single Chicago theater and launched a merchandising boom. Allegedly, the part of John Shaft had been intended for McQueen or Charlton Heston. But you watch Richard Roundtree strolling around Harlem in this movie, with ease and a real knowing, and you laugh thinking about how Heston would have worked out.

The plot is decent enough. A drug lord named Bumpy (Moses Gunn) needs Shaft to find his daughter, who’s been kidnapped.

That’s it. Almost everything else is righteous politics. Before Shaft hits the streets, he gives Bumpy a lecture about how bad his drugs-andhookers business is for Black people. As Shaft pounds the pavement, talking to contacts, director Gordon Parks shoots Roundtree from inside eateries and on the sidewalks. There’s a homey serenity to that montage, a sadness, too. Throughout it we hear Isaac Hayes’ “Soulsville,” a church-band hymn whose first couplet is “Black man, born free/ at least that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

Parks lets in a rare, life-size solemnity. At one stop on Shaft’s investigation, a man who answers the door calls after him, almost plaintively: “Know what the number was today?”

Shaft doesn’t. And it’s that sadness that lingers over this movie and almost all of the so-called blaxploitation films that followed in its wake.

Nobody ever hits the lottery. The lottery keeps hitting them. In just about three or four years, the look of the movies had changed, from bright and expansive to hard and gritty — even

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In “The French Connection,” directed by William Friedkin, Gene Hackman (wearing hat) plays a strutting cop named Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle. the musicals looked like they were in gangs.

Things had changed just enough to incorporate this kind of hard, dolorous realism.

In “The French Connection,” the protagonists chase and beat up a pile of Black Harlemites and Brooklynites. And Doyle says to Russo at some point, “Never trust a nigger.” A Black person might hear that and notice that these white people could keep getting away with — and getting awards for — this stuff. A filmmaker could love “The French Connection” and want to mimic it while also making heroes of the guys those cops keep shaking down. It’s just that after five more strong years of Black-oriented movies (lots of which were made by white people) they had evolved into impersonations, of white hits, of themselves.

But for this brief moment, Parks discovered what still feels like a vaccine for all that ailed a Black moviegoer for most of the movies’ existence. Shaft was more than a supercop. Rather casually, he had to be super at everything, including being in on the joke, including sex.

Parks also uses desire in damnation of the Black buck stereotype. After half an hour, Shaft is suddenly at home wearing nothing but the album cover he’s holding over his crotch when his woman comes home and runs to him. He pulls her to him, kisses her deep and as he’s trying to unzip her dress, Parks is already fading out to their lovemaking, which is really just a lot of bright light superimposed over a shot of her hands caressing his back until they begin to wag in palsied ecstasy. Parks was a mesmerist photojournalist and a prominent figure in the civil rights movement. This movie feels like indiscreet political art. It quenched the thirst for

movies in which Black people had sex, with one another, and with white women, as Shaft does a few scenes later.

The movie opens horny. The first shot peers down at Times Square movie marquees, and the first name you notice, before Roundtree’s even shows up, is Burt Lancaster’s on a sign for a theater playing “The Scalphunters” and “Rough Night in Jericho.” The camera tracks down the street, from marquee to marquee: Robert Redford in “Little Fauss and Big Halsy,” under which is a legible B-A-R-B-A, which, presumably, is short for “Barbarella.”

The longer the pan goes on, the trashier yet better the titles get: the erotic Italian romp “He and She” shares a spot with “The Animal.” The last one we see is written in red: “School for Sex” plus “The Wild Females.”

It’s not hard to miss the point: that you’re watching a movie lasciviously called (if you’re so inclined) “Shaft.” In 1971, you also know that none of these other movies has much to do for or with a Black person. Parks deduces a pecking order in the quality, and that order gives him a joke to tell. Right after we take in “School for Sex,” the cymbal taps of Hayes’ theme song kick in, “Shaft” appears in red, and up out of the subway, from underground to the surface, comes 28-year-old Roundtree, in a leather trench coat, mustache and little Afro, declaring his stardom and correcting 60 or so years of Black sexual neglect. The buck starts here.

As for that woman at the bar that Doyle shakes down? The movies never quite made amends to her. Not even the Black ones. They were for her yet never sufficiently about her.

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Monday, November 9, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Hawaii’s reopening may be good for tourism. Is it good for locals?

By TARIRO MZEZEWA

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ince Hawaii welcomed tourists back in mid-October, allowing them to skip its 14-day quarantine as long as they had a negative coronavirus test, more than 100,000 people have rushed to the islands from mainland states, exciting state officials, some hoteliers, airlines and local business owners, who for seven months have watched the state’s economy grind to a halt.

Instead of the quarantine, the islands began accepting a preflight coronavirus test for entry under a program it is calling Safe Travels. The state is only accepting what are known as nucleic acid amplification tests processed by specially certified laboratories and test results from certain trusted testing and travel partners, including some airlines.

Those who test negative within 72 hours of departure are exempt from quarantine upon arrival. Those who didn’t take a test before flying have to quarantine for 14 days, and those who arrive with a pending test must quarantine until they receive negative results. People who test positive are required to immediately take a PCR test, which detects the virus’ genetic material, and quarantine in their hotel room or other vacation lodging.

“Hawaii is at the vanguard of what travel will look like for the next year or so as we reopen,” said Avi Mannis, senior vice president of marketing at Hawaiian Airlines, one of a handful of airlines that began offering pre-travel COVID-19 tests in October.

Hawaiian, through Worksite Labs, is offering state-approved tests to passengers at drive-thru labs near Los Angeles International and San Francisco International airports for $90 for results within 36 hours, or $150 for day-of-travel express service. Passengers take PCR tests within 72 hours of traveling, upload their results to the Hawaii Safe Travel app before departing and show their results to state authorities in Hawaii upon landing. But the airline doesn’t check passengers’ test results before they board.

“Your test results are between you, your health care provider and the state of Hawaii,” Mannis said.

The surge of arrivals — 8,000 of them on the first day pretesting was available — presented an opportunity to test out new protocols for travelers that could help determine how to reopen travel internationally. If Hawaii’s reopening goes well, the belief is that preflight testing could become widespread.

And on the islands, if hotels can figure out how to deal with growing occupancy, the same thing could be done worldwide.

But what travel industry actors view as an opportunity to reopen safely and pave a way forward, many locals and residents view as putting them in harm’s way with untested protocols and allowing people who might have the coronavirus onto the islands.

“It feels like at every point that tourism gets prioritized,” said Landon Tom, a bartender and waiter in Waikiki. “It feels, whether intentionally or not, like we are the guinea pigs for tourism, like our leaders and the airlines are saying, ‘Can we safely reopen tourism or not? Well, let’s see if Hawaii survives.

If it does, let’s keep going. If it doesn’t, probably a lot of Pacific

Some A man sits on a nearly empty Waikiki Beach in Honolulu early in October, when all visitors were required to quarantine.

Islanders have gotten sick and suffered.’”

Tom said that on a recent hike near his home, he saw several groups of tourists heading to popular Koko Head without masks on, making him nervous that if any of them had the coronavirus they could pass it on to locals.

“Tourism is terrorism to me right now,” he said. “I’d ask tourists to stay home for now, if they can. You could test negative but get the virus afterward, or you could have it and not realize. Why not skip this vacation for now?”

Tourist arrivalsf ell 99% Earlier this year, as governments and health organizations advised against nonessential travel, Hawaii’s governor, David Ige, instituted a mandatory 14-day quarantine, a deterrent for tourists looking to escape for a quick vacation. In April, the state was paying people to leave in order to keep tourists out.

The quarantine, combined with other measures, like giving people citations for not wearing masks and fining those who broke the quarantine, helped the state hold the number of coronavirus cases down to 15,231. Florida, another popular vacation destination and a much larger state, has had more than 800,000 cases. In this sense, Hawaii’s location in the Pacific and its quarantine have been advantageous.

But they have also been a curse, effectively closing the state’s biggest industry. In 2019, Hawaii had more than 10 million visitors, an all-time high, according to data from the state’s Tourism Authority. That number was expected to continue rising in 2020. When Hawaii put the quarantine into effect, arrivals fell drastically; at one point they were down 99%.

The drop in tourism has been devastating to the state, where almost one-quarter of the economy is related to the industry. There has been a spike in homelessness and people at risk of becoming homeless; the number of people who could

potentially lose their health care benefits is up, and reports of domestic violence are up significantly, said Josh Green, the state’s lieutenant governor. Had the islands kept the quarantine mandate longer, those numbers as well as the number of people calling hotlines with plans of self-harm would have skyrocketed, he added.

“We are all at risk whether we live here in Hawaii or on the mainland, and we can’t stay isolated forever; we won’t survive,” he said. “There are people who want to ride this out until a vaccine comes, but it’s hard to make that policy when we know that homelessness will surge, kids won’t get vaccines and so on. Saying, ‘Don’t come under any circumstances,’ is not realistic.”

Green said that although there have been some hiccups during the reopening process, including people taking tests that are not approved by the state or refusing to get tested at all, the vast majority of visitors have been getting tests and testing negative. The state is conducting voluntary follow-up testing four days after people arrive as part of its surveillance testing program. So far, data shows that few travelers have tested positive for COVID-19 after arrival in Hawaii.

“We shouldn’t be afraid of the pandemic; we should attack it with good policy and be the safest place,” Green said.

“I’m looking forward to the vaccination, but the virus is here for a while.”

“Pandering” to tourists In October, images of the Honolulu mayor, Kirk Caldwell, handing out masks to tourists along Waikiki’s Kuhio Beach made rounds in group texts, on Facebook groups and on Twitter and were criticized by Oahu residents for being hypocritical and unfair. Nearly 50,000 locals had been cited for being on the beach, but tourists were being encouraged to visit it.

Caldwell did not respond to requests for comment.

“They are criminalizing locals and then pandering to tourists,” said Kawenaʻulaokala Kapahua, who recently graduated from the Chaminade University of Honolulu and lives in Kaneohe in Oahu. “Just yesterday someone who had taken a pre-travel test found out that their test was positive. But they had already brought coronavirus into the community. We are being put at risk by travelers.”

Kapahua organized a protest in the spring asking the government to force tourists to leave the island.

And on other islands, like Kauai, residents said that it’s too soon to welcome tourists back, and information about reopening isn’t being communicated clearly, causing more anxiety for them.

“I talk to people in our community every day, and they all tell the same story,” said Justin Kollar, Kauai County’s prosecuting attorney. “They feel like we’ve done such a great job here on Kauai keeping the pandemic at bay, and the state is running over that with a reopening process that is not well thought out and not well organized, and it’ll open the floodgates to this virus.”

Kollar noted that the sentiment that tourists are more important than locals is one felt by many of his constituents.

“There’s a sense that locals haven’t celebrated, haven’t seen family and have been asked to keep doing that so tourists can come play on our beaches,” he said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

23

You’re not too old to talk to someone

By PAULA SPAN

T

hree years ago, Janet Burns felt herself sliding into depression, a too-familiar state. Burns, a retired federal worker living in Rockville, Maryland, grew up in a home she described as abusive, with an alcoholic father. Sometimes, she said, “I get into a slump and can’t get out.” Several times, psychotherapy had helped her regain her equilibrium.

Then her father died. “It brought up a lot of stuff I thought I had dealt with,” she said. Experiencing both guilt and relief, and feeling responsible for her mother and an ailing sister, she began to have anxiety, insomnia and exhaustion. Sometimes she found it hard to get out of bed. “I needed some more help,” she decided.

Burns, 75, found a new counselor and saw her weekly for a couple of months, then every other week. “She helped me put this in perspective and lift the burden I was putting on myself,” Burns said. “She gave me some tools, mental exercises to do when the pressures were on.”

The coronavirus pandemic has brought fresh pressures.

Burns has had to largely suspend her volunteer work, and she and her husband have been unable to visit their children and grandchildren. She said she was handling it.

But, she added, it was reassuring to know that she could turn to her counselor again if necessary. “It’s like a safety net,” she said. “This is someone I trust, who knows my history, and that’s comforting. I wish everybody had it.”

Health experts and practitioners also wish that more older adults could access psychotherapy and other kinds of mental health care, especially now. Mental health problems have risen markedly during the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported.

Although younger people are much more apt to report such ailments, 1 in 4 people over age 65 said they experienced anxiety or depression in August, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis — more than twice the figure in 2018.

Loneliness and isolation have taken a toll on older people, and geriatric psychiatrists anticipate an increase in grief disorders.

“It makes their existing issues worse,” Mi Yu, a geriatric psychiatrist in Nashville, Tennessee, said of the pandemic’s effects. “All my patients seem to have experienced more distress and anxiety and they’re requiring more frequent sessions,” which lately are conducted by video or phone.

Experts have long reported that older people, particularly those over 80, seem more reluctant to seek treatment for psychological disorders. “The greatest generation are the pull-yourselfup-by-your-bootstraps group,” said Daniel Plotkin, a geriatric psychiatrist in Los Angeles. Acknowledging psychological problems still carries a stigma, particularly among rural residents and Black Americans.

Age bias can infect practitioners, too, Plotkin said. “The unfortunate attitude that most people have, including doctors, is that older people can‘t change, that they’re stuck in their ways,” he said. In fact, he noted, studies have shown that older people do as well in psychotherapy as younger ones.

Practitioners may prefer to treat younger clients because

Heidi Jelasic, who had been seeing a counselor when the pandemic hit and she lost her job and health coverage, at her home in Royal Oak, Mich., Oct. 29, 2020. Studies have shown that people of all ages do well in psychotherapy. they have decades ahead during which to reap the benefits. Yu recalled a woman in her 80s who sought therapy after her husband suffered a heart attack. Two dozen local practices turned her away, saying they didn’t accept patients her age.

“I was dumbfounded,” Yu said. “We actually find elderly patients are more open to therapy. They’re more reflective. Realizing that they have limited time left in life gives them a sense of urgency; they want to resolve something and they don’t have time to lose.”

Yu worked with the woman for about a year, also prescribing antidepressants, until “she gradually was back to herself.”

But the woman’s experience demonstrates that even when older people decide to seek treatment, finding and affording therapy can prove discouragingly difficult.

Traditional Medicare covers individual and group psychotherapy, with no cap on the number of sessions; beneficiaries pay 20% of the authorized amount. It also covers treatment of alcohol and drug abuse and provides for free annual depression screening. Copayments for Medicare Advantage beneficiaries vary from plan to plan.

But many mental health practitioners won’t accept Medicare, in part because the reimbursement is so low. Yu, for example, accepts Medicare’s payment of $91 for a 45-minute session, but because that is half or less than the going rate for therapy in Nashville, many of her colleagues opt out.

Researchers at George Mason University and Mathematica reported this year that in a national survey, only about 36% of

mental health providers accepted new Medicare patients, compared with 83% of physicians.

Moreover, although Medicare covers mental health treatment by a variety of providers (including doctors, clinical psychologists, clinical social workers, nurse practitioners and physician assistants), it won’t reimburse licensed professional counselors or marriage and family therapists.

With only 1,526 board-certified geriatric psychiatrists practicing nationwide last year, that pool of 200,000 licensed counselors and marriage and family therapists could go a long way toward meeting the demand for care.

“They comprise about 40% of the mental health workforce, but they’re not eligible under Medicare,” said Matthew Fullen, a counselor educator and researcher at Virginia Tech.

“That’s a pretty heavy disincentive to getting the help you need.”

He and his colleagues surveyed 3,500 practicing licensed counselors and found that half had turned away patients because of the Medicare coverage gap. Almost 40% had to refer existing patients elsewhere once they became Medicare eligible.

Heidi Jelasic, 68, an administrative assistant in Royal Oak, Michigan, had been seeing a licensed professional counselor after a traumatic event with a neighbor and felt she was making good progress. Then, in April, she lost her job in a pandemic layoff, and with it, her employer health coverage.

That meant shifting to Medicare, which would not cover her counselor, and she could not afford to pay out of pocket.

“I’m on a shoestring,” she said. “I can’t afford it.”

24 LEGAL NOTICE IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF THE TENTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT OF FLORIDA, IN AND FOR POLK COUNTY. In Re: Petition for Temporary Custody Of

SHERIANICK ZOE ROSADO REYES by

ANNIE CAST AING and JORGE ROSADO

and In Re: Petition for Temporary Custody of

KAMILA ANNIERICK ROSADO ORTIZ by

ANNIE CASTAING AND JORGE ROSADO

Case No.: 2020DR-000414.

SEC. 01. SECOND AMENDED NOTICE OF ACTION FOR TEMPORARY CUSTODY OF MINOR CHILD BY EXTENDED FAMILY.

To: Rose Marie Ortiz Urb. Bonneville Heights Calle Naranjito Numero 3 Caguas, Puerto Rico 00725

YOU ARE NOTIFIED that an action for Temporary Custody of Minor Children By extended family has been filed against you and that you are required to serve a copy of your written defenses, if any, to Petitioners, Annie Castaing and Jorge Rosado whose address is c/o Ira A. Serebrin, Esq. 2109 Combee Road, Lakeland, FL on or before December 14, 2020 and file the original with the Clerk of this Court, at Post Office Box Drawer CC-5 before service on Petitioner or immediately thereafter. If you fail to do so, a default may be entered against you for the relief demanded in the Petition.

Copies of all court documents in this case, including orders, are available at the Clerk of the Circuit Court’s office. You may review these documents upon request. You must keep the Clerk of the Circuit Court’s office notified of your current address.

(You may file Designation of Current Mailing and E-Mail Address, Florida Supreme Court Approved Family Law Form 12.915.) Future papers in this lawsuit will be mailed or emailed to the addresses on record at the clerk’s office. Dated: 10/22/2020.

STACY M. BUTTERFIELD, CLERK OF COURT. By: Debra R. Reed, Deputy Clerk.

LEGAL NOTICE IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO.

BOSCO IX OVERSEAS, LLC BY FRANKLIN CREDIT MANAGEMENT @

CORPORATION AS SERVICER Plaintiff, v.

BENJAMIN RODRIGUEZ RODRIGUEZ; WALESKA SANTIAGO AGUILAR;

Defendant CIVIL NO. 19-cv-1092 (PAD).

COLLECTION OF MONIES AND FORECLOSURE OF MORTGAGE. JURY TRIAL DEMANDED. NOTICE OF SALE.

TO: BENJAMIN RODRIGUEZ RODRIGUEZ; WALESKA SANTIAGO AGUILAR; AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC

WHEREAS: On July 29, 2020, this Court entered Judgment in favor of Plaintiff, against Defendants. On September 1st, 2020, this Court entered Order for Execution of Judgment. Pursuant to the Judgment, the Defendants were Ordered to pay Plaintiff the amount of $52,792.01 of principal of the said mortgage note, accrued interest at the annual rate of 7.125% which continues to accrue, plus fees, costs and any other amount expressly agreed upon in the mortgage deed, plus 10% for agreed upon attorneys’ fees in the amount of $7,300.00, plus all expenses and advances made by the plaintiff. WHEREAS: Pursuant to the terms of the aforementioned Judgment and the Order for Execution of Judgment thereof, the following property belonging to the Defendants will be sold at a public auction: RUSTIC: Portion of land located in Barrio Leguisamo, in the municipality of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, with a surface area of one rope, equivalent to 3,930.39 square meters. On the border: to the North, with a plot of land segregated from the main property, but according to the plan, with land belonging to María Selectre, de Aurora vda. de Rivera and a public plot; to the South, with the remainder of the main property; to the East, with the road (352) but according to the plan, with the public plot; and to the West, with a stream and land belonging to the main property, but according to the plan, with the remainder. The property is recorded at page 113 of volume 1224 of Mayagüez, property number 38163, Registry of the Property of Puerto Rico, Section of Mayagüez. The property is located at: RD 352 KM. 3.3 Bo. Leguisamo, Mayagüez, PR 00680. WHEREAS: The mortgage that encumbers the above described property is described as follows: MORTGAGE: For the amount of $73,000.00 with annual interest of 7.125%, in guarantee of a promissory note in favor of R&G Premier Bank of Puerto Rico or to order, due on

September 1, 2038. According to deed #158 executed in Mayaguez on August 21, 2008 before Christian M. Castillo Moreno.

Recorded pursuant to Law 216 of December 27, 2010, know as Property Registry Expediting Act on page 58 of volume 1530 in Mayaguez, 6th and last entry, dated December 11, 2012.

WHEREAS: The property is subject to the following junior liens: Entry 2017-061803-MY01, dated June 2, 2017: Filed and pending: Foreclosure Notice issued on Civil Case #ISCI201700043(206) on the First instance Court, Mayaguez Part pursued

by Scotiabank de Puerto Rico (Petitioner) vs Benjamin Rodriguez Rodriguez, his wife Waleska Santiago Aguilar, and the community property regime instituted by both of them (Defendants). Petitioner requests payment of debt guaranteed by mortgage recorded on the 6th entry, amounting $73,000.00 reduced to $52,792.01, plus interests, and other amounts, or its settlement via public auction of the plot. Potential bidders are advised to verify the extent of preferential liens with the holders thereof. It shall be understood that each bidder accepts as sufficient the title and that prior and preferential liens to the one being foreclosed upon, including, but not limited to any property tax, liens (express, tacit, implied or legal), shall continue in effect it being understood further that the successful bidder accepts them and is subrogated in the responsibility for the same and that the price shall be applied toward their cancellation. The present property will be acquired free and clear of all junior liens. WHEREAS: For the purpose of the first judicial sale, the minimum bid agreed upon by the parties in the mortgage deed will be $73,000.00, for the property and no lower offers will be accepted. Should the first judicial sale of the above described property be unsuccessful, then the minimum bid for the property on the second judicial sale will be two-thirds the amount of the minimum bid for the first judicial sale, or $48,666.66.

The minimum bid for the third judicial sale, if the same is necessary, will be one-half of the minimum bid agreed upon the parties in the aforementioned mortgage deed, or $36,500.00.

(Known in the Spanish language as: “Ley del Registro de la Propiedad Inmobiliaria del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico”, 2015 Puerto Rico Laws Act 210 (H.B. 2479), Articule 104, as amended). WHEREAS: Said sale to be made by the appointed Special Master is subject to confirmation by the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico and the deed of

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

conveyance and possession to the property will be executed and delivered only after such confirmation. The records of the case and of these proceedings may be examined by interested parties at the Office of the Clerk of the United States District Court, Room 150 or 400 Federal Office Building, 150 Chardon Avenue, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico.

NOW THEREFORE, public notice is hereby given that the Special Master, pursuant to the provisions of the Judgment herein before referred to, will, on the 4th day of December 2020 at 10:30 am, in his offices located at Mayagüez Street #134, San Juan, Puerto Rico, in accordance with 28 U.S.C. Sec. 2001, will sell at public auction to the highest bidder, the property described herein, the proceeds of said sale to be applied in the manner and form provided by the Court’s Judgment. Should the first judicial sale set hereinabove be unsuccessful, the second judicial sale of the property described in this Notice will be held on the 11th day of December 2020 at 10:30 am, in the Office of the Special Master located at the address indicated above. Should the second judicial sale set hereinabove be unsuccessful, the third judicial sale of the property described in this Notice will be held on the 18th day of December 2020 at 10:30 am, in the Office of the Special Master located at the address indicated above.

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 9th day of October 2020. Victor Encarnacion Pichardo, Appointed Special Master. ****

Rico, dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 2 de NOVIEMBRE de 2020. En Bayamon, Puerto Rico, el 2 de NOVIEMBRE de 2020. F/LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria. f/ VIVIAN J. SANABRIA, Secretario (a) Auxiliar.

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

MERCHANT ADVANCE, LLC Demandante v.

LEON EVENTS & MORE, INC. Y MARILYN LEON ACOSTA Y FULANO DE TAL, AMBOS EN SU CARACTER PERSONAL Y COMO MIEMBROS DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandado(a) Civil: CN2019CV00476. SALA 407. Sobre: COBRO DE DINEEstado Libre Asociado de Puerto RO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENRico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE TENCIA POR EDICTO. JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera A: MARILYN LEON Instancia Sala Superior de BAAGOSTA POR SI Y COMO YAMON.

LEGAL NOTICE

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante Vs

BANK OF AMERICA Y OTROS

Demandado CIVIL NUM. BY2020CV01832.

SALA: 504. SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO (A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 27 de OCTUBRE de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de esta. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto

(787) 743-3346

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

REPRESENTANTE DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA CON FULANO DE TAL

establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 30 de octubre de 2020. En CAROLINA, Puerto Rico, el 30 de octubre de 2020.

LCDA. MARILYN APONTE RODRIGUEZ, Secretaria. F/ BETHZAIDA MERCADO ALVAREZ, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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

Reverse Mortgage Funding LLC Demandante v.

Sucesión de Pedro Merced Gómez t/c/c Pedro Merced compuesta por Yelisa Merced González, José Antonio Merced Charneco, Taysha Merced, Gerald Merced Delgado, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos desconocidos; Sucesión de Elsie Eugenia González Moralest, t/c/c Elsie González Morales, t/c/c Elsi González Moralest, t/c/c Elsie González compuesta por Yelisa Merced González Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos desconocidos, Centro de Recaudaciones Municipales y; a los Estados Unidos de América.

Demandado(a) Civil: BY2019CV00771. Sobre: (Nombre de las partes a las que se Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de le notifican la sentencia por edicto) Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria.

EL SECRETARIO (A) que sus- NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENcribe le notifica a usted que el CIA POR EDICTO. 21 de octubre de 2020, este A: JOSE ANTONIO Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, MERCED CHARNECO, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución TAYSHA MERCED, en este caso, que ha sido debiFULANO DE TAL Y damente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted SUTANO DE TAL COMO enterarse detalladamente de los POSIBLES HEREDEROS términos de la misma. Esta noDE NOMBRES tificación se publicará una sola DESCONOCIDOS DE LA vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto SUCESION DE PEDRO Rico, dentro de los diez (10) MERCED GOMEZ, días siguientes a su notificación.

T/C/C PEDRO MERCED. Y, siendo o representando usted FULANO DE TAL Y una parte en el procedimienSUTANO DE TAL COMO to sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial POSIBLES HEREDEROS o Resolución, de la cual puede DE NOMBRES

DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION DE ELSIE EUGENIA GONZALEZ MORALES, T/C/C ELSIE GONZALEZ MORALES T/C/C ELSI GONZALEZ MORALES, T/C/C ELSIE GONZALEZ

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO (A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 2 de noviembre de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes a su notificación.

Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 5 de noviembre de 2020. En Bayamon, Puerto Rico, el 5 de noviembre de 2020.

LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria. F/ MILITZA MERCADO RIVERA, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO DEMANDANTE VS.

ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA; BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANO DE TAL COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES DE LOS PAGARÉS EXTRAVIADOS

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NÚM.: SJ2020CV05756 (602). SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE HIPOTECAS POR PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R.

A: FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES DEL PAGARÉ

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 día 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 secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Representa a la parte demandante, la abogada cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono se consigna de inmediato: LCDO. JUAN C. FORTUÑO FAS RÚA NÚM: 11416 FORTUÑO & FORTUÑO FAS, C.S.P. PO BOX 9300 SANTURCE, PR 00908 TEL: 787- 751-5290/ FAX: 787-751-6155 E-MAIL: ejecuciones@fortuno-law.com Se le apercibe que, si no compareciere usted a contestar dicha demanda dentro del término de 30 días a partir de la publicación de este edicto, radicando el original de la contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente, con copia a la parte demandante, se le anotaría la rebeldía y se le dictará sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. Se le apercibe que conforme al Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. § 2787, usted tiene 30 días para aceptar o repudiar la herencia desde la publicación de este edicto. A esos efectos, de no rechazarla, se tendrá la herencia por aceptada. En Bayamón, Puerto Rico a 5 de noviembre de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Secretaria. Nancy I Garcia Figueroa, Sec Serv a Sala.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LlBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA lNSTANClA SALA SUPERIOR DE GUAYNABO.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Y SUN WEST MORTGAGE COMPANY, lNC. COMO AGENTE DE SERVICIO DEMANDANTE VS.

SUCESIÓN DE ISABEL ROSARIO SANCHEZ COMPUESTA POR SU VIUDO JORGE LOPEZ LLANOS, por sí; su

The San Juan Daily Star

heredero conocido JORGE LOPEZ ROSARIO; FULANO DE TAL Y, SUTANA DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS Y/O PARTES CON, INTERÉS EN DICHA SUCESIÓN; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA.

DEMANDADOS CIVI L NÚM.: GB2020CV00561.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. ss.

Monday, November 9, 2020

LCDO. JUAN C. FORTUÑO FAS RUA NUM.: 11416 PO BOX 9300, SAN JUAN, PR 00908 TEL: 787- 751-5290, FAX: 787-751-6155 E-MAIL: eiecuciones@fortuno-law.com Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 4 de noviembre de 2020. Lcda. Laura I Santa Sanchez, Sec Regional. Diama T. Gonzalez Barreto, Sec del Tribunal Conf II.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE GUAYAMA.

Reverse Mortgage Funding, LLC DEMANDANTE VS.

A: SUCESIÓN DE ISABEL Sucesión de Paula Torres ROSARIO SANCHEZ Quiñones compuesta por COMPUESTA POR SU Antonio Morales Torres, VIUDO, JORGE LOPEZ Fulano de Tal y Sutano LLANOS, por si; su de Tal como posibles heredero conocido miembros de nombres JORGE LOPEZ desconocidos; Centro ROSARIO; FULANO DE de Recaudación de TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL Ingresos Municipales y COMO HEREDEROS a los Estados Unidos de DESCONOCIDOS Y/O América PARTES CON INTERf:S DEMANDADOS EN DICHA SUCESIÓN CIVIL NUM.: GM2019CV00097.

COND. CAPARRA HILLS SALA: 306. SOBRE: Cobro de TOWER (ANTES SUMMIT Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria. EMPLAHILLS) ZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESAPARTAMENTO 601 TADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA GUA YNABO, PR 00968 EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESDIRECClON POSTAL: A1, TADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO CALLE NOGAL, APT. 601, LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. GUAYNABO, PR A: Fulano de Tal y Sutano 00968-3145 de Tal como posibles POR LA PRESENTE se le emherederos de nombres plaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva desconocidos de la dentro de los treinta (30) días de Sucesión de Paula Torres haber sido diligenciado este emQuiñones y/o como plazamiento, excluyéndose el cualquier otra persona día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación con interés en este caso. 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. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Se Je apercibe que conforme al artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. § 2787, usted tiene derecho aceptar o repudiar la herencia. A esos efectos, de no rechazarla se tendrá la herencia por aceptada. Representa a la parte demandante, la representación legal cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono se consigna de inmediato: BUFETE FORTUÑO & FORTUÑO FAS, C.S.P.

25

CONTRATO (Materia o Asunto). BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO 2976 AVENIDA FAGOT EMPLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS RICO. SUITE I PONCE PUERTO UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL A: JR MORTGAGE RICO 00716 PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTANombre de la parte demandada Dirección de la parte demandada que se emplaza DOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIque se emplaza BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO 2976 AVENIDA FAGOT POR LA PRESENTE se le emRICO. SUITE I PONCE PUERTO plaza para que presente al triA: JORGE RIVERA bunal su alegación responsiva RICO 00716 MUNOZ, POR SI Y EN dentro de los (30) días de haber Dirección de la parte demandada que se emplaza sido diligenciado este emplazaREPRESENTACION DE LA PRESENTE se le em- miento, excluyéndose el día del LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE POR plaza para que presente al tri- diligenciamiento. Usted deberá GANANCIALES bunal su alegación responsiva presentar su alegación responsiNombre de la parte demandada dentro de los (30) días de haber va a través del Sistema Unificaque se emplaza sido diligenciado este emplaza- do de Manejo y Administración 2976 AVENIDA FAGOT miento, excluyéndose el día del de Casos (SUMAC), al cual pueSUITE I PONCE PUERTO diligenciamiento. Usted deberá de acceder utilizando la siguienpresentar su alegación responsi- te dirección electrónica: https:// RICO 00716 va a través del Sistema Unifica- tribunalelectronico.ramajudicial.

Dirección de la parte demandada que se emplaza do de Manejo y Administración pr/sumac2018/, salvo que se POR LA PRESENTE se le em- de Casos (SUMAC), al cual pue- represente por derecho propio, plaza para que presente al tri- de acceder utilizando la siguien- en cuyo caso deberá presentar bunal su alegación responsiva te dirección electrónica: https:// su alegación responsiva en la dentro de los (30) días de haber tribunalelectronico.ramajudicial. secretaría del tribunal. Si usted sido diligenciado este emplaza- pr/sumac2018/, salvo que se deja de presentar su alegación miento, excluyéndose el día del represente por derecho propio, responsiva dentro del referido diligenciamiento. Usted deberá en cuyo caso deberá presentar termino, el tribunal podía dictar presentar su alegación responsi- su alegación responsiva en la sentencia en rebeldía en su conva a través del Sistema Unifica- secretaría del tribunal. Si usted tra y conceder el remedio solicido de Manejo y Administración deja de presentar su alegación tado en la demanda, o cualquier de Casos (SUMAC), al cual pue- responsiva dentro del referido otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de acceder utilizando la siguien- termino, el tribunal podía dictar de su sana discreción, lo entiente dirección electrónica: https:// sentencia en rebeldía en su con- de procedente. tribunalelectronico.ramajudicial. tra y conceder el remedio soliciEDGARDO SANTIAGO LLORENS, pr/sumac2018/, salvo que se tado en la demanda, o cualquier Nombre del (de la) abogado(a) de la parte demandante, o de la parte, si no tiene represente por derecho propio, otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio en cuyo caso deberá presentar de su sana discreción, lo entien- representación legal. 9877, Número ante el Tribunal Supremo, si es abogado(a) su alegación responsiva en la de procedente.

1925 BLV. LUIS A. FERRE EDGARDO SANTIAGO LLORENS, secretaría del tribunal. Si usted SAN ANTONIO deja de presentar su alegación Nombre del (de la) abogado(a) de la parte PONCE PUERTO RICO 00728, demandante, o de la parte, si no tiene responsiva dentro del referido Dirección representación legal. 9877, Número ante el termino, el tribunal podía dictar TEL. 7872847224 / FAX 7872847225, Tribunal Supremo, si es abogado(a) Número de teléfono: número de fax. sentencia en rebeldía en su con1925 BLV. LUIS A. FERRE ESLAW2000@YAHOO.COM, tra y conceder el remedio soliciSAN ANTONIO Correo electrónico. tado en la demanda, o cualquier PONCE PUERTO RICO 00728, Expedido bajo mi firma y se]lo otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio Dirección de su sana discreción, lo entien- TEL. 7872847224 / FAX 7872847225, del Tribunal, el 21 de septiembre de 2020. Luz Mayra Caraballo Número de teléfono: número de fax. de procedente.

Garcia, Sec Regional. Madeline ESLAW2000@YAHOO.COM, EDGARDO SANTIAGO LLORENS, Correo electrónico.

Rivera Mercado, Sec Aux del Nombre del (de la) abogado(a) de la parte Expedido bajo mi firma y se]lo Tribunal. demandante, o de la parte, si no tiene representación legal. 9877, Número ante el del Tribunal, el 21 de septiembre Tribunal Supremo, si es abogado(a) de 2020. Luz Mayra Caraballo LEGAL NOTICE 1925 BLV. LUIS A. FERRE Garcia, Sec Regional. Madeline SAN ANTONIO Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rivera Mercado, Sec Aux del PONCE PUERTO RICO 00728, Rico Tribunal de Primera lnstanTribunal.

Dirección cia Sala SUPERIOR de PONCE. TEL. 7872847224 / FAX 7872847225, LEGAL NOTICE MARIA DE LOS ANGELEZ Número de teléfono: número de fax.

Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto ESLAW2000@YAHOO.COM, RENTAS COSTAS Correo electrónico.

Rico Tribunal de Primera lnstanY OTROS Expedido bajo mi firma y se]lo cia Sala SUPERIOR de PONCE. Nombre de la(s) Parte(s) del Tribunal, el 21 de septiembre MARIA DE LOS ANGELEZ Demandantes(s) VS. de 2020. Luz Mayra Caraballo RENTAS COSTAS JR MORTGAGE Y OTROS Garcia, Sec Regional. Madeline Nombre de la(a) Parte(s) Y OTROS Rivera Mercado, Sec Aux del Demandada(s) Nombre de la(s) Parte(s) Tribunal.

CASO NUM: PO2020CV01370.

Demandantes(s) VS. LEGAL NOTICE JR MORTGAGE Y OTROS SALON NUM: ACCION CIVIL DE: INCUMPLIMIENTO DE Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Nombre de la(a) Parte(s) CONTRATO (Materia o Asunto).

Rico Tribunal de Primera lnstanDemandada(s) cia Sala SUPERIOR de PONCE. CASO NUM: PO2020CV01370. EMPLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL MARIA DE LOS ANGELEZ SALON NUM: ACCION CIVIL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTALEGAL NOTICE DE: INCUMPLIMIENTO DE RENTAS COSTAS CONTRATO (Materia o Asunto). DOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIEstado Libre Asociado de Puerto Y OTROS EMPLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO Rico Tribunal de Primera lnstanNombre de la(s) Parte(s) UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL RICO. cia Sala SUPERIOR de PONCE. Demandantes(s) VS. A: JORGE A. RIVERA PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTA-

Guayama, finca número 7796, Sección de Guayama del Registro de la Propiedad. La Hipoteca Revertida grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar numero treinta y ocho (38) del bloque AX del Proyecto CRUV-VBC ciento cincuenta (150) conocido cono Residencial La Hacienda, radicado en el barrio Machete del término municipal de Guayama, Puerto Rico, compuesto de trescientos noventa y un metros cuadrados con ochocientos una milésima (391.801). En lindes por el Norte, en once metros con setecientos setenta milímetros (11.770), con la calle número cuarenta y tres (43); por el Sur, en dieciséis metros con novecientos setenta y tres milímetros (16.973 con el área de facilidades vecinales; por el Este, en veinticinco metros con doscientos cincuenta y dos milimetros (25.252), bloque AX; por el Oeste, en veinte metros con ochocientos setenta y ocho milímetros (20.878), con las calles números cuarenta y tres (43) y cuarenta y ocho (48). Enclava una estructura de concreto y bloques dedicada a vivienda. Consta inscrita al folio ciento treinta y cuatro (134) del tomo doscientos cincuenta y cuatro (254) de Guayama, finca número siete mil setecientos noventa y seis (7,796), Registro de la Propiedad, sección de Guayama. Se apercibe y advierte a ustedes como personas desconocidas, que de no contestar la demanda radicando el original de la contestación ante la secretaria del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Guayama, y notificar copia de la contestación de esta a la parte demandante por conducto de su abogada, GLS LEGAL SERVICES, LLC, Atención: Lcda. Genevieve López Stipes, Dirección: P.O. Box 367308, San Juan, P.R. 009367308, Teléfono: 787-758-6550, dentro de los próximos 60 días a partir de la publicación de este emplazamiento por edicto, que será publicado una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general en la isla de Puerto Rico, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia, concediendo el remedio solicitando en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle.

Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal hoy 4 de marzo de 2020. Marisol Rosado Rodriguez, Sec Regional I. Ileana Santiago Vega, Sec Auxilia del Tribunal.

POR LA PRESENTE, se les emplaza y se les notifica que se ha presentado en la Secretaria de este Tribunal la Demanda del caso del epígrafe solicitando la ejecución de hipoteca y el cobro de dinero relacionado al pagaré suscrito a favor de The Money House, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $150,000.00, con intereses computados sobre la misma desde su fecha hasta su total y completo pago a razón de la tasa de interés de 3.251% anual, la cual será ajustada mensualmente, obligándose además al pago de costas, gastos y desembolsos del litigio, más honorarios de abogados en una suma de $15,000.00, equivalente al 10% de la suma MARIA DE LOS ANGELEZ principal original. Este pagaRENTAS COSTAS ré fue suscrito bajo el affidávit Y OTROS número 3293 ante el notario Nombre de la(s) Parte(s) Laura Mia Gonzalez Bonilla. Lo Demandantes(s) VS. anterior surge de la hipoteca constituida mediante la escritu- JR MORTGAGE Y OTROS Nombre de la(a) Parte(s) ra número 572 otorgada el 12 Demandada(s) de septiembre de 2009, ante el mismo notario público, inscrita al CASO NUM: PO2020CV01370. folio 131 vuelto del tomo 453 de SALON NUM: ACCION CIVIL DE: INCUMPLIMIENTO DE

que se emplaza 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 día 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:// tribunalelectronico.ramajudicial. pr/sumac2018/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido termino, el tribunal podía dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

EDGARDO SANTIAGO LLORENS, Nombre del (de la) abogado(a) de la parte demandante, o de la parte, si no tiene representación legal. 9877, Número ante el Tribunal Supremo, si es abogado(a) 1925 BLV. LUIS A. FERRE SAN ANTONIO PONCE PUERTO RICO 00728, Dirección TEL. 7872847224 / FAX 7872847225, Número de teléfono: número de fax.

ESLAW2000@YAHOO.COM, Correo electrónico.

Expedido bajo mi firma y se]lo del Tribunal, el 21 de septiembre de 2020. Luz Mayra Caraballo Garcia, Sec Regional. Madeline Rivera Mercado, Sec Aux del Tribunal.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Y SUN WEST MORTGAGE COMPANY, INC. COMO AGENTE DE SERVICIO DEMANDANTE VS.

SUCESIÓN DE CARMEN MARÍA RIVERA T/C/C CARMEN MARÍA RIVERA RIVERA COMPUESTA POR SU VIUDO WILLIAM VIRELLA GRACIA, POR SÍ; SUS HEREDEROS CONOCIDOS CARMEN G. VIRELLA RIVERA, WILLIAM VIRELLA RIVERA Y JOSE IVAN VIRELLA RIVERA; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL JR MORTGAGE Y OTROS DOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LI- COLON, POR SI Y EN COMO HEREDEROS Nombre de la(a) Parte(s) BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO REPRESENTACION DE DESCONOCIDOS Y/O Demandada(s) RICO. LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE PARTES CON INTERÉS CASO NUM: PO2020CV01370.

A: ANA L. MUÑOZ GANANCIALES SALON NUM: ACCION CIVIL EN DICHA SUCESIÓN; BERMUDEZ, POR SI Y EN Nombre de la parte demandada DE: INCUMPLIMIENTO DE ESTADOS UNIDOS DE que se emplaza REPRESENTACION DE CONTRATO (Materia o Asunto).

AMÉRICA 2976 AVENIDA FAGOT EMPLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE DEMANDADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL SUITE I PONCE PUERTO CIVIL NÚM.: BY2020CV02184.

GANANCIALES PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTANombre de la parte demandada RICO 00716 SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO DOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LI-

que se emplaza

Dirección de la parte demandada

Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R.

A: Sucesión de CARMEN MARÍA RIVERA RIVERA COMPUESTA POR SUS HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL; O TERCEROS INTERESADOS EN DICHA SUCESION. LEVITTOW LAKES, SECCIÓN 4TA AD-24, BOULEVARD MONROIG TOA BAJA PR 00949

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 día 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 secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Representa a la parte demandante, la abogada cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono se consigna de inmediato: LCDO. JUAN C. FORTUÑO FAS RÚA NÚM: 11416 FORTUÑO & FORTUÑO FAS, C.S.P. PO BOX 3908 SANTURCE, PR 00908 TEL: 787- 751-5290/ FAX: 787-751-6155 E-MAIL: ejecuciones@fortuno-law.com Se le apercibe que, si no compareciere usted a contestar dicha demanda dentro del término de 30 días a partir de la publicación de este edicto, radicando el original de la contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente, con copia a la parte demandante, se le anotaría la rebeldía y se le dictará sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. Se le apercibe que conforme al Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. § 2787, usted tiene 30 días para aceptar o repudiar la herencia desde la publicación de este edicto. A esos efectos, de no rechazarla, se tendrá la herencia por aceptada. En Bayamón, Puerto Rico a 29 de octubre de 2020. Lcda.

Laura I Santa Sanchez, Sec Regional. Yariliz Cintron Colon, Sub-Secretaria.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

After a suspension, Alex Cora gets a 2nd chance with Red Sox

By JAMES WAGNER

E

ven as the Boston Red Sox announced Alex Cora’s departure for his role in the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal that marred the 2017 season, the manager’s former bosses spoke glowingly about him. In 2018, after all, Cora had guided the team to a World Series title.

“He was a tremendous manager for us on all levels, so we’re going to miss him,” Red Sox owner John Henry said in January. Sam Kennedy, the team’s president, called Cora “an extreme talent,” and when asked about the possibility of a second chance, said, “He’s apologized to us for the embarrassment that this caused. He’ll go through a process of rehabilitation, so we’ll see what happens.”

Ten months after Cora was ousted in January and with a Major League Baseball-imposed 2020 suspension complete, Cora, 45, has his old job back. The Red Sox rehired him on Friday.

“This past year, I have had time to reflect and evaluate many things, and I recognize how fortunate I am to lead this team once again,” Cora said in a statement issued by the team. “Not being a part of the game of baseball, and the pain of bringing negative attention to my family and this organization was extremely difficult. I am sorry for the harm my past actions have caused and will work hard to make this organization and its fans proud.”

Cora, formerly Houston’s bench coach, is the latest principal figure from the Astros’ tainted 2017 World Series championship season to return to baseball. Last week, the Detroit Tigers hired A.J. Hinch — Cora’s former boss and Houston’s manager during the 2017 and 2018 seasons in question — for their managerial vacancy.

Two other central characters who lost their jobs during the fallout of the’ scandal have yet to return to baseball: Jeff Luhnow — the former Astros general manager who, once again, proclaimed his innocence in a television interview last month — and Carlos Beltrán, who stepped down as the New York Mets’ manager after he was the only Astros player named in MLB Commissioner

Alex Cora led the Boston Red Sox to a World Series title in 2018. But he missed the entire 2020 season after being suspended for his role in the Houston Astros cheating scandal.

Rob Manfred’s report. Like Cora and Hinch, Luhnow was suspended by MLB for the 2020 season; Beltrán was not disciplined. Luhnow and Hinch were fired by the Astros after MLB announced their penalties.

Because Cora and Hinch were previously well-liked figures, successful managers and contrite about their roles in the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal, they were given another shot to lead teams.

Cora was heavily implicated in the report issued by Manfred in January, which came after the sign-stealing schemes were detailed by The Athletic in November 2019. An MLB investigation granted players immunity in exchange for testimony.

According to Manfred’s report, Cora arranged for a monitor displaying the center-field camera footage to be installed next to the Astros’ dugout. At least one player would decode the opposing team’s signs, and when the catcher issued a sign, the upcoming pitch would be relayed to the batter with a sound — most often the slamming of a baseball bat on a nearby trash can.

“Cora was involved in developing

both the banging scheme and utilizing the replay review room to decode and transmit signs,” Manfred wrote in January.

“Cora participated in both schemes, and through his active participation, implicitly condoned the players’ conduct.”

Soon afterward, the Red Sox and Cora “mutually agreed to part ways.”

While Red Sox officials then said that Cora had expressed remorse to them, Cora’s team-issued statement didn’t have an apology or admission of wrongdoing.

Cora thanked the team’s executives and called his two seasons with the Red Sox “the best years of my life.”

It wasn’t until April, when MLB announced its investigation into allegations of the Red Sox stealing signs during the 2018 season, that Cora publicly apologized. He said then that he took “full responsibility” for his role in the Astros’ scandal and called the team’s collective conduct “unacceptable.”

Cora was not disciplined by MLB relating to Boston’s sign-stealing scandal, which Manfred called “far more limited in scope and impact” than Houston’s.

J.T. Watkins, the Red Sox video replay operator, was the only person formally

disciplined as a result of that report. At the time, though, Manfred announced Cora’s suspension for the 2020 season for his role with the Astros’ sign stealing.

During the 2019 season, the Red Sox fired Dave Dombrowski, their president of baseball operations who had hired Cora and helped build the team that won the 2018 title. Chaim Bloom replaced Dombrowski and promoted Cora’s bench coach, Ron Roenicke, to manager for the 2020 season.

The Red Sox, who are rebuilding under Bloom, were one of the worst teams in the major leagues this year, going 2436 during the truncated season. Before the final game of the season, the Red Sox told Roenicke he would not return as manager in 2021, once again fueling speculation that Cora would return.

“Cora is an outstanding manager, and the right person to lead our club into 2021 and beyond,” Bloom said in a statement on Friday.

The Red Sox had considered a stable of candidates, Bloom said, and when Cora’s suspension ended after the conclusion of the World Series on Oct. 27, the two spoke, even though Bloom was unsure if it made sense yet to consider Cora for the job.

“Our conversations were lengthy, intense, and emotional,” Bloom said. “Alex knows that what he did was wrong, and he regrets it. My belief is that every candidate should be considered in full: strengths and weaknesses, accomplishments and failures. That is what I did with Alex in making this choice. He loves the Red Sox and the game of baseball, and because of that we believe he will make good on this second chance.”

JOSÉ BURGOS Técnico Generadores Gas Propano

787•607•3343

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

27

Authentic gets ‘emotional’ Breeders’ Cup win for John Velázquez

By JOE DRAPE

J

ohn Velázquez climbed aboard Authentic on Saturday afternoon with confidence as well as determination to make a vision come true. His mother-inlaw told him she had a good feeling about the $6 million Breeders’ Cup Classic. He and his colt, she told him, were going to win a race that had eluded him 19 times before.

Velázquez is a Hall of Famer. In September, he won his third Kentucky Derby with Authentic. And sure, he wanted to add America’s richest race and the marquee event of horse racing’s season-ending championships to his résumé.

But that is not what took his breath away after he crossed the finish line nearly three lengths ahead of Improbable. Instead, he was thinking about Joan O’Brien, the mother of his wife, Leona. The O’Briens are racetrackers — Leo O’Brien was a longtime trainer on the New York circuit — and know their horses. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Joan O’Brien has been grinding through chemotherapy to treat cancer and keeping up both a smile and her hopes.

“She told me she had a feeling,” Velázquez said. “She has a great attitude. She inspired me to do this. With everything that has gone on and the problems with the family, getting to ride a horse like this is a gift from God.” Velázquez and Authentic’s victory provided a rare grace note in a downbeat year for one of America’s oldest sports. In the spring, more than 30 people — trainers, veterinarians and others — were indicted on charges, brought by federal prosecutors, of doping horses. On Friday, in fact, prosecutors won additional in-

Authentic, ridden by John Velazquez, won the Breeders’ Cup Classic by nearly three lengths on Saturday. dictments against two trainers at the center of the investigation: Jason Servis and Jorge Navarro.

It didn’t help on Saturday that Maximum Security, one of the horses involved in the doping cases, was in the Classic field. The horse, who crossed the finish line first in last year’s Kentucky Derby, was disqualified 22 minutes later when racing officials decided he had interfered with rivals.

This time, Maximum Security was in the barn of Bob Baffert, also the trainer of Authentic. Baffert has gained the enmity of rivals who see him as a cheater, their suspicions fueled by the 29 drug tests his horses failed over four decades, including four in the past six months.

The cases took months, if not years, to adjudicate and resulted mostly in modest fines or brief suspensions, as Baffert asserted he had done nothing wrong and blamed the results on environmental contamination or human error. Once more, horse racing’s leaders must defend a culture in which performance-enhancing and painkilling drugs, combined with lax state regulations, undermine the credibility of the sport and threaten the well being of the animals who define it.

Earlier in the week, facing mounting criticism, Baffert pledged to be more vigilant.

“I am very aware of the several incidents this year concerning my horses and the impact it has had on my family, horse racing and me,” Baffert said in a statement.

“I want to have a positive influence on the

sport of horse racing. Horses have been my life and I owe everything to them and the tremendous sport in which I have been so fortunate to be involved.”

For Velázquez, Saturday was the 18th time that he had visited the winner’s circle after a Breeders’ Cup race. It was also the most important victory of a long, distinguished career.

“The older I get, the more emotional I get,” Velázquez said. “It worked out perfect. Bob said to take him to the lead so he doesn’t wander so much and keep his mind on running. It worked out. He did everything I wanted him to do.”

Authentic did everything that Joan O’Brien had envisioned a colt, and her sonin-law, would.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

Pandemic creates new considerations for arena construction

By ALLAN KREDA

T

im Leiweke could hardly contain his enthusiasm while he gestured toward what will be center ice at the New York Islanders’ future home at Belmont Park.

Leiweke, chief executive of venue development firm Oak View Group and a partner with the Islanders for UBS Arena, was discussing the team’s run to the conference finals increasing fan support for a project that broke ground last September and will be ready to host games in about a year.

Ticket demand is strong, with about half of premium club seats and the arena’s 56 suites selling in the past three months, he said.

“The team generated such a buzz and we were able to ride that buzz,” Leiweke said.

But amid all the anticipation of the Islanders at long last having a state-ofthe-art $1 billion home, there will be the never-ending concern of finding ways to incorporate normalcy and ensure safety for when the team, it hopes, hosts more than 17,000 people at games in late 2021.

After the pandemic shutdown, the NHL resumed its 2019-20 season in two so-called bubbles in Canada without fans in the stands. Once games return to home markets and spectators stream back into arenas, fans at Belmont Park will experience many new features, including cashless concession transactions to limit contact and help lines move along faster.

No U.S. sports league that plays its game indoors has widely permitted fans to attend games yet, but NFL teams with retractable roof stadiums — including the Atlanta Falcons and the Dallas Cowboys — have allowed limited-capacity crowds.

“We are waking up every day and trying to figure out how to have clean air,” Leiweke said. “That is critical to get people back to the live experience. We will get their confidence back.”

The Belmont project was on hold for two months after New York put restrictions in place to slow the spread of coronavirus in mid-March, when it struck with ferocity. UBS Arena is ex-

pected to be completed in time for the 2021-22 season.

The Islanders won’t be the only team in a new venue. The expansion Seattle Kraken — the NHL’s 32nd team — will begin play next year at the carbon-neutral Climate Pledge Arena, where the project was delayed for only two days.

Leiweke’s firm is working on both arenas — a scenario that has presented challenges and a chance for synergy in terms of safety and sustainability. Up to 1,000 workers are on-site in each venue on a given day, he said.

“These were two cities that had to deal with the impact of the pandemic early on,” he said. “We’ve taken a leadership position on sanitization. We will have sophisticated filters that clean what comes and goes. We also have to remember that when the vaccine comes, it is not the cure.”

“We have to be at a point where the virus is on the other side of the mountain,” he added. “We’re going to extremes.”

In addition to ensuring clear air for fans, the home of the Kraken will particularly focus on renewable energy, with solar panels on its atrium plus the arena mechanical systems, heating, dehumidification and cooking systems running on electric power. Single-use plastics will be eliminated over time, and there will be electric charging stations for vehicles outside.

Ed Bosco, managing principal at ME Engineers, has the task of studying and implementing airborne virus reduction solutions at UBS Arena. The company is working with more than 50 existing venues.

His team studied medical data including from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, domestic and foreign universities’ research and testing completed by equipment manufacturers and by international health research organizations. The goal is to make sure the Belmont arena would be ahead of the health curve, an evolving process.

“Buildings constructed before COVID-19 needed to balance comfort, safety and the fan experience,’’ said Bosco, whose firm has worked on venues

The UBS Arena at Belmont Park, where the Islanders will play. like Madison Square Garden, the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Yankee Stadium and Citi Field.

Bosco said government guidance on airflow rates and occupant spacing used to reopen schools has been a valuable tool. Because sports and entertainment venues have high ceilings and large concourses, he said, there is more air per person than in a typical classroom. At this year’s U.S. Open, closely supervising the operation of HVAC equipment helped increase ventilation in indoor spaces used by players and event staff by a factor of three, Bosco said.

Bosco also explained that active virus particles in the air can be reduced by ventilation, filtration, local dilution and exposing the virus to ultraviolet radiation.

“We can adapt existing buildings to operate differently when COVID is a concern and revert back to operating them as they do today when COVID has passed,” he said. “At UBS the systems will be newly calibrated and heavily tested during construction so we can be more certain about the data we collect and the building’s responses to tests we are running.”

Bosco added that having time to adjust UBS Arena before it opens has proved valuable.

“We’re starting to find solutions that really rise to the top,’’ he said. “We are looking at the big picture and how that influences the return of public assembly. It feels like these events are going to be what lets us get comfortable being back together as a society.”

Also involved in the UBS project is Matt Goodrich, whose eponymous firm is responsible for layouts and designs of corporate suites and public space inside and outside of the arena.

One option that will be present in the arena will be touchless features in the bathrooms.

“We had a project this big happening over a long period of time and then COVID popped into our consciousness relatively late in the process,” Goodrich said.

Both arenas will also harken back to earlier generations. Belmont’s architecture will feature archways and brickwork reminiscent of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Ebbets Field.

History is also a key element in Seattle, where the roof at Climate Pledge Arena is from the 1962 World’s Fair, an homage to President John F. Kennedy’s focus on space exploration that Leiweke insisted on including.

The arena, which will also host the WNBA’s Seattle Storm, will promote sustainability by encouraging fans to collect rainwater that will be turned into ice for their hockey team.

“They can bring it over in buckets and we will put it into our system and plant,” Leiweke said. “We will use it not only to put down the first sheet of ice but to maintain all year long.”

As work continues on both coasts, Leiweke’s zest has no time to wane.

The Kraken will give Seattle its longawaited NHL team, and the Islanders will be skating in a brand-new arena.

“Kudos to the crews out there to get that done for our organization and fans,” Anders Lee, the Islanders’ captain, said. “It’s going to be a special spot. We’re all going to enjoy the heck out of the Coliseum, give it another phenomenal ride. Belmont is right around the corner and it’s exciting.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 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

Monday, November 9, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

Money that has been delayed finally arrives.

Finances take a turn for the better and not before time. The efforts you have made in recent weeks will start to pay off now. You feel able to organise your budget more successfully.

New projects capture your imagination. It feels good to be able to get on with the things you most want to do.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

An experimental situation needs to be monitored very closely. Extra support may need to be arranged for people who need it. You may be asked to make sure a new system works.

Feedback will be important to help you decide on what further measures need to be taken to improve the situation.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Buying, selling and anything that involves the domestic scene will keep you occupied and busy. Making extensive home improvements will be exhausting but incredibly satisfying.

Adding creative touches will make even the dullest surroundings more comfortable. Someone you care for may need a little extra loving care and attention.

Your health is improving and your powers of concentration are strong. You can work for long stretches at a time without depleting your energy. Acting on your ideas will bring positive results. Cooperation within the home and workplace will ensure routine matters glide along smoothly without accident or incident.

You’re finding it easier to put your feelings into words.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

Whether or not you expected it, your attention will be drawn towards your home and family. A technical or mechanical breakdown will cause frustration. If you can’t deal with the problem yourself, arrange for repairs to be done so you are able to focus on other matters. A neighbour will put some interesting offers and suggestions your way.

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Leo

Aquarius

A friend is probing too deeply into your private life. You are starting to resent their interference. It will upset your partner to know you are sharing secrets that should be kept between you. There are ways to keep your independence without upsetting people who care.

Diplomacy is the keyword. Be careful about what you post on social media.

(July 24-Aug 23)

Be flexible in your handling of a troublesome situation. Work with others to find a solution.

This isn’t a matter where a one size fits all approach will work. Exercise patience when dealing with difficult people. You won’t be keen on household chores but it’s a good idea to keep domestic matters in order.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Press on with your main concerns. You have unique skills and valuable experience that will help you achieve your goals. Decisive action can be taken to make things happen. By standing up for what you believe in you will catch the attention of people who are willing to support you.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Take the odd calculated risk when the opportunity arises. If you have been thinking about instigating necessary changes in your life, numerous conversations in the family will strengthen your resolve to bring these about.

Listen carefully to an elderly relative’s wise advice. Accept an invitation to an online seminar. Expanding your knowledge will give you more options in the future.

Social events and activities that take place locally will bring you greatest satisfaction. Quiet events with strict safety measures in place are where you feel most comfortable. Take this opportunity to catch up with neighbours and re-connect with close friends. Keep conversations light and friendly.

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Creative ideas flood your mind. This would be a good time to spruce up your surroundings.

Don’t be surprised if you’re drawn to decoration schemes that will make a bold difference. It might take some time to persuade your housemates to agree with ideas that most appeal to you. A compromise will eventually be found.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Keep a sense of humour and show plenty of imagination no matter how difficult the situation. Your sensitivity to other people’s needs and feelings will help you give the right response in tense moments. Do your best to keep away from pessimistic relatives. Communications with a cheerful friend will bring a feeling of enrichment, emotionally.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Monday, November 9, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, November 9, 2020

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