Wednesday Oct 28, 2020

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

San Juan The

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Lorraine Bracco in Search of Her Sicilian Slice of Life P20

She Knew Governor Says Oversight Board’s Plan to Jettison Public Employees Is Not an Option for Preserving Retirement System; Acknowledges Virtual Meeting with Board Leadership

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PR Drivers Can Now Renew Their Licenses from Home P3 NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

District Electoral Officer Appointed

by US Attorney P5

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Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

GOOD MORNING

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October 28, 2020

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

Drivers can now renew licenses via phone app

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Governor extends license validity period to 8 years

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced, along with Transportation and Public Works (DTOP by its Spanish acronym) Secretary Carlos M. Contreras Aponte, announced on Tuesday that citizens, starting today, will be able to renew their drivers’ license via the smartphone app CESCO Digital.

During a press conference at the Puerto Rico Innovation and Technology Service (PRITS), Vázquez said more than 30,000 people per month will be able to renew their identifications and driver’s license “without visiting a Driver Services Center [CESCO by its Spanish acronym], obtaining a medical certificate or going through a Department of Treasury Collection Office.”

Contreras Aponte added that the digital renewal will cost $11, which was established by Law 211-2016, in addition to any fees from stamps, vouchers, and pending fines, which can be paid directly from the app.

“Instead of making an appointment to arrive and be attended to for a 15-minute procedure, now they’ll be able to do it from their phones, follow the instructed steps, pay their fee, [and] make an appointment to pick up their license,” Contreras Aponte said.

The DTOP secretary added by way of reminder that although the government now authorizes a virtual license, it is important to have the analog version as the virtual format has yet to be recognized in U.S. jurisdictions.

Among the requirements for renewing the license digitally, citizens must have all required documents within the DTOP system, be 21 to 70 years of age and have American citizenship; meanwhile, no medical certification is necessary and the photo from former licenses will

be reused in the renewed identification.

On the other hand, citizens whose documents are not up-to-date within the agency’s system, have a different physical address than the one that appears on their current license, have more than 24 points accumulated on their license, have debt with the Child Support Administration or Automobile Accident Compensation Administration, or have a suspended license won’t be able to renew digitally.

Contreras Aponte said the latest phase of the project that began back in 2018 will begin as a pilot plan for “two to three days” with license renewals being provided to those who are eligible to renew starting Jan. 1, 2020.

Those drivers will receive a notification from the app to begin the process and will be able to pick up their printed license from the Carolina CESCO; however, licenses will later be available in all 14 CESCO offices.

Vázquez meanwhile also signed a bill that will extend the license validity period from six to eight years and the right to renew it from 60 to 150 days before its expiration date.

“Citizens will not only have more time to accomplish renewal tasks, but they will also enjoy two more years with their license or identification lifeline,” the governor said. “This means that a driver must visit a CESCO office only every 16 years.”

As for safety measures against fraud on CESCO Digital, PRITS Executive Director Glorimar Ripoll Balet said citizens will only be required to submit their credentials, the last four digits of their Social Security number, license number and birthdate to authenticate their driver profile.

“Once you log into the app, you can configure your profile with the standard features from any mobile app, such as Face I.D., biometrics, pin number, password, Touch I.D.,” Ripoll Balet said. “We are using the standard procedures that the industry has to offer. The mobile phone app doesn’t contain any data from citizens, as that is found within the agency’s database.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Governor: Dismissal of gov’t employees ‘is not an option’ for retaining public retirement system Vázquez knew about oversight board’s request

By PEDRO CORREA HENRY

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced said Tuesday that she has known since last week of the Financial Oversight and Management Board’s (FOMB) intention to dismiss public employees as part of the cost of implementing Laws 80, 81, and 82, which include major benefits for civil servants’ retirement system, and that she has not budged in her opposition to the board’s position.

“We had a virtual meeting with FOMB Chairman David Skeel, where Executive Director Natalia Jaresko was also present,” Vázquez told the press during a press conference at the Puerto Rico Innovation and Technology Service where she signed a bill to extend the driver’s license validity period to eight years. “Before this meeting, we had a meeting with her [Jaresko] where we were [informed] that this was a possibility.”

The governor said she “clearly and thoroughly” rejects any suspension or dismissal of public servants, noting that the laws were submitted and signed because it was understood that there’s documentation that confirms that there were public savings ahead, and that passing the aforementioned

bills was “beyond the social justice that is done for all retirees who more than deserve it.”

“So in these conversations, we have continued looking for alternatives so that resources are obtained and a dignified retirement can be given for these people without the dismissal of public employees,” she said. “This is not, nor it will be [considered], an option.”

The governor insisted meanwhile that “anyone who wants to retire and who qualifies, we have to give them the opportunity to follow the process.”

“The process has continued, and especially the conversations with the [oversight] board to look for these alternatives so that Laws 80, 81, and 82 are passed,” she said.

As for the Christmas Bonus for public employees, Vázquez said she is making sure that it will be paid.

“Without a doubt, we are already working with the FOMB to identify the resources for the payment of the Christmas Bonus,” the governor said, adding that she will meet with the federal entity that regulates the island government’s budget and that, as happened in 2019, “this year will not be the exception.”

The oversight board informed the local government earlier that in order to mitigate the costs of the major retirement benefits that were defined under the aforementioned

laws, it required “significant reductions on public employees, more than those provided for in the Certified Fiscal Plan.”

Jaresko said that if the government is committed to enforcing the laws, “they must make a difficult decision.”

“The government will have to cut spending, including cuts to police, firefighters and other government employees to pay for these laws,” Jaresko said.

She added that the governor enacted all three laws in August without sufficient analysis of how much the laws would cost and where the savings would come from to cover those incremental costs. Even after repeated exchanges with the oversight board, the government’s analysis remains incomplete, while the board’s analysis found that the impact of the three laws combined could increase government spending by up to $8.3 billion over the next 30 years.

Islanders will no longer receive lockdown alert

By THE STAR STAFF

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ureau for Emergency Management and Disaster Administration (NMEAD by its Spanish acronym) Commissioner Nino Correa Filomeno announced Tuesday that Puerto Rico residents will no longer receive the alert on their cell phones that announces the curfew imposed as part of public health measures in response to the coronavirus pandemic, and reminds them to use a face mask.

“In mid-July, the sending of this alert was implemented again as a mechanism to guide citizens,” Correa Filomeno said. “After talking with Governor Wanda Vázquez Garced, we believe that it is prudent to stop sending the alert. However, it is important that citizens understand that the emergency

is not over and COVID-19 continues to be a threat that we must take seriously and responsibly. I make a call to continue observing the measures of physical distancing, the use of masks and to comply with the provisions of the executive order signed to prevent infection.”

The NMEAD chief noted that the alert message was sent using the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, which offers public safety officials an effective way to send alerts and warnings to the public through the Emergency Alert System, Wireless Emergency Alerts, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather radio, and other public warning systems from a single interface.

“I urge citizens to keep the option of receiving emergency alert messages

activated on their cell phones,” Correa Filomeno said. “This will help you to be notified about natural or man-made situations that may endanger your safety. This type of message is used in the event of floods, hurricanes and tsunamis, among other [emergencies].”

Vázquez said Tuesday that the executive order on COVID-19 will remain in effect as is on the island after an employee of the Government Ethics Office tested positive for the coronavirus.

“Until now we are going to leave the executive order as it is,” the governor told the Star. “Everyone has to take the needed measures; the work centers have to follow the measures, [people have to] sanitize them so that the government has continuity in its functions for the benefit of the Puerto Rican people.”

Governor mum on PFEI determination to sit on Telegram chat report Regarding the determination by Special Independent Prosecutor Panel (PFEI by its Spanish initials) President Nydia CottoVives to hold back the report on the infamous Telegram chat released last year, Vázquez reserved comment.

The Telegram chat scandal led to a two-week protest two summers ago that ended with then-Gov. Ricardo Rosselló Nevares’ resignation.

“Regarding the PFEI question, it’s a determination from the panel,” the governor said. “They will make the decision according to the reasons provided by the prosecutors. About this particular case, I won’t make any statements.”

The PFEI president told NotiUno 630 that the investigation came to an end, resulting in a “voluminous report [which contains more than] 100 pages.” As for the 10 additional days that were requested by the prosecutors assigned to the case, she insisted that “it wasn’t meant to throw in the towel on anyone.”

In addition to Rosselló, former oversight board government representative Christian Sobrino Vega, former La Fortaleza legal adviser Alfonso Orona, former Public Affairs Secretary Ramón Rosario Cortés, publicist Edwin Miranda Reyes and lobbyist Elías Sánchez Sifonte are under investigation.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

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US Attorney appoints district electoral officer

By THE STAR STAFF

U

nited States Attorney W. Stephen Muldrow announced Tuesday that the chief of the Financial Fraud & Corruption Section, Assistant U.S. Attorney Seth Erbe, will lead the efforts of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Puerto Rico in connection with the Justice Department’s nationwide Election Day Program for the upcoming Nov. 3 general election that seeks to detect voting rights violations.

Erbe has been appointed to serve as the District Election Officer for the District of Puerto Rico, and in that capacity is responsible for overseeing the District’s handling of complaints of election fraud and voting rights concerns in consultation with Justice Department Headquarters in Washington.

“Every citizen must be able to vote without interference or discrimination and to have that vote counted without it being stolen because of fraud,” Muldrow said in a statement. “The Department of Justice will always act appropriately to protect the integrity of the election process.”

“The Department of Justice has an important role in deterring election fraud and discrimination at the polls, and combating these violations whenever and wherever

they occur,” the statement reads. “The Department’s longstanding Election Day Program furthers these goals, and also seeks to ensure public confidence in the integrity of the election process by providing local points of contact within the Department for the public to report possible election fraud and voting rights violations while the polls are open through Election Day.” Federal law protects against such crimes as intimidating or bribing voters, buying and selling votes, impersonating voters, altering vote tallies, stuffing ballot boxes, and marking ballots for voters against their wishes or without their input. It also contains special protections for the rights of voters, and provides that they can vote free from acts that intimidate or harass them. For example, actions of persons designed to interrupt or intimidate voters at polling places by questioning or challenging them, or by photographing or videotaping them, under the pretext that these are actions to uncover illegal voting may violate federal voting rights law. Further, federal law protects the right of voters to mark their own ballot or to be assisted by a person of their choice (where voters need assistance because of disability or illiteracy).

In order to respond to complaints of election fraud or voting rights concerns during the voting period that ends on Nov. 3, and to ensure that such complaints are directed

U.S. Attorney W. Stephen Muldrow to the appropriate authorities, Muldrow said Erbe will be on duty in the District while the polls are open. He can be reached by the public at the following telephone numbers: 787-340-1795 or 787-340-1890.

In addition, the FBI will have special agents available in each field office and resident agency throughout the country to receive allegations of election fraud and other election abuses on Election Day. The local FBI field office can be reached by the public at 787-754-6000 or 787-987-6500.

Complaints about possible violations of federal voting rights laws can be made directly to the Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C. by phone at (800) 253-3931 or by complaint form at https://civilrights.justice.gov/.

SEC: Suspension of early vote counting due to lack of ’balance’ among parties

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

J

udge Jessika Padilla, the alternate chairman of the State Elections Commission (SEC), said Tuesday that the counting of early votes was stopped on Monday because not enough electoral officials from Puerto Rico’s various political parties showed up to ensure a balance.

“Not all the tables were ready due to lack of balance,” Padilla said in an interview with Julio Rivera Saniel on “Pegaos en la Mañana” on Radio Isla, without specifying the underrepresented political parties.

“If there was [an] insufficient [number of] officials it is because they did not arrive in time for the opening … of the vote count,” the SEC official said. “… That was one of the reasons, but it was not the only one.”

Padilla said that eventually led to a halt in the counting of early votes.

On Monday, the Administrative Board for Absentee and Early Voting (JAVA) began counting the early votes cast by voters who requested absentee and early voting by mail, using the electronic counting machines as planned.

Hours later, SEC Chairman Francisco Rosado Colomer said that “in order to safeguard the purity of the electoral process, the full Commission decided to pause the vote counting process to make more rigorous adjustments.”

“Unlike previous events, this time the volume of votes that JAVA will be processing during the count is significantly higher than usual,” Rosado Colomer added. “We saw it necessary to re-evaluate the logistics and give more precise instructions to the officials, who will resume work tomorrow, Tuesday, at 8:30 in the morning.”

He affirmed that the SEC’s work will continue as established in its calendar.

Meanwhile, Popular Democratic Party (PDP) Electoral Commissioner Nicolás Vega Gautier, asserted Tuesday that the “administrative failures and lack of organization” on the part of JAVA caused the suspension of work on Monday.

“At the Commission meeting on Sunday, the chairman of the State Elections Commission was specifically asked what jobs would be carried out by JAVA the next day,” Vega Gautier said in a written statement. “The chairman told us that first the mail-in envelopes [about 39,000] would be validated, then the volunteers would be trained and, if it was not too late, the vote-counting process would begin.”

“For the validation of the votes by mail, the presence of 110 volunteers was not necessary,” the PDP official contended.

“In addition, knowing the slowness of the processes once they

begin, I estimated that the presence of so many volunteers was not necessary. So I only summoned 60 people.”

“When the NPP [New Progressive Party] arrives, they begin to push for the vote counting to begin,” Vega Gautier continued. “The instructions were not agreed upon, [and] therefore the officials had not been trained and each one interpreted [the instructions] in their own way. The president of JAVA, without authorization, gave instructions for the vote counting to begin, and that was when the wheels came off.

The objections from all sides began and in that situation the chairman suspended the work.”

The PDP official said “the [parties’ electoral] commissioners met with the chairman of JAVA and the managers of each party, and time was given to agree on the instructions that would be given to the volunteers.”

“Subsequently, the [electoral] commissioners reviewed these instructions and finally, five hours later, the process was ready to begin,” Vega Gautier said.

He added that on Tuesday, as agreed at the SEC, PDP officials were ready to start the day’s work. Vega Gautier stressed that “the PDP is ready to attend and participate in the early voting process.”

Likewise, he said he was ready for the home voting that began over the weekend.

“Situations that do not concern the PDP were the cause of the suspension of the process yesterday [Monday],” Vega Gautier said, reiterating his call to party members to “exercise their vote and be certain that a transparent process will be guaranteed that respects and safeguards the fundamental pillar of democracy, which is the right to vote.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Vega Alta mayor calls out NPP rival over $320,000 in contracts with House of Representatives

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

V

ega Alta Mayor Oscar “Can” Santiago Martínez reacted on Tuesday to revelations from an investigation of Comptroller’s Office files that his New Progressive Party rival for the mayorship of the northern island town, María Vega, has accumulated more than $320,000 in contracts in the Puerto Rico House of Representatives during the current fouryear term.

“I received a report from the records of the Comptroller’s Office that show what the residents of Vega Alta have been suspecting for a few years and that is that mayoral candidate María Vega is part of the festival of contracts awarded by the speaker of the House,” Santiago Martínez, a member of the Popular Democratic Party,

said in a written statement on Tuesday. “The most unusual thing is that the contracts are supposed to be for administrative consultancy, when there are many more people doing the same work. In a country with the fiscal crisis that we are seeing, it is incredible that this is happening.”

The mayor, who is running for a second term, directly called on Vega to present a public report showing the work she has done on behalf of the people of Vega Alta.

“She has already been a representative to the House,” he said. “Ask in Vega Alta if anyone remembers what work she did for our people.”

Last Friday the House of Representatives published a list of employees, positions and salaries, in the face of public pressure and after a lawsuit was filed against House Speaker Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Núñez.

Environmental groups denounce tree felling

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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iudadanos del Karso (CDK), Para la Naturaleza and other community and environmental organizations in Puerto Rico have joined to denounce the irresponsible felling of trees on a large number of lands under Puerto Rico National Parks Co. supervision.

Among the sites in question are the zoo in Mayagüez (Zoológico de Mayagüez), spas such as Cerro Gordo in Vega Alta, Cavernas del Río Camuy National Park, urban parks such as Julio Monagas in Bayamón and resorts such as Monte del Estado in Maricao.

According to a press release, the logging coincides with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) alleg-

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edly making millions of dollars available to the government of Puerto Rico, which in turn has hired private companies to carry out the work. The contractors claim that the trees are sick or pose a danger; however, they do not present any evidence of the condition that allegedly afflicts them, the organization said.

“Interestingly, companies are paid by the volume of trees cut, so the ones that have suffered the most are the large trees,” CDK President Abel Vale said Tuesday. “We demand that the governor, the secretary of the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources [DNER] and FEMA stop this heinous massacre.”

Fernando Lloveras San Miguel, president of Para la Naturaleza, added that “requiring contractors to determine which trees to cut and then paying for the volume of what they cut would be a serious conflict of interest.”

“Nature cannot be at the mercy of hired mercenaries,” he said. “Trees in natural areas or national parks require responsible and sensitive management. This management must be planned according to the conditions of each tree, defining long-term objectives aimed at protecting the forest, the species that make trees their home and the safety of visitors.”

The organizations created a petition for citizens to sign on the Change.org platform. In addition, they sent letters to all of the candidates for governor to draw their attention to the mass felling of trees and requesting that they join the urgent demand that the operations be stopped until an evaluation is conducted by experts, such as ecologists and arborists and physiologists, independent of the agencies involved.

Community groups have been active in documenting the logging with photos and video, and sharing that record with organizations to support the complaint.

“As the citizens have responded, with commitment and haste, we expect an immediate and forceful response, both from the governor, as well as from the DNER, from FEMA and from those who aspire to lead Puerto Rico,” Vale said. “First the amendments to the Joint Regulations and now this. Enough of so much mistreatment of Puerto Rico’s natural systems.”

So far, some 2,000 people have signed the petition to stop the indiscriminate felling of trees in the forest parks of Puerto Rico, the groups said. Citizens interested in supporting the petition can sign it by visiting Change.org.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

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In swearing in Barrett, Trump defiantly mimics ‘superspreader’ Rose Garden ceremony

By PETER BAKER

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resident Donald Trump, who loves to boast of doing anything his predecessors have never done, pulled off such a historic first Monday. He won confirmation of a Supreme Court justice only eight days before a presidential election, rushing his choice through the Senate before voters decide whether to give him four more years or kick him out of office.

Trump then did something else no other president has done.

He hosted a nighttime ceremony on the White House lawn to swear in Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a virtual do-over of the superspreader event blamed for infecting multiple people with the coronavirus a month ago to the day, including the president himself, who was forced to spend three nights in the hospital.

To Trump, the first history-maker outweighed the second, a chance to celebrate a landmark political victory regardless of the risk. It was, in effect, the triumph of defiance over experience, a stubborn gesture by a president who refuses to acknowledge the continuing threat of a pandemic that has killed more than 225,000 people in the United States even after it has swept through his own circle of aides, advisers and allies. Undaunted and unbowed, Trump hosted the event even as five people working for Vice President Mike Pence have tested positive in recent days.

This time, at least, the White House made some concessions to the virus. Unlike the Rose Garden event on Sept. 26 when Trump announced his nomination of Barrett, apparently leading to a raft of infections, the ceremony Monday night marking her confirmation was held on the roomier South Lawn, with folding chairs seated several feet apart and guests required to wear masks.

Neither Trump nor Barrett wore masks, perhaps owing to the fact that both have already had the virus and therefore presumably could be immune. Melania Trump, the first lady, who also was infected after the last event, likewise attended without a mask. Justice Clarence Thomas, who was on hand to swear in his new colleague, wore no mask either, even though he is not known to have been previously infected. None of the other seven justices attended.

Neither the president nor the new justice made any reference to the virus or what happened the last time the two gathered supporters at the White House. Instead, they congratulated themselves on the superquick confirmation process that has now put her on the court just in time to rule on any of Trump’s challenges emerging from next week’s election.

Trump praised Barrett’s “deep knowledge, tremendous poise and towering intellect,” calling her a suitable replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal stalwart who died last month, even though she is the ideological polar opposite.

“It is highly fitting that Justice Barrett fills the seat of a true pioneer for women, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” the president told the crowd. “Tonight, Justice Barrett becomes not only the fifth woman to serve on our nation’s highest court, but the very first mother of school-aged children to become a Supreme Court justice.”

Barrett, 48, who has seven children, will be the current

President Trump speaking at the White House with Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Monday night. court’s youngest member, its third woman, its sixth Catholic and its only jurist from outside the Ivy League. A graduate of Notre Dame Law School, where she later taught, she has served on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since Trump appointed her in 2017 and has become a favorite of conservatives. Her appointment to the Supreme Court was Trump’s third, the most any president has had in a single term since Richard Nixon and an important credential for Republican voters who care about the judiciary.

In her own remarks Monday, Barrett, whose short-sleeve black dress contrasted with the president’s heavy, black overcoat on a crisp, 55-degree evening, referred to the speedy Senate approval as “a rigorous confirmation process,” a characterization Democrats strenuously disputed.

But she seemed intent on sending the message that she would not simply do Trump’s bidding, using the words “independent” or “independence” three times, even though he has said explicitly that he wanted her seated before the election so she could lend her vote in case of a legal dispute over the balloting.

“A judge declares independence not only from the Congress and the president but also from the private beliefs that might otherwise move her,” Barrett said after being sworn in.

“The oath I have solemnly taken tonight,” she added, “means at its core that I will do my job without any fear or favor and that I will do so independently of both the political branches and of my own preferences.”

Neither Democrats nor Republicans seemed to believe

that, instead commending or condemning her confirmation as a victory for conservatives and a defeat for liberals. Her replacement of Ginsburg means that the conservative wing now controls the Supreme Court 6-3, heralding a new era of jurisprudence not only on the forthcoming election, but on hot-button issues like abortion, gay rights and health care.

The nomination ceremony a month ago undercut the political message Trump wanted to send when he, Trump and others who were in attendance later tested positive for the coronavirus. Trump emerged from his sickness as uncowed as ever, insisting that the virus could be beaten and telling Americans not to let it dominate their lives.

Many of those who were infected that day stayed away Monday night. Among those who were back for more was Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who tested positive for the virus after the announcement ceremony where he had gone maskless and hugged others in the crowd. “Tonight’s vote was a huge win for the American people,” Lee said on Twitter without referring to the virus.

Democrats were flabbergasted that the White House would replicate the event a month later.

“They shame mask wearing,” Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., said on Twitter earlier in the day. “They hold super spreader events daily. They discourage testing. They pretend like a vaccine is days away so that people will let down their guard.

The biggest threat to America’s public health isn’t the virus, it’s the Trump White House.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Justice Dept. blocked in bid to shield Trump from rape defamation suit

By ALAN FEUER and BENJAMIN WEISER

A

federal judge ruled on Tuesday that President Donald Trump can be personally sued for defamation in connection with his denial while in office of a decades-old rape allegation.

The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, rejected the Justice Department’s attempt to step into the case and defend the president, and his ruling means that, for the moment, a lawsuit by writer E. Jean Carroll can move forward against Trump, in his capacity as a private citizen.

Carroll has accused Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. Her lawsuit claims he harmed her reputation when he denied the attack last year and branded her a liar.

Last month, the Justice Department abruptly intervened on Trump’s behalf in the suit, which had been filed in state court in

New York, citing a law designed to protect federal employees against litigation stemming from the performance of their duties.

Under that law, the Federal Tort Claims Act, the department sought to move Carroll’s suit to federal court and to substitute the United States for Trump as the defendant — a move that would have likely led to the dismissal of the charges.

While the Justice Department has used the law to shield members of Congress from being sued for defamation over things they have said, the department has rarely, if ever, used it to grant immunity to a president.

Kaplan, however, ruled against the department’s maneuver, saying Trump was not acting in his official capacity when he denied the accusation. “His comments concerned an alleged sexual assault that took place several decades before he took office, and the allegations have no relationship to the official business of the United States,” the judge wrote.

The writer E. Jean Carroll, center, joined by her legal team, arrives at federal district court in Manhattan on Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020, for a hearing on her defamation suit against President Donald Trump.

Philadelphia police fatally shoot a black man who they say had a knife

By AZI PAYBARAH

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hiladelphia police on Monday fatally shot a 27-year-old Black man who they said was armed with a knife, touching off protests and violent clashes hours later.

Mayor Jim Kenney said the shooting, which was partially captured on video by a bystander, raised “difficult questions that must be answered,” and the police commissioner promised an investigation.

Late Monday night, protesters marched through West Philadelphia, and video posted on social media appeared to show the police clashing with demonstrators. Thirty police officers were injured, in most cases by bricks and rocks that were thrown by protesters, Sgt. Eric Gripp, a spokesman for the Philadelphia Police Department, said on Tuesday. One officer was treated at a hospital for a broken leg after she was hit by a pickup truck, he said.

The shooting took place around 4 p.m., as police responded to a report of a man armed with a knife. Video that was posted on social media shows the man, later identified by a City Council member as Walter Wallace Jr., walking into the street as people yell and two police of-

ficers aim their guns at him.

At one point, Wallace, who is several feet away from the officers in the video, walks toward them as they quickly move backward.

The camera points down toward the ground as about a dozen shots are heard.

The camera quickly moves up as Wallace falls to the ground, and people rush toward him, including the officers. One woman who is screaming appears to throw something at one of the officers.

“Bro, they just killed him in front of me,” a man can be heard saying. “Y’all ain’t have to give him that many shots.”

Gripp told the Inquirer that officers had ordered Wallace to drop the knife and that he had “advanced toward the officers.” After the officers shot Wallace, one of them drove him to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, he said.

Kenney, the mayor, said he had watched “the video of this tragic incident” and spoken with Wallace’s family “to hear their concerns firsthand, and to answer their questions to the extent that I am able.”

The city’s police commissioner, Danielle Outlaw, said in a statement, “I recognize that the video of the incident raises many questions.”

She added, “I will be leaning on what the investigation gleans to answer the many unanswered questions that exist.”

In a statement, the council member who identified Wallace, Jamie Gauthier, said she wanted the police to “immediately” release the officers’ body camera video from the incident.

“The public deserves a full, unvarnished accounting of what took place today,” she said.

Gauthier also criticized the officers for firing their weapons. “Had these officers employed de-escalation techniques and nonlethal weapons rather than making the split-second decision to fire their guns, this young man might still have his life tonight,” she said.

The Philadelphia district attorney, Larry Krasner, said his office was looking into the shooting and urged the public to be patient.

“We intend to go where the facts and law lead us and to do so carefully, without rushing to judgment and without bias of any kind,” he said in a statement. “In the hours and days following this shooting, we ask Philadelphians to come together to uphold people’s freedom to express themselves peacefully and to reject violence of any kind.”

In a statement, John McNesby, the presi-

dent of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, also asked for the public’s patience and defended the officers.

“Our police officers are being vilified this evening for doing their job and keeping the community safe, after being confronted by a man with a knife,” he said. “We support and defend these officers, as they too are traumatized by being involved in a fatal shooting.”

Around 9:30 p.m., protesters were marching through the streets of West Philadelphia, with a parade of vehicles honking behind them. Just after 11 p.m., video posted on Twitter showed police officers using batons as they clashed with a large group of people on a residential street.

Taryn Naundorff, 21, who recorded the video, said police “started forcefully pushing back the crowd and beating anyone who wouldn’t back up.”

Five police vehicles and one fire department vehicle were vandalized, Gripp said. At least 14 people were arrested for looting, he said.

There have been widespread demonstrations against police violence and racial injustice across the country since May, when George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by police in Minneapolis.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

9

Classrooms without walls, and hopefully COVID

By AMELIA NIERENBERG

F

irst graders sit crisscross applesauce on tree stumps, hands sky-high to ask a question.

Third graders peer closely at the plants growing in class gardens, or spread themselves out in a sunflower-filled space to read. When the sun beats down, students take shelter under shades made from boat sails.

That’s what a school day is like this year in one community on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where every student now spends at least part of the day learning outdoors — at least when the rain holds off.

Seeking ways to teach safely during the pandemic, schools across the United States have embraced the idea of classes in the open air, as Americans did during disease outbreaks a century ago.

The efforts to throw tents over playgrounds and arrange desks in parks and parking lots have brought new life to an outdoor education movement, inspired in part by Scandinavian “forest schools” where children bundle up against frigid temperatures for long romps in the snow.

“The outside provides much more flexibility,” said Sharon Danks, the chief executive of Green Schoolyards America and the coordinator of the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative, which formed in May. “You can have a 6-foot-apart seating chart, and have enough space to move around.”

While some educators balked at the costs and logistical hurdles, others embraced the idea, with teachers learning carpentry to build their own outdoor classrooms, and parents raising money and hitting up local businesses for lumber.

“COVID has hastened the pace of a shift toward trying to take better advantage of the outdoors,” said Maria Libby, the superintendent of the Five Town Community School District in Rockport, Maine, who bought tents and Adirondack chairs for outdoor classrooms.

Here is a look at four American schools where students are learning in the open air, and where at least some parents and teachers hope that the temporary measures might become permanent, for as long as the weather cooperates.

Falmouth Public Schools Falmouth, Massachusetts Amy Leonardi envied private schools that seemed to have no problem holding class outdoors. “Montessori-style, or Waldorf, they’ve been doing this kind of thing for a long time,” she said. “But to do it in the public school system has been kind of prohibitive.”

This summer, though, it became clear that outdoor classrooms might be the only way to keep students in school during the pandemic. So Leonardi, with one child in elementary school

and one soon to enter, volunteered to lead the district’s outdoor learning project committee.

They spent the summer re-imagining the spaces around several school buildings. A community garden, for example, seemed a perfect spot to hold science classes and take breaks.

Then she organized a team to obtain equipment, coordinate construction and raise donations.

Lori Duerr, the Falmouth Public Schools superintendent, said the district didn’t have to spend money on the project because the community stepped up. “These are not just parents,” she said. “These are just community people who are jumping in to also help.”

Local lumber companies and landscapers donated stumps for seats. Families pitched in old outdoor gear. And Leonardi gave one group of parents the job of writing “thank you” notes to contributors.

“It’s a great example for the kids,” she said. “They’re getting the benefit of the outdoor learning — health-wise, academically and mental health — but they’re also seeing an entire community come together for them. That’s a powerful message, too.”

Essex Street Academy New York City Well before the coronavirus, professional graffiti artists painted murals on the walls atop Essex Street Academy, a public school in Lower Manhattan. The school hosted events under the sky. After classes, children played soccer on a rubber field and shot hoops on the basketball court.

Now, the roof doubles as a classroom space.

“We didn’t really have to modify anything, because it’s technically a schoolyard,” said Wallace Simpson, the school’s principal. “It’s designed to be used.”

New York City, which has a long history of holding classes outside during disease outbreaks, approved about 1,100 proposals for public schools to move students outdoors this fall. Some wanted to close down streets or take to parks. Essex Street Academy students just had to climb the stairs.

Samaiya Bailey, 17, a senior, said she loves the breaks she takes on the roof between classes.

There, she can see her friends, at a safe distance.

“When I see them, I don’t hug them,” she said. “I do that little elbow touch.”

Like all New Yorkers who stayed in the city this spring for the early months of the pandemic, students remember the crushing fear and claustrophobia that gripped their neighborhoods. As the weather turns crisp, they’re wearing hoodies and jackets to stretch out their time on the roof as long as possible.

“Even though I’m not taking my mask off, I’m getting fresh air,” Bailey said. “I’m able to

be more open and spacious, instead of being crammed up in that classroom.”

Lakeside School District Hot Springs, Arkansas At the start of each school day, Dana Hotho’s students ask: “Where are we learning today?”

It’s a fair question. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, Hotho takes her class from Lakeside Intermediate School to Garvan Woodland Gardens at the University of Arkansas. The program in the botanical garden, developed over the summer by Bruce Orr, an assistant superintendent, serves students across the district with special needs.

Sometimes, Hotho, her fellow teachers and paraprofessional aides conduct class at four wrought-iron tables. With white boards and hand sanitizer, the students practice their letters. (On a recent week, the class was focused on the letter H.) As they work, she plays quiet classical music from a Bluetooth speaker. A peacock named George might wander through class.

“It’s just peaceful to have George in your presence,” Hotho said, laughing. “I just can’t tell you how wonderful it is.”

Often, though, she uses the outdoor space for activities that would be impossible in a classroom. She weaves counting lessons into socially distanced dance parties or sends children on scavenger hunts through the gardens.

“The kids are learning, and they don’t even know they’re learning,” Hotho said. “They just think they’re having a good time.”

The space also helps special-needs students manage and regulate their emotions. When an overstimulated child starts to show signs of a meltdown, Hotho will often suggest taking a deep breath.

“When you take a deep breath in the

classroom, it’s a different deep breath than when you’re sitting at Garvan Gardens,” Hotho said.

Prairie Hill Waldorf School Pewaukee, Wisconsin At the Prairie Hill Waldorf School outside of Milwaukee, students do not use technology in the classroom until middle school. And even then, they use it sparingly, under an educational philosophy developed a century ago in Germany and followed at some private and charter schools in the United States.

“Virtual learning definitely isn’t a strong option for us, so we wanted to come back to school in a safe way,” said Lindsey Earle, a fourthgrade teacher at the Prairie Hill school, which has about 125 students in pre-K to eighth grade.

Her idea for how to do that: Build a 12-sided outdoor classroom.

Earle spent the summer months working alongside parent volunteers to create the space, and the outdoors easily become part of her lessons on Wisconsin history and geography.

“A lot of what we do incorporates the natural world,” Earle said. “With Wisconsin geography, what better way to be out and exploring it? We’re talking about glaciers and the landforms that were left over by the glaciers. We can even see some of those on our properties.”

Earle installed a wood-burning clay stove in her classroom, which she hopes will heat the space through the snowy winter months. She is still trying to raise donations for a roof, but a tarp works for now. And it is not like her 13 students haven’t been in the cold before, growing up in Wisconsin.

“It feels like we’re camping all day long,” she said, laughing. “With camping comes a lot of packing, a lot of schlepping, a lot of back and forth. It’s trials and tribulations, but in the end, you’re just glad that you did it.”

Teachers lead their class in a singalong at Garvan Woodland Gardens at the Uninersity of Arkansas in Hot Springs on Oct. 7, 2020.

10

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Why NYC’s economic recovery may lag the rest of the country’s ting a return of professional service workers to their offices.

“A lot of those things which we had celebrated as having helped to diversify the city’s economy in the COVID economy turned out to be big liabilities,” he said.

The cratering of the local economy is on stark display along many Manhattan blocks where offices are mostly empty, streets are lined with shuttered stores and restaurants and normally bustling gathering spots, like Bryant Park, are eerily quiet.

The city’s struggle to dig out of its financial hole and the looming possibility of major cuts to services and programs will likely become a dominant issue in next year’s mayoral election, with voters judging candidates on their economic blueprints.

The managers of some office builShuttered storefronts on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan on Sept. 9, 2020. New York dings recalled their staffs of cleaners and is in worse shape than other major American cities, with more than one million security agents in recent weeks, anticiparesidents out of work. ting a return of office workers as the worst of the outbreak eased.

But just a fraction have trickled back

By PATRICK McGEEHAN ked together in stadiums: The very thing that made New York New York was un- and some large tech companies like Gooew York, whose diversified eco- dermined by the pandemic, was upended gle have told employees to work from home until next summer. nomy had fueled unparalleled job by it.”

Even a professional address as prestigrowth in recent years, is now faZandi said he expected that it would cing a bigger challenge in recovering from take New York about two years longer than gious as the Empire State Building is having the pandemic than almost any other major the rest of the country to recover all the trouble attracting its tenants back.

The 102-story building laid off worcity in the country. More than 1 million economic losses suffered during the panresidents are out of work, and the unem- demic. “It’s going to be a long slog” that kers in late summer after calling them back ployment rate is nearly double the national will last into 2023 for the nation and possi- from furlough, said Mariusz Dudziec, a utility porter who has worked there for more average. bly until 2025 for New York City, he said.

The city had tried to insulate itself So far, New York has been regai- than seven years.

Dudziec, 27, said he hoped to go from major downturns by shifting from ning jobs slower than other big cities. As tying its fortunes to the rise and fall of Wall of September, employment in the city was back to work soon but was in line behind Street. A thriving tech sector, a booming still down more than 600,000 jobs from a several colleagues who had seniority over real estate industry and waves of interna- year before, according to the state Labor him. Since last spring, Dudziec, has been collecting unemployment benefits, which tional tourists had helped Broadway, hotels Department. and restaurants prosper.

In September, more than 2.3 million has provided enough to cover his bills.

He missed the usual swirl of exciteBut now, as the virus surges again in New York state residents were collecting the region, tourists are still staying away unemployment benefits, said James Pa- ment around the building, which normally and any hope that workers would refill the rrott, an economist with the Center for draws lines of tourists from dawn until late city’s office towers and support its busines- New York City Affairs at the New School. at night. “It’s getting kind of boring being at ses before the end of the year is fading. As Of those, at least 1.3 million were city resi- home” in the East Village, he said.

New York has so many big buildings a result, New York’s recovery is very likely dents who were either out of work or sevethat staffing them is a significant source of to be slow and protracted, economists said. rely underemployed, he said.

“This is an event that struck right at Those losses are concentrated in five jobs. Last year, about 43,000 people, inthe heart of New York’s comparative ad- key industries — restaurants, hotels, the cluding lobby agents, elevator operators, vantages,” said Mark Zandi, chief econo- arts, transportation and building services cleaners and porters, worked in commermist for Moody’s Analytics, a Wall Street — that rely on travel, tourism and business cial and residential buildings.

Even though most buildings require research firm. “Being globally oriented, activity, Parrott said. Workers who staff at least a skeletal staff to operate and mainbeing stacked up in skyscrapers and pac- office buildings have been laid off, awai-

N

tain systems like air conditioning, building services has suffered greater losses than most categories of jobs. In September, jobs were down almost 35% from a year before, a decline of 14,400 positions.

The drop is still far smaller than the devastation suffered by businesses that depend on tourists, like restaurants, hotels and Broadway theaters, which will now be closed at least through May 30. The performing arts and spectator sports have lost more than two-thirds of their jobs.

More than 165,000 jobs have been lost in restaurants, bars and hotels. Those three industries are more concentrated in New York than most other cities, contributing to its disproportionate share of the nation’s job losses, said Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s.

“New York depends on industries that are being crushed by the pandemic,” he said. “It’s a global city and the global economy is shut down.”

The effect on the city’s economy has been historic. Before the virus, New York was enjoying its longest expansion on record — by far. The city had gained nearly 1 million jobs in a period of economic growth that lasted more than 10 years.

The city’s tourism agency, NYC & Co., has zealously promoted New York in other countries, including China, Brazil and Australia, which helped feed a surge in annual visitors from 45.8 million in 2009 to 66.6 million in 2019.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city cultivated tech startups and attracted tech giants like Google by supporting educational programs, including the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute on Roosevelt Island.

Big Tech, including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, collectively employs 22,000 people in New York and, in what has been a small dose of good news for the city, has hired thousands of workers this year despite the pandemic.

Still, by the end of summer, the city had regained only about 30% of the payroll jobs lost in March and April.

“It’s pretty hard to get around the fact that we’re still going to be down 500,000 to 600,000 jobs at the end of the year,” the New School’s Parrott said, adding that those losses include the self-employed.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

11

Trump’s manufacturing promises disappoint as economy sours

By ALAN RAPPEPORT

A

t a 2018 groundbreaking ceremony for a Foxconn plant in Wisconsin, President Donald Trump declared that the factory would be the “eighth wonder of the world” — a $10 billion hub that would hire 13,000 workers to make flatscreen televisions in America’s heartland.

This month, Wisconsin denied Foxconn tax subsidies for failing to make good on its investment plans. The company has hired less than a quarter of the 2,080 workers it was expected to employ last year and invested just $300 million, rather than the expected $3.3 billion, according to a report from Wisconsin’s Division of Executive Budget and Finance.

The Foxconn plant, the report said, appears to be primarily used for storage and is “off track to be considered a viable manufacturing facility.” Innovation centers that the Taiwanese company was supposed to open across the state sit empty.

Foxconn’s failure to create the kind of factory powerhouse that Trump described demonstrates how the president’s promise of an American manufacturing renaissance has not always resulted in the pledged jobs or economic investment. Trump has threatened companies like General Motors, Harley-Davidson and Carrier with backbreaking taxes and boycotts if they moved manufacturing abroad, often cajoling job promises out of those firms. But in many cases, those pledges went unfulfilled once Trump’s attention shifted elsewhere and market realities could not be ignored.

At the first presidential debate in September, Trump claimed that he had brought back 700,000 factory jobs after the Obama administration neglected the sector. Jobs did increase during the first three years of his term, though not to the degree he suggested: Manufacturing employment rose by just under 500,000 jobs.

Through August, employment in the sector had fallen by more than 200,000 from when Trump took office, as a wave of plant closures and the pandemic recession took a toll.

“The president likes to fly in and make a show of being involved and showing that he got something going,” said Matthew Jewell, a science and engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-

Then President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence tour a Carrier plant in Indianapolis, Dec. 1, 2016.

Eau Claire, who was hoping that his students might find jobs at one of Foxconn’s nearby innovation centers that sit vacant.

“It was frustrating for us.”

Those unfulfilled promises may matter little to Trump’s supporters, who see the president’s corporate jawboning and manufacturing rhetoric as evidence that he is fighting hard for American workers.

Most polls continue to show Trump having an edge over Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, when it comes to managing the economy.

In some ways, Trump’s efforts to revitalize American manufacturing have been undercut by his own policies. His 2017 tax cuts jump-started investment and led many companies to promise new jobs. But his trade fights with China, Europe, Canada and Mexico proved a drag on the economy, as the United States imposed levies on its biggest trading partners, prompting retaliatory taxes on American goods. Trump’s tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum and $360 billion worth of Chinese goods have weighed particularly hard on the manufacturing sector, which fell into recession last year. The coronavirus pandemic has since upended the economy entirely, erasing the “blue-collar boom” that Trump administration officials had been promoting.

Last month, Trump invited Steve Burns, the chief executive of Lordstown Motors, to the White House to herald the

company’s new electric pickup truck. The visit was intended to celebrate Trump’s role as a jobs savior. In 2019, he successfully compelled General Motors to sell a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that it was planning to shutter to Lordstown Motors, an upstart car manufacturer. The plan was meant to avert about 1,600 layoffs.

The Ohio Tax Credit Authority said it was requiring GM to repay $28 million in tax credits and invest $12 million in the Mahoning Valley because of its decision to close the Lordstown assembly factory.

It was awarded the tax credits in 2008 on the condition that it would employ 3,700 workers in the city for 20 years.

After the sale, some of the General Motors employees took jobs at other plants, but the Lordstown Motors factory currently employs only about 50 engineers.

Burns has said that he plans to hire 600 more workers next year and then ramp up staffing significantly in 2022.

Trump’s powers of persuasion have at times had only a partial effect. In 2016, before he took office, Trump pressured United Technologies, the parent company of the heating and cooling giant Carrier, to keep an Indianapolis factory open and not move the jobs to Mexico. With a mix of threats and incentives, the company agreed to keep the plant open, saving more than 700 jobs. However, in 2017 and 2018 Carrier cut about 500 jobs from that fac-

tory, moving those roles to Mexico.

During the 2020 presidential race, Trump has looked past the unintended consequences of many of his economic policies, boasting instead that he created the strongest economy in history. In the president’s campaign messaging, even some of his advertisements overlook the challenges that he has created for sectors he was trying to save, such as steel.

Trump imposed steep tariffs on global steel imports early on in his term, temporarily raising prices and helping American manufacturers. But as global demand for steel slowed as a result of rising prices, the industry was left with a hangover. A September ad, reported earlier by Vice News, showed an image of Trump wearing a hard hat during a 2018 visit to a U.S. Steel mill in Illinois. The same mill announced plans to furlough about 700 workers this year, and the Pittsburgh-based company said in May that it would reduce its workforce by 2,700 overall as losses mounted.

The president has had some success intervening to project jobs when the government is directly involved. In August, Trump fired board members of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned corporation that provides electricity across the Southeast, after it announced plans to outsource more than 100 technology jobs to contractors in other countries.

The president assailed the authority’s chief executive for being overpaid and warned of more firings before the utility reversed course.

Peter Navarro, the director of the White House’s Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, argued that Trump’s threats of tariffs have succeeded in compelling companies to keep jobs in the United States. He also contended that Democratic policies of tightening regulation on the energy industry and potential cuts to spending on the military would hurt the workers these industries support.

“In a Biden world, these jobs will be gone,” Navarro said in an interview.

In an interview with a Milwaukee television station last week, Trump insisted that — if he is reelected — Foxconn would fulfill its promises to the state.

“They will do what I tell them to do,” Trump said. “They will do what’s supposed to be done.”

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

How the virus slowed the booming wind energy business

Completed wind turbines at the site of a wind farm under construction in Milligan, Neb., on June 8, 2020. The coronavirus pandemic has delayed deliveries and disrupted construction of the wind project being built by EDF, a French energy company.

By IVAN PENN

E

ven as businesses around the world shut down this spring, executives at EDF Renewables were hopeful they would finish installing 99 wind turbines in southern Nebraska before a year-end deadline. Then, in early April, the pandemic dealt a big blow to the company.

A manager at a factory that was building the giant cylinders on which the turbines sit had died of the coronavirus, shutting down the plant and delaying EDF’s work by five weeks. That and other setbacks — including construction workers at the site in Nebraska contracting the virus — have hampered EDF’s efforts to finish the $374 million project by the end of the year. A prolonged delay could increase costs, threatening the project’s financial viability.

The company’s struggles are emblematic of how the pandemic has disrupted global supply chains and imperiled tens of

billions of dollars of investments and millions of jobs, with retail stores and oil and gas companies among those hit hardest.

But EDF’s challenges show how the pandemic has walloped even thriving industries like renewable energy.

The American Wind Energy Association estimates that the pandemic could threaten a total of $35 billion in investment and about 35,000 jobs this year. The losses could grow if the coronavirus continues to disrupt the economy well into next year.

“Every part of the supply chain has been hit by this,” said John Hensley, the wind association’s vice president of research and analytics. “Certainly if we see major delays, it can take a major economic toll.”

Wind turbines provide more than 7% of U.S. electricity and are the largest carbon-free energy source after nuclear power plants. Nebraska gets about 20% of its electricity from wind, and when it is complete, EDF’s project will have the

capacity to meet the electricity needs of about 115,000 homes.

The wind energy business was growing about 10% a year before the pandemic. But industry officials now fear that projects under construction might be postponed or canceled because of the pandemic. The industry had hoped Congress might provide aid to renewable energy, but it got little from the stimulus bills passed in the spring.

The industry did receive some help from the Treasury Department, which in May gave wind energy developers more time to complete construction in order to qualify for a federal tax credit. Businesses now have to finish projects they began in 2016 and 2017 within five years, up from four years previously. EDF began its project in 2016.

“Everybody is trying to figure out how everything is going to land,” said Benoit Rigal, a vice president of engineering and construction for EDF. A virus scare in a small Nebraska town On March 13, EDF was preparing the site to receive three dozen blades that harness the wind. These are some of the first components the company had expected to arrive in the village of Milligan, Nebraska, less than an hour southwest of Lincoln.

But three days before the blades were scheduled to arrived, Dwynne Igau, an EDF planning and construction manager in charge of the project, received worrying news: one of her workers had taken ill. Igau quickly called off the delivery and ordered about 30% of her crew into quarantine.

The areas around Milligan experienced an early surge in coronavirus cases, driven in part by infections at meatpacking plants. Just a few hundred people live in the village, a railroad community incorporated in 1888 that is surrounded by rows of cornfields and is known as the “Hospitality Capital of Nebraska” because it has services like a salon and spa.

According to EDF, at least three workers tested positive for the virus this year. Several people who worked as contractors and equipment suppliers have also gotten sick.

“We didn’t really think it would spread that much and that fast,” said Gilles Gaudreault, a transport and logistics manager who also oversees the project.

The blades that were delayed in mid-

March were on their way from China and sat for days at a railway yard in central Nebraska. But that delay was hardly the last of Igau’s problems.

Another set of blades, from India, were delayed when the government there closed a factory because of a coronavirus outbreak. The plant eventually reopened, but the shutdown had a lasting impact, and the last seven of those blades just arrived at a Houston port last week.

Missing components and shipping delays In the first week of April, EDF received word from the cylinder maker, which is based in Mexico, that a logistics manager had died from the coronavirus.

“That whole team was quarantined for two weeks,” Igau said, adding that for a time she couldn’t even get the contractor to confirm when “they would be able to return to work.”

She spent days looking for other suppliers and worrying that the setback would mean that the project would not be done by the end of the year. But few companies make the cylinders, which have to be strong enough to hold up heavy turbines and withstand stiff winds. There was little spare capacity available, and even had she found another factory, there was no guarantee she would have been able to arrange for transportation because the shipping routes had been disrupted by the pandemic, too.

But it wasn’t just the cylinders that Igau had to worry about. She was also having trouble securing blades for her turbines.

Supplies of balsa wood, a major component of wind turbine blades, became scarce this spring because about 95% of it comes from Ecuador, which was overwhelmed by the pandemic. At one point, so many people were dying there that bodies wrapped in plastic bags lay in the streets.

With just over two months left in the year, the first five turbines started spinning last week, giving EDF some hope that it will meet its deadline. But the number of coronavirus cases are on the rise across the country, and flu season is beginning, leaving executives uncertain.

“Every day something could happen on site that means our entire team could go into quarantine,” Igau said. “I don’t know how we will finish by the end of the year.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

13 Stocks

Stocks wobble on COVID-19, US election uncertainty; dollar slips

A

gauge of world stock markets edged lower and the U.S. dollar fell on Tuesday as investors grappled with a surge in coronavirus cases and uncertainty over the impending U.S. election.

MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe shed 0.14%, as the pan-European STOXX 600 index lost 0.95%. Wall Street’s main indexes were mixed in afternoon trading a day after the S&P 500 posted its biggest drop in a month, with the S&P 500 and the Dow industrials in negative territory but the tech-heavy Nasdaq gaining.

“The factors that helped drive the selloff yesterday COVID trends and the election uncertainty - are likely going to persist this week,” said Keith Lerner, chief market strategist at Truist/SunTrust Advisory.

“It’s a bit of a low conviction tug-of-war until we move past the election and see what the impact of these COVID numbers rising are.”

The United States, Russia, France and other countries have registered record numbers of infections in recent days, and European governments moved to set new curbs in motion to try to rein in a fast-growing surge of cases.

Ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump in national opinion polls. But the race is close in key battleground states that could decide the outcome, and investors had pointed to a tightening of the election as a factor in Monday’s volatility.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 143.36 points, or 0.52%, to 27,542.02 the S&P 500 lost 3.04 points, or 0.09%, to 3,397.93 while the Nasdaq Composite added 67.26 points, or 0.59%, to 11,426.20.

Investors also focused on a busy week of corporate earnings. Caterpillar shares fell 3.7% and 3M dropped 1.8% after the two industrial companies’ respective earnings reports.

In foreign exchange markets, the dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies, fell 0.272%, with the euro up 0.17% to $1.1828.

U.S. Treasury yields fell and the yield curve was flatter as hopes faded for a stimulus deal in Washington to arrive soon. Euro zone bond yields also dipped.

“The market wants some sort of stimulus. It’s not getting it yet,” said Eric Jussaume, director of fixed income for Cambridge Trust.

Benchmark U.S. 10-year notes last rose 7/32 in price to yield 0.7793%, from 0.803% late on Monday.

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14

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Cage match or PR opportunity? Boris Johnson bets on live press briefings.

Allegra Stratton arriving at 10 Downing Street earlier this month.

By MARK LANDLER

B

ritain and the United States have been living under the same political weather vane for the past four years, so it is fitting that Prime Minister Boris Johnson is borrowing one of the White House’s most familiar daily rituals, the televised press briefing, for No 10 Downing St. The fact that Johnson is doing so at a time when the Trump White House’s briefings have become a grim spectacle of patently erroneous claims and base-pleasing antagonism toward the news media is not lost on critics in Britain.

Some worry that a milder version of that cage match could take root in Downing Street. Even if it does not, they warn that a mix of hungry reporters, a close-to-the-vest press secretary and TV cameras will blow up a system that has operated comfortably for decades in a more collegial style. Until now, the prime minister’s spokesman has quietly briefed a designated circle of journalists without being identified by name.

Creative destruction is perhaps what Johnson and his communications aides are after. Televised briefings could be a way to get their message directly to the public, unfiltered by a political press corps that has become increasingly critical of Downing Street over its erratic handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Johnson has recruited a well-connected former political journalist, Allegra Stratton, who most recently headed communications for the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak.

When she takes the podium next month, Stratton, 39, will in-

stantly become one of the government’s most visible officials.

Some worry that it is the equivalent of putting a big red target on her back.

“Quite frankly, she’s being sold a pup,” said Bernard Ingham, who served as Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary during her 11 years as prime minister, using a British expression meaning to be tricked into accepting a raw deal. “Look at the background against which she is starting.”

There is little good news for Johnson’s press secretary to promote these days. The virus has hit Britain harder than any other major European country, economically and epidemiologically. The prime minister’s lockdowns are stirring up rebellions from northern mayors and members of his own Conservative Party. Brexit negotiations with the European Union are bumpy and rife with reversals.

“It will deflect criticism from Johnson and his key aides to the press spokeswoman,” said Michael White, a former political editor at The Guardian, who once worked with Stratton.

“She is a smart, tough woman, but it’s going to be very difficult for her. It’s a 24/7 job.”

White, who was a Washington correspondent in the 1980s, recalled useful off-camera briefings that President Ronald Reagan’s spokesman, Larry Speakes, held with reporters.

Even if those sessions were at times adversarial, they were worlds away from the acrid encounters that reporters now have with President Donald Trump’s current press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.

Stratton did not reply to a request for an interview, and

a Downing Street spokesman declined to discuss her new assignment.

Some critics object to televised briefings on constitutional grounds: They say they may subvert the role of Parliament, where the prime minister and members of his Cabinet are expected to account for government policies. Johnson, who suspended Parliament last year at the height of the debate over Brexit, has come under fire more recently for imposing virusrelated restrictions without consulting the House of Commons.

“The PM’s word should always be stronger than that of a spokesman, and in our system that means Parliament,” said Alastair Campbell, who served as spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair and is an outspoken critic of the current prime minister. “Johnson is basically still a journalist masquerading as a prime minister, so he always thinks another media fix is the answer.”

Before entering politics, Johnson was the Brussels correspondent for The Daily Telegraph and later the editor of The Spectator, a right-leaning weekly magazine that has close ties to the Conservative Party.

In the incestuous tradition of British politics and media, The Spectator has even closer ties to Stratton. She is married to James Forsyth, a political reporter and editor for the magazine who writes knowing, if anonymously sourced, columns about the machinations inside Downing Street.

Adding to the politics as one large cocktail party vibe, Sunak, the government’s No. 2 official who has recently emerged as something of a rival to Johnson within the party, served as Forsyth’s best man at his marriage to Stratton (they were schoolmates).

This web of social ties further complicates Stratton’s task.

“I don’t do spin,” Stratton once said to The Telegraph, an assertion backed up by her former colleagues.

Johnson’s aides hope to build on the success of the coronavirus briefings that the prime minister and his scientific advisers conducted every day as the virus first swept through the country last spring.

Unlike the freewheeling, often fractious, briefings that Trump gave at the White House during the early days of the pandemic, the Downing Street sessions were laden with a sense of national crisis. Reporters asked earnest questions, and the officials offered equally earnest answers. The drama proved a ratings bonanza.

But the ratings waned, and Downing Street stopped holding the sessions regularly. Now, with British solidarity giving way to angry divisions over the government’s lockdown policies, the cordial tone of those briefings would most likely be replaced by the cut-and-thrust of everyday political coverage.

Introducing cameras, former White House press secretaries said, only intensifies that dynamic. Too often, they said, briefings become platforms for showboating rather than wellintentioned efforts to extract or convey information.

“If the press secretary is strong, articulate and fast on her feet, she can represent the PM well,” said Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary to George W. Bush. “But still, it will likely become a TV show that debases everyone.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

15

Why a new abortion ban in Poland is tearing the country apart

By MONIKA PRONCZUK

T

ens of thousands of Poles have defied COVID-19 restrictions to protest against a new high court ruling that imposes a neartotal ban on abortion, blocking major roads and bridges and chanting anti-government slogans.

The demonstrators, some dressed as characters from “The Handmaid’s Tale,” have even disrupted masses and vandalized churches — a rare case of lashing out at the government’s ally, the Catholic Church, in the staunchly Catholic country.

The protests began Thursday over the ruling that tightened what was already one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws. But they have increasingly turned into a broader expression of anger at a right-wing government that opponents accuse of hijacking the judiciary and chipping away at the rights of women and minorities.

“What is happening in the public space, those acts of aggression, attacks, barbarism, is unacceptable,” the prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said on Tuesday. “I don’t give my consent to attack people, churches, and the right to pursue values by others,” he added, appealing to protesters to refrain from acts of aggression.

Here’s a look at how the issue became such a flash point.

What sparked the protests?

Prior to Thursday’s ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal, Poland had permitted terminations only for fetal abnormalities, in case of a threat to a woman’s health or in the case of incest or rape. But in practice, the overwhelming majority of legal abortions — 1,074 of 1,100 performed last year — resulted from fetal abnormalities.

However, the latest court ruling held that abortions for fetal abnormalities violate the Constitution — a decision that cannot be appealed.

Still, this category of abortions represents only a small fraction of those obtained by Polish women. Many already go abroad for abortions or have them illegally. Common obstacles to legal termination include lengthy waits and doctors refusing to perform them.

And there is very little financial and psychological support for families of disabled children, who are left to fend for themselves once the child is born.

In the court ruling, the tribunal’s president, Julia Przylebska, said that allowing abortions

for fetal abnormalities legalized “eugenic practices.” Because Poland’s Constitution guarantees the protection of human life, she added, termination based on the health of a fetus amounted to “a directly forbidden form of discrimination.”

Protesters are demanding that the court reverse itself and a growing number are also calling for liberalization of the abortion law.

Protests have spread from cities to towns and villages and women’s groups have found support from some unlikely corners, including taxi drivers, farmers and coal miners, all with their own grievances against the government.

How does this reflect Polish politics and society?

The ruling Law and Justice party has largely erased the independence of the judiciary, drawing international condemnation.

Opponents say the party is now using subservient courts to achieve what it could not do legislatively, something that the government denies.

The government has tried repeatedly to make the abortion law stricter, but could not muster the votes in Parliament. Polls have shown that most citizens oppose new limits and each attempt was met with mass demonstrations.

Analysts say that with attention on the pandemic and the next election three years away, the time was ripe for a new strategy. Rather than try again to pass legislation, right-wing lawmakers asked the constitutional tribunal, Poland’s highest court, to review the law.

But many women say they are being used as pawns in the ruling party’s efforts to distract the public from its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, with cases surging and hospitals increasingly overwhelmed. In the past month, Poland has become one of the hardest-hit countries in the world, straining its health care system. The president, Andrzej Duda, tested positive on Saturday.

Critics say the governing Law and Justice Party is doing the bidding of church leaders and right-wing groups, forcing women to choose whether to have dangerous illegal abortions, to go abroad for abortions, or to give birth to children with serious — often fatal — health problems.

The governing party, which took power in 2015, presents itself as the defender of traditional, Catholic values, and denigrates its opponents as anti-Polish and anti-Christian.

Central to that vision are Polish women as wives and mothers, and women’s rights groups

A protest against a decision by the Constitutional Tribunal on abortion law restriction, in the Polish capital on Monday. are depicted as dangerous agents of liberal, Western propaganda.

They have not been the party’s only target.

At the height of Europe’s migration crisis, Law and Justice portrayed refugees as a threat to Christian civilization — but later agreed to take in Christian ones. After that issue subsided, the right focused much of its attention during recent political campaigns on gay people, painting them as a threat to Polish life and values.

Law and Justice has seized on European Union complaints about Poland’s illiberal course as evidence that the bloc is pushing “foreign” ideas that threaten to undermine Polish sovereignty.

What sets these protests apart?

Protesters are using an intentionally vulgar slogan to shock people and send the message that well-mannered approaches have not worked. And they have broken the longstanding social taboo against challenging the church.

The Catholic church, perhaps the most influential pillar of Polish society since the fall of Communism, has long pressured the government to tighten or eliminate access to abortion.

On Sunday, women’s rights activists were protesting in the streets and disrupting church services all over Poland, holding up anti-government and anti-church banners that read: “This is war,” or “We have had enough,” and “We will not be victimized.”

Groups of young men and women confronted priests in some places, and protesters

painted graffiti on the walls of churches and cathedrals across the country. Since the beginning of the demonstrations, far-right activists have been defending churches and confronting the protesters, sometimes using physical force, in a reflection of what critics say is an alliance between the government, the Catholic Church, and far-right groups.

In Konstancin Jeziorna, a leafy suburb of Warsaw, a monument to Pope John Paul II was doused with red paint — a once-unthinkable affront to a national hero.

How does Poland compare to other countries?

Under Communism, Poland and other Soviet bloc states had some of the most liberal abortion laws. Women’s rights activists used to help Swedes travel to Poland for abortions.

But the country now has one of the most restrictive abortion laws among the world’s wealthier countries, adopted in 1993. The high court ruling moves the country even farther from the mainstream.

Nearly all of Europe has abortion on demand, up to a certain point in pregnancy.

The United States does, as well, though many states have made access to it difficult.

On the day of the top court’s ruling on abortions, the governments of Poland, the United States and several other countries, including Uganda, Hungary, Belarus and Saudi Arabia, signed the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a statement challenging the right to abortion.

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Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Belarus opposition calls general strike, as protesters gird for long fight

By ANTON TROIANOVSKI

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or close to three months, protesters in Belarus have been beaten, jailed, pepper-sprayed, fined and exiled. But Oksana Koltovich, a bar and beauty salon owner in the country’s capital, Minsk, is undeterred.

“I get the feeling that we’ve entered some kind of tunnel,” Koltovich said by phone from Minsk on Monday, on her way to yet another protest against President Alexander Lukashenko. “There is no way back. We keep going and going and going.”

When Belarusians took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands in August, after Lukashenko claimed a reelection victory that was widely seen as fraudulent, many predicted that it was only a matter of days or weeks until the longtime authoritarian leader stepped down. Instead, Lukashenko and the large swath of the public that is arrayed against him have settled into a drawn-out test of wills, with their country’s future on the line.

Protesters continue to turn out in the tens of thousands every Sunday, chanting “Go away!” and waving the whitered-white flag of the opposition. Lukashenko responds with waves of crackdowns by the police and, backed by Russia, appears determined to wait the protests out.

“In such a tense situation, absolutely anything could turn out to be the trigger that topples the system,” said Artyom Shraibman, a Minsk-based nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “It could end in the course of a

Protesters demonstrating against the results of presidential elections gather in front of the Independence Palace in Minsk, Belarus, Aug. 30, 2020.

week, or it might not die for a year. No revolution has ever gone according to plan.”

On Monday, scattered groups of workers across the country answered the call for a general strike — the loosely organized opposition movement’s latest attempt to seize the initiative. They were joined by university students who walked out of their classes, on the heels of an opposition march in Minsk on Sunday that drew more than 100,000 people.

“The regime is not prepared to speak the truth, to answer for its words or to enact people’s demands,” Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Lukashenko’s election challenger, who was forced to flee Belarus, said on Sunday in calling for the strike.

“That means that this regime is not worthy of the Belarusian people.”

The course of events in Belarus, a former Soviet republic of 9.5 million between Poland and Russia, could prove significant for the geopolitics of Europe. Belarus is Russia’s closest ally, and President Vladimir Putin has threatened to send Russian forces to stop the protests. Russian officials have depicted the opposition movement as a Western-backed campaign to wrest Belarus out of its longtime alliance with Moscow, even though the opposition’s leaders say they do not intend to break with Russia.

As if to reinforce that notion, the Belarus authorities said Monday that they had blocked entry of 595 foreigners into the country in the last week, most of them “tough young men with an athletic build” from Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania.

The authorities’ use of violence to try to put down the protests appears to be escalating, further feeding the anger in Belarusian society. It was a bout of severe police violence early in the uprising that supercharged the protests. Subsequently, and apparently under guidance from Moscow, security officers exercised a lighter touch.

On Sunday, riot police lobbed stun grenades into a crowd of protesters, footage circulating on social media showed. Another video showed officers wearing body armor and balaclavas entering an apartment where protesters had taken refuge. One of the officers swings at a young man with a baton, to the sound of screams and then a sickening thwack.

“They understand that if they stop protesting, not only will Lukashenko win and smother everything with repression, but also, the last two months will have been for naught,” Shraibman said of the protesters.

Lukashenko has signaled that he might be ready to compromise, up to a point. He held a jailhouse meeting with

Belarusian opposition activists this month to discuss constitutional reform, sitting with the political prisoners at an oval wooden table with a floral centerpiece.

But Tikhanovskaya, who ran for president after Lukashenko jailed her husband, an opposition blogger, issued a “people’s ultimatum” on Oct. 13 that promised a general strike if Lukashenko did not resign within two weeks. Reinforcing her message, the crowds at Minsk’s anti-government protest Sunday were the biggest the city had seen in weeks.

On Monday, the first day of the strike, there appeared to be no walkouts at Belarus’ state-owned factories on the scale seen in the initial days of the protest movement in August. But some workers did walk off the job, including at the Minsk Tractor Works, one of the country’s iconic companies, according to video footage from the factory grounds.

Social-media accounts backing the opposition reported that people in Grodno, in Minsk and elsewhere formed human “chains of solidarity” on Monday in support of striking workers. Protests in Minsk continued after nightfall, even as the police roamed the city center, grabbing people and dragging them into unmarked vans, videos showed.

A key audience for the protests lies in Moscow. They send a message to Putin that the longer he backs Lukashenko, the more he risks losing the sympathy of regular Belarusians, who have closer ties to Russia than perhaps any other people in today’s Europe.

Konstantin Zatulin, a Russian lawmaker specializing in the post-Soviet space, told The New York Times this month that officials “at the highest levels of the Russian Federation” believed that Lukashenko would need to step down “sooner or later.”

Lukashenko, however, appears to be betting that he can outlast the protesters. Indeed, thousands of Belarusians, including many employees of its once-thriving technology sector, left the country in recent months for neighboring Ukraine, Lithuania and Poland.

Liza Moroz, a 23-year-old Belarusian journalist, moved to Kyiv, Ukraine, about two months ago. She actively participated in the protests in August, but lately, there has been little but some acquaintances’ Instagram posts to keep her apprised of the events back home. Most of her friends, she said, have left Belarus as well.

“I don’t know if I want to come back,” Moroz said by phone. “All that’s happening — I think it is going to go on for a long time.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

17

Hong Kong police arrest activist said to seek U.S. asylum ate and ask for protection when he was arrested at a coffee shop across the street, said Friends of Hong ong Kong police on Tuesday arrested a Kong, an activist group based in Britain that said it 19-year-old activist outside the U.S. con- was helping Chung.

The South China Morning Post posted a video sulate just as he was about to seek asylum, that appeared to show Chung being led away by a according to an advocacy group.

The activist, Tony Chung, had previously been group of men in plain clothes near the consulate. arrested in July under a national security law imposed A consulate spokesman said he had no immediate on the city by Beijing earlier this year. He was ac- comment.

Two of Chung’s associates, Yanni Ho and Wilcused of posting a message on social media about a new political party that called for Hong Kong’s inde- liam Chan, were also detained Tuesday, according to pendence from China. Chung has denied writing it. Studentlocalism, a group that Chung helped found, Chung had been planning to enter the consul- which posted a message on its Facebook page. Police confirmed that three people had been arrested for allegedly inciting secession, though it did not identify the individuals.

Chung was the first prominent activist to be arrested this year under the new national security law. He was released on bail and had surrendered his passport while under investigation. Under the sweeping new law, secession crimes of a “grave nature” could be punishable by at least 10 years in jail and up to life imprisonment. Those convicted of inciting or abetting secession could be jailed for up to 10 years.

Chung co-founded Studentlocalism when he Tony Chung in August. The pro-democracy activist was a student in secondary school.

Pro-democracy activists in recent weeks have was detained by the Hong Kong police on Tuesday.

By AUSTIN RAMZY and ELAINE YU

H

been granted asylum in the United States, Canada and Germany, becoming the latest catalyst for deteriorating relations between China and Western governments.

The White House has criticized the Chinese government over the clampdown in Hong Kong, and President Donald Trump issued an executive order in July that ended the special status the United States had previously extended to the territory for trade and other ties.

The Trump administration also said it would prioritize refugees from Hong Kong for the first time even as it lowered the total number of asylum claims the United States would grant over the next year. There was no indication, however, that the United States had planned to use its Hong Kong consulate to protect potential asylum seekers, a move that would have further deepened the rift between the two countries.

The United States has on occasion shielded activists in its embassy in Beijing, a move that has soured ties and required sensitive negotiations to resolve. In 1990, Fang Lizhi, the dissident astrophysicist, was allowed to travel to the United States with his wife after more than a year in the embassy. Chen Guangcheng, the legal activist who escaped house arrest, spent several days at the Beijing embassy in 2012 before he too went to the United States with his wife and two children.

Blast at Pakistani religious school kills at least 8

By SALMAN MASOOD

A

t least eight people were killed and more than 100 wounded when a powerful explosion ripped through an Islamic religious school in northwestern Pakistan on Tuesday, officials said.

Classes were underway early Tuesday at the school, the Jamia Zuberia madrassa, located in a crowded suburban neighborhood outside Peshawar, when the explosion shook the compound. Officials said an improvised explosive device was most likely used in the blast.

No group has claimed immediate responsibility.

The majority of those injured were taken to the nearby Lady Reading Hospital. A state of emergency was declared for the city’s other hospitals, which prepared for the crush of wounded victims.

Television footage showed a scene of devastation at the site of the blast. The religious school was cordoned off as officials combed for forensic evidence. Police officials said they were investigating

from all angles and some students told authorities that an unidentified man brought a bag inside the compound early Tuesday morning and left soon after. The officials suspected the bag contained an IED. The madrassa is in a neighborhood where a large number of Afghans also live. Most of its students are in their early to mid-20s.

The explosion broke an extended period of relative calm in Peshawar, which for years was the scene of regular terrorist attacks by the Pakistani Taliban. Militant attacks have ebbed since a successful 2014 military operation in the tribal regions of the province.

The Pakistani Taliban later on Tuesday released a statement denying its involvement in the attack and called the targeting of students a “reprehensible act.”

The threat level was raised to “high alert” in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, after the blast, officials said. Prime Minister Imran Khan said he was “deeply saddened by the terrorist attack.”

“My condolences go to the victims’ families & prayers for early recovery of the injured,” Khan wrote on Twitter. “I want to assure my nation we will ensure the terrorists responsible for this cowardly barbaric attack are brought to justice ASAP.”

Security officials inspect the scene in the aftermath of a bombing that took place at an Islamic school on Tuesday in Peshawar, Pakistan. At least seven people were killed.

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Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Trump tells coronavirus, ‘I surrender’

By PAUL KRUGMAN

A

s we head into the final stretch of the election, COVID-19 is on a roll.

Coronavirus cases keep hitting records — among other things, five aides to Vice President Mike Pence have tested positive. Hospitalizations, which lag behind cases, are soaring. And deaths, which lag even further behind, are starting to rise, too. Put it this way: Just between now and Election Day, we’re likely to lose almost twice as many Americans to COVID-19 as died on 9/11.

So how is the Trump administration responding? Actually doing anything about the pandemic is apparently off the table. What we’re getting instead is a multilevel public relations strategy: We’re doing a great job. Anyway, there’s nothing anyone can do.

And besides, doctors are faking the numbers so they can make more money.

These are, of course, inconsistent stories, and the smearing of health care workers who put their lives on the line to save others is just vile. But none of this should surprise us.

This is, after all, Donald Trump. Also, we’ve seen this combination of denial, declared helplessness and

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conspiracy theorizing before: Trump and company are following the same strategy on COVID-19 that the right has long followed on climate change.

By now, almost everyone is familiar with the way Trump keeps moving the goal posts to claim success no matter how bad things get. Back in February he predicted zero cases “within a couple of days.” In the spring he said that it would go away when the weather got warmer. Lately he’s been claiming triumph because the coronavirus hasn’t killed 2.2 million people.

The administration was slower to admit that it was abjectly surrendering to COVID-19. But back in August Dr. Scott Atlas, a believer in “herd immunity” — basically letting the virus rip through most of the community — joined the White House coronavirus task force.

Atlas is a radiologist with no known expertise in infectious disease, and actual epidemiologists like Dr. Anthony Fauci are horrified by his ideas. But Atlas, not Fauci, appears to be calling the shots these days.

And on Sunday Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, made it more or less official, saying that “we are not going to control the pandemic” because it is a “contagious virus.”

This came after a rally in which Trump — who considers himself a victim because the media keep talking about “COVID, COVID, COVID” — claimed that coronavirus fatalities are being exaggerated because “doctors get more money and hospitals get more money” if they say that COVID-19 was the cause of death.

All of these excuses sound very familiar to anyone who has followed the climate debate over the years. According to the right, climate change isn’t happening; anyway, there’s nothing we can do about it without destroying the economy; and it’s all a hoax concocted by a global conspiracy of scientists, who are just in it for the money.

That last bit is, of course, projection. No, the overwhelming scientific consensus that we’re experiencing man-made global warming isn’t being driven by financial incentives — but those who reject that consensus are.

At this point, climate denial is largely sustained by a network of right-wing think tanks supported by fossilfuel interests; that is, the “experts” claiming either that global warming isn’t happening or that nothing can be done about it are basically professional deniers, who make a living as “merchants of doubt.”

And COVID denial, it turns out, isn’t just a similar phenomenon; it’s being conducted by pretty much

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during a television interview outside the White House on Sunday, Oct. 25, 2020. “Was there ever a chance that Trump would take the pandemic seriously? Probably not. the same people.

Atlas and other administration officials have reportedly been strongly influenced by the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto on behalf of herd immunity that grew out of a meeting at the American Institute for Economic Research. What do we know about this institute?

Well, it is, not surprisingly, linked to the Charles Koch Institute. And a perusal of its website reveals that until recently it devoted much of its time to climate denial, putting out articles with titles like “Brazilians Should Keep Slashing Their Rainforest.”

More recently, however, the institute’s focus has shifted to COVID denial. Last month, for example, it published an article lauding Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, whose refusal to take action against the coronavirus has turned her state into what the article called “a fortress of liberty and hope protected from the grasps of overbearing politicians.”

Since then, of course, South Dakota has experienced an explosion of infections and soaring hospitalizations, and is now seeing a rapid rise in COVID-19 deaths.

Was there ever a chance that Trump would take the pandemic seriously? Probably not. After all, he has always been a die-hard, conspiracy-theorizing denier of climate change, and his coronavirus response has come straight out of the climate-denier playbook.

In any case, we can predict with high accuracy what he will do if the polls are wrong, and he wins a second term. He will do nothing at all to fight the pandemic; he will, however, try to suppress the truth about what’s happening. And many, many more Americans will die.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

19

Disponible nuevo sistema de citas en línea en el Depto. de Hacienda Por THE STAR

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l secretario del Departamento de Hacienda, Francisco Parés Alicea, anunció la disponibilidad de un nuevo sistema en línea para que los contribuyentes puedan hacer citas y realizar sus gestiones en una fecha determinada, sin filas, ni aglomeración de público.

“Con mucha satisfacción les informo que ya tenemos disponible nuestro sistema de citas en línea a través del enlace hacienda.turnospr.com, para continuar atendiendo las necesidades de los contribuyentes de manera ágil y segura, cumpliendo con el distanciamiento físico y la prevención del COVID-19”, expresó el funcionario.

Al acceder al servicio de citas en línea, los contribuyentes podrán seleccionar bajo las categorías de Colecturías, para los servicios con citas presenciales, y Servicio al Contribuyente, para los servicios con citas mediante la llamada de un técnico. También encontrarán una lista de preguntas frecuentes sobre el funcionamiento del nuevo sistema de citas. “Al presionar éstas áreas de servicio, los ciudadanos encontrarán distintas opciones disponibles y la descripción de los documentos y requisitos que deberán tener al momento de ser atendidos”, explicó Parés Alicea.

En la categoría de Colecturías, por ejemplo, los contribuyentes pueden verificar las gestiones disponibles y la colecturía más cercana que esté ofreciendo el servicio que necesitan, además de la lista de contactos y el horario de operación para proceder a hacer su cita. Entre los servicios de Colecturía dis-

ponibles para citas presenciales están la solicitud de certificaciones de deudas contributivas y de planillas, la venta de sellos de Rentas Internas y otros, pago de multas de tránsito y reclamación de los premios de Loterías, entre otras transacciones.

En el área de Servicio al Contribuyente, las citas serán mediante la llamada de un técnico a la hora seleccionada, por lo que no se recibirán personas físicamente en las oficinas. Las opciones de servicio disponibles bajo esta categoría son: estatus de reintegro y Pago de Impacto Económico (Ley CARES), planilla de corporaciones, IVU y otras retenciones, planilla de individuo y planilla senior. Al presionar cada opción, se accederá al menú de servicios de cada una.

En caso de la planilla de individuo, el contribuyente podrá hacer reclamaciones sobre reintegros, deudas, reintegros acreditados a deudas, acredita-

ción de pagos, notificaciones de errores matemáticos y ajustes en planillas, entre otras. En cada cas, se requerirá que provean los documentos necesarios para atender el asunto cuando acuda a su cita.

Una vez seleccionado el servicio que interesa, el contribuyente oprimirá el calendario para separar su espacio, según disponibilidad y solo aplicará el horario acordado. Los turnos estarán garantizados siempre y cuando no se presente alguna situación de emergencia en las Colecturías y Centros de Servicio, que de ocurrir, se notificaría a través del correo electrónico provisto al solicitar la cita.

Para solicitar una cita se debe completar un formulario con el nombre y dos apellidos, proveer un correo electrónico, su número de teléfono celular y proveedor. Para hacer cancelaciones, deberá presionar ese enlace disponible en la parte superior de la página y seleccionar otra fecha.

En el caso de necesitar asistencia para hacer su cita o para seleccionar el servicio, los contribuyentes podrán escribir por el enlace ‘Asistencia en Suri’, que se encuentra en la página principal de SURI y no requiere usuario ni contraseña para su acceso.

“Esta herramienta digital representa un gran adelanto en el mejoramiento de los servicios que el Departamento de Hacienda debe brindarle a todos los contribuyentes. Nuestro plan de trabajo incluye continuar añadiendo opciones al sistema”, afirmó el Secretario.

Para más información, manténgase conectado a las redes sociales y visite la página de Hacienda www.hacienda.pr.gov.

Depto. del Trabajo desembolsa 106,829 cheques por concepto de pago retroactivo de $300 Por THE STAR

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l secretario del Departamento del Trabajo y Recursos Humanos, Carlos Rivera Santiago, anunció el martes, el desembolso de $103,627,720 por concepto de los 300 dólares semanales retroactivos dirigidos a los ciudadanos que reciben el Seguro por Desempleo acogidos al método de pago por cheque.

Esta cantidad se suma a los $32.7 millones enviados mediante depósito directo la semana pasada.

“El contratista a cargo de imprimir y procesar los cheques entregó la totalidad de 106,829 cheques al correo postal ayer. En los próximos días todo aquel ciudadano que no esté registrado en depósito directo y cumple con los requisitos de esta compensación

recibirá el cheque retroactivo”, explicó Rivera Santiago en comunicación escrita.

“Esta compensación automática será por un término de 6 semanas, estaremos programando la segunda etapa para el mes de noviembre y así cumplir con el pago total correspondiente”, dijo el titular de la agencia.

“Recomendamos que se acojan al sistema de depósito directo, el cual se encuentra disponible para que el reclamante haga el cambio mediante nuestra plataforma y reciba su compensación más rápido”, puntualizó el secretario.

Estos fondos fueron aprobados por la Agencia Federal de Manejo de Emergencias (FEMA, por sus siglas en inglés) para atajar la pérdida de empleo provocado por la pandemia del COVID-19.

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Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Lorraine Bracco goes searching for her Sicilian slice of life

The actress Lorraine Bracco at her home in Bridgehampton, N.Y., Oct. 15, 2020. The actress, of “Goodfellas” and “The Sopranos” fame, is the unlikely star of her own HGTV show, “My Big Italian Adventure.”

By DAVID ITZKOFF

W

hen people ask Lorraine Bracco how she’s doing these days, the actress said she usually gives the same answer. “I say I’m crazy,” she said. “A little nutty, but good.”

To be clear, she doesn’t mean the kind of insanity that would get someone committed by Dr. Melfi, the psychiatrist she played on “The Sopranos,” or that would compel someone to sit atop her mobster husband in their marital bed while aiming a gun at him, as she did in “Goodfellas.”

“More fun crazy,” Bracco said. “I think one of the things they would say about me is that I’m fun.”

It is that spirit — call it intrepidness, call it recklessness — that drove Bracco, inspired by little more than a news article she read on her phone, to purchase a ramshackle house in Sicily for 1 euro and restore it to its former glory.

And it is that same boldness that spurred her to contact HGTV and per-

suade the cable channel to have a camera crew document her efforts.

And that is how Bracco became the star of her own home renovation series, “My Big Italian Adventure,” which debuts Friday.

Even as she recounted its origin story in a Zoom conversation this month, Bracco could not help enumerating all the red flags that warned against this undertaking. For starters, she didn’t speak Italian and had never been to Sicily before.

“There would have been a lot of reasons not to do it,” she said. “But I was so intrigued.”

On a recent Wednesday morning, Bracco, 66, was speaking from her yearround home in Bridgehampton, New York. She sat in a living room she had decorated with black-and-white photos of favorite artists and performers, like James Brown, Elizabeth Taylor, Federico Fellini and John Huston. “I’m inspired by them all,” she said.

She was similarly energized by that news story she had read online about

two years ago, reporting that Sambuca, a small hilltop town in Sicily, was selling abandoned and ruined homes there for 1 euro. (The local program, which required new owners to restore the dwellings within three years of purchase, was established to encourage tourism and boost the region’s economy.)

As Bracco recalled: “I said to myself, what do I have to lose? What is the downside?”

A fan of home-renovation shows and HGTV programming, Bracco was convinced her Sicilian renovation project would make a good series for the channel.

So she contacted directly Loren Ruch, an executive there, and pitched the idea.

Ruch, who is HGTV’s group senior vice president for development and production, said that Bracco’s approach “was completely not our typical way of finding a show, but it felt right.”

“If it was a celebrity that just asked us to buy them a vacation home, we would probably politely decline,” Ruch said. (HGTV said that it covered its own production costs for “My Big Italian Adventure” and compensated Bracco for appearing in the series, but that she paid the costs for the home renovation herself.)

But Ruch said that Bracco’s proposal “felt rooted in passion and love to us — that’s what we’re always looking for.”

“I run by emotion,” he added. “I could just imagine this show working.”

Further challenges awaited Bracco when she first traveled to Sicily in early 2019 to see the 200-year-old, 1,075-square-foot property that she now owned.

“Basically, what I bought was a town house,” she said. After a brief pause, she added: “I’m lying. What I bought was three freakin’ rock walls. I mean, it was a disaster.”

She spent the next several months working with a contractor, artisans and laborers to rebuild the structure, provide it with electricity and running water and outfit it to her particular tastes.

As with any artistic endeavor, there were creative differences to overcome.

“I wanted two dishwashers and they were like, ‘aah, two dishwashers?’” Brac-

co recalled. “I said that’s what I’m used to — I have a family, and I expect a lot of people to come. I put French doors in the bathroom, to open up onto a little terrace.

And they would be like, ‘Mamma mia.’

They thought I was slightly off. But in the long run, it’s gorgeous.”

In total, Bracco estimated that the home restoration cost her $250,000 to $300,000, considerably more than the $150,000 she had budgeted for the project. “One euro, my ass,” she said.

Still, the enterprise was not without fringe benefits, like the fans that Bracco encountered on shopping trips to Palermo who recognized her not from the internationally acclaimed Italian American sagas “The Sopranos” and “Goodfellas” but from her role as Angie Harmon’s mother on the TNT police drama “Rizzoli & Isles.”

Harmon, who visited Bracco in Sicily during the making of “My Big Italian Adventure,” said that the two of them have remained so close since “Rizzoli & Isles” ended in 2016 that she still refers to Bracco as “Ma.” She, too, was surprised by the initial condition of Bracco’s property. “I was told there’s a couple walls missing, but you don’t think it’s, like, rubble,” she said.

“But Ma has exquisite taste, so I knew she was going to make something really beautiful out of it.”

She was also impressed to see how swiftly Bracco had settled into Sicilian culture.

“She takes me to a cheese stand, and it’s all I hear about for two days,” Harmon recalled. “‘We got to go to the cheese stand, it’s all about the cheese.’

I’m like, OK, I get it. How good could it be? And she was right — it was really, really good cheese.”

It has been several months since Bracco finished work on the house, and while she will not be able to fully appreciate it until after the pandemic has subsided, she said it felt sufficiently empowering just to get it done.

“Oh, I’m empowered,” she said with a laugh. “I often butt against things that people say, ‘Oh, oh, oh, no, no.’ But I make things happen. I do.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

21

How long can NYC museums survive at 25% capacity?

By JULIA JACOBS and ZACHARY SMALL

O

n a weekday afternoon at the Brooklyn Museum, Carolyn and Joel Jacobson ambled through the American art galleries, alone with George Bellows’ smirking “Newsboy” and a bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln.

The couple hadn’t left their Long Island home — aside from going to the grocery store — since the pandemic bore down on New York in March.

“This was a big day for me,” said Joel Jacobson, 84, his voice echoing through the empty gallery.

A similar scene played out that day in the winding galleries of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, where roughly 40 mask-wearing visitors meandered through the museum. An attendant said it was the busiest he had seen since the space opened on Oct. 3.

And at the American Museum of Natural History, a visitor from Florida, Cheyenne Grant, 21, observed the emptiness: “It’s just us and the dinosaurs.”

Over a month after most of New York’s most prestigious museums reopened to the public, they are experiencing an existential crisis, fueled by the state-mandated reduced capacity of 25%. While the public face of New York City museums welcomes back these visitors with a smile and the promise of a safe experience, administrators behind the scenes anxiously wonder how long they can feasibly stay at that meager occupancy without making significant cuts to staffing or programming.

That’s not to say visiting a New York museum is always a solitary activity.

Visiting during the pandemic can be like a chooseyour-own adventure game. If you go on a weekday, the eerie emptiness can make you feel as if you’re sneaking in after hours. But on a weekend at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you may have to stand in line outside just to get your temperature checked. And if you’re aiming to snap an upclose picture of “The Starry Night,” you’ll likely have to wait in a line of people around 2 — not 6 — feet apart.

Some arts advocates have been encouraging politicians to allow museums to elevate their numbers, but there are no signs that the state plans to ease that restriction any time soon.

At the Met — where about 91,500 people visited in September, compared with 381,500 during the same month last year — the museum’s pandemic team is assuming that the 25% capacity restriction will persist into the spring.

(Another scenario administrators are gaming out imagines a year with that restriction.)

Daniel H. Weiss, the Met’s chief executive, said that if the 25% capacity extends past June, the museum will have to consider another round of money-saving measures like trimming staff pay or programming. The Met, which relies on ticket sales and other purchases from visitors for roughly a third of its annual revenue, has already had two rounds of employee cuts, leaving the museum with a staff that is about 20% smaller than it was before the pandemic.

That financial anxiety doesn’t mean the Met is push-

Temperature checks are placed at the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Aug. 27, 2020. ing the state government to allow it to fill its galleries to capacity. Weiss said safety is the priority.

“We want to be open, but we don’t want to push the envelope,” he said, “especially as, throughout the country, we’re seeing that the pandemic is on the rise precisely through the lack of adherence to social-distancing rules.”

Other leaders in the museum world are more intent on convincing the state to ease up on its capacity restrictions.

At a round table with state legislators on Wednesday, Erika Sanger, the executive director of the Museum Association of New York, painted a dire economic picture for museums here unless the 25% capacity restriction is increased as soon as possible. The organization estimated that museums in New York state lost $3.5 million a day in April, Sanger said. While that figure has surely dropped since the reopenings, she added that she knows of at least 12 museums that are discussing dissolution or mergers.

The amount of time that a museum will be able to survive at a 25% capacity depends on several factors, including the size of its endowment and cash reserves, as well as how much government funding it has received and will continue to bring in, despite the pressures of the pandemic, Sanger said.

Amid the upheaval, museum employees remain in fear of losing their jobs considering many of New York’s institutions have each laid off dozens of workers.

The front-facing staffers are expected to ensure that

visitors are keeping their masks on and staying 6 feet apart from one another. As a result, some museum workers are lobbying their institutions and public officials for hazard pay.

While some essential workers did receive hazard pay in the form of lump-sum bonuses and wage multipliers during the pandemic’s early months, that hazard pay was available for a short amount of time. Despite current demands, union representatives for museum employees are not putting hazard pay on the bargaining table now. Robert Wilson, a representative for Local 30 of the International Union of Operating Engineers — which represents art handlers and maintenance staff at MoMA and the Guggenheim — said that these museums are already in tough financial situations.

“For us to say, during this difficult time, that we want more than we would normally ask for, when the museum is struggling, is a difficult thing to accomplish,” he said.

Museum advocates have framed their industry as being one of the most adaptable to the challenges of the pandemic, highlighting some institutions’ vast gallery spaces and attendants who are already trained to make sure people keep a distance from the art. In one of the most extreme adaptations, the Shed in Hudson Yards, a flexible-space venue that won a dispensation to open recently to show art, transformed its space so that visitors entered through what had previously been the fire exits, so they didn’t have to use the escalator or elevator.

FASHION The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, March 4, 2020 28, 2020 Wednesday, October 20 22

The TheSan SanJuan JuanDaily DailyStar Star

Guess what? More time makes a fashion show much better

his previous signature, he offered up looser, high-waisted cropped denim paired with shirred tulle cropped tops or Celine-logo sports he desire to buck a stifling system can bras under bourgeois pinstriped blazers. Instead make allies of even the most unlikely of thigh-high, after-midnight minidresses, there names. Thus emerged the breakaway conwere delicately beaded and hand-embroidered tingent of fashion brands from Tokyo to Antwerp tea dresses sparkling with tiny flowers, lamé to New York that seized the pandemic-spawned pleats and silver screen sequins paired with moment of largely digital shows to rethink chunky hoodies or cardigans. when and where they would reveal their new collections. Opting out of the seasonal fourAnd instead of prima donna drama, he week, four-city calendar, they chose instead to showed a fresh sense of openness. There were unveil their work as it was ready. baseball caps on top, thick-soled sneakers or hikThe result: a mind-meld desire to … do ing boots below, and plenty of bags on the side. your own thing. Both temporally and aesthetiRei Kawakubo plays with time and toys This year, in a rare move since she upendcally. While the drip, drip, drip of collections was confusing, the separation from the herd ed the Paris fashion scene in the early 1980s, produced a notable number of refreshingly disRei Kawakubo elected to keep her Comme des Garçons collection home in Tokyo. Ditto tilled proposals for what we might want to wear the brands she incubates, Junya Watanabe and next (hint: NOT SWEATPANTS) and why.

Noir Kei Ninomiya. Distance did not dilute any It was enough to make you wish you of their power, however. Indeed, if anything, could have seen them on a runway.

From left, looks from the Raf Simons, Christopher John Rogers and Celine with these collections Kawakubo et al. unRaf Simons introduces womenswear Having a debut in the middle of a pan- spring 2021 collections. derscored just how important her brand of intellectual and aesthetic demic outside the regular season may seem like challenge is to the wider industry. a counterintuitive move — generally design- the edges, and long dresses caught at the hip of streamlined zoot suits and She takes nothing for granted and ers unveiling a new line want all the bells and with a button reading “Free Admission With lacy minidresses in mostly sustainable materials with a BMX has no truck with those who tipwhistles and buzz of a Major Show with Major This Button.”

Simons has an affinity for words, though edge. (The lace was patched toCelebrities to create Major Instagram. But then, toe around the scared totems of Raf Simons has always been more interested in that kind of irony played better than the mes- gether from leftovers of previous fashion. collections.) sages shirts and hoodies blaring the more questioning the system rather than embracing it.

So she began with more There were seashell prints abundant show notes than her So his decision to reveal his first womens- self-consciously pretentious “Children of the usual mystery koan: “The human wear line for his own brand via an 18-minute Revolution” and “Muted Chaos” (even if “Teen and dip-dyed jumpsuits, hoodie brain always looks for harmony dual-gender film was both entirely in character Dreams” was the title of the whole thing and frocks and no-nonsense bodyand logic/ When harmony is deand pretty smart. It was a way to tamp down ex- those are, pretty much by definition, self-con- con ribbed knits, all atop bright pectations — sky high after his stints at Jil Sand- sciously pretentious). As did the slithery sap- squishy flip-flops. Filmed in the nied, where there is no logic, when phire pencil skirts and oily plastic open air in the fields of a statethere is dissonance/ … a powerful er, Dior and Calvin Klein and his vests that transformed tailored ly house in Norfolk in eastern moment is created which leads first show last month as co-crejackets into corseted, peplum tops England, amid the monumenyou to feel an inner turmoil and ative director of Prada — and give in tones of falling leaves. tal earth sculptures of Richard tension/ … that can lead to find himself room to construct his own In the end, despite the Long, the clothes looked both Stella McCartney, positive change and progress.” universe. Or expand it, anyway.

“Nightmare on Elm Street” over- natural and no-nonsense. Made spring 2021 So in a surreal wood It was as unabashedly optilay, you couldn’t escape the sen- to move. straight out of a campy horror mistic and positive a guide to her Hedi Slimane loosens up (a Little) at Ce- thought process as anything Kawakubo has ofsation that the show was a pretty movie, saturated with intimaeffective, and effectively alluring, line tions of doom and shades of infered before, and almost surprisingly parsable, expression of the liminal state Perhaps because of pandemic safety pro- as if the designer couldn’t be bothered with obdigo, blue and violet, lemon and in which we are all currently tocols, perhaps simply because it was time for fuscation of motive and moment. Who has the chartreuse, a host of disaffected trapped. something new, Hedi Slimane took his Celine time to engage in lint-picking existential quesyouth (youth culture is one of SiStella McCartney makes a show out of its usual black box behind the In- tioning given what is going on in the world? mons’ signature obsessions) came manifesto valides and into the open air at the Stade Louis crawling through a landscape of Duh — no one. Instead they can simply Stella McCartney spent II in Monaco. Whatever the reason, it was a for- revel in a collection that explored the tension dead trees and fraying nets. They lockdown creating an “A to Z” tuitous change. Viewed in the light of day, as between cartoons and couture, history of the were propped up limply against manifesto of brand values (you the models strolled around the (Celine-brand- youngest and most ageless kind: Mickey Mouse a wall or sprawled out in a web, know, when the rest of us were ed) red track, the chock-full-of-stuff wardrobe prints and bubble letters on even more bulbous wearing layers of alienation and doing puzzles), and the rigor of Slimane has been very deliberately constructing skirts and trapeze tops; explosive Empire-waist grace. There were second-skin such specificity seems to have fil- since he joined the house took on a more re- gowns in lace and lattice veiled by a scrim of tattoo undershirts or silks printed tered down to her clothes. The re- laxed mien and was the better for it. in psychedelic Pucci-inspired Michael Kors, sheer vinyl; bows and crimps and teddy bears; Instead of the discomfort jeans that were panniers and polka dots. sult was a tightly edited collection swirls, sleeveless coats fraying at spring 2021

By VANESSA FRIEDMAN

T

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

23

Think you have ‘normal’ blood pressure? Think again

By JANE E. BRODY

S

o you think your blood pressure is normal? Think again.

The latest iteration of an “ideal” blood pressure — a level of 120 millimeters of mercury for systolic pressure, the top number — that Americans are urged to achieve and maintain has been called into question by a long-term multiethnic study of otherwise healthy adults.

The study, published in June in JAMA Cardiology, found that as systolic blood pressure rose above 90 mm, the risk of damage to coronary arteries rose along with it. Systolic blood pressure represents the pressure within arteries when the heart pumps (as opposed to diastolic blood pressure, the lower smaller number, when the heart rests).

The new findings suggest a need to look more carefully at why, despite considerable overall improvements in risk factors for heart disease in recent decades, it remains the nation’s leading killer.

Starting in the 1940s, cardiovascular researchers have unveiled evidence that Americans live in a society that all but guarantees a disproportionately high risk of developing and dying of heart disease.

Since my first weeks writing for this newspaper in the early 1960s, I’ve publicized their advice urging people to curb preventable risks to their hearts and blood vessels.

Although significant progress has been made along several fronts, especially drastic cuts in cigarette smoking and lowered levels of artery-damaging cholesterol, atherosclerotic heart disease still kills far too many people in this country long before they reach their potential life span. If not for a plethora of therapeutic advances, like antihypertensive drugs, cholesterollowering statins and open-heart surgery to bypass clogged arteries, life expectancy would be a lot worse for many people.

But the overall picture suggests we’ve still got a long way to go. For example, as Americans get fatter and fatter, two major risk factors for heart disease — Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure — rise along with readings on bathroom scales.

Yes, there are medications to treat both conditions. But why resort to pills, in-

cluding drugs with unwanted side effects, to modify risks that are within the personal control of most people?

And as shown in the study, even levels of blood pressure that are generally considered “normal” may indeed be high enough to foster the development of atherosclerotic heart disease by more than fourfold above the risk faced by people with systolic blood pressures that are physiologically ideal.

Heart experts have long known that people in traditional nonindustrial societies typically maintain systolic blood pressures in the low 90s throughout life.

Unlike typical Americans, their blood pressure does not rise with age. Rather, it seems, the increase in blood pressure most common among Americans as they age into mid- and late adulthood is an artifact of our sedentary lifestyles and diets too rich in calories and high in sodium, all of which result in stiff, narrowed arteries that result in high blood pressure.

The study, directed by Dr. Seamus P. Whelton, cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease in Baltimore, followed a cohort of 1,457 middle-aged men and women initially free of atherosclerotic vascular disease and known risk factors for 14.5 years. As the participants aged, their risk factors for heart disease increased, along with calcium deposits in their coronary arteries and cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes.

The research team focused on increases in systolic blood pressure with age, adjusting the data for changes in other heart risks. They found that for every 10 mm increase in systolic blood pressure, the risk of calcium deposits and cardiovascular events rose accordingly. Compared with people with systolic pressures of 90 to 99 mm, those with pressures of 120 to 129 mm were 4.58 times more likely to have experienced a cardiovascular event.

Still, Whelton said in an interview that it would be wrong to focus preventive strategies on blood pressure alone. People with high blood pressure, he said, “are also more likely to have higher cholesterol and blood glucose levels. The ideal strate-

New research shows that even levels of blood pressure that are generally considered “normal” may be high enough to foster the development of heart disease. gy would focus on all risk factors — blood cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure. Maintaining a healthful diet, exercising, not smoking and consuming alcohol only in moderation would improve all the risk factors for cardiovascular disease.”

Levels of what doctors consider a healthy systolic blood pressure have been falling for about half a century. In August 1950, a report in JAMA suggested that labeling systolic blood pressures of 140, 150 or 160 mm as abnormally high is “arbitrary, particularly when age is concerned.” The authors suggested that raising acceptable blood pressure levels for people over 40 “would result in a decrease in the reported incidence of hypertension and thus allay some of the widespread and unnecessary fear regarding high blood pressure.”

The latest blood pressure advisory, issued in 2017 by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology, considers a systolic blood pressure of 120 mm the upper limit of normal, and defines 130 mm and above as high blood pressure that warrants treatment with lifestyle measures or medication.

In an editorial accompanying the new study, Dr. Daniel W. Jones, hypertension specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center who helped formu-

late the current blood pressure guidelines, wrote, “the risk imposed by a blood pressure level below the currently defined hypertensive level is continuous beginning with a systolic blood pressure as low as 90 mm mercury.”

Jones said in an interview, “Normal blood pressure can be in the 90s, which is what it is in young healthy women, before the vascular system is damaged by elevated blood pressure over the years. Prevention should start with children, with a healthy diet low in salt and regular exercise, and adults should avoid gaining weight with age, which I realize is very difficult to do in our toxic food society.”

In praising me for maintaining a systolic blood pressure of 100 to 110 throughout my adult life, he said, “It’s rare for Americans to reach your age of 79 and not have hypertension.”

When I asked why doctors don’t put more emphasis on maintaining youthful levels of blood pressure, Jones said that in the 1960s medical schools taught that blood pressure should rise with age to assure an adequate blood supply to the brain.

“Only in recent decades has it been accepted that it’s actually better for the brain, kidneys and heart to keep blood pressure down as people age,” he said.

24

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

No, mouthwash will not save you from the coronavirus

Varieties of Listerine on display at Johnson & Johnson’s testing lab in Morris Plains, N.J., Aug. 20, 2014. Outside experts warned against over-interpreting a new study suggesting mouth wash can “inactivate” coronaviruses and help curb their spread, noting that the findings might not have practical relevance to COVID-19.

By KATHERINE J. WU

A

rash of provocative headlines recently offered a tantalizing idea: that mouthwash can “inactivate” coronaviruses and help curb their spread.

The stories sprang from a new study that found that a coronavirus that causes common colds — not the one that causes COVID-19 — could be incapacitated in a laboratory when doused with mouthwash.

The study’s authors concluded that the products they tested “may provide an additional level of protection against” the new coronavirus.

But outside experts warned against overinterpreting the study’s results, which might not have practical relevance to the new coronavirus that has killed more than 220,000 Americans. Not only did the study not investigate this deadly new virus, but it also did not test whether mouthwash affects how viruses spread from person to person.

“I don’t have a problem with using Listerine,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. “But it’s not an antiviral.”

The study, which was published last month in The Journal of Medical Virology, looked only at a coronavirus called 229E that causes common colds — not the new coronavirus, which goes by the formal name of SARS-CoV-2 and causes far more serious disease. Re-

searchers can study SARS-CoV-2 only in high-security labs after undergoing rigorous training.

The two viruses are in the same family, and, in broad strokes, look anatomically similar, which can make 229E a good proxy for SARS-CoV-2 in certain experiments. But the two viruses shouldn’t be thought of as interchangeable, Rasmussen said.

The researchers tested the virus-destroying effects of several products, including a watered-down mixture of Johnson’s baby shampoo — which is sometimes used to flush out the inside of the nose — and mouthwashes made by Listerine, Crest, Orajel, Equate and CVS. They flooded 229E coronaviruses, which had been grown in human liver cells in the lab, with these chemicals for 30 seconds, one minute or two minutes — longer than the typical swig or spritz into a nose or mouth. Around 90% to 99% of the viruses could no longer infect cells after this exposure, the study found.

“It’s clear that if these compounds come into contact with the virus, they can inactivate it,” said Craig Meyers, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, who is an author of the study.

But because the study didn’t recruit any human volunteers to gargle the products in question, the findings have limited value for the real world, other experts said. The human mouth, full of nooks and crannies and a slurry of chemicals secreted by a diverse cadre of

cells, is far more complicated than the inside of a laboratory dish. Nothing should be considered conclusive “unless human studies are performed,” said Maricar Malinis, an infectious disease expert at Yale University.

Meyers said he hoped his team would undertake such studies soon, and noted that a handful of clinical trials had already begun investigating these questions.

The study’s findings aren’t necessarily surprising, or even unprecedented. Other researchers have conducted similar experiments, including one that looked at the effects of mouthwash on the new coronavirus, with comparable results. And since the early days of the pandemic, scientists have stressed the effectiveness of hand-washing and disinfection with soap, alcohol and other similar chemicals that can bust through the new coronavirus’s fragile outer layer, or envelope. (Not all mouthwashes or nasal rinses contain such potent ingredients, however.)

Valerie Fitzhugh, a pathologist at Rutgers University, pointed to a study from the 1990s, in which researchers in Texas inactivated a strain of flu virus by swirling it in Listerine for 30 seconds. But that study “was never shown to be clinically relevant,” she said.

Even if people did a very thorough job coating the inside of their mouths or noses with a coronavirus-killing chemical, a substantial amount of the virus would still remain in the body. The new coronavirus infiltrates not only the mouth and nose, but also the deep throat and lungs, where mouthwash and nasal washes hopefully never enter.

Viruses that have already hidden away inside cells will also be shielded from the fast-acting chemicals found in these products. “It’s not like your cells get infected and then they secrete a bunch of virus and they’re done,” Rasmussen said. “Infected cells are constantly making more virus. It’s a timing issue.”

Relying on mouthwash or a nasal rinse to rid the body of infectious virus would be about as futile as trimming the top of a cluster of weeds, paying the roots little mind, and expecting the garden pests to disappear.

Meyers acknowledged this limitation. After a quick swizzle of mouthwash, “How long do you have? I don’t know,” he said. “All we’re saying right now is, this could add an extra layer of protection,” he explained, on top of proven protective measures like mask-wearing and physical distancing.

Rasmussen said she remained cautious. In the context of the pandemic, a false sense of security could be dangerous, she noted, adding that people shouldn’t rely on bathroom products to cleanse their bodies of the coronavirus.

“You can use mouthwash to reduce your own chance of getting gingivitis,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to have a meaningful impact on your ability to transmit this virus.”

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CONDADO I, LLC. Demandante v.

JOSE MIGUEL COLON BURGOS, SU ESPOSA, YARITZA RODRIGUEZ NEGRON Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandado(a) Civil: BY2020CV01028. SALA: 506. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: JOSE MIGUEL COLON BURGOS, SU ESPOSA, YARITZA RODRIGUEZ NEGRON Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO (A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 23 de octubre de 2020 este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 23 de octubre de 2020.

En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico, el 23 de octubre de 2020. F/LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario.

MARILYN COLON CARRASQUILLO, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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

Wednesday, October 28, 2020 VERONICA ESCALERA QUIÑONES Demandante v.

PEDRO PABLO MENDOZA CONTRERAS

Demandado(a) Civil: SJ2020RF00500. Sobre: DIVORICO, RUPTURA IRREPARABLE. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: PEDRO PABLO MENDOZA CONTRERAS

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO (A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 3 de septiembre de 2020 este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 6 de octubre de 2020.

En SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, el 6 de octubre de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretario. VERONICA AGOSTO NUÑEZ, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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

Reverse Mortgage Funding, LLC DEMANDANTE VS.

Sucesión de Josefina Gonzalez Ojeda compuesta por Evelyn Marrero González, Josefina Marrero González, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos de nombres desconocidos, Centro de Recaudación de Ingresos Municipales; y a los Estados Unidos de América.

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: BY2020CV02314.

SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria. ORDEN. Examinada la demanda radicada por la parte demandante, la solicitud

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

de interpelación contenida en la misma y examinados los autos del caso, el Tribunal le imparte su aprobación y en su virtud acepta la Demanda en el caso de epígrafe, así como la interpelación judicial de la parte demandante a los herederos del codemandado conforme dispone el Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. sec.

2787. Se Ordena a los herederos del causante a saber, Evelyn Marrero González, Josefina Marrero González, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal, como herederos de nombres desconocidos a que, dentro del término legal de 30 días contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia del causante Josefina Gonzalez Ojeda. Se le Apercibe a los herederos antes mencionados: (a) Que de no expresarse dentro del término de 30 días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia la misma se tendrá por aceptada; (b) Que luego del transcurso del termino de 30 días contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia del causante y por consiguiente, responden por la cargas de dicha herencia conforme dispone el Artículo 957 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 2785. Se Ordena a la parte demandante a que, en vista de que la sucesión del causante Josefina Gonzalez Ojeda incluyen como herederos a Evelyn Marrero González, Josefina Marrero González, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal, como posibles herederos desconocidos, proceda a notificar la presente Orden mediante un edicto a esos efectos una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general de la Isla de Puerto Rico. DADA en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy día 24 de septiembre de 2020.

F/Maria C. Marina Duran, JUEZ.

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

SCOTIABANK DE PUERTO RICO COMO AGENTE DE SERVICIO DE THE MONEY HOUSE, INC. Demandante V.

RICHARD RUSSELL FUNK, DONNA MARIE FUNK Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS (DEUDORES HIPOTECARIOS); EDGARD PEREZ GARCIA (TITULAR REGISTRAL) Demandado(a)

(787) 743-3346

25 Civil: BY2019CV06102. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA (VIA ORDINARIA). NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: LA PARTE CODEMANDADA:RICHARD RUSSELL FUNK, DONNA MARIE FUNKY LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS (DEUDORES HIPOTECARIOS) A SU ULTIMA DIRECCION CONOCIDA: FISICA: #9 CALLE ANDRES SANTIAGO URB. VEGAS DORADAS SECTOR SABANA VEGA ALTA, PR 00692; Y POSTAL: MM2 CALLE CANGREJO URB. DORADO DEL MAR DORADO, PR 00646; 5926 FEDERAL ClR., ASHLAN KY 41102-9326

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que 21 de octubre de 2020 , este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 22 de octubre de 2020. En VEGA BAJA. Puerto Rico, el 22 de octubre de 2020. LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario(a).

LILLIAN MERCADO RIVERA, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

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

su carácter personal y en representación de la sociedad legal de gananciales compuesta por ambos, ASEGURADORA ABC

Sobre: INCUMPLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO, COBRO DE DINERO Y REPOSESIÓN. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO Demandada RICO. CASO NÚM: SJ2019CV12945.

SS. SALA: 908. SOBRE: INCUMPLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO Y A: VICTOR M. CORDERO COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMALDONADO MIENTO POR EDICTO E INTERUrb. Brisas de Camuy, PELACION. ESTADOS UNIDOS 14 Calle 8, Camuy, DE AMERICA, EL PRESIDENTE Puerto Rico 00627 DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDIOS, EL DE: FIRSTBANK ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. PUERTO RICO

A: LUZ I. TIRADO MELENDEZ, NASSER MUSA AKHRAS FONTOURA ambos por sí y en representación de la sociedad legal de gananciales compuesta por ambos.

Quedan emplazados y notificados de que en este Tribunal se ha radicado una demanda de Incumplimiento de contrato y cobro de dinero en su contra.

Se le notifica que 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 Superior de Puerto Rico, Sala de Manatí y enviando copia a la parte demandante: Lcda. Liz Arabel Rodríguez Rivera, PO Box 192655, San Juan, PR 00936, Tel: 787.915.3444, Correo electrónico: info@abogada-notario. com. Se le apercibe y notifica que si no contesta la demanda radicada en su contra dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, se e anotará la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin más citárseles, ni oírseles.

EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y Sello del Tribunal, hoy día 4 de septiembre de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. LOYDA M. COUVERTIER REYES, SECRETARIA SERVICIOS A SALA.

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

MERQUIADES ACEVEDO RIVERA

FIRSTBANK PUERTO RICO

NASSER MUSA AKHRAS FONTOURA Y LUZ I. TIRADO MELENDEZ, ambos en

VICTOR M. CORDERO MALDONADO

Demandante v.

Demandante v.

Demandado CIVIL NUM. AR2020CV00940.

Chacon compuesto por Juana Valentín Menendez t/c/c Juana Valentín Melendez t/c/c Juana Valentín de Chacon, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal; Juana Valentín Menendez t/c/c Juana Valentín Melendez t/c/c Juana Valentín de Chacon; ET ALS.

Demandado(a) Civil Núm. AR2018CV00937. SALÓN CIVIL: 403. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE Se le emplaza y requiere que SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. conteste la demanda dentro de A: JUANA VALENTIN los treinta (30) días siguientes MENENDEZ T/C/C JUANA a la publicación de este edicto.

VALENTIN MELENDEZ Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sis- T/C/C JUANA VALENTIN tema Unificado de Manejo y AdDE CHACON POR SI ministración de Casos (SUMAC), Y COMO MIEMBRO al cual puede acceder utilizando DE LA SUCESION DE la siguiente dirección electróniMIGUEL ANGEL CHACON ca: https://unired.ramaiudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por MARTINEZ T/C/C MIGUEL derecho propio, en cuyo caso A. CHACON MARTINEZ deberá presentar su alegación T/C/C MIGUEL CHACON; responsiva en la secretaría del FULANO DE TAL Y tribunal. Este caso trata sobre Incumplimiento de Contrato, SUTANO DE TAL COMO Cobro de Dinero y Reposesión POSIBLES HEREDEROS en que la parte demandante soDE NOMBRES licita que se condene a la parte DESCONOCIDOS DE LA demandada a pagar al 23 de SUCESION DE MIGUEL julio de 2020 las siguientes canANGEL CHACON tidades: $25,814.22 de principal, más $2,529.29 de intereses los MARTINEZ T/C/C MIGUEL cuales continúan acumulándose A. CHACON MARTINEZ hasta el total y completo pago de T/C/C MIGUEL CHACON. la deuda, más $450.68 de cargos (Nombre de las partes a las que se los cuales continúan acumulán- le notifican la sentencia por edicto) dose hasta el total y completo EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscripago de la deuda, más una suma be le notifica a usted que el 20 equivalente al 5% del total adeu- de octubre de 2020, este Tribunal dado para honorarios de aboga- ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia dos según pactado. Se le aper- Parcial o Resolución en este cibe que si dejare de hacerlo, se caso, que ha sido debidamente dictará contra usted sentencia en registrada y archivada en autos rebeldía, concediéndose el reme- donde podrá usted enterarse dio solicitado en la demanda, sin detalladamente de los términos más citarle ni oírle. de la misma. Esta notificación se Lcda. Carolina M. Mejía Lugo, publicará una sola vez en un peNúmero del Tribunal Supremo 19857 221 Ponce de León Ave., Suite 900, riódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de San Juan, PR 00917, los 10 días siguientes a su notifiTeléfono: (787) 296-9500, Correo Electrónico: cación. Y, siendo o representancmejia@lvprlaw.com do usted una parte en el proceEXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y dimiento sujeta a los términos de Sello del Tribunal, hoy 22 de oc- la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial tubre de 2020. VIVIAN Y. FRES- o Resolución, de la cual puede SE GONZALEZ, Secretario(a). establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término LEGAL NOTICE de 30 días contados a partir de la Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto publicación por edicto de esta noRico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE tificación, dirijo a usted esta noJUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera tificación que se considerará heInstancia Sala Superior de ARE- cha en la fecha de la publicación CIBO. de este edicto. Copia de esta noREVERSE MORTGAGE tificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de SOLUTIONS, INC. 23 de octubre de 2020. En AREDemandante v.

CIBO, Puerto Rico, el 23 de octuSucesión de Miguel bre de 2020. VIVIAN Y. FRESSE Angel Chacon Martinez GONZÁLEZ, Secretario(a) . f/ t/c/c Miguel A. Chacon YANOLIES QUILES ROSARIO, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

Martinez t/c/c Miguel

26

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Another double amputee’s fight for the Olympics is dealt a major setback

By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

E

ight years ago, Blake Leeper ran in the Paralympics against Oscar Pistorius, the original Blade Runner, thinking that one day he would do everything Pistorius had done on the track, and then some.

By the end of last year, Leeper, 31, was getting very close. His best times for the 400 meters were more than a half-second faster than Pistorius’ best. He finished fifth at the 2019 USA Track & Field Championships, running a time that put him within reach of a spot on the 2020 Olympic team, at the very least as a member of the 400 relay squad.

Off the track, though, unexpected headwinds were gaining momentum. Officials with World Athletics, track and field’s global governing body, had ordered him to prove that his carbon-fiber blades did not give him an unfair advantage over able-bodied athletes — a battle that disabled athletes assumed they had won with Pistorius more than a decade ago. On Monday, the headwinds turned fierce, as the world’s top sports court ruled that Leeper’s prostheses made him artificially taller than he most likely would be if he had legs, a decision that might prohibit him from competing against able-bodied athletes in Tokyo in 2021.

Leeper, who has competed on the same blades for five years, largely without facing any suggestions that he has an advantage, said the decision was a discriminatory attempt to keep people with disabilities off the Olympic track and, possibly, the podium. Leeper, who is Black, noted that the study World Athletics cited to argue he was taller than he should be given the length of his torso had no Black subjects — only Asian and Caucasian people — and that it failed to address differences in populations.

“I’m the first double amputee to run 44 seconds” for 400 meters, Leeper said during an interview Monday from Los Angeles. “Now that I am running fast, now that I am running those times, now they say I have an unfair advantage.”

In a statement, World Athletics dismissed the accusations of racism in its methodology and praised the ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland, saying it had met its burden of proving that Leeper’s prostheses gave him an artificial competitive advantage.

“The Court of Arbitration for Sport has rejected Mr. Leeper’s argument that those rules are designed to discriminate against disabled athletes, and instead has fully accepted that they are intended to pursue the legitimate objective of ensuring the fairness and integrity of competitive athletics,” the statement said.

Leeper and his lawyers plan to appeal the ruling in civil court in Switzerland. Whatever the outcome, the case illustrates how World Athletics continues to struggle to sort through modern science and differences in human anatomy to legislate what should be permissible in competition.

The organization has spent years fighting the inclusion of intersex athletes in women’s competitions, argu-

Blake Leeper and his lawyers plan to appeal the ruling in civil court in Switzerland. ing they produce excess testosterone that gives them an unfair advantage at distances between 400 meters and the mile, and that they need to either medically reduce their hormone levels or compete against men.

Champion runner Caster Semenya of South Africa, an intersex athlete, has accused World Athletics of violating her human rights by prohibiting her from competing without medical intervention.

Jeffrey Kessler, the New York lawyer who has represented Semenya, Pistorius and now Leeper, said World Athletics had long followed an outdated understanding of the human condition that subscribes to strict definitions of what athletes should look like, without allowing for variations.

In Leeper’s case, the organization argued that someone with his size torso would be 5-foot-9, according to standard metrics, and that his blades made him run as though he were 6-foot-8. In fact, Leeper is about 6 feet 2 inches tall on his blades, roughly the average height of other top 400-meter runners, many of whom have short torsos and long legs.

“There is no way to determine how tall Blake would be or should be,” Kessler said Monday. “Everything is a spectrum. There are all sorts of variations, and there is no reliable way to say where someone would fall in that spectrum.”

The controversy over whether Leeper was running at a competitive advantage started in 2018, when USA Track and Field, the governing body for the sport in the United States, informed him that the sport’s international leaders had ruled it could not officially post his race times until he proved his blades

did not unfairly benefit him. The International Paralympic Committee had recently changed its rule on how tall prostheses could make athletes, known as maximum allowable standing height, though World Athletics did not focus on that at the time.

Leeper spent the next year working with scientists, who studied his running form and his blades, and in the summer of 2019 submitted his application to World Athletics for continued eligibility. The organization rejected it in February, prompting his appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

During testimony in July, an expert witness for World Athletics cited its study that showed how tall Leeper would most likely be if he had not been born without lower legs. During questioning from Leeper’s lawyers, the expert revealed that the study he was relying on did not have any Black subjects.

“Guess what? Some African Americans have longer legs,” Kessler said. World Athletics rejected that claim Monday.

“World Athletics is aware of no proof that African American athletes have significantly different bodily dimensions (proportionality), and certainly not to the extent identified in this case,” the organization wrote in its statement.

The ruling allows Leeper to use smaller prostheses, but to do so he will essentially have to relearn how to run. Kessler said even a small difference in the size of the legs Leeper has used for years would require a significant adjustment, which Kessler called “an undue burden.”

Leeper grew up in Tennessee, playing baseball and basketball on prostheses. He always sensed he was fast, but his equipment could not keep up with him. Sometimes a leg would fall off when he tried to accelerate.

In 2009, he got his first set of blades and realized just how fast he might be. He soon began competing internationally and was on the same track as Pistorius in London in 2012 at the Paralympics, winning the silver medal in the 400 meters in his classification.

Like a lot of runners, Leeper has spent the coronavirus pandemic hunting for places to train. His usual training track at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been closed. He has run in parking lots, on the beach, on mostly empty streets, anywhere he can find enough space to mark off 200 and 400 and 800 meters. He said the ruling would not make him any less determined.

“I trained this morning, I am going to train tomorrow, I am going to train the next day,” he said.

“Regardless of the outside noise, I got to go and show up and keep training.”

Leeper said the experience with World Athletics, and learning of the study that included no Black people, reminded him of the racism he had faced growing up in Tennessee.

“I’m training twice as hard now,” he said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

27

World Rugby bars transgender women, baffling players

By GILLIAN R. BRASSIL and JERÉ LONGMAN

G

race McKenzie started playing rugby in 2018.

While at a technology conference in San Francisco, she was approached by a few ruggers who recommended that she try out for a recreational team. As a transgender athlete, McKenzie jumped at the chance to participate in a sport whose international governing body promoted the motto “Rugby for All.” “Before rugby found me, I was at a low,” McKenzie, 26, said, explaining that she often encountered people who disrespected her gender identity. “In rugby, I found people who accepted me for who I am.”

In a sport that had embraced athletes of different sizes, shapes, abilities and gender identities, McKenzie and other transgender ruggers felt blindsided in recent months when word spread that World Rugby planned to exclude transgender women from women’s teams at top international events, even though none yet are known to have played at the sport’s highest levels.

“It may have a minimal impact right now, but it certainly sets a cement ceiling,” said Joanna Harper, a researcher in England who is transgender and has long studied transgender athletes.

On Oct. 9, World Rugby became the first international sports governing body to institute a ban on transgender women competing in global competitions like the Olympics and the women’s Rugby World Cup. Each country can determine whether to continue to permit transgender women to participate in domestic rugby competitions.

After nine months of review and deliberation, World Rugby said that in a collision sport where at least one injury typically occurs per match, “safety and fairness cannot presently be assured for women competing against trans women in contact rugby.”

Rugby officials said they worried that transgender women could cause serious injuries when tackling cisgender women. (Cisgender people are those whose gender identity matches their assigned sex at birth.)

At puberty, male athletes generally gain physiological advantages for many sports, including a larger skeletal structure and greater muscle mass and strength. As a result, men and women compete in mostly separate divisions.

There is little or no scientific research regarding the performance of elite transgender athletes, experts say. But some studies have indicated that residual strength and muscle mass advantages largely remain when people assigned as males at birth undergo testosterone suppression for a year.

World Rugby’s ban was announced months after a prominent Swedish study of 11 transgender women showed that after a year of testosterone inhibition, the women maintained the muscle strength in their thighs and lost only 5 percent of the muscle mass.

“If sports don’t take care of the safety issue, sports will die,” said Ross Tucker, an exercise physiologist from South Africa who advised World Rugby on the ban. “Mothers won’t put their children in these collision-type sports because of the danger.”

But ruggers and activists who oppose the ban say it is a solution in search of a problem.

Grace McKenzie said she generally thought of rugby as an inclusive sport before World Rugby’s ban. “In rugby, I found people who accepted me for who I am,” she said.

A number of leading rugby-playing nations oppose the ban. And athletes who are in favor have been reluctant to come forward in fear of backlash. That viewpoint, in a time of heightened political polarization, generally goes against the inclusivity espoused by international sports, including at the Olympics.

“It’s about policing female bodies,” said Verity Smith, 39, of Britain, a transgender man who competed on women’s teams for 26 years before transitioning and was a silent observer at the World Rugby deliberations. “These governing bodies automatically assume that all female-bodied athletes are not as strong as male-bodied ones, when that simply isn’t the case.”

No scientific studies have been conducted specifically on transgender women in rugby, Harper said.

And there are no examples of transgender women causing serious injuries to cisgender women, said Anne Lieberman, the director of policy and programs for Athlete Ally, an advocacy group for women and LGBTQ participants in sports.

The rugby issue plays into a wide, complex question throughout sports about how to balance inclusivity, safety and fairness when considering athletes who transition from male to female. The sports world has tended toward inclusivity, though the issue remains contentious.

A federal judge in Idaho recently halted a ban on transgender women competing in all sports in the state. And in New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce University changed its policy of allowing transgender athletes to compete to help settle a case with the U.S. Department of Education. That challenge surfaced when CeCe Telfer won an NCAA track championship, taking first place in the Division II women’s 400-meter hurdle race last year.

The Tokyo Olympics, set for next July and August, and the 2021 Rugby World Cup in New Zealand next September would be the first major international competitions that would block transgender ruggers at the door if they happen as scheduled given the coronavirus pandemic.

However, no transgender women would have been expected to compete in the Rugby Sevens at the Tokyo

Olympics or in the 2021 women’s Rugby World Cup, regardless of the ban.

USA Powerlifting, which does not oversee an Olympic sport, bars transgender women from competition. But Olympic-related sports other than rugby do not completely block transgender women from competing on teams that match their gender identity. Track and field requires transgender women to suppress and maintain their testosterone levels below a certain limit to remain eligible to compete in certain running events.

Four women’s rugby powers, the United States, England, Canada and Australia, said they would ignore the ban when holding domestic competitions. New Zealand is expected to follow suit.

“We want to make sure we strike the balance between safety and fairness so we won’t be rushing into any decision,” said Ken Quarrie, New Zealand Rugby’s chief scientist.

Transgender women ruggers said none were invited to discussions by World Rugby officials before the ban was implemented.

“They didn’t listen to feedback from rugby-playing nations,” Lieberman said. “Looking at major rugby countries, this ban is largely unacceptable.”

Isabella Macbeth Cain, 33, of South Carolina, who started playing the sport after she transitioned, said World Rugby did not show interest in hearing her voice or similar voices.

“My team wanted me there, they were pulling me into the fray of it,” she said of the decision. “The World Rugby ban is so the opposite of everything I’ve come to know about rugby.”

Harper, the researcher, recommended, as a compromise between a ban and no restrictions, that teams be allowed one transgender player per international competition. Because there are few transgender women in rugby — for instance, there are four who are self-identified in Britain, where the sport is popular — setting a limit would not exclude athletes at the moment, she said.

Transgender men are permitted to play on men’s teams as long as they sign a waiver and undergo a physical proving it is safe for them to play. They are not allowed to compete on women’s teams after starting testosterone enhancement treatments. Transgender women can play on elite men’s teams, however there are no known examples of transgender women wanting to do so.

Transgender women can still play mixed-gender, noncontact rugby, World Rugby announced, although guidelines for elite mixed-gender rugby are still being formulated. Transgender women who transitioned before puberty can also play women’s rugby after confirming medical treatment that would have prevented biological changes that occur primarily via testosterone during puberty.

Even with the recent ban, the prohibition of transgender women ruggers is not considered permanent. More research will be conducted, World Rugby said, and the guidelines will be formally reviewed every three years.

“Sports want to be a reflection of society, and society wants to be inclusive,” said Tucker, the South African scientist. “It’s a difficult, complex issue — the most complex issue in collision sports.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

What went wrong for the Patriots? Everything

By BILL PENNINGTON

L

ate last season, the New England Patriots were 10-1 and considered a favorite to win a seventh Super Bowl. The team’s downfall since then has been beyond striking, and not just because the Patriots have won only four of their last 12 games after Sunday’s 33-6 thumping at the hands of the San Francisco 49ers.

Consider this: After New England takes its 2-4 record to Buffalo this coming weekend, Patriots coach Bill Belichick might be in the mood for a roster fire sale on the eve of the NFL’s Nov. 3 trade deadline. Giving up might not be the Patriot Way, but neither is pigheaded determination when sagacious rebuilding would be more shrewd. Belichick has player assets, like All-Pro cornerback Stephon Gilmore, that could fetch a firstround pick.

It would be an uncomfortable act of desperation, but it could not be more humiliating than what the Patriots lived through Sunday when a 27-point loss was not the only indignity.

On Sunday, one quarterback that the Patriots traded, San Francisco’s Jimmy Garoppolo, came back to Foxborough, Mass., and thoroughly trounced his former team.

Nearly 3,000 miles away in Las Vegas, the other quarterback the Patriots let get away, Tampa Bay’s Tom Brady, threw four touchdown passes to keep his Buccaneers in the Super Bowl hunt at 43 years old.

Oh, and Brady was heaving bombs to ex-Patriot tight end Rob Gronkowski, who caught five passes, one for a touchdown on a nifty Brady throw.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton, who replaced Brady this year and seemed to rejuvenate the Patriots fandom last month, was intercepted three times.

Worse, there was more than the obvious symbolism at work. New England’s defense, ranked No. 1 in the league late in 2019, is in tatters and gave up 467 yards of offense to the 49ers. Imagine how that felt for Belichick, who may be the best defensive coach in NFL history. Sunday’s rout was also the largest home defeat in Belichick’s New England tenure and the first time since 2002 that the Patriots lost a third consecutive game.

“We didn’t perform well enough in any area — offense, defense, special teams, running, passing, defending the run, defending the pass, ball security, tackling, blocking,” said Belichick, who is often most frank when he is most upset. “None of it was good enough. Maybe I left something out.”

After the game, quarterback Cam Newton said he knew what was ailing the Patriots: “Me not playing good.

No, that would seem to pretty much sum it up.

Belichick, however, continued: “We were clearly out-coached, outplayed. Just out-everything.”

After the game, Newton said he knew what was ailing the Patriots. A reporter asked: “What is the issue?”

Answered Newton: “Me not playing good.”

Later, Newton, who continued to take the blame for the loss, elaborated: “The energy has definitely been off for me, and at times it’s not rewarding when you’re just going out there with this aura about yourself that’s not you.”

He added: “I have fun playing this football game, but the performances here [haven’t] been somewhat delightful for me to have fun in doing so. So I just got to be better.”

If the Patriots were understandably morose, the 49ers (4-3) were delirious about reviving their season with successive victories.

A smiling Garoppolo conceded that returning to play in Foxborough was more than just another road game for him.

“Coming back here, seeing the same stadium, hearing the same songs they used to play — a lot of memories came back,” he said. “A lot of emotions out there. But it was a fun night.”

Garoppolo, who was twice intercepted but completed 20 of 25 passes for 277 yards, also likes the way San Francisco has earned its last two victories.

“We’re in a good spot right now,” he said. “It’s just a mindset that we have as a group. You could feel it — I felt it in the locker room today from the guys.”

Meanwhile, 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, while professing his utmost respect for Belichick, said he felt like it was an easy night for him, especially since his team had 197 rushing yards on 43 carries.

“The way our O-line was playing,” Shanahan said. “It’s a pretty easy game for me to just sit back and watch our guys.”

If the 49ers seem to be heading in a positive direction in the talented NFC West, how the Patriots will proceed from here is anyone’s guess.

Might an unforeseen resurrection begin this weekend in Buffalo? Perhaps. Countless times in previous seasons it has been a mis-

take to underestimate Belichick’s resourcefulness as a coach. Newton is a former league MVP and could certainly rebound.

The Patriots, who have had to weather the departure of several veterans who chose not to play this season because of the coronavirus pandemic, might develop the cohesion and consistency they currently lack with more time together.

But Sunday evening, things looked dire.

In the final minutes, Newton sat on the home bench repeatedly shaking his head side to side, an expression of disbelief on his face.

Wide receiver Julian Edelman, New England’s resolute, usually indomitable presence, was seated next to him. Edelman’s eyes were blank, which nearly matched his entry on the game’s score sheet, which read: one reception for 13 yards.

Newton’s backup Jarrett Stidham was on the field, throwing another Patriots interception. Belichick, who after the game insisted he was not contemplating a change at quarterback, walked over and patted Newton on the leg as if to say: “Hey, we’ll climb out of this hole; there will be better days.”

As Belichick turned his back, Newton resumed shaking his head side to side.

The San Juan Daily Star

GAMES

29

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Sudoku How to Play: Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9.

Sudoku Rules: Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword Crossword #25WT4BY2

Wordsearch

Down

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

1. Low cart 2. Carni or omni end

14

15

17

16

18

3. Filches 4. Read superficially

19

Y

A

X

Q

H

G

G

R

S

P

I

R

E

D

E

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R

M

I

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N

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T

O

B

O

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S

J

C

T

S

E

I

D

E

E

S

N

A

R

O

I

O

H

M

M

M

R

E

F

E

D

C

E

X

O

A

E

E

I

O

O

E

V

L

H

T

U

B

N

D

R

X

R

O

S

I

F

F

S

S

S

S

L

A

E

P

S

R

S

E

I

F

O

O

E

R

E

S

G

N

P

E

X

R

E

U

O

P

E

D

E

T

A

E

H

A

E

S

I

R

A

E

P

Y

T

G

N

D

M

S

I

U

R

T

G

T

I

R

S

S

A

P

A

P

A

P

R

I

K

A

N

W

I

Q

M

L

Y

T

L

A

E

R

A

N

G

O

T

N

E

V

E

K

Y

B

B

U

R

G

N

D

C

I

T

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E

S

S

T

N

I

A

S

5. Winston competitor 20

6. Language spoken by Jesus

21

7. Clever sort 22 26

27

28

23

29

24

25

8. "That's amazing!"

30

31

35

36

32

33

9. Classic Mercedes roadsters 10. Horizontal layers

34 37

38

42

43

39 44

45

46

40

11. Retired Cunard flagship, for short 12. Cleaning cloths

41

13. Lazy Susan, essentially 18. iPad, for one

47

21. Hoover, for one 48

49

50

51

52 54

55

23. Lee's org.

24. Balkans grp. of the late 90s

53

56

57

25. Water-to-wine location 58

59

60

61

26. The third time's said to be one 27. Pie chart dividers

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

28. Smart ___ (wise guy) 29. Neighbor of Penn.

31. Sink 32. Secret _____ 33. Prescribed quantities

Across

47. On-line periodical

1. Some cable company boxes

48. Noted heavyweight

5. Georgia footballers

51. Strains

10. What 5 is to 25, briefly

52. Side-to-side skid

14. Castle

54. Electronic censor

15. Fancy window

57. Stiff

16. Go lickety-split

62. Ball hit out of bounds

17. Mediates

63. Ship to the New World

19. Largest city of Latvia

66. Bit of cunning

20. Assent to mom

67. One way to cook

21. Word preceding chain or wheel

68. Word before music or dancing

22. Inauspicious omen

69. Breeding horse

26. Go on all fours

70. British pantry

30. Capital of Pakistan

71. The terrible ____

34. Cut in two 35. James who played Sonny Corleone 36. "Long ___ and Far Away" 37. "I'll hit ya with ___ blow" (Kool Moe Dee lyric) 39. Treats roughly

38. Big rds.

40. State of confusion 41. Action film gun 44. Eruption fallout 45. Part of an internet address 46. Discombobulated 49. Did taxes online, perhaps 50. Fifteen percent, often

Adhesive

Event

Postcard

Spire

53. Land of Milan

Agrees

Fires

Primer

Steel

54. Orgs. for former servicemen

Appraise

Grubby

Realty

Tangs

Archer

Heated

Regales

Truffles

58. Castaway's escape vessel

Arise

Hither

Reuse

Truism

59. Cock-a-doodle-doo

Beige

Manager

Robot

Wooden

60. Hawaiian city that looks like two

Booth

Mixes

Roomier

Cities

Offering

Saints

63. Entrepreneur's support org.

Defer

Papas

Seediest

64. Give guns to

Dowry

Paprika

Seemed

Dross

Peals

Seeping

Emirs

Pension

Sheets

55. San Francisco's ____ Tower 56. Online video site

antonyms 61. Chatters away

65. San Francisco hill

42. Flair or Ocasek 43. Desert stream

Answers on page 30

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

Someone who holds information to help you proceed with certain ideas is conspicuous by their absence. Getting in touch with them will be easier said than done. You hadn’t expected to encounter this kind of obstacle when you had hoped a job would be underway by the end of the day.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

You’re full of ideas you want to discuss with your family and friends. Someone you work with will show a big interest in your plans.

Their destiny will be linked with yours in a business sense and you will sense this too. An older relative will need time to grasp the meaning behind some of your ideas.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Hold on to the determined mood in which you begin the day. It may go against your basic nature to be aggressive but this may be necessary to get your point across in some areas. Don’t hesitate to put your innermost thoughts into words even if someone isn’t going to like what you have to say.

A burst of energy will be short lived so get all those important business issues complete as early in the day as possible. Don’t take on too much if you haven’t been feeling 100%. You might feel obliged to accept more responsibility but it’s time to put your health first.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

You have gained lots from your past experiences. You have also learned how to trust your intuition. Go with an inclination to base decisions on what you feel rather than on facts.

When others see the results, they will think you have developed supernatural powers. Colleagues who see your amazing talents will ask for help with their problems.

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Leo

Aquarius

People will drag out an argument if you allow it. Keep important discussions brief and to the point. A colleague will be inclined to waffle as a way of avoiding having to face up to duties they aren’t keen on. It is doubly essential to hold on to what you want to do when someone will try to talk you out of it.

(July 24-Aug 23)

A friend or family member is looking for some warmth, affection and understanding. You have a reputation for being kind and generous yet you’ve been so busy with outside interests you hadn’t realised how much someone close needed you. Make it up to them today. A new hobby will catch your interest.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Ideas and thoughts that could help make you some extra cash will pop into your head at the most random moments. Pack a pen and paper to jot them down on or look for a note taking App. Talking to your friends and family will open up the door for new opportunities based on ideas you have shared.

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Tension in a close relationship is preventing you from getting the best out of the time you are spending together. A touch of charm, a friendly approach and a fun suggestion should help wipe this away once and for all.

How could anyone resist your warm personality? Peace and harmony will be found in the future when you speak up and work together in making decisions.

Take some time away from practical matters and allow your creative side to come out to play. With you feeling so imaginative and energised, expressing your feelings will be surprisingly easy. Whether you’re enjoying a romantic dinner or concocting a special meal for someone you love, let your emotions flow.

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

News of a forthcoming event will mean you can re-establish links with people you haven’t seen since the start of the year. Despite the hectic pace of life, you will enjoy being this busy. Recently you may have failed to meet targets due to various restrictions. If these are lifted, you’re determined to achieve your goal.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Those in high places seem to be changing the rules every day. There is no time to get used to one routine when another is implemented. Some initial guidance or support that was offered will be withdrawn with no explanation. Don’t be surprised if you are yet again reconsidering your involvement in some areas.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

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