Ruby Washington/The New York Times
2 GOOD MORNING
The San Juan Daily Star, the only paper with News Service in English in Puerto Rico, publishes 7 days a week, with a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday edition, along with a Weekend Edition to cover Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Comptroller finds irregularities in San Juan Health Dept.
By THE STAR STAFF
The Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico on Monday issued an adverse opinion on the fiscal operations of the Department of Health of the Municipality of San Juan, in which it reveals multiple irregularities, including improper payments, unjustified excesses and the lack of legal contracts.
The report details that the municipality paid $299,631 in excess of the permitted limit to a contractor in charge of billing and collections, in addition to $115,497 for services without a contract and $22,665 due to a mathematical error. The unsupported payments hamper the proper use of public resources, the report noted.
“In Disagreement – The fifth clause of the contract […], between the municipality of San Juan (municipality) and […] established that the Municipality will pay the contractor for contingency an amount equivalent to 11% of the amounts collected monthly during the provision of services that includes providing billing personnel, billing to medical plans and collections to medical plans,” San Juan Mayor Miguel Romero Lugo commented on the findings. “However, it is important to note that the service contract referred to in the report was granted for the purpose of providing billing and collection personnel to medical plans; medical services (billing and collection) provided by the Municipal Health Department of San Juan (department) […]; services in the areas of linen, diets, diet supervisor, ward clerks, and assistant in medical offices, among others. [sic].”
“We considered the mayor’s allegations, but we determined that the finding
prevails,” the Comptroller’s Office noted in response to Romero Lugo’s comments in disagreement. “The Municipal Contract Regulations provide that compensation in this type of contract may never exceed 10% of the income generated.”
Among the findings it was highlighted that nonprofit corporations performed work without legal authorization at the Municipal Hospital, receiving payments that were not deposited in the municipal accounts. In addition, it was identified that a special payer deposited six checks, totaling $11,055, in her personal account, an action that has been referred to the Department of Justice for evaluation.
The report also notes that the Municipality has not kept records of accounts receivable for 50,735 patients, with debts amounting to $7,180,666, which prevents effective management of collections and budget control. In addition, it highlights the lack of regulations and procedures for inventory management and the transfer of medicines.
The comptroller’s audit report reveals multiple irregularities, including improper payments, unjustified excesses and the lack of legal contracts.
The Comptroller’s Office recommended that the Municipality of San Juan implement a corrective action plan to improve its internal controls and ensure the efficient use of its resources.
In a response on Monday, the municipality said: “Regarding the recent report issued by the Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico, which identified several allegations since 2017, it is important to clarify that all administrative allegations included in the findings of the audit report originated in periods prior to the current administration of Mayor Miguel A. Romero Lugo. In the report, several administrative findings were presented by the Office of the Comptroller, for which the current administration of the Municipality of San Juan has taken several actions to address them.”
By THE STAR STAFF
he island Treasury Department has given the private sector, academics and the public at large until Oct. 10 to submit comments on the possible implementation of the GloBE Rules in Puerto Rico.
On Sept. 23, the Treasury Department opened a public consultation on the impact of the Pillar Two Rules in Puerto Rico.
The GloBE Rules are slated to be incorporated in local tax legislation to ensure that multinational entity groups (MNE Groups) with annual revenues of $830 million or more are subject to a minimum level of taxation of 15% regardless of the jurisdictions where they operate. MNE Groups operating
in Puerto Rico under tax incentive programs such as Act 1351997, Act 73-2008 and Act 60-2019, which generally provide for effective tax rates below 15% pursuant to individual tax grants, are bound to be impacted with additional taxation on their Puerto Rico operations.
For the past year, several MNE Groups have been urging the Puerto Rico government to develop a plan to address the impact the implementation of the Pillar Two Rules in several jurisdictions will have on their Puerto Rico operations and the Puerto Rico industrial development program.
This public consultation indicates that inaction is not an option, and feedback from stakeholders, private sector organizations, advisers, academics and the public in general on the impact of the Pillar Two Rules in Puerto Rico is requested.
Inter-American University to open meat & poultry workforce training center
The Barranquitas and Guayama campuses of InterAmerican University of Puerto Rico are spearheading an initiative to establish a Meat and Poultry Processing Workforce Training Center.
By THE STAR STAFF
With Puerto Rico producing less than 15% of the food it consumes, food security is at high risk, particularly in rural areas.
In response to the pressing issue, the Barranquitas and Guayama campuses of Inter-American University of Puerto Rico are spearheading an initiative to establish a Meat and Poultry Processing Workforce Training Center. Funded by a $950,000 Hispanic-Serving Institutions Education Grant in 2023 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the four-year project aims to revitalize Puerto Rico’s agriculture sector by developing a skilled workforce in meat and poultry production and processing, according to a statement from NIFA.
Project Director Dr. Yesenia Rivera Rivera said the project offers more than training.
“This project, beyond training, is a business option for those interested in entering the meat industry in Puerto Rico with the skills and knowledge that make them competitive,” she said. “And at the same time, it guarantees Puerto Ricans fresh food from farm to table, minimizing the risk of food shortages.”
The project recognizes the vital role agriculture can play in ensuring food security, generating employment and driving economic growth. By focusing on meat and poultry
Education Dept. launches new extended hours program
By THE STAR STAFF
Secretary of Education Yanira Raíces Vega on Monday announced the start of the “Our Extended School” (“Nuestra Escuela Extendida,” or NEExt) project, which will begin on Wednesday, with the goal of strengthening students’ skills and learning through extended hours.
The program is the continuation of the successful “Refuerzo Académica Extendido” (RAE), an initiative led by Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urritia, which has been key in improving students’ academic performance and supporting their comprehensive development outside of school hours.
The “Our Extended School” project seeks to complement school time by integrating the subjects of Spanish, English and mathematics with fine arts and physical education, covering 600 schools and benefiting an estimated enrollment of 50,000 students from kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12). Pierluisi’s public policy promotes the extended-hour service as one of the strategies to improve students’ academic achievement
and address their skills gaps.
“Once again, we are betting on support services for our students, offering extended hours to help them in their learning and skills development, while we work to close the academic gap,” Raíces Vega said. “The support of families is essential in this process, enrolling their children and collaborating with teachers to improve student performance. Teamwork will translate into better learning.”
The academic focus of the project will be on learning acceleration, ensuring that students master essential grade-level concepts and skills in core subjects. Additionally, the social-emotional component of the program will focus on prevention, minimizing the risk of academic, social, emotional or behavioral problems.
“This is a broad project that allows us to ensure that our children and youth receive specific academic support according to their needs in Spanish, English, and mathematics,” said Beverly Morro, deputy secretary for academic and programmatic affairs. “In addition, it strengthens mastery in
production, the initiative seeks to strengthen the supply chain for those essential animal-based proteins, which are the main source of protein for Puerto Rico’s population. Currently, only 8.86% of beef, 3.4% of pork, and 21% of chicken consumed on the island are produced locally. The new training center aims to boost those numbers, reducing dependence on imports and enhancing food security.
The training center will be the first of its kind in Puerto Rico. It will recruit 110 students, offering them specialized academic programs designed to meet industry standards. Each campus will be equipped with state-of-the-art laboratories, providing students with hands-on experience in meat and poultry processing at the industrial level. The practical training will be complemented by online education, ensuring that the programs are accessible to a wide range of students.
The initiative also includes partnerships with industry experts and the Small Business Technology Development Center to ensure that the curriculum is relevant and up-todate. A symposium on meat and poultry processing will be held as part of the project, bringing together academia, industry and farmers to share knowledge and best practices. By investing in the education and training of a new generation of meat and poultry professionals, the initiative will not only strengthen Puerto Rico’s agricultural sector but also will provide a pathway to economic growth and sustainability, proponents said.
Education Secretary Yanira Raíces Vega
these subjects by integrating fine arts and physical education, promoting their artistic and physical development. It also offers socio-emotional support, involving their families to enhance the comprehensive development of students, guaranteeing their well-being.”
Body found after hit-and-run on PR-52 expressway in Ponce
By THE STAR STAFF
Aman was run over and killed at approximately 6:11 a.m. on Monday on the PR-52 expressway, at kilometer 97.1 near the Ponce sign.
According to preliminary information, a call was received through the 9-1-1 Emergency System reporting a man seen lying on the pavement. When police agents and paramedics from the emergency medical services arrived at the scene, they found a man with no vital
signs on the side of the road in the green area. Information regarding the man’s identity was not available as of press time.
Agents assigned to the Ponce region Highway Division, Homicides, and the prosecutor on duty were investigating.
Broadband program’s progress & challenges discussed at DC summit
By THE STAR STAFF
Puerto Rico Broadband Program Executive
Director Michelle Cabiya Zorrilla participated on Monday in the “Friends of Puerto Rico Capitol Hill Summit” in Washington, D.C., where she shared the progress and challenges of the “Smart Island” project to expand connectivity on the island.
“Puerto Rico still faces challenges to achieve
full connectivity, such as geographic barriers, infrastructure damage and financial constraints,” Cabiya Zorrilla said in a written statement.
Cabiya Zorrilla also highlighted the advances in broadband infrastructure and how they have generated growth opportunities in urban and rural areas, benefiting underserved communities. She urged Congress to maintain its commitment to expanding broadband access in Puerto Rico.
The Asociación Pro-Bienestar de la Familia Comerieña (Family Pro-Wellness Association) in Comerío received a nearly $25,000 allocation for roof repairs on three buildings, as well as protections for electrical equipment. (Eliezer Hernández)
By THE STAR STAFF
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has awarded nearly $438,000 to three nonprofit organizations dedicated to revitalizing communities and supporting people in socially disadvantaged situations. The funds were aimed at restoring infrastructure at the
By THE STAR STAFF
U.S. Reps. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) and Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) lead the list of individuals who will receive awards at the 4th Recognition Ceremony of the island delegation that participates in Puerto Rican Week and National Puerto Rican Parade activities in New York.
The event scheduled for Friday, Nov. 8 at the Convention Center in Miramar and organized by the Puerto Rico Police Members Association, will be held three days after the island’s general elections and will be the first event in which the new governor-elect will appear.
“We traditionally invite the governor in office and we already have the commitment of the campaign coordinators of the
The Broadband Program was created by Gov. Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia in 2022, with the objective of coordinating and executing the use of local and federal funds to build connectivity infrastructure throughout the island.
Puerto Rico Broadband Program Executive Director Michelle Cabiya Zorrilla, right, participated in the “Friends of Puerto Rico Capitol Hill Summit” in Washington, D.C. on Monday.
FEMA funds projects that serve low-income residents
organizations whose facilities were damaged as a result of Hurricane Maria.
“These restorations represent a lifeline for those who rely on these services,” said Federal Disaster Recovery Coordinator José G. Baquero. “The obligation of funds helps restore facilities that provide key support for the emotional and economic development of these families.”
On one hand, FEMA awarded nearly $228,000 to the Trujillo Alto Economic Development Corp. (CDETA by its initials in Spanish) to repair the Aires del Manantial Retirement Home, a residential project for low-income people 62 years of age and older. The facility was built in 2016 in the Cuevas neighborhood of Trujillo Alto, through a public and private sector effort. It has 10 floors with capacity for 120 housing units and parking spaces.
“CDETA has played a key role in supporting seniors and people with disabilities by facilitating their access to safe
different political parties, which will allow the winner of the general election process to be with us as a guest speaker,” said Wilson Nazario, coordinator of the Puerto Rican Delegation that will travel to New York to participate in the activities of next year’s Puerto Rican Week and the National Puerto Rican Parade.
Other figures who will be recognized at the event by the Delegation Committee include Rafael Hernández Montañez (speaker of the island House of Representatives), José Luis Dalmau Santiago (president of the island Senate), Grégory Gonsález Souchet (mayor of Peñuelas), Lt. José J. Taboada de Jesús (president of the Puerto Rico Police Members Association), Rep. Eddie Charbonier Chinea, Luis Vélez (councilman of New Jersey), Jesús Márquez Rodríguez (mayor of
and affordable housing,” CDETA Executive Director Nilda H. Díaz said. “Our organization is responsive to the needs of these vulnerable populations, working to adapt our projects so that they can live independently.”
The construction project included various structural repairs, such as replacing wall panels, metal railing on the balcony, and renovation work in the bathroom, kitchen and living room. The agency included nearly $28,000 in mitigation funds to reinforce the facility and reduce the risk of future events.
Another of the nonprofit facilities receiving restoration funding was the Asociación Pro-Bienestar de la Familia Comerieña (Family Pro-Wellness Association) in Comerío. The nearly $25,000 allocation was used to repair the roofs of all three buildings, work that included repairing leaks and channeling rainwater, as well as to protect electrical equipment from voltage changes.
Luquillo), Fabián Arroyo Rodríguez (mayor of Lares), Jorge “Georgie” Luis González Otero (mayor of Jayuya), Héctor Camacho (manager PR-Virgin Islands, Jet Blue), Luis Rodríguez Díaz (executive director of the Traffic Safety Commission), Johnny Cruz of the Salsa Museum in New York, Wilson D. Nazario Cruz (president of Interstate General Construction), Pablo Crespo Claudio (former executive director of the Commonwealth Employees Association, or AEELA), Dr. Ramón Barquín III (president of the United Retailers Center of PR), Carlos Mercado (director of the Puerto Rico Tourism Company), and Matilde Rodríguez (the oldest person to march in the 2024 parade and a native of Lares).
Meanwhile, three companies will receive recognition for their efforts to help the delegation: Koffy Brunch & Bistro from
Palmas del Mar in Humacao, Potrero Los Llanos in Coamo and AEELA.
“It is very important for us to make these recognitions since the Delegation and the CROEM ALUMNI organization were able to [stage] the most important activity held during Puerto Rican Week in New York last year, which was the ‘Third Conversation on the Empowerment of Communities and Opportunities for SMEs’ (small and midsize businesses) who want to do business in New York, which brought together hundreds of leaders of small and midsize businesses,” said Marcel García Burgos, the CROEM ALUMNI presidential delegate for the activities held in New York last June. “We are already planning our Fifth Conversation, for which several topics have emerged that we hope to announce soon.”
Biden will visit region ravaged by ‘history-making’ Helene
By JACEY FORTIN
Rescuers fought their way along washed-out roads and through mud-filled ravines Monday to deliver food, water and emergency supplies across the mountains of southern Appalachia. Officials said hundreds of residents remain missing in the remote communities devastated by Hurricane Helene.
President Joe Biden promised long-term aid and said he would visit the region, possibly later this week, as the death toll from the storm rose to at least 111 across six states. Almost a third of those killed were in the county surrounding Asheville, North Carolina.
“There are reports of up to 600 people unaccounted for because they can’t be contacted,” Biden said from the White House. “God willing, they’re alive.”
Though the hurricane made landfall in northwestern Florida on Thursday evening as a powerful Category 4 storm, with winds of 140 mph, the damage has spread far and wide. Strong winds and flash flooding leveled communities far from any coastline.
The damage in western North Carolina — where Gov. Roy Cooper said the death toll would most likely continue to rise — and eastern Tennessee has been especially dire. Neighborhoods and small towns across the region have been utterly destroyed by floodwaters and landslides, and Asheville’s drinking water system was severely damaged.
Officials have been working to truck in drinkable water to the city of about 94,000 people, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said on Monday. But the lack of cellphone communication, along with widespread power outages and blocked roads, have left officials unsure of the extent of the damage in many hard-to-reach spots.
Power and phone service have been problems all across the South. More than 2 million customers were still without electricity by midday Monday from Florida to Ohio, with the most in South Carolina, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.
Damage after catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Helene in downtown Marshall, N.C., on Sept. 29, 2024. President Joe Biden will visit the region ravaged by Helene; the death toll from the storm has risen to more than 110 people across six states. (Nicole Craine/The New York Times)
FEMA said in an update that more than 100 roads had been cleared across North Carolina by Monday morning, but nearly 300 remained impassable, along with more than 100 each in South Carolina and Georgia.
Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia told reporters Monday that Helene “spared no one” as it ripped across the state. The death toll there had risen to at least 25, he said.
A spate of electricity outages in the state were concentrated around Augusta, a city of about 200,000 people, where most residents were still without power Monday.
At least 100 people were missing in Tennessee, Patrick C. Sheehan, the director of Tennessee’s emergency management agency, said at a Monday news conference. He expected that number to grow. At least 11,000 homes were without power, he said, and drinking water was scarce in many places.
Trump golf course suspect pleads not guilty
By PATRICIA MAZZEI
The man accused of mounting an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at one of his Florida golf courses pleaded not guilty Monday in a brief appearance in federal court.
The defendant, Ryan Routh, formally entered his plea through one of his lawyers. He spoke only when U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart of the U.S. District Court in West Palm Beach, Florida, asked him if he understood the five charges against him.
“Yes, your honor,” said Routh, clad in a beige jail uniform.
The most serious charge in the case, attempting to assassinate a political candidate, carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. Routh also faces charges of assaulting a federal officer and three firearms offenses.
Monday’s court proceedings lasted less than five minutes.
At a much longer court hearing last week, prosecutors laid out evidence that Routh, an itinerant building contractor, had appeared to survey the grounds of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach for about a month before his arrest.
On Sept. 15, while Trump was playing the fifth hole of the course, a Secret Service agent scouting ahead saw a man’s face and the barrel of a semiautomatic rifle outside the fence near the sixth hole. The agent fired at the man, who fled, prosecutors said, adding that the man was later identified as Routh.
It was the second apparent assassination attempt against Trump since July.
As they investigated the episode, authorities learned that Routh had left a box at a friend’s house in North Carolina months earlier, and that a note in the box read, “This was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump but I failed you.”
“Flood recovery of this sort is a long, long, hard process,” Sheehan added, “especially when we see the level of infrastructure damage that we’ve seen.”
Aviators from the Tennessee National Guard had rescued more than 100 people by Monday afternoon, and transported more than 34,000 pounds of drinking water, food, generators and other equipment.
Biden said he would visit the devastated region as soon as he could do so without drawing resources away from relief efforts. Biden told reporters at the White House that federal emergency officials would not leave the region “until the job is done,” and called Helene a “history-making” storm.
Former President Donald Trump made a stop in Valdosta, Georgia, on Monday, speaking briefly to supporters and reporters. He thanked local leaders and emergency responders for their work. “We’re here today to stand in complete solidarity with the people of Georgia and with all of those suffering in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Helene,” he said.
There were nearly 3,000 people in 78 shelters across five states on Monday morning, according to FEMA. So far, more than 6,300 rescue and aid personnel have been deployed from FEMA, the National Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Communications Commission, among others, the agency said.
Biden noted that he had approved emergency declarations in Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia and Alabama, as well as disaster declarations for North Carolina, Florida and South Carolina.
“Communities are devastated,” the president said. “Loved ones, waiting, not sure if their loved ones are OK, and they can’t contact them because there’s no cellphone connections. Many more folks displaced, with no idea when they’ll be able to return to their home, if ever — if there’s a home to return to.”
Jonatan Ramos Director Funerario
Trump allies bombard the courts, setting stage for post-election fight
By DANNY HAKIM, ALEXANDRA BERZON and NICK CORASANITI
Republicans have unleashed a flurry of lawsuits challenging voting rules and practices ahead of the November elections, setting the stage for what could be a far larger and more contentious legal battle over the White House after Election Day.
The onslaught of litigation, much of it landing in recent weeks, includes nearly 90 lawsuits filed across the country by Republican groups this year. The legal push is already more than three times the number of lawsuits filed before Election Day in 2020, according to Democracy Docket, a Democratically aligned group that tracks election cases.
Voting rights experts say the legal campaign appears to be an effort to prepare to contest the results of the presidential election after Election Day should former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, lose and refuse to accept his defeat as he did four years ago. The lawsuits are concentrated in swing states — and key counties — likely to determine the race. Several embrace debunked theories about voter fraud and so-called stolen elections that Trump has promoted since 2020.
In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the state’s third-largest county, the party is seeking to force local officials to count ballots by hand, evoking debunked conspiracy theories about corrupted voting machines. A case filed by the Republican National Committee in Nevada this month falsely asserts that nearly 4,000 noncitizens voted in the state in 2020, a claim that was rejected at the time by the state’s top election official, a Republican.
If successful, the Republicans’ lawsuits would shrink the electorate, largely by disqualifying voters more likely to be Democrats. They seek purges of voter rolls, challenge executive orders from President Joe Biden aimed at expanding ballot access and create stricter requirements to voting by mail.
Election experts, including some Republicans, say a vast majority of the cases are destined to fail, either because they were filed too late or because they are based on unfounded, or outright false, claims.
The volume and last minute timing of the cases, along with statements from party officials and Trump allies, suggest a broader aim behind the effort: Laying the groundwork to challenge results after the vote. The claims
in the lawsuits may well be revived — either in court or in the media — if Trump contests the outcome.
“Many of these cases reinforce particular narratives, particularly those about immigrants and voting,” said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group that monitors elections. “Putting false claims in the form of a lawsuit is a way to sanitize and add legitimacy.”
Republican lawyers involved said their work was aimed at creating more confidence in elections.
“Our legal efforts are fighting to fix the problems in the system, hold election officials accountable, protect election safeguards and defend the law,” Gineen Bresso, who is running the election integrity operation for the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, said in a statement.
“While Democrats want a system open to fraud without safeguards, that counts illegal votes, we are committed to securing the election so every legal vote is protected.”
The RNC is leading a broad network of conservative legal groups in the effort. Trump’s allies, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, took over the committee last March, placing Bresso in charge of the legal operation and promising a more aggressive strategy. After the 2020 election, the party’s lawyers had at times refused to participate in Donald Trump’s legal campaign, forcing him to rely on a collection of outsiders who filed cases rife with errors and false claims. Several Trump lawyers have since been
criminally charged.
Among them is Christina Bobb, who is now senior counsel on the RNC’s election integrity team. Bobb recently suggested that she was braced for more litigation after Election Day.
“I’m kind of holding my breath for that,” she said on a recent podcast. “I think we’re in probably, at least litigation-wise, as good of a place as we can be before the election.”
Democrats, too, say they are prepared.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign says it has a legal team of hundreds of lawyers and thousands of volunteers. They have played more defense than offense, but have picked some key places to intervene. The campaign recently filed a lawsuit in Georgia against the state Election Board after it made refusing to certify results easier for its members.
“We’re doing more defensive interventions than we’ve ever done before,” Marc Elias, a leading Democratic election lawyer working for the Harris campaign, said in an interview. “I am a big believer that you do not allow the Republicans to bring serious litigation that goes unresponded to.”
New faces, new strategy
The expanded legal effort represents a strategic gamble for the RNC. The party has typically spent much of its energy on turning out voters — funding extensive organizing operations that knock on doors, run phone banks and track voters. This year, the Republicans and the Trump campaign have largely outsourced those efforts to allied organizations and redirected resources to litigation
and other so-called election integrity efforts. Many of the leaders are new to the party’s legal team.
Bresso, however, has a history as an establishment Republican election lawyer. She served on the federal Election Assistance Commission and was for a time associated with a GOP election law firm, Holtzman Vogel. She has said relatively little publicly about Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, although it appears her views may have shifted.
In the early days of the pandemic, she co-wrote an opinion piece arguing that state and local governments needed to be given “flexibility” to adjust to the crisis and that expanded access to mail-in votes “might be part of the solution” though it was “no cure all.”
That perspective was soon rejected by Republicans aligned with Trump, who came to see the surge of mail voting as an attempt to steal the election. After the 2020 election, Bresso blamed the COVID-era changes to voting procedures for “this landscape that we have in place right now.”
Since then, Bresso repeatedly participated in meetings of the Election Integrity Network, a leading group of activists who promote or buy into conspiracy theories about voting. During a panel discussion in 2022, she urged those in attendance to “go out and be a poll worker,” adding, “we need to have eyes on the process.”
Under her direction, the RNC has filed several lawsuits seeking to restrict mail voting, including active cases in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and North Carolina.
The committee has also sought to remove voters from the rolls, filing several recent cases based on false claims that Democrats are signing up vast numbers of immigrants without legal status to vote. Some have already been dismissed.
“Democrats continue to put noncitizens first and Americans last as they allow noncitizens to vote,” Michael Whatley, the chair of the RNC, said in a recent news release announcing the Nevada lawsuit.
Studies of prosecutions and state voter data have shown it is very rare for noncitizens to cast ballots.
“The one thing they need in court is evidence,” said Ty Cobb, a former White House lawyer under Trump, who bemoaned the revival of old falsehoods. “They didn’t have any last time, and they’re unlikely to have any this time.”
Primary voters at a polling place in in Lower Salford Township, Pa., April 23, 2024. (Caroline Gutman/The New York Times)
Texas-based firm to build multi-million-dollar development in Fajardo
By THE STAR STAFF
Texas-based Juniper Capital, a real estate investment and development firm, in partnership with Capital United, is building in Fajardo what has been described as the Palm Beach of Puerto Rico, called Moncayo.
The project will sit across a 1,100-acre parcel of forested coastline and will include 400 residences, all $3 million and up, and a splashy Auberge Resort.
According to a company statement, Moncayo has been designed to seamlessly blend into the stunning landscape while fostering authentic community connections and respecting the island’s natural environment.
With what the developers say is a sustainable and forward-thinking vision, the multi-phase community will integrate cuttingedge education, comprehensive wellness programs, and authentic agricultural offerings with modern luxury residential living.
Carter Redd, president of the initiative,
said that after having worked intentionally to design a thoughtful and inspired new offering, “we are proud to debut our community and reimagine the future of the island’s east coast.”
Moncayo has been designed by Hart Howerton, an architecture and land planning firm tasked with creating a timeless and enduring community experience with a lasting legacy. The resulting design for Moncayo draws on the island’s centuries-old history, including Taino, Spanish colonial, and modernist influences, to represent an evolved tropical style that will define Moncayo.
Thus, Moncayo will feature a 68room luxury hotel facing the sea, offering world-class cuisine and a spa and wellness program.
Spanning the entire property, the Moncayo Ocean Club will include an 18hole championship golf course designed by Mackenzie & Ebert and a Family Short Course for resident members and guests.
The club will establish Moncayo as a unique destination with its unprecedented offering, the developers said, including direct access to boating and water sports, a private island beach experience, a golf and performance training center, a private resident clubhouse, and a sports club offering stadium-style courts for tennis, pickleball and paddle tennis.
Personalized performance training will also be offered throughout the club and residential experience. With the goal of increasing longevity and vitality, each resident will have the opportunity to benefit from unique healing programs, personalized athletic movement training, and a kitchen designed to optimize their daily life.
The project will sit across a 1,100-acre parcel of forested coastline and will include 400 residences, all priced at $3 million and up, and a splashy Auberge Resort. (Facebook via Noticias de Fajardo)
According to Bloomberg, Moncayo is the most ambitious endeavor for the area, which has a long history of failed projects. At the site alone, other developers had a $230 million plan to build a Four Seasons resort that ultimately dead-ended some time before Redd’s team purchased it in 2022. More than $100 million in foreign debt from that project was converted into equity during the acquisition, and Redd says that represents just a fraction of what Juniper Capital has put into it since.
The project begins major construction in November, with a golf course and farm already underway.
Dockworkers strike could begin today, with talks at an impasse
By PETER EAVIS
Longshoremen on the East and Gulf coasts are likely to strike today, halting most activity at some of the busiest U.S. ports, if their union and employers fail to end a monthslong standoff over a new labor contract.
The walkout by members of the International Longshoremen’s Association would cost the economy billions of dollars a day.
President Joe Biden can use a federal labor law to force the longshoremen back to work, but Sunday he said he was not considering using that power. In recent days, top government officials have pressed both sides to reach a deal.
“It’s not desirable for the Biden administration and for the economy,” Harley Shaiken, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in trade and labor issues, said of the strike prospect. “But it looks like it’s going to happen.”
The ILA, which has 47,000 members, has not held a strike at all the East and Gulf coast ports since 1977. The union and the United States Maritime Alliance, the employers’ negotiating group, are at loggerheads over wages and benefits. The union is also resisting the use of automated machinery at the ports.
Recently, big unions like the Teamsters and the United Automobile Workers have gotten much of what they asked for in contract negotiations. The longshoremen have even more leverage.
There is no practical alternative to the East and Gulf coast ports for moving many goods in and out of the eastern half of the country. And the ports can’t operate without longshoremen, who move metal boxes called containers on and off ships and handle other economically crucial cargo, like cars and heavy machinery.
Over a dozen ILA members at a union night out at Yankee Stadium in New York on Friday said they supported a strike.
Fearing a strike, many businesses ordered goods early so that they cleared the East and Gulf coast ports before Tuesday. But much cargo didn’t make it through in time and could be stranded at sea. Even if a strike is short, it could take weeks to clear the backlog.
John Wrenn, the chief operating officer at MHW, an alcoholic beverages distributor based in Manhasset, New York, is concerned that a strike might delay shipments and leave his business short in the lead up to Thanksgiving.
“Those are big opportunities for sales that will just be lost because products will not be on the shelves,” he said. MHW imports
over 2,000 containers a year through the Port of New York and New Jersey, the third busiest port in the United States.
The ILA said a strike would not stop work on cruise ships. At the Port of New York and New Jersey, bulk foodstuffs like edible oils and orange juice will also be unaffected. But other food imports could stop, leading to shortages if a strike dragged on.
Stefanie Katzman, executive vice president at S. Katzman Produce, a fruit and vegetable supplier in the Bronx borough of New York, is particularly concerned that mangos, which are imported from Brazil, will spoil if they are stuck on a ship. She is considering flying some mangos in, a much more expensive option. “There’s nowhere near as much room to fly product as there is to send it in by boat,” Katzman said.
The West Coast ports will stay open because their longshoremen belong to another union, which agreed a new contract last year. Though some shipments are being diverted there, causing a recent surge in activity, those ports will not be able to absorb all the cargo that goes through East and Gulf coast ports, which account for three-fifths of U.S. container traffic. And businesses say transporting cargo from the West Coast ports on trucks or trains to
the East Coast is too expensive for many goods and destinations.
The ILA broke off contract talks in June, saying it had discovered labor-saving technology at a port in Mobile, Alabama. The technology, used to check trucks in and out of the port, has been at the port since 2008, when it opened, a person familiar with the port said. Last week, the Maritime Alliance asked the National Labor Relations Board to force the ILA to resume negotiations, though it could take many weeks before the board acts after investigating the alliance’s claims.
The union’s president, Harold J. Daggett, has recently focused the ILA’s campaign more on wages, saying the raises offered by the Maritime Alliance were “insulting.”
Under the current contract, which was due to expire Monday, longshoremen earn a top rate of $39 an hour. The ILA is asking for a $5-an-hour raise for each of the six years of the new contract, which would put them at $69 an hour in the final year of the contract. The pay of West Coast longshoremen will rise to $60.85 an hour in 2027, the last year of their contract. With overtime and shift work, a longshoreman’s income can exceed $200,000. But longshoremen say they have to put in long work weeks to make that much money.
The San Juan Daily Star
Tuesday, October 1, 2024 7
Stocks
Investor caution prompts global money market fund inflow
Global money market funds experienced their highest weekly inflows in nearly six months, with investors cautious about the health of the U.S. economy and concerned that further rate cuts this year could signal deeper economic troubles.
Investors bought safer money market funds totaling about $98.32 billion, LSEG Lipper data showed, marking their largest weekly net purchase since April 3.
A weak consumer sentiment report last week raised concerns among investors about the health of the labor market, prompting worries that the Fed’s rare 50 basis point rate cut the previous week was in response to a sharp economic slowdown.
“Despite market expectations for an unwind of the huge pile of money market assets to provide a tailwind as it flows back to risk assets, the category has continued to garner flows,” said Thomas Poullaouec, Head of MultiAsset Solutions APAC at T. Rowe Price.
“Perhaps the start of rate cuts could entice some investors to come off the sideline, but with a gradual path priced in, it is unlikely to have a huge impact.”
The Q3 scores show world stocks and U.S. Treasuries both up around 6%, gold almost 15% higher, the yen up a whopping 11%. Oil is 17% lower and central banks have just delivered the biggest batch of interest rates cuts since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The storms started when the normally docile yen went wild at the idea of higher Japanese rates at almost exactly the same time U.S. economic data started looking queasy.
In just a few weeks, MSCI’s main world equity index shed $6 trillion in one of the fastest sell-offs in years, especially for Big Tech. Traders went from pricing one or two U.S. rate cuts this year to five or six.
“The biggest thing that happened in Q3 was that the yen carry trade broke down,” Societe Generale’s Kit Juckes said, explaining the strategy of borrowing cheaply in Japan to buy higher-yielding assets elsewhere.
“That, along with the first pieces of weak U.S. data, really changed the market.”
The prospect of lower borrowing costs did the trick though. By the end of August, world stocks had rebounded and Chinese markets were about to make a remarkable turnaround of their own.
MOST ASSERTIVE STOCKS
As Beijing turned on the stimulus taps, including lower rates and measures aimed at the ailing property market, Chinese stocks have just notched up their strongest week since 1996 and real estate shares have rocketed by a third.
China’s largesse has also helped spur the biggest quarterly spike in both emerging market stocks and the main global volatility gauges since 2022.
“China needs to recover to see a turnaround in the asset class,” said Claus Born, an emerging markets equity portfolio manager at Franklin Templeton. “China’s influence is very important”.
The LSEG data showed investors offloaded a net $10.43 billion worth of global equity funds during the week, booking the sharpest weekly outflow since June 12.
Although U.S. equity funds saw $22.43 billion in net sales, investors actively bought European and Asian equity funds, adding $5.88 billion and $5.29 billion respectively.
Global bond funds attracted investors for the 40th consecutive week, gaining a net $13.74 billion.
Dollar-denominated short-term government bond funds drew$3.21 billion, the highest in four weeks. Investors put $1.68 billion into high-yield and $1.11 billion into Euro-denominated global bond funds, respectively.
The
Tuesday, October 1, 2024 9
Israeli commandos conduct raids in Lebanon as Cabinet debates ground invasion
By PATRICK KINGSLEY, JULIAN E. BARNES, RONEN BERGMAN and NATAN ODENHEIMER
Israeli commando units have made brief incursions into Lebanon in recent days to prepare for a possible wider ground invasion, according to seven Israeli officers and officials and a senior Western official. But American officials said Monday that they believed that the invasion would be a limited one.
The Israeli and Western officials said the raids had been focused on gathering intelligence about Hezbollah’s positions close to the border, as well as identifying the Iranian-backed group’s tunnels and military infrastructure, in order to attack them from the air or the ground. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter. The Israeli military declined to comment.
Israel’s Cabinet was meeting Monday evening to discuss whether and when to launch a major ground operation in southern Lebanon, which would be Israel’s first there in nearly two decades. Israel occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 and briefly invaded again in 2006, during a monthlong war with Hezbollah.
American officials said Monday that they believed they had persuaded Israel not to conduct a major ground invasion. The understanding came after intense talks over the weekend. The United States saw some signs that Israel was preparing to move into Lebanon, and some American officials said they believed a major ground operation was imminent.
After the discussions, U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence and diplomatic negotiations, said they believed Israel was planning only smaller, targeted incursions into southern Lebanon.
Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, has hinted that Israel could send ground troops into Lebanon. On Monday, he told mayors from Israeli towns along the border with Lebanon that “the next stage of the war against Hezbollah will soon commence.”
In a statement released by his of-
A customer reads a newspaper at a coffee shop in the Hamra area of Beirut, on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. Israeli reservists are gathering at assembly points in northern Israel ahead of a potential ground maneuver in Lebanon. (Diego Ibarra Sánchez/The New York Times)
fice, Gallant pledged that the next phase would “constitute a significant factor in changing the security situation,” allowing the tens of thousands of Israelis who have fled Hezbollah rocket fire over the past year to return to their homes.
Hezbollah said Monday that its forces would confront Israeli troops if they carried out a full invasion. “We will confront any possibility, and we are ready if the Israelis decide to enter by land,” Sheikh Naim Qassem, Nasrallah’s deputy, said in a televised statement.
Officials said that if a broader operation proceeded, Israel was expected to try to destroy Hezbollah military infrastructure near the border, most likely in an intense series of cross-border raids, rather than to advance deep into Lebanon and occupy large areas of land. Southern Lebanon is a rugged area, filled with steep valleys in which defenders can easily ambush an invading army, a factor that may have shaped Israeli military planning.
The raids and plans suggest that Israel is seeking to capitalize on Hezbollah’s disarray, after it killed much of the group’s
senior leadership in recent weeks, including its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah.
Though much of Hezbollah’s high command is dead, the group still controls much of the Lebanese side of the IsraelLebanon border, where, Israel says, the group has built an extensive network of military installations, rocket launchers and tunnel networks that pose a threat to residents living in northern Israel.
Here’s what else to know:
— Reviving a cease-fire: Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati called for a cease-fire Monday and for the implementation of Resolution 1701, a 2006 agreement adopted by the United Nations Security Council in which Lebanon south of the Litani River would be controlled by U.N. peacekeepers and the Lebanese military, and emptied of Hezbollah fighters. Mikati “expressed readiness to deploy the army” and “fulfill its duties in coordination with international peacekeeping forces in the region,” Lebanon’s National News Agency reported.
— Inflaming Iran: Benjamin Netan-
yahu, the Israeli prime minister, released an English-language video aimed at the Iranian public, saying, “The people of Iran should know — Israel stands with you.” He also reiterated his threats against Iran’s regime, saying, “There is nowhere we will not go to protect our people and protect our country.”
— Hamas official killed: Hamas said Monday that its leader in Lebanon, Fatah Sharif, had been killed with his family in an airstrike on a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military said he had coordinated Hamas’ ties with Hezbollah. The main United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said Monday that Sharif had been an agency employee but was placed on leave without pay in March after it received allegations “about his political activities.”
— Hezbollah’s future: Sheikh Naim Qassem, deputy secretary-general of Hezbollah, said in a televised address Monday that the group would name a leader to replace Hassan Nasrallah “at the closest opportunity.” Israel killed Nasrallah on Friday in a bombardment in a densely populated neighborhood near Beirut and launched dozens more attacks on Hezbollah targets Sunday.
— Beirut blast: Israel said it was behind a blast in Beirut that hit a residential building overnight, in the first known Israeli attack in Lebanon’s capital since Israel and Hezbollah fought a war in 2006. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a militant group based in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip that is mostly known for a string of airline hijackings and bombings decades ago, said that three of its members had been killed in the attack.
On Ukraine’s eastern front, 100 miles of high-stakes struggle
By MARC SANTORA
After months of constant pressure and grinding, bloody advances, Russian forces are pressing up against multiple strongholds along more than 100 miles of the jagged front in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine. For Ukraine, losing any of those important defensive positions could significantly alter the contours of the fight for control of the region, long coveted by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Despite staggering casualties, Russian forces are mounting armored assaults and sending waves of infantry on foot, motorbikes and all-terrain vehicles to attack Ukrainian positions from Chasiv Yar in the north to the southern stronghold of Vuhledar, which is at risk of being encircled, according to Ukrainian soldiers and combat footage.
With attacks across fields scattered with their own dead, the Russians are racing to seize territory before the fall strips the foliage they use for cover and the rains turn farmland into bog.
Even with both armies exhausted, the battles in the east remain as deadly as at any point in the war, according to Ukrainian soldiers and Western officials.
On each of two days in one recent week, the Ukrainian military reported more
Ukrainian soldiers of the 59th Motorized, Da Vinci Wolves Battalion, undergo weapons training in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, Sept. 15, 2024. Russian forces are pressing against an arc of strongholds in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, in a fight as intense as any in the war. (Nicole Tung/The New York Times)
than 200 clashes between the two sides — the highest such numbers in many months, according to DeepState, a group of analysts that maps the battlefield.
At a location near the front where injured soldiers are treated, the steady influx of the wounded on a recent weekend testified to the intensity of the fight. In just 24 hours, small crews of medics treated more than 70 soldiers.
Sergeant Valeria, a 23-year-old combat medic, ticked off a list of the traumatic injuries the wounded have sustained, including severe head injuries and burns covering more than 20% of their bodies.
As bleary-eyed fighters slumped against a wall listening to the screams of a soldier injured in fighting around Vuhledar, she said that in the grim calculus of her vocation, screams were a positive sign.
“The most important thing about someone who’s screaming is that they’re breathing,” she said.
Valeria, like other soldiers interviewed on the front, asked only to be identified by a first name or call sign in accordance with military protocol. The New York Times was given access to medics and soldiers at the facility under the condition that its location not be disclosed.
As the battles raged at home, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in the
defense is beyond those places.
The Russians have, however, failed to turn some past advances into rapid breakthroughs. They are also paying a steep price in troops and equipment for every mile they gain.
The Ukrainians have held the Russians at bay for months outside the ruined hilltop town of Chasiv Yar, but just 20 miles to the south, the Russians are advancing in bloody urban battles now raging inside Toretsk.
Just south of there, the Russian advance toward the city of Pokrovsk over the past seven months has created a bulge some 22 miles deep and 15 miles wide, altering the geometry of the front in complicated ways.
Pokrovsk, a critical rail and road hub, is the last major city before the wide-open plains leading to the Dnipro region, home to the third-largest city in Ukraine and vital to its economic health.
Ukrainian soldiers have halted the direct advance on Pokrovsk, for the moment, but the Russians are close, fortifying their positions about 5 miles to the east.
United States on a diplomatic mission that he portrayed as no less urgent.
He spoke at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday and then met with President Joe Biden on Thursday, when he pleaded, yet again, for the ability to strike deeper into Russian territory using Western-supplied missiles. Without that, he says, it will be harder to continue to bring the war home to Russia — the only way, he believes, that Moscow can be brought to the negotiating table.
Biden has been loath to approve such strikes, fearing confrontation with Russia. On Wednesday, Putin said he planned to lower the threshold for his country’s use of nuclear weapons, an escalation in the Kremlin’s efforts to deter the United States from expanding its military aid to Ukraine.
Along the eastern front line, the Ukrainian soldiers interviewed this month spoke of exhaustion and of securing one area only to see another come under threat. The territory that they are protecting, the remaining unoccupied sections of Donetsk, is part of the Donbas region, what was once the industrial heartland of Ukraine.
The cities and towns under assault are of strategic importance for different reasons, including their use as hubs to move soldiers and supplies, and their elevated positions. It is unclear how robust Ukraine’s next line of
The city is under daily bombardment. All the highway overpasses have been destroyed, so authorities are urging the 15,000 people who remain to use winding dirt roads to leave while they can.
“It’s very scary,” said Kateryna Kandybko, a 34-year-old mother of two. Her family is packed and ready to run, but is holding on for now. “We don’t really want to leave at all. But we definitely don’t want to live under the Russian flag.”
Ginseng, the call-sign of a 44-year-old master sergeant in charge of an artillery unit with the 68th Jaeger Brigade protecting Pokrovsk’s southern flank, said that Ukrainian forces had stabilized the line but that the fight remained a “nightmare.”
He pointed to a shotgun near the entrance of his bunker, which he said was the best defense against small Russian attack drones when electronic jamming equipment fails.
“They fly in waves: One shows up, then 15-20 minutes later, another,” he said.
His small band of soldiers manning a Soviet-designed howitzer emerge from the bunker only when they have a target sent in by their own surveillance drone operators.
Even if they can hold their lines, Ginseng fears Pokrovsk is doomed.
“They’ll level it,” he said. “I’ve seen so many cities wiped out — it’s overwhelming.”
What this Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas-Iran conflict is really about
By THOMAS FRIEDMAN
To understand why and how Israel’s devastating blow to Hezbollah is such a world-shaking threat to Iran, Russia, North Korea and even China, you have to put it in the context of the wider struggle that has replaced the Cold War as the framework of international relations today.
After the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, I argued that we were no longer in the Cold War, or the post-Cold War. We were in the post-post-Cold War: a struggle between an ad hoc “coalition of inclusion” — decent countries, not all of them democracies, who see their future as best delivered by a U.S.led alliance nudging the world to greater economic integration, openness and collaboration to meet global challenges, such as climate change — versus a “coalition of resistance,” led by Russia, Iran and North Korea: brutal, authoritarian regimes who use their opposition to the U.S.-led world of inclusion to justify militarizing their societies and maintaining an iron grip on power.
China has been straddling the two camps because its economy depends on access to the coalition of inclusion while the government’s leadership shares a lot of the authoritarian instincts and interests of the coalition of resistance.
You have to see the wars in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in the context of this global struggle. Ukraine was trying to join the world of inclusion in Europe — seeking freedom from Russia’s orbit and to join the European Union —
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and Israel and Saudi Arabia were trying to expand the world of inclusion in the Middle East by normalizing relations.
Russia attempted to stop Ukraine from joining the West (the EU and NATO) and Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah attempted to stop Israel from joining the East (ties with Saudi Arabia). Because if Ukraine joined the EU, the inclusive vision of a Europe “whole and free” would be almost complete and Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy in Russia almost completely isolated.
And if Israel were allowed to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, not only would that vastly expand the coalition of inclusion in that region — a coalition already expanded by the Abraham Accords that created ties between Israel and other Arab nations — it would almost totally isolate Iran and its reckless proxies of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq, all of which were driving their countries into failed states.
Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate how much Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli strike Friday, were detested in Lebanon and many parts of the Sunni and Christian Arab world for the way they had kidnapped Lebanon and turned it into a base for Iranian imperialism.
I was speaking over the weekend to Orit Perlov, who tracks Arab social media for Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. She described the flood of social media postings from across Lebanon and the Arab world celebrating Hezbollah’s demise and urging the Lebanese government to declare a unilateral cease-fire so the Lebanese army could seize control of southern Lebanon from Hezbollah and bring quiet to the border. The Lebanese don’t want Beirut to be destroyed like Gaza and they are truly afraid of a return of civil war, Perlov explained to me. Nasrallah had already dragged the Lebanese into a war with Israel they never wanted, but Iran ordered.
The Biden-Harris administration has been building a network of alliances to give strategic weight to the ad hoc coalition of inclusion — from Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Australia in the Far East, through India and across to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and then up through the EU and NATO. The keystone of the whole project was President Joe Biden team’s proposed normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis are ready to do, provided Israel agrees to open negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank on a two-state solution.
And here comes the rub.
Pay very close attention to the speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the U.N. General Assembly on Friday. He understands very well the struggle between the coalitions of “resistance” and “inclusion” that I am talking about. In fact, it was central to his United Nations speech.
How so? Netanyahu held up two maps during his address, One was titled “The Blessing” and the other “The Curse.” “The Curse” showed Syria, Iraq and Iran in black as a blocking coalition between the Middle East and Europe. The second map, “The Blessing,” showed the Middle East with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan in green and a red two-way
A United Nations Security Council meeting held to discuss the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, at U.N. headquarters in New York, Sept. 27, 2024. (Graham Dickie/The New YorkTimes)
arrow going across them, as a bridge connecting the world of inclusion in Asia with the world of inclusion in Europe.
But if you looked closely at Netanyahu’s “Curse” map, it showed Israel — but no borders with Gaza and the Israelioccupied West Bank (as if it had already been annexed — the goal of this Israeli government).
And that is the rub. The story Netanyahu wants to tell the world is that Iran and its proxies are the main obstacle to the world of inclusion stretching from Europe, through the Middle East over to the Asian-Pacific.
I beg to differ. The keystone to this whole alliance is a Saudi-Israel normalization based on reconciliation between Israel and moderate Palestinians.
If Israel now moved ahead and opened a dialogue on two states for two peoples with a reformed Palestinian Authority, which has already accepted the Oslo peace treaty, it would be the diplomatic knockout blow that would accompany and solidify the military knockout blow Israel just delivered to Hezbollah and Hamas.
It would totally isolate the forces of “resistance” in the region and take away their phony shield — that they are the defenders of the Palestinian cause. Nothing would rattle Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Russia — even China — more.
But to do that, Netanyahu would have to take a political risk even greater than the military risk he just took in killing the leadership of Hezbollah, aka “The Party of God.”
Netanyahu would have to break with the Israeli “Party of God» — the coalition of far-right Jewish settler supremacists and messianists who want Israel to permanently control all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, with no border lines in between — just like on Netanyahu’s U.N. map. Those parties keep Netanyahu in power, so he would need to replace them with Israeli centrist parties, which I know would collaborate with him on such a move.
So there you have the big challenge of the day: The struggle between the world of inclusion and the world of resistance comes down to many things, but none more — today — than Netanyahu’s willingness to follow up his blow to the “Party of God” in Lebanon by dealing a similar political blow to the “Party of God” in Israel.
Impulsan construcción de biblioteca en la égida Leopoldo Figueroa
POR EL STAR STAFF
SAN JUAN – El representante por el Distrito #3 de San Juan, José ‘Cheito’ Hernández, anunció la construcción de una biblioteca en los predios del proyecto de vivienda para adultos mayores Leopoldo Figueroa en Río Piedras.
El legislador del Partido Nuevo Progresista indicó, además, que estará buscando un acuerdo colaborativo con universidades como la Universidad de Puerto Rico, la Universidad Interamericana, la Universidad Politécnica y el Sistema Ana G. Mendez, con el fin de que estudiantes en computadora puedan, de forma voluntaria, ofrecer talleres en el uso de la Internet, entre otros programas, a los residentes del antes mencionado complejo.
“Durante una serie de visitas que hemos llevado a cabo en el complejo Leopoldo Figueroa para dialogar sobre las necesidades e inquietudes de sus residentes, estos nos han comentado el interés que tienen de crear un área de biblioteca, donde puedan pasar un tiempo leyendo y buscando información mediante medios electrónicos e interactivos, como el Internet.
Esta nueva facilidad será una plataforma de recreación para los residentes, así nos los han indicado y estamos comprometidos en complacerlos”, comentó Hernández.
El secretario del departamento de Vivienda y actual administrador, William Rodríguez, endosó el proyecto de la biblioteca.
“Este proyecto, la biblioteca, es algo que estaremos dialogando con nuestro alcalde, Miguel Romero, quien ha demostrado un compromiso con apoyar esfuerzos similares, con el propósito de agilizar la construcción. Ahora mismo, se puede desarrollar esta biblioteca en el área del centro comunal, el cual se encuentra en condiciones de albergar libros y equipos computarizados”, añadió el Representante.
Sobre el acuerdo colaborativo, Hernández busca que los residentes aprendan destrezas como introducción al uso de la Internet y la navegación segura, aspectos sobre la seguridad cibernética, así como el uso de los programas Word y Power Point, entre otros.
Secretaria del DTOP exhorta a renovar marbete
POR CYBERNEWS
SAN JUAN – La secretaria del Departamento de Transportación y Obras Públicas, ingeniera Eileen Vélez Vega exhortó el lunes a los ciudadanos a renovar el marbete de sus vehículos, cuyo vencimiento está programado para septiembre, antes de que finalice el plazo establecido
“La resolución que permite renovar el marbete sin evidencia de conciliación de pagos en el sistema de Auto Expreso vence hoy”, indicó Vélez Vega en decla-
raciones escritas.
La deuda de peajes en el sistema Auto Expreso se mantuvo en pausa hasta hoy, facilitando a los ciudadanos realizar sus reclamos y transacciones. Desde abril de 2022 no se han emitido multas por falta de balance en Auto Expreso.
Desde la implementación de la pegatina digital, se han registrado 2,376,237 renovaciones de marbete, detalló Vélez Vega. Los servicios de CESCO están disponibles de forma digital mediante la aplicación CESCO Digital.
Presentan 63 cargos criminales contra administradora de condominio acusada de falsificar más de 40 cheques
POR CYBERNEWS
SAN JUAN – El Departamento de Justicia presentó el viernes 63 cargos contra Ana Enid Acevedo Jiménez, administradora del Condominio La Coruña, por supuestamente apropiarse ilegalmente de más de
60,000 dólares y falsificar más de 40 cheques de la propiedad entre 2019 y 2021.
La fiscal Maricarmen Rodríguez Barea y la agente Nilda Couvertier Lasén lideraron la investigación que reveló que Acevedo Jiménez depositaba el dinero en cuentas personales y de una compañía accesible a ella.
Se informó que la jueza Arelys Ortiz encontró causa para arresto y fijó una fianza de 630,000 dólares.
La vista preliminar fue programada para el 10 de octubre.
Kris Kristofferson, country singer, songwriter and actor, dies at 88
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN
Kris Kristofferson, a singer-songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions infused country music with rarely heard candor and depth, and who later had a successful second career in movies, died at his home on Maui, Hawaii on Saturday. He was 88.
His death was announced by Ebie McFarland, a spokesperson, who did not give a cause.
Hundreds of artists have recorded Kristofferson’s songs — among them Al Green, the Grateful Dead, Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight and the Pips.
Kristofferson’s breakthrough as a songwriter came with “For the Good Times,” a bittersweet ballad that topped the country chart and reached the Top 40 on the pop chart for Ray Price in 1970. His “Sunday Morning Coming Down” became a No. 1 country hit for his friend and mentor Johnny Cash later that year.
Cash memorably intoned the song’s indelible opening couplet:
Well, I woke up Sunday morning
With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t
bad
So I had one more for dessert.
Expressing more than just the malaise of someone suffering from a hangover, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” gives voice to feelings of spiritual abandonment that border on the absolute. “Nothing short of dying” is the way the chorus describes the desolation that the song’s protagonist is experiencing.
Steeped in a neo-romantic sensibility that owed as much to John Keats as to the Beat Generation and Bob Dylan, Kristofferson’s work explored themes of freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light.
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose/Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free,” he wrote in “Me and Bobby McGee.” Janis Joplin, with whom Kristofferson was briefly involved romantically, had a posthumous No. 1 single with her plaintive recording of the song in 1971.
Later that year “Help Me Make It Through the Night” became a No. 1 country and Top 10 pop hit in a heart-stopping performance by Sammi Smith. The composition won Kristofferson a Grammy Award for Country Song of the Year in 1972.
It was a heady time to be a songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, where Kristofferson
fell in with a gifted circle of like-minded — and similarly bacchanalian — tunesmiths who were as driven to succeed as he was, Roger Miller and Willie Nelson among them.
“We took it seriously enough to think that our work was important, to think that what we were creating would mean something in the big picture,” Kristofferson said in an interview with the journal No Depression in 2006.
“Looking back on it, I feel like it was kind of our Paris in the ’20s,” he went on, alluding to American expatriate writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein who lived there at the time. “Real creative and real exciting — and intense.”
Kristofferson’s own raspy, at times pitch-indifferent vocals never quite gained traction with commercial radio. One notable exception was the gospel-suffused “Why Me,” a No. 1 country and Top 40 pop hit released on the Monument label in 1973. (Another gospel song of his, “One Day at a Time,” written with Marijohn Wilkin, was a No. 1 country single for singer Christy Lane in 1980.)
Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, who were married for much of the ’70s, won Grammy Awards for best country vocal performance by a duo or group with “From the Bottle to the Bottom” (1973) and “Lover Please” (1975). They also appeared in movies together, including Sam Peckinpah’s gritty 1973 western, “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid,” in which Kristofferson played the outlaw Billy the Kid. Peckinpah cast Kristofferson in the film after seeing him perform at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and in “Cisco Pike” (1972), his big-screen debut.
Martin Scorsese then cast Kristofferson, whose rugged good looks lent themselves to the big screen, as the laconic male lead, alongside Ellen Burstyn, in the critically acclaimed 1974 drama “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” He later starred opposite Barbra Streisand in Frank Pierson’s 1976 remake of “A Star Is Born,” a performance for which he won a Golden Globe Award.
Over four decades Kristofferson acted in more than 50 movies, among them the 1980 box-office failure “Heaven’s Gate” and John Sayles’ Oscar-nominated 1996 neo-western “Lone Star.” Singer-songwriters may not be the likeliest of movie stars, but Kristofferson consistently revealed onscreen a magnetism and command that made him an exception to the rule. In 2006 he was
inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame, along with Matthew McConaughey, Cybill Shepherd and JoBeth Williams.
Kristofferson’s last major hit as a recording artist was “The Highwayman,” a No. 1 country single in 1985 by the Highwaymen, an outlaw-country supergroup that included his longtime friends Waylon Jennings, Nelson and Cash.
Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, had played a pivotal role in Kristofferson’s budding career when they invited him to appear with them at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969.
Kristofferson was still a scuffling songwriter at the time, having worked as a janitor at Columbia Studios in Nashville, where he later recalled emptying ashtrays and wastepaper baskets during the 1966 sessions for Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde.” Immobilized by stage fright at Newport that night, Kristofferson might have forfeited his opportunity had it not been for the encouragement of Carter Cash, who, as her husband recalled in interviews, all but dragged him onstage with them.
The evening proved propitious, exposing Kristofferson to a national audience after he received a highly favorable mention in The New York Times the next day.
“If there was one thing that got my performing career started, that was it right there,” Kristofferson said, reflecting on the experience as quoted in the 2013 book “Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville,” by Michael Streissguth.
Kristoffer Kristofferson was born June 22, 1936, in Brownsville, Texas, the eldest of three children of Mary Ann (Ashbrook) and Lars Henry Kristofferson. His father, a major general in the Air Force, strongly urged him to pursue a military career.
The family later moved west, and in 1954 Kristofferson graduated from San Mateo High School in Northern California, where he distinguished himself in both academics and athletics. He was subsequently featured as a promising boxer in Sports Illustrated’s “Faces in the Crowd” series in 1958.
Kristofferson graduated with honors with a degree in literature from Pomona College in Claremont, California, in 1958. He also had prizewinning entries in a collegiate short-story contest sponsored by The Atlantic magazine before being awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study English literature at Oxford.
Continues on page 14
Kris Kristofferson performs in Indio, Calif., in May 2007. Kristofferson, the singer and songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night” infused country music with rarely heard candor and depth, died Sept. 29, 2024, at his home in Maui, Hawaii. He was 88. (Heidi Schumann/The New York Times)
Under the pseudonym Kris Carson, he made a fruitless bid to become a pop star while there, working with Tony Hatch, the British impresario known for his success with singer Petula Clark.
Kristofferson graduated from Merton College, Oxford, in 1960 and received a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. In 1961 he married Frances Beer and was stationed in Germany, where he served as a helicopter pilot.
He attained the rank of captain in 1965 and received an appointment to teach English at West Point. He ultimately declined the position, trading the comforts it might have afforded for the penury of life as a would-be songwriter in Nashville.
If his wife was crestfallen by the move, his parents were scandalized. For a while they disowned him for throwing away everything he had worked so hard to achieve.
“Not many cats I knew bailed out like I did,” Kristofferson said, talking about this tumultuous period, during which he and his wife divorced, for a 1970 feature in The Times Magazine. “When I made the break I didn’t realize how much I was shocking the folks, because I always thought they knew I was going to be a writer. But I think they thought a writer was a guy in tweeds with a pipe. And I quit and didn’t hear from ’em for a while.
“I wouldn’t want to go through it again,” he continued, “but it’s part of what I am.”
Success in Nashville initially eluded Kristofferson, and not without reason. According to Wilkin, the first publisher to sign him to a songwriting deal, he had a few things to learn — and unlearn — before he arrived at the distinctive mix of vernacular and sophisticated idioms that became his stock in trade.
“He had been a poet and an English teacher, so his songs were too long and too perfect,” Wilkin said in a 2003 interview with Nashville Scene. “His grammar was too perfect. He had to learn the way people talk.”
Kristofferson’s transformation as a songwriter involved more than merely sprinkling colloquialisms like “ain’t” and “nothin’” into his lyrics. He also cultivated a keen melodic sensibility, a languid expressiveness that bore little resemblance to the straightforward Hank Williams-derived shuffles he was turning out when he first arrived in Nash-
ville.
“I had to get better,” Kristofferson said in an interview with Nashville Scene, reflecting on the lean years before he broke through as a songwriter. “I was spending every second I could hanging out and writing and bouncing off the heads of other writers.”
He also changed publishers, leaving Wilkin’s Buckhorn Music for Combine Music, owned by producer Fred Foster, who also had the freewheeling likes of Shel Silverstein and Mickey Newbury under contract.
In 1970 Foster issued, on his independent label Monument, “Kristofferson,” Kristofferson’s debut as a recording artist. The album contained versions of several songs that had been hits for other artists, including “Me and Bobby McGee,” for which Foster was credited as a co-writer. (That song was originally recorded by Roger Miller, who
had a Top 20 country hit with it in 1969.)
Kristofferson released other albums, to mixed reviews, in the ’70s; by decade’s end his career in movies began to eclipse his reputation as a singer-songwriter.
The ’80s and ’90s saw his music take an activist turn, with lyrics championing social justice and human rights. “What About Me,” a song from his 1986 album, “Repossessed,” spoke out against right-wing military aggression in Central America.
Bypass surgery in 1999 slowed Kristofferson down, as did an extended bout with Lyme disease in the decade that followed, but he remained active into his 80s.
Kristofferson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004. By that time he had already been elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1977) and the National Academy of Popular Music’s Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1985). He also received a lifetime achievement honor at the 2014 Grammy Awards.
Kristofferson is survived by Lisa (Meyers) Kristofferson, his wife of over 40 years, their sons, Jesse, Jody, Johnny and Blake, and a daughter, Kelly Marie; a son, Kris, and daughter, Tracy, from his marriage to Beer; and a daughter, Casey, from his marriage to Coolidge; and seven grandchildren.
A man of prodigious gifts and appetites, Kristofferson struggled early on with what path to pursue among the many that were open to him. In the song “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” he seemed to acknowledge as much, depicting a conflicted figure, much like himself, who took “every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”
Such self-deprecation notwithstanding, Kristofferson believed that songwriting — certainly a “wrong direction” in the eyes of his family, at least at first — was the means through which he discovered his vocation in life, and by which he achieved celebrity and artistic acclaim.
“I wouldn’t be doing any of it if it weren’t for writing,” he said, looking back on his career, in a 2006 interview with the online magazine Country Standard Time.
“I never would have gotten to make records if I didn’t write. I wouldn’t have gotten to tour without it. And I never would’ve been asked to act in a movie if I hadn’t been known as a writer.”
“Writer” was the occupation listed on Kristofferson’s passport.
Kris Kristofferson was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2004. (Facebook via Kris Kristofferson)
CIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN. IPM WAREHOUSING & LOGISTICS LLC
Parte Demandante V. TODD STOTESBERY Y OTROS
Parte Demandada Caso Núm. SJ2024V06387.
Salón Núm. Acción Civil de: COBRO DE DINERO ORDINARIO, INCUMPLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO. EMPLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS. A: DORADO ACCESSORIES LLC
B5 CALLE TABONUCO SUITE 216 PMB 158 GUAYNABO, PUERTO RICO 00968
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://www.poderjudicial. pr/index.php/tribunal-electronico/, salvo que el caso sea de un expediente físico o que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal y notificar copia de la misma al (a la) abogado(a) de la parte demandante o a ésta, de no tener representación legal. 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. Además, se le apercibe que, en los casos al amparo de la Ley Núm. 57-2023, titulada Ley para la Prevención del Maltrato, Preservación de la Unidad Familiar y para la Seguridad, Bienestar y Protección de los Menores, entre los remedios que el Tribunal podrá conceder se incluyen la ubicación permanente de un (una) menor fuera de su hogar, el inicio de procesos para la privación de patria potestad, y cualquier otra medida en el mejor interés del (de la) menor. (Artículo 33, incisos b y t de la Ley Núm. 57-2023). Se le advierte de su derecho a comparecer acompañado(a) de abogado(a) en los casos que proceda.
Nombre del Abogado: CHRISTIAN ALCALA MARQUEZ
RUA: 16706
Dirección: CAPITAL CENTER BLDG. STE 606, 239 ARTERIAL HOSTOS, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, PUERTO RICO, 00918
Tel: ¡Fax:
Correo Electrónico: christian.alcaIagmaiI.com
Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, el 18 de julio de 2024. Griselda Rodríguez Collado, Sec Regional. Liz M. Lopez Figueroa, Sec Auxiliar. LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN.
IPM WAREHOUSING & LOGISTICS LLC
Parte Demandante V. TODD STOTESBERY Y OTROS
Parte Demandada Caso Núm. SJ2024V06387. Salón Núm. Acción Civil de: COBRO DE DINERO ORDINARIO, INCUMPLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO. EMPLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS. A: SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES
COMPUESTA POR TODD STOTESBERY Y PERSONA A DIRECCIÓN
DESCONOCIDA
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://www.poderjudicial. pr/index.php/tribunal-electronico/, salvo que el caso sea de un expediente físico o que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal y notificar copia de la misma al (a la) abogado(a) de la parte demandante o a ésta, de no tener representación legal. 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. Además, se le apercibe que, en los casos al amparo de la Ley Núm. 57-2023, titulada Ley para la Prevención del Maltrato, Preservación de la Unidad Familiar y para la Seguridad, Bienestar y Protección de los Menores, entre los remedios que el Tribunal podrá conceder se incluyen la ubicación permanente de un (una) menor fuera de su hogar, el inicio de procesos para la privación de patria
potestad, y cualquier otra medida en el mejor interés del (de la) menor. (Artículo 33, incisos b y t de la Ley Núm. 57-2023). Se le advierte de su derecho a comparecer acompañado(a) de abogado(a) en los casos que proceda.
Nombre del Abogado: CHRISTIAN ALCALA MARQUEZ
RUA: 16706
Dirección: CAPITAL CENTER BLDG. STE 606, 239 ARTERIAL HOSTOS, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, PUERTO RICO, 00918
Tel: ¡Fax:
Correo Electrónico: christian.alcaIagmaiI.com
Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, el 18 de julio de 2024. Griselda Rodríguez Collado, Sec Regional. Liz M. Lopez Figueroa, Sec Auxiliar. LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN. IPM WAREHOUSING & LOGISTICS LLC
Parte Demandante V. TODD STOTESBERY Y OTROS
Parte Demandada Caso Núm. SJ2024V06387. Salón Núm. Acción Civil de: COBRO DE DINERO ORDINARIO, INCUMPLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO. EMPLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS. A:TODD STOTESBERY DIRECCIÓN DESCONOCIDA
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://www.poderjudicial. pr/index.php/tribunal-electronico/, salvo que el caso sea de un expediente físico o que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal y notificar copia de la misma al (a la) abogado(a) de la parte demandante o a ésta, de no tener representación legal. 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. Además, se le apercibe que, en los casos al amparo de la Ley Núm. 57-2023, titulada Ley
para la Prevención del Maltrato, Preservación de la Unidad Familiar y para la Seguridad, Bienestar y Protección de los Menores, entre los remedios que el Tribunal podrá conceder se incluyen la ubicación permanente de un (una) menor fuera de su hogar, el inicio de procesos para la privación de patria potestad, y cualquier otra medida en el mejor interés del (de la) menor. (Artículo 33, incisos b y t de la Ley Núm. 57-2023). Se le advierte de su derecho a comparecer acompañado(a) de abogado(a) en los casos que proceda.
Nombre del Abogado: CHRISTIAN ALCALA MARQUEZ RUA: 16706
Dirección: CAPITAL CENTER BLDG. STE 606, 239 ARTERIAL HOSTOS, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, PUERTO RICO, 00918
Tel: ¡Fax: Correo Electrónico: christian.alcaIagmaiI.com Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, el 18 de julio de 2024. Griselda Rodríguez Collado, Sec Regional. Liz M. Lopez Figueroa, Sec Auxiliar. LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA BAJA
HACIENDA DEL MAR OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION, INC.
Demandante V. BILLIE RAE HOFKNECHT T/C/C BILLIE RAE WATTS
KOWALKOWSKI T/C/C
BILLIE RAE WATTS
Demandada Civil Núm.: VB2024CV00664. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. A: BILLIE RAE HOFKNECHT T/C/C
BILLIE RAE WATTS
KOWALKOWSKI T/C/C
BILLIE RAE WATTS - 101 E GERMANTOWN PIKE, PLYMOUTH MTNG, PA 19462-1506. POR LA PRESENTE, se le notifica a Billie Rae Hofknecht Billie Rae Hofknecht t/c/c Billie Rae Watts Kowalkowski t/c/c Billie Rae Watts que se ha radicado mediante el sistema SUMAC una Demanda por la demandante HACIENDA DEL MAR OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION, INC., solicitando un Cobro de Dinero. POR LO TANTO se le emplaza por edicto y se le requiere que notifique a MARINI PIETRANTONI MUÑIZ LLC., Lcdo. Luis C. Marini Biaggi (lmarini@mpmlawpr.com), la Lcda. Ashley Anne Clemente Serrano (aclemente@mpmlawpr.com) y la Lcda. Getzemarie Lugo Rodríguez (glugo@
mpmlawpr.com), 250 Ponce de León Ave., Suite 900 San Juan, PR 00918, Tel. 787- 705- 2171, copia de su contestación a la Demanda dentro de los (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Vega Baja. SE LE ADVIERTE que, de no proceder conforme con lo antes indicado, se le anotará la rebeldía y podrá dictarse Sentencia en su contra, concediendo a la parte demandante los remedios solicitados en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle, o cualquier otro, si el Tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, a 12 de septiembre de 2024. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA GENERAL. MARITZA ROSARIO ROSARIO, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA BAJA
HACIENDA DEL MAR OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION, INC.
Demandante V. JOSÉ LUIS RAMOS CÁDIZ, LUZ MILDRED RAMOS PÉREZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS
Demandados Civil Núm.: VB2024CV00663. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. A: JOSÉ LUIS RAMOS CÁDIZ, LUZ MILDRED RAMOS PÉREZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS - 11018 HOLLY CONE DR., RIVERVIEW, FL 33569-2012. POR LA PRESENTE, se le notifica a José Luis Ramos Cádiz, Luz Mildred Ramos Pérez y la Sociedad Legal de Bienes Gananciales compuesta por ambos, que se ha radicado mediante el sistema SUMAC una Demanda por la demandante HACIENDA DEL MAR OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION, INC.,
solicitando un Cobro de Dinero. POR LO TANTO se le emplaza por edicto y se le requiere que notifique a MARINI PIETRANTONI MUÑIZ LLC., Lcdo. Luis C. Marini Biaggi (lmarini@ mpmlawpr.com), la Lcda. Ashley Anne Clemente Serrano (aclemente@mpmlawpr.com) y la Lcda. Getzemarie Lugo Rodríguez (glugo@mpmlawpr.com), 250 Ponce de León Ave., Suite 900 San Juan, PR 00918, Tel. 787- 705- 2171, copia de su contestación a la Demanda dentro de los (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Vega Baja. SE LE ADVIERTE que, de no proceder conforme con lo antes indicado, se le anotará la rebeldía y podrá dictarse Sentencia en su contra, concediendo a la parte demandante los remedios solicitados en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle, o cualquier otro, si el Tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, a 12 de septiembre de 2024. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA GENERAL. MARITZA ROSARIO ROSARIO, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA BAJA
HACIENDA DEL MAR
OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION, INC.
Demandante V. JOSÉ LUIS RAMOS CÁDIZ, LUZ MILDRED RAMOS PÉREZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS
Demandados Civil Núm.: VB2024CV00663. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. A: Luz Mildred Ramos Pérez, por si y en representación de la Sociedad Legal de Bienes
Gananciales - 11018 Holly Cone Dr., Riverview, FL 33569-2012.
POR LA PRESENTE, se le notifica a Luz Mildred Ramos
Perez, por si y en representación de la Sociedad Legal de Bienes Gananciales, que se ha radicado mediante el sistema SUMAC una Demanda por la demandante HACIENDA DEL MAR OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION, INC., solicitando un Cobro de Dinero. POR LO TANTO se le emplaza por edicto y se le requiere que notifique a MARINI PIETRANTONI MUÑIZ LLC., Lcdo. Luis C. Marini Biaggi (lmarini@mpmlawpr. com), la Lcda. Ashley Anne Clemente Serrano (aclemente@mpmlawpr.com) y la Lcda. Getzemarie Lugo Rodríguez (glugo@mpmlawpr.com), 250 Ponce de León Ave., Suite 900 San Juan, PR 00918, Tel. 787705- 2171, copia de su contestación a la Demanda dentro de los (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Vega Baja. SE LE ADVIERTE que, de no proceder conforme con lo antes indicado, se le anotará la rebeldía y podrá dictarse Sentencia en su contra, concediendo a la parte demandante los remedios solicitados en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle, o cualquier otro, si el Tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, a 12 de septiembre de 2024. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA GENERAL. MARITZA ROSARIO ROSARIO, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA
SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA BAJA
HACIENDA DEL MAR OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION, INC.
Demandante V. JOSÉ LUIS RAMOS CÁDIZ, LUZ MILDRED RAMOS PÉREZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS
Demandados
Civil Núm.: VB2024CV00663. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, SS. A: José Luis Ramos Cádiz, por si y en representación de la
Sociedad Legal de Bienes Gananciales - 11018 Holly Cone Dr., Riverview, FL 33569-2012. POR LA PRESENTE, se le notifica a Jose Luis Ramos Cadiz, por si y en representación de la Sociedad Legal de Bienes Gananciales, que se ha radicado mediante el sistema SUMAC una Demanda por la demandante HACIENDA DEL MAR OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION, INC., solicitando un Cobro de Dinero. POR LO TANTO se le emplaza por edicto y se le requiere que notifique a MARINI PIETRANTONI MUÑIZ LLC., Lcdo. Luis C. Marini Biaggi (lmarini@mpmlawpr.com), la Lcda. Ashley Anne Clemente Serrano (aclemente@mpmlawpr.com) y la Lcda. Getzemarie Lugo Rodríguez (glugo@ mpmlawpr.com), 250 Ponce de León Ave., Suite 900 San Juan, PR 00918, Tel. 787- 705- 2171, copia de su contestación a la Demanda dentro de los (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Vega Baja. SE LE ADVIERTE que, de no proceder conforme con lo antes indicado, se le anotará la rebeldía y podrá dictarse Sentencia en su contra, concediendo a la parte demandante los remedios solicitados en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle, o cualquier otro, si el Tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, a 12 de septiembre de 2024. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, SECRETARIA GENERAL. MARITZA ROSARIO ROSARIO, SECRETARIA AUXILIAR. LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA BAJA HACIENDA DEL MAR OWNERS’ ASSOCIATION, INC.
Demandante V. ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ, MARÍA DEL PILAR GONZÁLEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES, COMPUESTA POR AMBOS
Demandados
Civil Núm.: VB2024CV00665. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE
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Dikembe Mutombo, a towering NBA presence, dies at 58
Dikembe Mutombo of the Atlanta Hawks during an NBA game against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden in New York, Jan. 13, 1998. Mutombo, a raw talent who became a towering presence in professional basketball and a dedicated humanitarian in his native Democratic Republic of Congo, died on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. He was 58. (Barton Silverman/ The New York Times)
By HARVEY ARATON
Dikembe Mutombo, who arrived at Georgetown University as an international student with aspirations of being a doctor but who instead became a towering presence in professional basketball and a dedicated humanitarian in his native Congo, died Monday in Atlanta. He was 58. The cause was brain cancer, according to a statement by the National Basketball Association. His family announced in 2022 that he was undergoing treatment for a brain tumor in Atlanta.
Mutombo did not play basketball until midadolescence, having preferred soccer as a child. An older brother, Ilo, and his father, Samuel, encouraged him to try the sport in which his outsize frame, which ultimately stretched to 7 feet 2 inches, combined with his athletic agility, could be of greater benefit.
He wound up playing 18 seasons in the
NBA for six teams, retiring with the secondmost blocked shots in league history behind Hakeem Olajuwon, another African-born center. Mutombo was known for his trademark finger wag, a provocative pose he used to dissuade shooters from challenging him at the rim.
At 21, Mutombo enrolled at Georgetown in 1987 on an academic scholarship after Herman Henning, an administrator at the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, and a former high school basketball coach, sent word of him to John Thompson, coach of the vaunted Georgetown program.
After playing only intramural basketball during freshman year while gaining fluency in English, Mutombo abandoned pre-med courses, a concession to the demands of major college basketball. He switched to a double major in linguistics and diplomacy. He spoke French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and five African dialects.
Though his basketball skills were initially raw, Mutombo trained during summers with Patrick Ewing, a Georgetown alumnus and NBA All Star center, and a teammate, Alonzo Mourning, another center and budding NBA star. By his senior season, Mutombo averaged 15.2 points, 12.2 rebounds and 4.7 blocked shots per game.
“Basketball-wise, he’s just a babe in the woods,” Thompson told the Washington Post in 1991. “He hasn’t been brought up being given things and being told how great he is, and he wants to get better.”
Selected fourth in the 1991 NBA draft by the Denver Nuggets, Mutombo was immediately intimidating on defense. Though awkward-looking, he had an effective hook shot, which helped him average what would be a career-high in points, 16.6. He made the first of eight All-Star Game appearances.
The highlight of Mutombo’s five years in Denver came when he anchored the Nuggets’ upset of the Seattle SuperSonics in the first round of the Western Conference playoffs in 1994. In the decisive fifth game, after grabbing the final rebound in overtime, he was memorably photographed prone on the court holding the ball aloft, celebrating the first-ever defeat of a first-seeded team by one seeded eighth. (The Nuggets were eliminated in the second round by the Utah Jazz.)
Mutombo moved on from Denver in 1996, signing a five-year, $55 million contract with the Atlanta Hawks. Pete Babcock, the Hawks’ general manager, said in a 2022 interview for this obituary that Mutombo
had been intrigued by Atlanta as a base for a foundation that he envisioned establishing for the benefit of his home country, then colloquially known as Zaire. He started the foundation in 1997.
“When we recruited Dikembe, we tried to impress upon him how diverse Atlanta was, how important the African American community was compared to most large American cities,” Babcock said. “That first summer we signed him, he was buying school buses and shipping them to the Congo, and talking about how unstable the country was due to civil strife, especially the medical facilities.”
Mutombo’s mother, Biamba Marie, died at home in 1998 after having a stroke; he had been unable to get hospital care for her due to a government-enforced curfew. That year, he invited business and political insiders to a dinner in Washington to announce a fundraising campaign for a hospital in Kinshasa to provide treatment for the poor. Over the next several years, he struggled to raise money, even from people within the NBA, two notable exceptions being Ewing and Mourning.
“I thought it would be easy, that I would call up all the rich people I knew from being a basketball player and the whole thing would take nine months,” he told The New York Times weeks before the 300-bed hospital, named for his mother, opened in September 2006, on land donated by the government. He said that he had to pay squatters to vacate the property and that he had donated roughly $15 million to the project.
“This is going to be the proudest day of my life,” he said during the ceremonial opening.
As a basketball player, Mutombo could be idiosyncratic, even churlish, especially when compared to his Georgetown brethren Ewing and Mourning. Though he was voted Defensive Player of the Year four times by the news media, he at times complained of being underappreciated.
“Wanting people to recognize his accomplishments, in a sense, is a certain type of pride that’s part cultural,” Mutombo’s cousin Dr. Louis Kanda, a Washington surgeon whose career path Mutombo initially hoped to follow, told The Washington Post in 1995.
His finger wag popularized him, along with his gravelly voiced, thickly accented proclamations, typically followed by deepthroated laughter. Reporters delighted in
his misadventures with Americanized expressions — he once described Shaquille O’Neal’s playoff opposition as “a walk in the cake.”
The finger wag became an irritant to his coaches and teammates, who believed he was incentivizing opponents to play harder. Many implored him to stop, as did David Stern, the league’s commissioner, in a personally delivered appeal. Mutombo believed that the more attention he drew, the better it was for his fundraising.
“Eventually, we told him he could do the finger wag but only to the crowd,” Babcock said.
That strategy backfired in a playoff game in Atlanta in 1997, when Mutombo blocked a shot by the Chicago Bulls’ Brian Williams, turned his back to finger-wag the crowd but neglected to notice the ball still inbounds. Much to the ire of his coach, Lenny Wilkens, it was promptly dunked by the Bulls’ Scottie Pippen.
Mutombo often joked about how much in fines his showmanship had cost him under the league’s no-taunting rule. But four years into retirement he received ample payback, starring in an acclaimed Geico commercial created for the 2013 Super Bowl. In that 30-second spot, in full uniform, he wagged his famous finger at people in various everyday activities.
He told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the commercial had reestablished recognition “for me and for my foundation. I thank God for it.”
Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean Jacque Wamutombo was born June 25, 1966, in Kinshasa. He was the seventh of 10 children of Samuel Mutombo, a school principal and district superintendent who studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. His mother taught Sunday school.
The family had a modest home in downtown Kinshasa and observed Luba tribal custom, which directs the eldest or wealthiest son to care for children of siblings. Mutombo and his wife, Rose — a Congolese woman he married in 1996, two years after canceling a wedding to an American-born medical student over a prenuptial dispute — adopted four children of two deceased brothers and a sister.
The couple themselves had three children, including a son, Ryan, a 7-foot-2 center who joined the Georgetown basketball team, coached by Ewing, in 2021. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.
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