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October 9-11, 2020

San Juan The

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Trump Evading Nonpartisan Commission’s Virtual Debate P10

CLASS OF 2020 A Historic Administration: Remembering Those Dropouts, Expelled and ‘Good’ Alums from 2017-2020

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Social Workers: Venezuela, Gender Violence Increasing; Once an Oil Giant, Reaches the Declare State End of an Era of Emergency Now P6

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The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

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October 9-11, 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.

Education Dept. announces online preventative measure

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s a preventive measure during online classes necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the island Department of Education (DE) and commonwealth and federal security agencies will offer a cycle of digital workshops aimed at training members of the school communities in the proper use of social networks and digital platforms, DE Secretary Eligio Hernández Pérez announced Thursday.

“Since the [start of] public health emergency, we have resorted to the modality of distance education and the use of technology as part of the teaching-learning process,” the DE secretary said in a written statement. “Internet access represents an additional challenge for our entire school community and we want to provide tools so that there is more security during that period when students are connected to a platform. Their physical and emotional safety is the most important thing.”

For the series of webinars, a team of experts in technology, cybercrime and online security developed, over a month ago, a list of workshops for parents, teachers and students that will promote the correct use of online tools. The Puerto Rico Police, the island Justice and Family departments, the federal Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are some of the agencies that are collaborating with the DE in this educational effort. Also participating is the island telecommunications provider Liberty Puerto Rico, which will offer the use of its secure internet browsing capsules.

In the trainings, cybersecurity experts will discuss topics that will help enable teachers and parents to detect any inappropriate situation or behavior that occurs while students are online. In turn, the technical staff will explain what immediate steps must be taken and how to refer the incident to the authorities for investigation.

Some of the topics to be presented are prevention of obscene material, child exploitation and production of child pornography. Likewise, the webinars will cover the subjects of school and sexual harassment, cyber crimes and procedures for the prosecution of minors.

“As the lead agency of the alliance against child exploitation, of which the Department of Education is a member, ICE HSI [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to collaborate with all our partners to identify, investigate and prosecute all those who so aberrantly intend, through the

Internet, to use the most vulnerable segment of society, our children, to perpetrate crimes,” said Iván J. Arvelo, special agent in charge of ICE HSI for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

The workshops will be published on all DE digital platforms, including Teams, and will be shared with parents or guardians at various broadcast times so that they can access them after their workday.

“We understand how challenging remote learning can be and to help, we will continue to provide virtual workshops in coordination with the Department of Education to improve the use of the tools by teachers, parents and students and thus provide visibility on the security controls they should consider,” said Carla López, education leader for Microsoft Caribe. “In this way, we will contribute to creating more efficient and safe educational environments for Puerto Rico.”

The Private Education Association has also joined the initiative and will disseminate training for its enrollment, parents and guardians, confirmed its president, Prof.

Wanda Ayala de Torres.

Meanwhile, all of the public system enrollment will also have access to the orientation series to be broadcast by the Puerto Rico Corporation for Public Broadcasting, commonly known by its official call letters WIPR, and simultaneously on the DE’s social networks (@educacionpr).

Experts will participate in an orientation and training panel so that students have the tools to identify, and refer, the types of inappropriate approaches they may encounter on social networks or digital platforms.

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The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

Resignations, dismissals galore in PR gov’t over 4-year term

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

T

he New Progressive Party (NPP)-led Puerto Rico government has not only been susceptible to hurricanes, earthquakes and a global pandemic, but also to numerous resignations and dismissals of heads of agencies throughout the fouryear term that is now drawing to a close.

As the island is on the verge of a new government on Jan. 2, the current quadrennium has been shaped by historic changes in command within days of each other at leading government entities. Below, the Star looks at some of the most significant shifts and determinations of the past four years.

La Fortaleza For the first time, Puerto Rico had three governors during a four-year period. On one hand, former Gov. Ricardo Rosselló Nevares, who was elected in 2016 by almost 42 percent of the island’s voters, announced his resignation in July 24, 2019 after citizens protested for 15 consecutive days in front of the executive mansion on Calle de La Fortaleza in Old San Juan after the Center for Investigative Journalism released an 889-page Telegram chat log that not only contained offensive remarks from officials, advisers and the governor himself, but also contained an alleged corruption scheme from within La Fortaleza.

Then, now-NPP gubernatorial candidate Pedro Pierluisi was sworn in as governor on Aug. 2, 2019 as Rosselló appointed him as designated secretary of State, yet Pierluisi’s five-day-long governance came to end after the Puerto Rico Supreme Court unanimously ruled his appointment as governor unconstitutional due to the former resident commissioner not having been ratified by both the island House of Representatives and Senate.

On Aug. 8, 2019, then-Justice (DOJ) Secretary Wanda Vázquez Garced was sworn in as governor, her post being the next in line according to the Puerto Rico Constitution.

Department of Education (DE) On April 1, 2019, Julia Keleher quit as DE secretary and three days later resigned from a $250,000 annual contract as a member of the Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority, as confirmed by then-La Fortaleza Chief of Staff Ricardo Llerandi. A little over three months later,

on July 10, 2019, Keleher was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation along with five other public officials for wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering that reached $15.5 million.

Eleuterio Álamo was appointed DE interim secretary on April 4, 2019 by thengovernor Rosselló, but his appointment was withdrawn; on June 24, 2019, current DE Secretary Eligio Hernández, who was referred to as Keleher’s left hand by Popular Democratic Party Sen. Eduardo Bhatia, was confirmed by a Senate majority.

Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) On Nov. 17, 2017, 27 days after Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, PREPA Executive Director Ricardo Ramos resigned amid criticism for granting a $300 million contract to Whitefish Energy, a Montana-based electric power company with only two permanent employees, to repair the island’s flattened electrical grid.

Justo González, who became the designated executive director in charge of PREPA before Walter Higgins III was appointed by Rosselló on March 20, 2018, welcomed retirement on June 22, 2018, two days after the Law to Transform Puerto Rico’s Electric Power, which would lead PREPA into privatization, was signed. On July 7, 2018, Higgins III resigned after the DOJ warned PREPA’s governing board that the agreed upon productivity bonus that would raise his annual salary to $450,000 was illegal.

However, the utility’s governing board announced that Higgins III’s successor, Rafael Díaz Granados, who was also a board member, would get a $750,000 annual salary according to an American Public Power Association formula. On July 12, 2018, Díaz Granados and five board members resigned.

José Ortiz Vázquez, who was appointed on July 18, 2018, tendered his resignation on Aug. 3 of this year after being heavily criticized for his work on the agreement to restructure the authority’s public debt and the electricity grid’s recovery. Currently, Efrán Paredes Maisonet is PREPA’s interim executive director.

Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewage Authority (PRASA) PRASA Executive Director and Financial Oversight and Management Board Representative Eli Díaz Atienza resigned from both seats on Feb. 14 as “it was time

to allow myself to consider new professional growth options in private business while steps are taken for PRASA’s change and renovation.”

Current Executive Director Doriel Pagán Crespo was confirmed by PRASA’s governing board on Feb. 25.

Department of Labor and Human Resources (DTRH by its Spanish initials) Former DTRH Secretary Carlos Saavedra stepped down as then-governor Rosselló appointed him as both legal adviser and adviser on labor matters, replacing former adviser Alfonso Orona, positions in which he would have earned $138,000 annually. However, he stepped down on Aug. 2, 2019, the same day Rosselló’s resignation to the government became official.

Briseida Torres was appointed DTRH secretary on May 15, 2019; however, she resigned on June 9 of this year after the agency experienced substantial delays in paying pandemic financial aid to unemployed citizens.

On June 18, the island Senate confirmed current DTRH Secretary Carlos Rivera Santiago amid heavy criticism for his work as DOJ Deputy Secretary for Minors and Family.

Emergency Management and Disaster Administration Bureau (NMEAD by its Spanish acronym) Former NMEAD Commissioner Abner Gómez resigned on Nov. 11, 2017, 51 days after Hurricane Maria struck the island.

On Jan. 18 of this year, Gov. Vázquez dismissed Carlos Acevedo from the same post due to controversies involving unused supplies dating back to 2018 that citizens from the city of Ponce found at an abandoned warehouse.

On June 7, Gen. José Burgos resigned as he was being investigated by the Special Independent Prosecutor’s Panel on a

failed $38 million purchase for serological tests for COVID-19 from APEX General Contractors.

Currently, rescuer Nino Correa Filomeno is NMEAD’s interim commissioner.

Department of Housing (DV by its Spanish initials) Former DV Secretary Fernando Gil Enseñat was dismissed on Jan. 19 of this year by Gov. Vázquez as he allegedly was unable to provide information requested on warehouses and inventory during the earthquakes that had been rocking much of southern Puerto Rico since Dec. 28, 2019.

Since Jan. 28, Luis Fernández Trinchet has been DV secretary, in charge of Puerto Rico’s disaster relief with Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery Program funds.

Department of Health (DOH) On March 13 of this year, Gov. Vázquez dismissed DOH Secretary Rafael Rodríguez Mercado after he minimized the coronavirus pandemic and the entity confirmed the first three cases of the virus that causes COVID-19 from Italian tourists who arrived on the island from the Costa Luminosa cruise. Interim Secretary Concepción Quiñones de Longo, mother of former DOJ Secretary Denisse Longo Quiñones, was appointed soon after.

Quiñones de Longo resigned 12 days later due to alleged pressure from La Fortaleza officials to sign acquisitions for COVID-19 screening tests without proper evaluation. Lorenzo González Feliciano is the current DOH secretary.

On the other hand, two of the agency chiefs who have remained on the job since then-governor Rosselló formed his cabinet are Economic Development and Commerce Secretary Manuel Laboy and Transportation and Public Works Secretary Carlos Contreras Aponte.

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

5

Chamber of Commerce urges gov’t to help small businesses by relaxing PPP requirements

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Puerto Rico Chamber of Commerce asked the central government Thursday to make changes to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as numerous small businesses on the island have yet to receive financial assistance because of the prevailing slow pace of disbursements.

The PPP comes from funds allocated from the Coronavirus Relief Fund that was awarded under the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The funds are managed locally by the commonwealth Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF by its Spanish initials) and Treasury Department. According to a report from the program, as of Oct. 2 the island government has only issued $44 million of the $350 million available, an amount that represents 12.5 percent of the total funds, impacting only 5,324 businesses.

“As a general rule, both the number

of applications and the amount of benefits have been drastically reduced,” said Juan Carlos Agosto, president of the Puerto Rico Chamber of Commerce. “However, businesses, particularly small ones, continue to suffer from the economic hardships that the pandemic has brought.”

Agosto urged Treasury Secretary Francisco Parés and AAFAF Director Omar Marrero to make the program’s requirements more flexible so it can reach the

entrepreneur who really needs it. The funds must have been exhausted by Dec. 30, so it is essential to modify the computations for the granting of the benefit to make them more flexible, Agosto said.

“We are aware that these funds come from the Coronavirus Relief Fund that was granted under the federal CARES Act and that that statute is intended to not duplicate benefits,” Agosto added. “That is why we understand the reason for making adjust-

ments to the computation when other benefits were received, such as forgivable loans (i.e. EIDL [Economic Injury Disaster Loan] and PPP) or private concessions by industry under said federal statute. However, it must also be considered that the benefits granted under the CARES Act were used in the first weeks of this crisis and that as of today, more than six months after the first order of closure, business operations have not been able to resume normally.”

He pointed out that “all our small businessmen continue with their operations affected by the situation of the pandemic.”

“Failure to make the formula more flexible will mean that these funds cannot be used to help our entrepreneurs and will certainly have to be returned,” Agosto said. “It is for this reason that the Puerto Rico Chamber of Commerce is formally requesting that the formula used for [the PPP] program be reviewed and made more flexible so that we can ensure access to that benefit for our entrepreneurs.”

PRASA eyes limited bond refinancing

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) and the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF by its Spanish initials) are evaluating a potential bond issuance by PRASA to refinance certain outstanding bonds, according

to a notice posted in the municipal markets.

The bond issuance will be to refund and annul all or a portion of senior lien revenue bonds, Series A and Series B, each dated March 18, 2008, as well as Series 2012A and Series 2012B, dated Feb. 29, 2012. The bond issues totaled $3.4 billion, according to PRASA’s web page.

Pricing will be accomplished through a syndicate led by Barclays Capital Inc. The size, timing and structure of the proposed transaction are subject to, among other things: approval by the respective boards of directors of PRASA and AAFAF, and the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico; market conditions; and other factors within the discretion of PRASA and AAFAF, the notice said.

“The Authority and AAFAF are under no obligation to issue the bonds (or any other obligations of the Authority), pursue any transaction (including the Proposed Transaction), or any particular structure (including any refunding), and reserve the right to change or modify their plans as they deem appropriate,” the notice reads.

“There is no guarantee that the proposed transaction will be consummated, that any particular outstanding bonds or other obligations of the Authority will be redeemed or otherwise defeased [annulled], or that all or a portion of the bonds will be offered, sold or issued.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

Trans woman in guarded condition following assault in Río Piedras

By THE STAR STAFF

P Social workers demand a state of emergency amid wave of gender violence cases

By THE STAR STAFF

A

s part of the organization’s celebration of 80 years of service, Puerto Rico Social Workers Association (CPTSPR by its Spanish initials) President Mabel López Ortiz, along with vice presidents Lydael Vega Otero and Esterla Barreto, reiterated on Thursday the need to declare a national emergency to address gender violence on the island, as well as the need to improve employment conditions for social work professionals.

“Today [Thursday] we celebrate the proclamation of social work month, and the CPTSPR continues to petition on the need

for a national emergency declaration to address gender violence in the country, as well as the integration of the gender perspective curriculum in our schools,” López Ortiz said in a written statement. “We also demand answers, explanations and solutions for the disappearances of women and children, as well as equitable access for our children and youth to education in times of pandemic.”

Vega Otero meanwhile made an urgent call for wage justice for social work professionals and for providing them with better working conditions.

“The government agencies [whose mission is to] protect and serve the needs of children,

olice are investigating an assault against Nicole Pastrana, a trans woman, during the early hours Thursday on Del Parque Street in the Capetillo neighborhood of Río Piedras.

According to the victim, she was sharing a residence with several individuals, when an argument arose under unknown circumstances and she was repeatedly stabbed and beaten with a bat.

Pastrana was transferred to the Río Piedras Medical Center, where it was confirmed that she has four open wounds in different parts of her body and trauma to the head.

She is currently in guarded condition.

Agents are investigating the events. youth and the elderly in the country must provide better human and fiscal resources to our professionals to ensure the continuity of the services that our people need so much,” Vega Otero said. “The volume of social situations we face as a country does not match the available services.”

The CPTSPR leaders noted that “the role and actions of the social work professional is questioned, when the main reasons for the inability in the country to make quality services accessible to citizens depend on the human and fiscal resources allocated for those services.”

Barreto added that “[s]ituations such as the

rise in intra-family violence, gender violence, food insecurity, lack of access to education for our children, among others, have been denounced by the professional organization as human rights issues which, by not being addressed, end up in violations of the law.”

López Ortiz stated that “we have consistently demanded a comprehensive inter-agency assistance plan that brings together sectors of non-governmental and community organizations, and professional unions, to serve, assist and accompany our citizens.”

“Declare social services as essential and that they be built from a human rights perspective,” she said.

One young woman reported missing after 5½ months, another reappears

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

L

idia N. Reyes García, a teenager who was reported missing on Sept. 26, appeared in good health on Wednesday afternoon in the northwestern coastal town of Isabela, the Puerto Rico Police Bureau (PRPB) has confirmed.

Reyes García, 16, had been last seen in the Aguacate neighborhood of Yabucoa in the southeastern part of the island.

Her whereabouts had been sought by the Missing Persons Section of the Humacao Criminal Investigation Corps’ Homicide Division.

Meanwhile, Caroline Nicole Nazario Rivera, 19, disappeared on April 21, but police

were not informed of the event until five months later, on Sept. 28, the PRPB confirmedThursday.

Nazario Rivera was described as having a black complexion, curly black hair, standing five feet four inches tall and weighing about 160 pounds. She also has a tongue ring.

The young woman’s attire at the time of her disappearance is unknown. It was not the first time that she had disappeared, according to police.

Anyone who knows the whereabouts of Nazario Rivera can confidentially communicate with agent Rafael Ortiz Piñeiro of the San Juan CIC at (787) 793-1234 ext.

2202/2200/2217 or (787) 343-2020 or through the officialTwitter account @PRPDNoticias and on Facebook www.facebook/prpdgov.

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

7

Trump calls his illness a ‘blessing from God’

By MAGGIE HABERMAN and KATIETHOMAS

P

resident Donald Trump claimed on Wednesday that catching the coronavirus was “a blessing from God” and portrayed as a miracle cure the unproven therapeutic drug he was given after testing positive last week for the virus.

Trump said he planned to make the antibody cocktail being developed by the drug maker Regeneron, which does not yet have government approval, free to anyone who needs it. He did not explain how he would do it.

The president’s statement, in a video released early Wednesday evening by the White House, was his latest effort to repair the political damage he has suffered after months of trying to minimize the effects of a pandemic that has killed more than 211,000 Americans.

In remarks he made while he was at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was taken by helicopter on Friday night, and then when he returned to the White House on Monday, Trump did his best to play down the virus’s effects, telling Americans, “Don’t be afraid of it,” and saying that he felt “better than 20 years ago.”

But in the video released Wednesday night Trump, whose skin appeared darkened by makeup and who appeared to struggle to get air at times, seemed to be saying that he had discovered, without evidence, a new drug that suddenly made him feel better and could do the same for everyone else with COVID-19.

“I call that a cure,” said Trump, adding that everyone should have access to the notyet-approved drug for “free” and that he would make sure it was in every hospital as soon as possible. Regeneron has received more than $500 million from the federal government to develop and manufacture its experimental treatment as part of “Operation Warp Speed,” the federal effort to come up with viable vaccines and treatments for the virus, in order to help distribute it once it is available.

“I think this was a blessing from God that I caught it,” Trump said, apparently referring to the fact that he had learned about the benefits of the drug as a result of becoming ill.

It was the first time that Trump tacitly acknowledged another appearance problem — that he has received the kind of intensive and costly medical care for coronavirus that is not available to any member of the general public.

In an interview on Wednesday, Dr. George Yancopoulos, Regeneron’s president and chief scientific officer, said it was possible that Trump responded to the treatment and that the level of virus had declined. “That’s a logical conclusion,” Yancopoulos said.

“Based on his symptomology, that has to have happened.”

But neither Yancopoulos nor Trump can definitively say whether the treatment worked because any drug must be proved in large clinical trials that compare the outcomes of people who got the product with those who received a placebo. Those trials have not yet been completed.

Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at UCSF Health in San Francisco, said in his opinion there was “1 million percent no” chance that the Regeneron treatment could have cured Trump in 24 hours, as the president claimed.

Another explanation, he said, is that the president is experiencing the effects of the steroid dexamethasone, which he has been receiving since Saturday, which is known to reduce fever and can create feelings of wellbeing and euphoria in patients. “This is all in keeping with the dexamethasone speaking,” Chin-Hong said.

The president has been desperate to announce some kind of definitive treatment, or a vaccine, ahead of the Nov. 3 election, in which nearly all polls show him trailing Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, nationally, and in key states.

He has also been looking for a type of miracle cure for the virus for months, initially seizing on hydroxychloroquine as an answer before health experts raised concerns about its use. But his disdain for those experts has been consistent with his general refusal to believe in science, a refusal that led The New England Journal of Medicine, in an editorial published on Wednesday, to say the Trump administration had responded so poorly to the coronavirus pandemic that it had “taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.”

The journal did not explicitly endorse Biden, but that was the only possible inference, other scientists noted.

The New England Journal of Medicine’s editors join those of another influential journal, Scientific American, who last month endorsed Biden.

The Regeneron antibody cocktail is not the only drug that Trump was prescribed. He

President Donald Trump inspects a test kit for the coronavirus known as COVID-19, developed by Abbott Laboratories, during a news conference with the coronavirus task force at the White House in Washington, March 30, 2020. has also been taking the antiviral drug remdesivir, as well as the steroid dexamethasone, which the World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health recommend only for people who have severe or critical cases of COVID-19.

Doctors have declined to say what other medications Trump is taking as he fights off the virus.

Most people with COVID-19 eventually recover, and medical experts have also said that Trump is most likely still battling it.

Outside medical experts have said that the next week will be pivotal because many patients who do poorly take a turn for the worse in the second week after symptoms arise.

With the federal assistance, Regeneron has said it can produce up to 300,000 doses of the treatment, which is expected to be provided to Americans free of charge. It is one of several similar antibody therapies — another is being developed by Eli Lilly — that seek to give people powerful antibodies in the hopes of boosting their immune response.

But although both companies have reported promising early results, clinical trials are still underway. Although Trump credited the Regeneron treatment with having improved his illness, there is no way to know if a drug is safe and if it works without testing it in large groups of people, some who receive the drug, and some who get a placebo.

The video was not the only way Trump tried on Wednesday to put the best spin on his illness.

In mid afternoon he resumed working in the Oval Office, defying the aides who had hoped he would remain in his private quarters in the White House or a work space specially set up him for him because he is sick.

The president had made clear that was his intention from the time he returned from the hospital on Monday. The presence of a Marine guard outside the office shortly after 3 p.m. signaled that he had gotten his wish, flouting the safeguards sought by his aides at a time when a wave of infections has left the White House thinned out of staff.

Melania Trump, the first lady, has remained in the White House residence since last week when it was announced that she had also tested positive.

A White House official said that Trump had entered the Oval Office by walking along the colonnade outside, meaning there was a smaller amount of viral load he would have been shedding indoors. Only two aides were said to be with him — Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Dan Scavino, a deputy chief of staff — and wearing personal protective equipment like masks and gloves.

An “isolation cart” filled with such equipment was put next the indoor entrance to the Oval Office.

8

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

In scuttling stimulus talks, Trump invites political risk for himself and Republicans

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin arrives to meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2020.

By JIM TANKERSLEY and EMILY COCHRANE

P

resident Donald Trump’s decision to walk away from bipartisan talks over a coronavirus aid bill less than a month before Election Day was a remarkably perilous act for a president about to face voters and for Republicans who are fighting to keep the Senate and now risk being blamed for the collapse of a compromise that had always faced steep obstacles.

Vulnerable Republicans were alarmed at what one of them, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, called a “huge mistake.” Democrats seized on the president’s move to accuseTrump of callous disregard for Americans struggling amid the pandemic. And by Tuesday night, Trump himself took to Twitter to try to walk back his own decision to kill the negotiations, suggesting that he might support narrower stimulus measures.

But such bare-bones plans have been rejected by Democrats and Republicans alike, and there was little reason to believe they would be successful now. If that holds, there will be no comprehensive plan to provide jobless aid or stimulus checks to Americans, furnish aid to small businesses and airlines, or send federal support to state and local governments, at least for now. The economic recovery will continue to shudder, and Trump will have left little ambiguity about how a plan to stabilize it finally fell apart.

“Trump made this really easy for Demo-

crats,” said Tony Fratto, a former aide to President George W. Bush, who is now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies in Washington.

“Republicans can try to explain that the blame is on Democrats. Democrats only have to hold up Trump’s tweet, taking the blame himself.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, did just that Tuesday in his own Twitter post that said, “Make no mistake: if you are out of work, if your business is closed, if your child’s school is shut down, if you are seeing layoffs in your community, Donald Trump decided today that none of that matters to him.”

Even as Republicans publicly blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the breakdown, saying she had been unwilling to compromise, multiple aides privately likened the president’s tweets to his 2018 declaration that he would be “proud to shut down the government for border security.” His words at the time effectively handed Democrats political cover for the historic lapse in government funding that would follow, and top Republican officials feared that they could have the same effect now, with voters already casting ballots.

In an interview on ABC’s “The View” Wednesday, Pelosi said Trump’s blitz of followup tweets calling for tailored aid measures was evidence that he had seen the political downside of ending negotiations, saying the president was “rebounding from a terrible mistake that he made yesterday, and the Republicans in Congress are going down the

drain with him on that.”

Compounding the political risk, Trump said the halt in stimulus negotiations would give Republicans time to focus on quickly confirming his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a move that polls have shown is unpopular with voters. By contrast, Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of another stimulus bill.

“This is going to make it very hard for him to make the case that he’s doing all he can to pull the nation out of economic malaise,” Fratto said.

Trump vowed that a recovery plan would pass “immediately after I win,” but there was little indication that the powerful political disincentives that have so far stymied efforts to strike a bipartisan deal would dissipate in the lame-duck session that bridges the weeks between Election Day and the start of a new Congress in January. The election outcome, aides and lawmakers warned, could in fact deepen the intransigence on both sides, further delaying relief to Americans.

For months, even as the economic need grew and the contours of a compromise became clear, political forces have conspired to thwart a stimulus deal. Republicans who feared Trump was headed for defeat in November began polishing their fiscally conservative credentials in anticipation of future campaigns, including the 2024 presidential race, by asserting their opposition to another costly aid plan. By staying out of the talks early and remaining disengaged at key moments, Trump confounded many in his own party by failing to push Republicans to cut a deal, a detachment that only grew after he signed executive orders in August that attempted to bypass Congress to deliver some relief.

And Democrats, sensing mounting Republican political vulnerability, have been unwilling to make many concessions — which could provide a potential political lifeline to Trump and his party — when they believe an electoral sweep for their party in November could allow them to push through a far more generous bill after Election Day.Top Democrats believe that voters increasingly see Trump as a “chaos” president and that a last-minute agreement could temper that perception.

“Their political positions are far apart, and their polling, which is being done daily, says they’re not being punished for not doing a deal,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office who runs the conservative think tank American Action

Forum and remains close to many Republicans in Congress, said last week. “The minute that changes, they’ll shift.”

The elements of an agreement have been obvious for some time: a price tag somewhere around $2 trillion, including extended aid of around $400 a week for the unemployed; additional support for small businesses and direct payments to low- and medium-income households; liability protections for businesses and workers; and more money for schools, state and local governments and coronavirus testing.

Democrats had started negotiations north of $3 trillion, with a bill that passed the House in May. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. and the majority leader, waited until midsummer to present his party’s $1 trillion plan but has since scaled down his offer considerably to $350 billion, even as the Trump administration was reaching for a much larger package. Trump has been a disruptive force in the negotiations, never making clear what he wanted and by turns cheering on the talks and moving to blow them up.

As recently as Saturday, he had called for an agreement, tweeting, “OUR GREAT USA WANTS & NEEDS STIMULUS. WORK TOGETHER AND GET IT DONE.” Jason Furman, a former top economist for President Barack Obama, had recently begun pushing for Democrats to accept an offer by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the lead White House negotiator, of a $1.6 trillion package, stressing the potential harm to people and businesses if the economy went months without more stimulus.

“I’m disappointed that policymakers haven’t come together more quickly because time really matters here,” Furman said in an interview. “It matters for schools. It matters for families. It matters for testing to control the spread of the virus.”

Business groups pressured congressional leaders on both sides to compromise, to little avail.

Several analysts blamed the relative stability of stock markets in recent months for undermining urgency for another package, a sentiment Trump seemed to reflect in his Twitter posts Tuesday. “Our Economy is doing very well,” he wrote. “The Stock Market is at record levels.”

After Trump’s posts withdrawing from negotiations, the S&P 500 dropped. On Wednesday morning, it rose again, on what analysts speculated was hope that Trump’s latest Twitter posts might revive the stimulus talks.

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

9

6 Standout moments from Harris and Pence at the debate B

By ASTEAD W. HERNDON and ADAM NAGOURNEY

y the standards set by President Donald Trump at his debate with Joe Biden, the matchup on Wednesday night between Sen. Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence was almost civil. Almost.

They offered contrasting visions of how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. They talked about China, the economy and the unrest in response to police abuses.

They were as likely not to answer a question as to answer one — though in this case, Pence was probably the winner. Even by the standards of modern debates, Pence ignored questions he presumably did not want to answer and often spoke over Harris and the moderator, Susan Page of USA Today, though at considerably less volume than Trump.

But there was no shortage of revealing and noteworthy moments.

Harris swiftly attacks Pence on the coronavirus.

The first answer from Harris was a window into the strategy of Biden’s campaign: all COVID-19, all the time.

The campaign believes the pandemic response encapsulates every unpopular part of Trump’s administration, and Harris opened the debate by focusing on the federal government’s response to the virus. She was unrelenting, evoking memories of the Democratic presidential primary race, when she promised to “prosecute the case against Donald Trump.”

The early attack on the virus was also significant for media markets. With the debate starting at 9 p.m. ET, both campaigns will have known that the early moments are critical for newspaper deadlines and audience ratings, because live viewership tends to drop as the evening goes on.

With Harris making the pandemic response her first answer, she focused her energy on the issue her campaign is zeroed in on.

Pence hits back on the pandemic.

Pence responded to Harris’ criticism of the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic by talking about the partial ban on travel from China that Trump put in place early this year, when the virus was beginning to spread to the United States, and about efforts to fast-track a vaccine.

But the vice president expressed no regret about being part of the White House nomination ceremony for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s choice for the Supreme Court, where attendees were packed together, many not wearing masks. Among the maskless: Trump, who later tested positive for the virus, and Pence, who is the head of the White House task force on the coronavirus.

Pence has tested negative for the virus.

That event on Sept. 26, especially a reception inside the White House, is now seen as a superspreader event, responsible for a surge of coronavirus cases at the highest levels of the federal government.

Pence dismissed the notion that he and the president had set a bad example for Americans, saying that decisions on social distancing and wearing masks were personal and that he trusted Americans to take the appropriate precautions. In doing so, he laid out a key distinction with Harris — and with a majority of Americans, who polls show overwhelmingly support the wearing of masks.

A few hours before the debate, Trump posted a video in which he suggested he had been cured of the coronavirus by an experimental drug cocktail. (Medical experts say he is most likely still battling the illness.)

Pence was never asked about that. He was also not asked

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Vice President Mike Pence participate in the vice-presidential debate at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2020. if he agreed with the president that people should not be afraid the disease, or what he thought about the president’s removing his mask in front of television cameras as soon as he had returned to the White House from the hospital.

Harris tells Pence to stop interrupting her.

Harris is one of the few women ever selected for a major party’s presidential ticket, and the first woman of color to be chosen as a running mate. Her debate with Pence, a white man from Indiana, was always going to have an undercurrent of gender and racial dynamics.

In this face-off, during which the tone was more cordial than at last week’s presidential debate and issues were the focus, perhaps the most pronounced moments were when Harris chided Pence for interrupting her comments. This also occurred when Pence talked over the moderator, Page.

Still, Pence was conscientious about showing respect and deference to Harris at some points, complimenting her on her barrier-breaking nomination. He and Harris largely tried to project a feeling absent from the first presidential debate: mutual respect.

On health care, Pence ignores a big question.

At one point, Pence was pressed on how the Trump administration would protect coverage for preexisting conditions if it succeeded in persuading a court to throw out the Affordable Care Act. (Trump has pledged to protect such coverage, without offering details on how that might work.)

Pence ignored the question, pivoting to talk about the Supreme Court and abortion. It was an instructive moment; there were many instances in this debate where he glided over questions, very much in keeping with his debate style.

He also avoided saying whether he would support imposing a ban on abortion in Indiana, where he was once governor, if a Supreme Court ideologically realigned by Trump’s judicial appointments threw out Roe v. Wade, sending authority on regulating abortion back to the states.

Neither the moderator, Page, nor Harris pressed him to

answer those questions.

Harris, like Biden, dances around the prospect of expanding the Supreme Court.

Harris and Biden have both decided to not answer a question often posed to them by reporters and Republican opponents: Would their administration embrace the idea of expanding the Supreme Court, as progressive Democrats have urged?

Pence asked Harris directly several times to answer the question, and she declined. This is the same posture Biden has previously adopted, on the basis that it would create a short-term distraction benefiting Trump in the election.

A dual truth is at play here: Giving a straight answer on expanding the Supreme Court would generate headlines that the Biden campaign would probably prefer to avoid — but Democrats have also been guarded about their governing plans on certain issues.

If Biden were to win, both moderate and progressive Democrats would hope to have his ear in the Oval Office, and he would face pressure to placate both party wings.

Pence evades a question on a peaceful transfer of power.

Pence stuck by Trump on one critical issue: He evaded a question about what he would do if the president lost the election and wouldn’t commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

“First and foremost, I think we’re going to win this election,” Pence said. “When you talk about accepting the outcome of the election, I must tell you, Senator, your party has spent the last 3 1/2 years trying to overturn the results of the last election. It’s amazing.”

Pence was referring, in part, to the impeachment proceedings against the president. (Remember those?)

The vice president also asserted that Biden and Harris were trying to change the rules of elections to enable voter fraud.

In the final moments of last week’s presidential debate, in another attempt to stoke uncertainty about the integrity of the election, Trump claimed — with no apparent basis in fact — that ballots cast by his supporters had been cast into rivers. Pence had a chance to clear that up. He did not.

10

October 9-11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Trump objects to Commission’s virtual debate plan

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and MAGGIE HABERMAN

P

resident Donald Trump, in an extraordinary break from the norms of modern campaigning, said Thursday that he would refuse to participate in the next presidential debate after organizers changed the event to a virtual format because of health concerns about the coronavirus.

His withdrawal from the Oct. 15 event came shortly after the Commission on Presidential Debates, citing the “health and safety of all involved,” abandoned plans to stage the next in-person debate in Miami, saying that Trump and Joe Biden would instead participate remotely from separate locations.

But Trump, whose recent contraction of the coronavirus was a significant impetus for the commission to modify its plans, immediately dismissed the idea of a remote debate as “ridiculous” and accused the debate commission without evidence of seeking to protect his Democratic opponent.

“No, I’m not going to waste my time on a virtual debate,” Trump told Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo in a television interview. “That’s not what debating is all about. You sit behind a computer and do a debate — it’s ridiculous.”

“That’s not acceptable to us,” Trump added.

The debate commission decided to change to a virtual format after members of its production team objected to the safety risks of staging another in-person event at an indoor venue, according to a person familiar with its deliberations.

Trump’s defiance may pose the most significant test to the debate commission’s legitimacy since the group was founded in 1987. There is no law that presidential candidates must debate. Traditions and norms govern the practice, and like many political institutions in recent years, the commission’s board now faces its own Trumpian stress test.

The debate commission was already under pressure to change its safety protocols after the first debate last week in Cleveland, where Trump’s family members and aides declined to wear masks in the debate hall, flouting regulations set by the organizers. Biden’s aides had also expressed concern about their candidate’s potential exposure next week to a

president who could still be infectious.

Biden’s team said Thursday that he would agree to the virtual format.

“Vice President Biden looks forward to speaking directly to the American people,” said Kate Bedingfield, a deputy campaign manager.

But Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, issued a blistering attack on the debate commission, calling its members “swamp monsters” and describing the move to a virtual debate as “pathetic.”

“The safety of all involved can easily be achieved without canceling a chance for voters to see both candidates go head-to-head,” Stepien said in a statement. “We’ll pass on this sad excuse to bail out Joe Biden and do a rally instead.”

He also claimed that Trump “will have posted multiple negative tests prior to the debate,” although White House officials have repeatedly declined to give details about Trump’s current health status and the president has not yet tested negative for the virus.

Trump, in the Fox Business interview, said he learned of the change to a virtual format Thursday, although there were indications that people in his circle were aware of the debate commission’s thinking Wednesday evening.

The president also sought repeatedly to undermine the integrity of the debate commission. He accused the moderator of the next debate, Steve Scully of C-SPAN, of being a “never Trumper,” without offering evidence for his claim. He said the moderator of the first debate, Chris Wallace of Fox News, “was a disaster” who favored Biden. And he said the commission’s plan for a remote debate was about “trying to protect Biden.”

In fact, a presidential debate with candidates in different locations is not unprecedented.

In 1960, the third debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon was held remotely. Kennedy debated from a television studio in New York; Nixon appeared from Los Angeles.

A split-screen camera feed allowed viewers to watch both candidates simultaneously, with the men filmed on a

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden during the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Sept. 29, 2020, with moderator Chris Wallace, right. pair of identical sets. The moderator of that debate, Bill Shadel of ABC News, conducted the proceedings from a third studio in Chicago.

How to safely stage a pair of indoor, in-person debates between Biden and Trump, who tested positive for the coronavirus last week and spent three days at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, has been the subject of intense conversations among board members of the debate commission in recent days.

Aides to Trump had privately discussed the notion of debates held outdoors, but people familiar with the commission’s deliberations said the Trump campaign had never formally proposed that idea.

Organizers said the moderator, Scully, would still conduct the proceedings from Miami at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. The debate is to be held in a town-hall-style format with questions from South Florida voters, who would also be present at the venue.

The debate commission did not address the third debate in its statement Thursday. That matchup is scheduled to be held at Belmont University in Nashville on Oct. 22, with Kristen Welker of NBC News as the moderator.

The vice-presidential debate took place as planned Wednesday in Salt Lake City, with Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Vice President Mike Pence debating in person — albeit with plexiglass dividers between them.

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

11

Facebook widens ban on political Ads as alarm rises over election

By MIKE ISAAC

O

ver the past few weeks, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his lieutenants have watched the presidential race with an increasing sense of alarm.

Executives have held meetings to discuss President Donald Trump’s evasive comments about whether he would accept a peaceful transfer of power if he lost the election. They watched Trump tell the Proud Boys, a far-right group that has endorsed violence, to “stand back and stand by.” And they have had conversations with civil rights groups, who have privately told them that the company needs to do more because Election Day could erupt into chaos, Facebook employees said.

That has resulted in new actions. On Wednesday, Facebook said it would take more preventive measures to keep political candidates from using it to manipulate the election’s outcome and its aftermath. The company now plans to prohibit all political and issue-based advertising after the polls close on Nov. 3 for an undetermined length of time. And it said it would place notifications at the top of the News Feed notifying people that no winner had been decided until a victor was declared by news outlets.

“This is shaping up to be a very unique election,” Guy Rosen, vice president for integrity at Facebook, said in a call with reporters on Wednesday.

Facebook is doing more to safeguard its platform after introducing measures to reduce election misinformation and interference on its site just last month. At the time, Facebook said it planned to ban new political ads for a contained period — the week before Election Day — and would act swiftly against posts that tried to dissuade people from voting. Zuckerberg also said Facebook would not make any other changes until there was an official election result.

But the additional moves underscore the sense of emergency about the election, as the level of contentiousness has risen between Trump and his opponent, Joe Biden. On Tuesday, to help blunt further political turmoil, Facebook also said it would remove any group, page or Instagram account that openly identified with QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy movement.

For years, Facebook has been striving to avoid another 2016 election fiasco, when it was used by Russian operatives to spread disinformation and to destabilize the American electorate.

Zuckerberg has since spent billions of dollars to hire new employees for the company’s “integrity” and security divisions, who identify and clamp down on interference. He has said the amount of money spent on securing Facebook exceeded its entire revenue of roughly $5.1 billion during its first year as a public company in 2012.

“We believe that we have done more than any other company over the past four years to help secure the integrity of elections,” Rosen said.

Yet how successful the efforts have been are questionable.

The company continues to find and take down foreign interference campaigns, including three Russian disinformation networks as recently as two weeks ago.

Domestic misinformation has also mushroomed, as Facebook has said it will not police speech from politicians and other

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 10, 2018. In 2016, Zuckerberg had said it was a “pretty crazy idea” that the social network could have a serious role in altering the outcome of the election. leading figures for truthfulness. Zuckerberg, who supports unfettered speech, has not wavered from that position as Trump has posted falsehoods and misleading comments on the site.

For next month’s election, Facebook has gamed out almost 80 scenarios — what technology and security workers call “red teaming” exercises — to figure out what could go wrong and to protect against the situations. It also updated its policies to outlaw certain types of statements and threats from elected officials, capped by last month’s sweeping set of changes.

But after weeks of Trump declining to say he would accept the election’s outcome, while also directing his supporters to “watch” the polls, Facebook decided to ramp up protective measures.

Asked why the company was acting now, Facebook executives said they were “continuing to evaluate and plan for different scenarios” with the election.

Representatives from the Trump and Biden campaigns did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Vanita Gupta, president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said Facebook’s moves were “important steps” to “combat disinformation and the premature calling of election results before every vote is counted.”

The open-ended ban on political advertising is especially significant, after Facebook resisted calls to remove the ads for months. Last month, the company had said it only would stop accepting new political ads in the week before Election Day, so existing political ads would continue circulating. New political ads could have resumed running after Election Day. But Facebook lags other social media companies in ban-

ning political ads. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, banned all political ads from the service a year ago because, he said, they could rapidly spread misinformation and had “significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.” Last month, Google said it, too, would ban all political and issue ads after Election Day. Zuckerberg has said that ads give less well-known politicians the ability to promote themselves, and that eliminating those ads could hurt their chances at broadening their support base online.

Facebook also said it would rely on a mix of news outlets, including Reuters and The Associated Press, to determine whether a candidate had secured the presidency. Until those news organizations called the race, Facebook said, it would place notifications in the News Feed to say no candidate had won. That buttresses what the company had said it would do last month, when it announced that it would attach labels to posts redirecting users to Reuters if Trump or his supporters falsely claimed an early victory.

To tamp down on potential intimidation at ballot boxes, Facebook also plans to remove posts that call for people to engage in poll watching “when those calls use militarized language or suggest that the goal is to intimidate, exert control, or display power over election officials or voters.”

The company said that it wouldn’t shy away from eliminating more posts as the election approaches. On Tuesday, it took down a post from Trump where he falsely claimed the flu was more deadly than the coronavirus.

“I want to underscore that we remove this content regardless of who posts it,” said Monica Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook. “That includes the president.”

12

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

Clorox wipes are still the hard-to-find pandemic item

By JULIE CRESWELL

F

or six months, May Vanegas hunted her prey.

She scoured grocery stores. She arrived at Target and Walmart early in the morning, hoping to catch a delivery. She followed social media accounts, searching for clues on where her quarry was last sighted in her area.

And then, finally, one day in mid-September when the 41-year-old mother of two teenagers stopped at her local Target in San Antonio, she stumbled across what she had long been stalking: Clorox disinfecting wipes.

“My daughter and I started screaming in the store, ‘Oh, my god! Oh, my god!’” Vanegas said. “I had given up looking for them in the last month. I had lost all hope.”

Informed that the store was allowing shoppers to buy only a single canister, Vanegas and her daughter each grabbed one. The two canisters of Clorox wipes are now displayed on the kitchen counter at Vanegas’ home, trophies from this strange time when American life has been completely upended by the coronavirus.

Most shoppers these days are able to routinely buy common household items like toilet paper, paper towels, pasta and beans that had been in short supply in the early weeks of the pandemic, when consumers were loading up their pantries. But Clorox wipes remain stubbornly elusive.

“We know our products are not everywhere everyone wants them to be,” said Andy Mowery, who, as Clorox’s chief supply officer, is in charge of figuring out how to make more wipes. “It’s a point of personal frustration

Clorox disinfectant wipes for sale in a store at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va., March 12, 2020. As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the United States, sales of Clorox wipes and other household products have soared. for me.”

With cleanliness on the minds of many guarding against the virus, the wipes have become the pandemic version of the must-have toy of the holiday season. Across social media, shoppers share where and when to find wipes made by Clorox, or Lysol — which is owned by Reckitt Benckiser Group — or wipes from other brands. (Only Clorox and a handful of other wi-

pes have been approved by regulators to kill the coronavirus.) Shoppers show up to stores early when deliveries are made and clear out shipments in a matter of minutes.

All of the hullabaloo around its disinfecting wipes has been a strange turn of events for Clorox, which started making and selling liquid bleach as a household cleaning product back in 1916, and presents a big challenge for Linda Rendle, a 17-year veteran of the company who took over as its chief executive officer in midSeptember.

The company said it was struggling because demand for the wipes had surged 500% in the last few months. After increasing production, Clorox is making 1 million canisters of disinfecting wipes each day. (Executives wouldn’t say how that compared with before the pandemic.) It plans to further increase production early next year.

Before the pandemic, Clorox — which also makes Glad trash bags, Kingsford charcoal and Pine Sol cleaner — told Wall Street analysts that, at best, the company would see a 1% increase in sales for its fiscal year 2020.

Its stock and financials were lagging its peers, said Kevin Grundy, a research analyst at the investment bank Jefferies.

But as the pandemic swept across the United States, sales of Clorox wipes and other

household products soared. For its fiscal year that ended June 30, Clorox reported an 8% increase in total sales from last year; in the fourth quarter, sales in the category that includes its cleaning products jumped 33% from a year earlier. Clorox’s stock price has risen 40% this year.

“The pandemic hit, and we saw consumer shopping habits change abruptly, not only around cleaning products and wipes but also in areas like Brita water filters, which had not been doing well,” Grundy said.

The demand wasn’t coming from consumers alone. Companies, hoping to reassure nervous employees and customers that their locations or services were disinfected, formed partnerships with Clorox.

For instance, Uber Technologies received 600,000 canisters of wipes for a pilot program in Atlanta, Chicago and New York. Wipes have been distributed to 68,000 drivers in those cities, and the program has been expanded to include Washington and Dallas.

“All of our flight attendants are using Clorox wipes on all mainline aircraft,” said Maddie King, a spokeswoman for United Airlines, which also formed a partnership with Clorox.

(She declined to provide details about the partnership.) Customers are also given individually wrapped wipes (not made by Clorox) on the flights to clean their own seats and areas.

For Clorox, meeting the heightened demand not only this year but well into next year will remain a challenge.

Only one of the five plants Clorox owns in the United States assembles the finished canisters of wipes; the company also contracts with third-party manufacturers to make the wipes. This summer, Clorox added a third shift to the plant it owns in Atlanta, running it around the clock, and increased the number of outside plants it used to make wipes.

The company also reduced the number of products it makes to focus on high-demand items like wipes. For instance, a new wipe that can be composted but doesn’t disinfect was sidelined.

Increased demand for disinfecting and cleaning products is hitting Clorox’s supply chain, making it difficult, at times, to obtain the individual pieces that make up a canister of wipes. These include the plastic container, the lid, the label, the fragrance, the five or so chemicals that are the disinfecting agents, and the substrate, or the clothlike material. They all come from different suppliers, most of them in the United States.

“Putting together these canisters is like baking a cake,” Mowery said. “If you’re missing one ingredient, you can’t bake the cake.”

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

13 Stocks

Wall Street hits one-month high as Trump fuels stimulus hopes

W

all Street’s main indexes rose to a one-month high on Thursday as comments by U.S. President Donald Trump raised hopes of fresh fiscal aid, while data showed a recovery in the labor market struggled to gain momentum.

Two days after calling off talks on a comprehensive bill, Trump said some discussions were ongoing with Democrats about boosting support for U.S. airlines and providing Americans with $1,200 stimulus checks.

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said legislation to help airlines was a matter of national security and could only move through Congress with guarantees of work continuing on the comprehensive deal.

The Dow Jones airlines index .DJUSAR was up about half a percent after earlier rising as much as 2.9% to a three-week high.

“A compromise on a big stimulus package in Washington could potentially deliver another October surprise,” said Jeff Buchbinder, equity strategist at LPL Financial in the Greater Boston Area.

“The optics of getting nothing done aren’t great on either side, and there are a lot of close Senate races right now, suggesting there still may be a glimmer of hope for a deal by Nov. 3.”

All the 11 major S&P indexes were up by early afternoon, with the energy sector .SPNY tracking a jump in oil prices.

Still, gains were largely led by the real estate .SPLRCR and utilities .SPLRCU sectors - both considered defensive plays. U.S. Treasury prices also edged higher, suggesting a cautious mood across financial markets.

Data on Thursday showed the number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits drifted lower last week but signaled the labor market was making little headway in getting millions of people back on the job after being out of work due to COVID-19 disruptions.

Doubts about more fiscal aid and signs of a slowing domestic economic rebound halted a five-month gaining streak on Wall Street in September, but the main indexes have since recovered, partly as investors begin to digest the prospect of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden winning the Nov. 3 election.

Biden appeared to lead Trump among likely voters in Florida and the two were locked in a tight race in Arizona, according to Reuters/Ipsos opinion polls released on Wednesday.

At 1:18 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI was up 0.23%, the S&P 500 .SPX was up 0.59% and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC was up 0.39%.

International Business Machines Corp IBM.N rose 5.1% after saying it was splitting itself into two public companies, capping its years-long effort to diversify away from its legacy businesses to focus on high-margin cloud computing.

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14

October 9-11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Venezuela, once an oil giant, reaches the end of an era

A man walks where oil percolated up to a street in Cabimas, Venezuela, Sept. 18, 2020. Refineries that once processed oil for export are rusting hulks, leaking crude that blackens shorelines and coats the water in an oily sheen.

By SHEYLA URDANETA, ANATOLY KURMANAEV and ISAYEN HERRERA

F

or the first time in a century, there are no rigs searching for oil in Venezuela.

Wells that once tapped the world’s largest crude reserves are abandoned or left to flare toxic gases that cast an orange glow over depressed oil towns.

Refineries that once processed oil for export are rusting hulks, leaking crude that blackens shorelines and coats the water in an oily sheen.

Fuel shortages have brought the country to a standstill. At gas stations, lines go on for miles.

Venezuela’s colossal oil sector, which shaped the country and the international energy market for a century, has come to a near halt, with production reduced to a trickle by years of gross mismanagement and U.S. sanctions. The collapse is leaving behind a destroyed economy and a devastated environment and, many analysts say, bringing to an end the era of Venezuela as an energy powerhouse.

“Venezuela’s days as a petrostate are gone,” said Risa Grais-Targow, an analyst at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

The country that a decade ago was the largest producer in Latin America, earning about $90 billion a year from oil exports, is ex-

pected to net about $2.3 billion by this year’s end — less than the aggregate amount that Venezuelan migrants who fled the country’s economic devastation will send back home to support their families, according to Pilar Navarro, a Caracas, Venezuela-based economist.

Production is the lowest in nearly a century after sanctions forced most oil companies to stop drilling for or buying Venezuelan oil — and even that trickle could dry up soon, analysts warn.

“Without drilling, without services companies and without money, it’s very difficult to maintain even the current levels of production,” said David Voght, head of IPD Latin America, an oil consulting firm. “If the political situation in the country doesn’t change, you could go to zero.”

The decline has diminished beyond recognition a country that just a decade ago rivaled the United States for regional influence.

It is also unraveling a national culture defined by oil, a source of cash that once seemed endless; it financed monumental public works and pervasive graft, generous scholarships and flashy shopping trips to Miami.

Crippling gasoline shortages have led to an outbreak of dozens of daily protests across most Venezuelan states in recent weeks.

In the capital, Caracas, periodic fuel shipments from Iran, paid for with the country’s remaining gold reserves, provide a sem-

blance of normality for a few weeks at a time.

But in the countryside, residents have defied the pandemic lockdown to block roads and clash with police amid their desperate demands for the modicum of fuel they need to survive.

Across Venezuela’s oil towns, the sticky black crude that once provided jobs and social mobility is poisoning residents’ livelihoods.

In Cabimas, a town on the shores of Lake Maracaibo that was once a center of production for the region’s prolific oil fields, crude seeping from abandoned underwater wells and pipelines coats the crabs that former oil workers haul from the lake with blackened hands.

When it rains, oil that has oozed into the sewage system comes up through manholes and drains, coursing with rainwater through the streets, smearing houses and filling the town with its gaseous stench.

Cabimas’ desolation marks a swift downfall for a town that just a decade ago was one of the richest in Venezuela.

During the boom years, PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, showered the residents of oil towns such as Cabimas with benefits including free food, summer camps and Christmas toys. It built hospitals and schools.

Now the bankrupt company’s tens of thousands of workers have been reduced to dismantling oil facilities for scrap metal and selling their distinctive coveralls, emblazoned with the company logo, to make ends meet.

The end of oil’s central role in Venezuela’s economy is a traumatic reversal for a nation that in many ways defined a petrostate.

After major reserves were tapped near Lake Maracaibo in 1914, oil workers from the United States poured into the country. They helped build many Venezuelan cities and instilled in the country a love of baseball, whiskey and big gas-guzzling cars, differentiating it forever from its South American neighbors.

As a driving force in the founding of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in 1960, Venezuela helped Arab nations take control of their oil wealth, shaping the global energy market and the geopolitical order for decades to come.

Even in those heady days, Venezuela’s prominent oil minister, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, warned that there were pitfalls to sudden oil wealth: It could lead to excessive debt and the destruction of traditional industries.

“It is the devil’s excrement,” Perez Alfonzo famously declared. “We are drowning

in the devil’s excrement.”

In the years that followed, despite abundant oil revenues, Venezuela faced a roller coaster of recurring debt and financial crises. The wealth also did nothing to diminish corruption or inequality, and when a former paratrooper, Hugo Chávez, appeared on the national stage in the 1990s promising a revolution that would put Venezuela’s oil to work for its poor majority, he captivated the nation.

Soon after he was elected president in 1998, Chávez commandeered the country’s respected state oil company for his radical development program. He fired nearly 20,000 oil professionals, nationalized foreign-owned oil assets and allowed allies to plunder the oil revenues.

The troubled industry went into a free fall last year, when the United States accused Chavez’s successor and protégé, President Nicolás Maduro, of election fraud and enacted severe economic sanctions to force him from power.

Soon, Venezuela’s oil partners, bankers and customers broke ties, and output plunged at a pace that has outstripped Iraq’s downturn during both Gulf wars and Iran’s after its Islamic Revolution.

The sanctions forced the last U.S. oil companies in the country to stop drilling. They may leave the country entirely in December if the Trump administration ends their exemptions from sanctions.

To compensate for the loss of revenue, Maduro has turned to illicit gold mining and drug trade to stay in power, according to the U.S. government.

Maduro’s retreat from oil has left the shrinking Venezuelan economy comparable to that of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that has been plagued by civil strife since independence. But the transition has allowed Maduro to keep the loyalty of the military and weather the punishing U.S. sanctions, said Grais-Targow, the analyst.

The costs of this economic contraction have been borne by the Venezuelan people, she said.

More than 5 million Venezuelans, or 1 in 6 residents, have fled the country since 2015, creating one of the world’s greatest refugee crises, according to the United Nations.

The country now has the highest poverty rate in Latin America, overtaking Haiti this year, according to a recent study by Venezuela’s three leading universities.

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

15

Putin, long the sower of instability, is now surrounded by it

By ANTON TROINAVSKI

I

n Russia’s self-proclaimed sphere of influence, Russia is losing its influence.

Concurrent crises in Belarus, Central Asia and the Caucasus region have blindsided the Kremlin, leaving it scrambling to shore up Russian interests in former Soviet republics and undermining President Vladimir Putin’s image as a master tactician on the world stage.

“There is nothing good about these conflicts for Moscow,” Konstantin Zatulin, a senior Russian lawmaker and Putin ally who specializes in relations with what Russians call their “near abroad.”

Putin has spent years building up Russia as a global power, with a hand in hot spots from Latin America to the Middle East, and even meddling in presidential elections in the United States. But after working for years to destabilize the West, he suddenly finds himself surrounded by instability; once seen as sure-handed in foreign affairs, he seems to have lost his touch.

In Belarus, Putin responded to a street uprising in August by propping up the country’s unpopular autocrat, President Alexander Lukashenko, turning public opinion against Russia in what had previously been Europe’s most Russia-friendly country.

In Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia, protesters this week appeared on the verge of toppling President Sooronbai Jeenbekov, less than two

weeks after Putin pledged to him in a rare in-person meeting that “we will do everything to support you as the head of state.”

And in the Caucasus, the long-simmering conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh erupted last week into the worst fighting since the 1990s, threatening to undo the balancing act that had allowed Russia to cultivate diverse links to the region.

“Russia was doing all it could to maintain ties both with Azerbaijan and Armenia,” Zatulin said. “Every day of conflict in Karabakh is, effectively, helping zero out Russia’s authority.”

The spate of new challenges to Russian influence strikes at the heart of Putin’s yearslong effort to cast himself as the leader who restored the great-power status that the nation lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Even as the Kremlin denied Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russian state television gleefully reported on the American allegations of that interference as a sign that Moscow was being reckoned with again on the world stage.

Now, rather than react decisively to emergencies close to home, Putin sounds ambivalent about Russia’s role.

“We hope the conflict will end very soon,” he said of Nagorno-Karabakh, in a television interview broadcast Wednesday.

Minutes later, referring to Kyrgyzstan, he said,

A rally protesting election results, which many believe to be fraudulent, that kept President Alexander Lukashenko in power, in Minsk, Belarus, Aug. 30, 2020.

“We hope that everything will be peaceful.”

The confluence of crises in Russia’s own neighborhood is such that some pro-Kremlin commentators are already accusing the West of an organized campaign to sow discord in the post-Soviet regions.

More balanced analysts, however, have singled out one constant factor in the growing unrest. Both Russia and its neighbors, they say, have been destabilized by the coronavirus pandemic, which has exposed distrust in institutions and in out-of-touch leaders across the region.

It helped undo the fragile truce between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and in Belarus and in Kyrgyzstan, the disease set the stage for public uprisings by exposing the ruling elite as disconnected from people’s suffering.

Lukashenko angered Belarusians by playing down the danger of the virus, joking that vodka would cure it; in Kyrgyzstan, critics blamed officials for using coronavirus aid money to enrich themselves.

Within Russia, the economic hardship caused by the pandemic has helped deepen public anger against Putin. In the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, for example, thousands of protesters angry over the arrest of a popular governor spilled into the streets last Saturday for the 13th week in a row.

Some analysts say that public discontent within Russia means that Putin needs to turn more of his focus to domestic issues such as economy hardship, pollution and poor health care, rather than delving into global geopolitics. But developments in recent weeks have given Putin more reason to focus on the latter.

“For Putin, practically his entire mission and his vision of Russian greatness and success revolve around his foreign-policy agenda,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research organization focused on politics and policy.

The new series of crises, she went on, “will very much distract Putin from domestic problems.”

The centrality of the former Soviet lands to Putin’s foreign policy was evident in the Kremlin’s list of world leaders who called Putin to wish him a happy birthday on Wednesday, when he turned 68. Of the 12 who called, only three leaders — those of Israel, India and Cuba — head countries outside the former Soviet Union.

In Armenia, which hosts a Russian military base, some hope for a more forceful

stance by Russia in the conflict, which has already killed at least 250 people, according to official reports. But Russia’s ability to influence events in the Caucasus now appears limited, despite its past role as a mediator in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Turkey, Azerbaijan’s most important ally, has taken on a more assertive regional stance.

“Turkey, indeed, in this current situation probably should be considered as a balance to unilateral Russian interference,” said Farid Shafiyev, chairman of the Center of Analysis of International Relations in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku. In the Caucasus, he added, “the Russian role is probably diminishing.”

Across the former Soviet Union, Russian remains the lingua franca, and the proliferation of mostly uncensored internet access across the region means that protests in one country can easily inspire a disenchanted populace in another.

Some protesters in Belarus carried signs supporting the demonstrations in Khabarovsk, over 4,000 miles away. And ahead of Kyrgyzstan’s parliamentary elections last Sunday, government critics were keeping an eye on Belarus, where it was a blatantly falsified election in August that sparked the uprising against Lukashenko.

But, for Moscow, recent events in Belarus offer a cautionary tale that illustrates the fragility of Russia’s standing among its neighbors — carrying echoes of Ukraine’s more violent departure from Russia’s orbit in 2014. Some Belarusians who had been well disposed toward Putin turned against him after he propped up Lukashenko in the face of the protests.

Zatulin, the Russian lawmaker, said officials “at the highest levels of the Russian Federation” believed that Lukashenko would need to step down “sooner or later.” But Lukashenko had argued to Russian officials, Zatulin said, that his stepping down in the face of street protests could set a dangerous precedent for what might happen to Putin himself.

“By unconditionally supporting Lukashenko, we are creating an enormous problem for ourselves in the future with the majority or a significant part of the Belarusian population,” Zatulin said. “We are creating a problem for ourselves with the other Belarusian politicians and public figures, who are increasingly forced to seek sympathy in the West. Russia wants that least of all.”

16

October 9-11, 2020

Battle over mink fur almost brings down the Polish government

Farmers protesting in Warsaw, Poland, Sept. 30, 2020, against a new bill introduced by the governing Law and Justice Party which includes a ban on breeding fur animals.

By MARC SANTORA

W

hen the European Union condemned Poland’s government for demonizing gays and lesbians, the country’s governing coalition defiantly stood together. When state media was accused of spreading hate speech that fueled violence, the governing parties brushed off concerns. And when protests erupted against efforts to control the judicial system, they pressed ahead regardless.

Then came the minks.

Proposed legislation that would ban the farming of minks, semiaquatic mammals prized for their fur, and put in place a range of protections for other animals, opened deep divisions in the coalition that almost brought down the government.

It took the intervention of Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of the dominant Law and Justice Party, to quell the uprising for now by taking on a formal role that allowed him to act as a buffer between opposing factions.

The bill, which gained momentum after a documentary aired on Polish television showing minks living in deplorable conditions on one farm, has widespread public support and the leaders of the country’s foremost opposition party support the legislation.

But the conservative governing coalition is divided over the issue, waging increasingly furious internal battles at a time when the nation is consumed with the coronavirus. All that has raised questions about the long-term viability of the government.

In the face of those concerns, Kaczynski, the most powerful

politician in Poland and the architect of the government’s agenda, stepped in Tuesday to be sworn in as deputy prime minister after five years of ruling from behind the scenes.

Apart from separating feuding coalition partners, one of his main tasks will be trying to grow public support for the Law and Justice Party, whose candidate for president, Andrzej Duda, only managed a narrow election victory in July.

It will be a difficult challenge since Kaczynski has been the driving force behind efforts by his party to marginalize the LGBT community, a campaign that has turned off many young voters. And his government has spent years at war with the European Union, despite broad support in Poland for membership in the bloc, especially among the generation born after the end of communist rule in 1989.

The government also has a dismal record on environmental issues — from logging in the country’s ancient forests to failing to curb a reliance on coal.

But in championing animal rights, Kaczynski sees an opportunity.

“This is a pivotal moment for the party,” said Wojciech Przybylski, the editor-in-chief of Visegrad Insight, a policy journal focused on Central Europe. Kaczynski, he said, knows he needs to expand his political base to include younger, more moderate voters by sending “a message of concern about nature and animals.”

While Kaczynski’s Law and Justice Party has long been the dominant force in the United Right coalition, it depends on the support of two junior conservative partners to stay in power: the Agreement and United Poland parties.

United Poland is led by the country’s powerful justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, who has made no secret of his desire to become the leader of the country’s conservative movement. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki sees himself as the heir apparent. Kaczynski’s emergence as deputy prime minister was partly aimed at keeping the two men apart.

Morawiecki quickly aligned himself with Kaczynski on the animal issue, posting his own video on TikTok supporting a ban on fur. Ziobro opposes the legislation and, until Kaczynski’s intervention, his party was threatening to withdraw from the coalition over it, a move that would have erased the government’s parliamentary majority.

Ziobro’s opposition to the ban on mink farming reflects the industry’s deep roots in Poland. The country is home to the largest mink farms left in Europe and the third largest in the world. The bill, which is still being debated, calls for the fur farms to be closed in a year.

Kaczynski has often used more extreme factions to push certain messages, and build his party’s power base. The far right was critical in directing public outrage at migrants, helping the Law and Justice Party rise to power in 2015. More recently, as the party cast “LGBT ideology” as a threat to the nation, ultraconservatives have been driving the messaging.

Now Kaczynski risks losing some of that support.

Rev. Tadeusz Rydzyk, a conservative cleric who has strong connections to Law and Order and controls a vast media empire, used his Radio Maryja station to attack the legislation.

“They feel pity now over these little furs,” Rydzyk said recently, adding that the government should be focused on things like further limiting abortion rights. “Let’s not animalize man and humanize animals.”

The bill is also opposed by the meat industry, which says its export business to markets with halal and kosher requirements would be badly hit.

But it is the minks that have drawn the most attention. And it has turned Szczepan Wojcik, who along with his four brothers controls the vast majority of the mink farms in the country, into a national figure.

“I’m the most attacked person in Poland,” he said in an interview at one of his farms some 60 miles outside of Warsaw.

He sees the attacks as part of a broader cultural war in Poland.

“The people who started the debate in Poland about animal rights, banning the use of animals by man, for example, for furs, are exactly the same people who promote LGBT, same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia and so on,” he said.

While he has supported Law and Justice in the past, he said his thinking was now more in line with the more conservative groups led by Ziobro and Rydzyk.

Recent polls indicate overwhelming support for the ban, however.

Much of that is a result of the documentary co-produced by the animal rights organization Open Cages, showing gruesome footage of minks attacking each other, gnawing off limbs of other caged animals and even feasting on their remains.

“Poles don’t want fur farms,” said Bogna Witkowska, one of the group’s leaders.

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

17

Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to 2 scientists for work on genome editing

By KATHARINE J. WU, CARL ZIMMERand ELIAN PELTIER

T

he Nobel Prize in chemistry was jointly awarded Wednesday to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for their 2012 work on CRISPR-Cas9, a method to edit DNA. The announcement marks the first time the award has gone to two women.

“This year’s prize is about rewriting the code of life,” Goran K. Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said as he announced the names of the laureates.

Charpentier and Doudna, only the sixth and seventh women in history to win a chemistry prize, did much of the pioneering work to turn molecules made by microbes into a tool for customizing genes — whether in microbes, plants, animals or even humans.

“I’m over the moon; I’m in shock,” Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said at a news conference Wednesday.

It has been only eight years since Doudna and Charpentier — now the director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin — co-authored their first paper demonstrating the power of CRISPR-Cas9. Since then, the technology has exploded. Doctors are testing it as a cure for genetic disorders such as sickle cell disease and hereditary blindness. Plant scientists are using it to create new crops.

Some researchers are even trying to use CRISPR to bring species back from extinction.

Along with these high-profile experiments, other scientists are using CRISPR to ask fundamental questions about life, such as which genes are essential to a cell’s survival. CRISPR “solves problems in every field of biology,” said Angela Zhou, an information scientist at CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society.

“This technology has utterly transformed the way we do research in basic science,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “I am thrilled to see CRISPRCas getting the recognition we have all been waiting for, and seeing two women being recognized as Nobel Laureates.”

CRISPR has also become one of the most controversial developments in science because of its potential to alter human heredity. In 2018, He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist, announced that he had used the technology to edit the genes of human embryos, which yielded the world’s first genetically modified infants. His experiments were decried by many in the scientific community as irresponsible and dangerous.

“There is enormous power in this genetic tool, which affects us all,” said Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

Charpentier and Doudna both stumbled across CRISPR by accident. Charpentier, a microbiologist, spent a number of years studying Streptococcus pyogenes, a species of bacteria that causes scarlet fever and other diseases. Inspecting the microbe’s DNA in 2006, she and her colleagues discovered a puzzling series of repeating segments.

A few scientists had studied these segments since the

Emmanuelle Charpentier, left, and Jennifer A. Doudna in Oviedo, Spain, in 2015.

1980s, but no one was sure of their function. Francisco Mojica, a microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain, gave these DNA stretches a name in 2000: clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPR for short.

Mojica and other researchers spent the 1990s and early 2000s trying to determine why microbes had this mysterious repetitive DNA. It became clear that between these repeats were bits of genetic material derived from viruses that had tried to infect the bacteria. Somehow, the bacteria were grabbing bits of viral genes and storing them away. It was if they were creating an archive of past infections, which they could later use to defend against future attacks.

Charpentier and her colleagues discovered some of the key steps by which the bacteria used this information to attack viruses. The bacteria made molecules of RNA — ribonucleic acid, a cousin of DNA — that recognized the genes of attacking viruses.

After writing a paper on their discovery in 2011, Charpentier recognized she needed to collaborate with an expert on RNA molecules to make more progress. That expert was Doudna.

Doudna (the first syllable rhymes with loud) had never heard of CRISPR until another Berkeley scientist, microbiologist Jill Banfield, brought it to her attention in 2006. Until then, she had studied how bacteria make RNA molecules for other purposes, such as sensing the environment and silencing certain genes.

Charpentier, 51, and Doudna, 56, met at a cafe in Puerto Rico in 2011 while attending a scientific conference and immediately started to collaborate on understanding how CRISPR worked. Soon, they realized that they might be able to harness the RNA molecules to seek out and alter any piece of DNA.

Bacteria defend themselves by using these molecules to recognize the genes of an attacking virus. The weaponry includes an enzyme called Cas9 that slices the viral genetic material.

Charpentier and Doudna realized that they could synthesize a piece of RNA that targeted and chopped up not just a spot on a viral gene — but on any gene. In 2012, the scientists proved this concept could work.

CRISPR was not the first tool scientists invented to alter DNA. But previous methods were relatively crude, involving expensive, cumbersome machines and materials. CRISPR could become a far more precise genetic surgery.

If researchers used CRISPR molecules to make cuts at two neighboring sites on a piece of DNA, for example, the DNA stretch would heal, sewing itself together without the sliced segment. It became possible to insert a new piece of DNA in the place of the removed one. Subsequent research revealed how to use CRISPR to alter single genetic letters.

What had begun as an ancient system of antiviral defense quickly became one of the most powerful and precise genome-editing tools available to science. In less than a decade, CRISPR has become commonplace in laboratories around the world.

Following her 2011 and 2012 discoveries, Charpentier was told numerous times by colleagues that CRISPR might be Nobel-worthy. But she had trouble internalizing it.

“It’s something you hear, but you don’t completely connect,” she said in a news conference Wednesday. When she received the call, “I was very emotional,” she said.

Still, experts noted, women make up a paltry percentage of science laureates. Scientists of color, especially those who identify as Black, Latino, Native or Indigenous, have been almost entirely left out of the process.

Early on, Charpentier and Doudna recognized the potential dangers of the technology that they helped usher into the world. Doudna left her lab and hit the lecture circuit. In 2017, she co-wrote a book, “A Crack in Creation” to describe both the promise and the peril of CRISPR. Nevertheless, she was taken by surprise a year later when He announced his reckless experiment in China.

“We as a community need to make sure we recognize we are taking charge of a very powerful technology,” Doudna said in an interview Wednesday. “I hope this announcement galvanizes that intention.”

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18

October 9-11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Trump does fear the Coronavirus

By FARHAD MANJOO

S

omething momentous happened late last week, a brief pinprick of clarity piercing through the haze: President Donald Trump finally showed Americans the truth about the coronavirus.

Not with his words, of course. According to researchers at Cornell, Trump has been the single largest driver of misinformation about the pandemic. Public health experts had hoped that the president’s own infection might prompt him to become more truthful. Instead, since his release from the hospital Monday, Trump has become even bolder in his distortions, declaring that the virus is nothing to be afraid of. On Tuesday both Facebook and Twitter blocked posts in which Trump falsely claimed that the seasonal flu is deadlier than the coronavirus.

But the president’s actions tell a more honest tale and suggest a way for the media to convey even to Trump’s loyalists the threat the virus poses: When he became the patient, Trump took it seriously. He did not react like a man who’d only gotten the flu. To convey the true danger, the media should focus on how Trump acts with regard to his own battle against the virus, rather than amplifying the things he says about how the rest of us should think of it.

The timeline unspooled like a medical thriller. The president announced he’d tested positive just before 1 a.m. Fri-

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day. Only 16 hours later, with his fever spiking and his blood oxygen levels dropping, Trump was taken by helicopter to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

The president’s doctors did not mess around with any of the miracle cures that Trump had long touted. Instead of hydroxychloroquine, ultraviolet light therapy or bleach, they turned to treatments whose efficacy had a basis in science.

They put him on an experimental antibody treatment that has been shown in a clinical trial to alleviate symptoms in some patients; it is unavailable to most Americans. Over the weekend, Trump was prescribed two more drugs, including a steroid that is usually administered to patients with severe cases of COVID-19.

“We’re in a bit of uncharted territory when it comes to a patient that received the therapies he has so early in the course,” Dr. Sean Conley, the president’s physician, said Monday.

Behind Conley stood a phalanx of doctors attending to Trump. The scene was grave: The president of the United States had acquired a deadly infection, and an army had assembled to confront the enemy. Those doctors were responding with everything they had, with shock and awe, as if it were a full-blown emergency — because, guess what, it was.

I don’t begrudge Trump his world-class medical care; the leader of the United States deserves it. But if the president’s COVID-19 deserves to be taken seriously, requiring a team of the world’s best doctors and a pharmacy full of drugs, how can he tell the rest of us to treat it as if it’s no big deal?

But there’s more at stake here than hypocrisy. We in the media often focus on what Trump says about the virus instead of how he has sought to combat it personally. For instance, while Trump does not often wear a mask himself, he has been irritated when others who are close to him don’t, and he has bristled when people get too close to him. (Then again, he has also asked people to remove their masks when addressing him; consistency is not his strong suit.)

The media also take for granted that the public will be able to see through his lies to see these facts. That COVID-19 is actually pretty dangerous may seem like an obvious point, considering that more than 210,000 Americans have been killed by the disease, and hundreds more are dying each day.

But many Americans do not accept this danger, mainly because Trump has managed to steamroll obvious reality since the very beginning of the pandemic. In his wake, rumors and conspiracy theories have sprouted like wildflowers.

Now, behind in the polls and with a widening outbreak on his staff, Trump is embarking on his most damaging disinformation campaign yet: The virus is nothing, and America is back.

No one should believe this claptrap, but millions will.

The Cornell researchers — a team led by Sarah Evanega, director of the Cornell Alliance for Science — analyzed 38

President Donald Trump gestures a thumbs up as he departs the Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., after testing positive for COVID-19 and spending four days at the facility, on Oct. 5, 2020. million English-language articles published this year between Jan. 1 and May 26. They found numerous subjects of misinformation about the virus, from miracle cures to conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci and 5G cellular technology’s supposed links to the disease.

The researchers found that while “grass-roots sources” like anti-vaccination groups did make an impact, “they contributed far less to the overall volume of misinformation than more powerful actors, in particular the U.S. president.”

Why is the president such a powerful source of mendacity? It isn’t simply that he says a lot of things that aren’t true; it’s that everything the president says is amplified by the media. Some of these mentions might be as part of an effort to correct the president; the vast majority are not. The researchers found that “a great deal of misinformation is going out to the public uncorrected.”

You might argue that the way to mitigate this problem is for reporters to challenge the president’s falsehoods, and perhaps to cover him a lot less, too. But I’m not sure either is the answer. Studies have shown fact-checking to be of mixed effectiveness against misinformation. And as long as Trump is the president, not covering him isn’t really an option — especially now, in the midst of a heated campaign and a pandemic in which he has played a starring role.

To me, the president’s medical treatment last week makes a point that undoes months of propaganda: COVID-19 is clearly a very bad disease. It can take you from to hobnobbing with high-dollar donors one day to requiring supplemental oxygen the next.

Trump says we shouldn’t let COVID-19 dominate us.

That’s easy to say; it’s just as easy to prove untrue. The facts of Trump’s experience with the virus — how rapidly it spread through those closest to him, how thoroughly it undermined his campaign messages and sidelined his campaign travel, and how quickly it sickened him to the point of requiring intensive medical care — are the greatest weapon against his misinformation about it. Even the president of the United States has been dominated by the virus.

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

19

Comité para promover inversión a través de Exención de Carga Aérea y de Pasajeros inicia plan de trabajo Por THE STAR

E

l Comité designado a través de la Orden Ejecutiva 2020-051 para Promover el mercadeo, promoción, estrategia y logística de transferencia de carga y pasajeros internacionales en Puerto Rico, entregó a la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced, el plan de trabajo para implementar la Exención de Carga Aérea y de Pasajeros, otorgada por el Departamento de Transportación (DOT) de los Estados Unidos, a inicios de este año, así lo anunció el jueves el secretario del Departamento de Desarrollo Económico y Comercio (DDEC), Manuel Laboy Rivera.

“Cumpliendo con lo dispuesto en la Orden Ejecutiva, el 30 de septiembre entregamos el informe e iniciamos inmediatamente con la agenda de trabajo.

El informe establece varias estrategias en las que colabora Invest Puerto Rico (IPR) y Discover Puerto Rico, así como otras organizaciones y cuyo objetivo es maximizar las oportunidades de desarrollo económico proporcionadas por la dispensa del DOT. La Exención de Carga Aérea y de Pasajeros ofrece una oportunidad única para promover la Isla como un destino de centro de transfe-

rencia, y desarrollo de capacidad para apoyar múltiples sectores, renovando la infraestructura. Dada la situación actual de la pandemia, Puerto Rico tiene la oportunidad de convertirse en centro principal de las Américas en el sector de manufactura de productos farmacéuticos, y de otros sectores. Igualmente se espera que el sector turístico comience su recuperación en el año 2021 tras afectarse por los cierres a causa de la propagación del COVID19”, indicó en comunicación escrita el también presidente del Comité creado para promover dicha dispensa.

El secretario del DDEC, agregó que otro de los esfuerzos concertados está dirigido a continuar la colaboración con el gobierno federal para atraer más

inversión en el área de manufactura y esta dispensa es un valor añadido a estos fines.

Rodrick Miller, principal oficial de Invest Puerto Rico, informó, “hemos trabajado de la mano con diversos sectores para desarrollar un plan de promoción basado en las ventajas únicas que la Isla ofrece como centro de trasbordo. Desde la perspectiva de estrategia hemos desarrollado una selección de prospectos basada en aquellas empresas con operaciones en el extranjero cuyo mercado está principalmente en los Estados Unidos y para las que Puerto Rico provee un valor competitivo. Como parte del plan de trabajo del comité, esta semana estamos sosteniendo reuniones en Washington, D.C. con agencias federales, organizaciones de la industria de aérea y de transportación, así como compañías interesadas para posicionar a Puerto Rico en el marco de las oportunidades que se han presentado en respuesta a la pandemia”.

Se proyecta que en los primeros dos años de vigencia de esta dispensa debe haber un efecto multiplicador en el comercio en general y se creará al menos seis mil empleos directos e indirectos, entre otros beneficios cuyo impacto

económico se estima en 219.3 millones de dólares.

Por su parte, el principal oficial ejecutivo de Discover Puerto Rico, Brad Dean, manifestó que “Puerto Rico está bien posicionado para convertirse en un destino principal para los viajes internacionales, lo que creará miles de empleos nuevos e impulsará nuestra economía. La exención otorgada por el Departamento de Transportación de los Estados Unidos no tiene precedentes y podría ser útil para atraer a los transportistas extranjeros a reconocer a Puerto Rico como una puerta de entrada, tanto para el tráfico de carga como de pasajeros”.

El Comité establecido en la Orden Ejecutivo 2020-51, está compuesto por el secretario del Departamento de Desarrollo Económico y Comercio, el secretario del Departamento de Estado, el secretario de la Gobernación, el secretario del Departamento de Transportación y Obras Públicas, y el director Ejecutivo de la Autoridad de los Puertos.

También hay integrantes del sector privado tales como: la Cámara de Comercio de Puerto Rico, y la Asociación de Industriales de Puerto Rico, entre otros.

Representantes reclaman que en Bomberos procuran “atornillar” a empleados de confianza Por THE STAR

E

l representante Jesús Manuel Ortiz y los candidatos a la Cámara de Representantes Janice “Nanny” Nieves y Luis Daniel Rivera denunciaron este jueves la supuesta intención del jefe del Negociado del Cuerpo de Bomberos, Alberto Cruz, de atornillar personal en posiciones de supervisión a días de las elecciones.

Los líderes populares denunciaron la apertura de convocatorias para capitán, teniente e Inspector de Prevención de Incendios, las cuales vencen el 22 de octubre de 2020.

“El Negociado del Cuerpo de Bomberos, ha sido administrado de manera desastrosa este cuatrienio. En vez de estar atornillando supervisores, el Cuerpo de Bomberos necesita con urgencia inversión para mejoras permanentes a las estaciones, fortalecer la flota, restaurar su sistema de comunicaciones y mejorar las condiciones de trabajo de los bomberos. Atornillar capitanes y

otros supervisores mientras el Negociado está en su peor momento es irresponsable y atenta contra la seguridad de quienes necesiten sus servicios”, indicó Ortiz, portavoz del Partido Popular Democrático en la Comisión de Seguridad Pública de la Cámara, en declaraciones escritas.

Por su parte Nieves, candidata a la cámara por el distrito 7 de Bayamón manifestó que “el jefe del Cuerpo de Bomberos demuestra nuevamente, que es más un Comisionado del PNP que del Cuerpo que dirige. Desde la creación del Departamento de Seguridad Pública, esta administración ha abandonado el Cuerpo de Bomberos, exponiendo así a la población a una pobre respuesta en casos de emergencia. Emplazamos a la Gobernadora a que detenga la utilización de agencias públicas para premiar a simpatizantes políticos”.

Mientras, Rivera Filomeno dijo que “esta acción evidencia que la presente administración actúa más como un ente político que como gobierno. La prioridad debiera ser atender los reclamos

que tienen los bomberos sobre los pocos recursos que han recibido en los pasados tres años y la falta de equipo que enfrentan para poder brindar con efectividad sus servicios. Lo lamentable es que éstas movidas políticas ponen en juego la seguridad de nuestra gente que debiera ser la prioridad número uno”.

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October 9-11, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Eddie Van Halen’s 12 essential songs

By ROB TANNENBAUM

I

n 1985, Edward L. Van Halen submitted a patent application for a mounted device that would lock a stringed instrument in a horizontal position, allowing guitarists to “create new techniques and sounds previously unknown to any player.”

Even holding a guitar in the familiar old vertical position, Eddie created a stunning array of sounds with a utility belt of fleet-fingered techniques that included two-handed tapping on the guitar neck, whammy bar sound effects that sounded like laughter or a spiraling airplane and harmonics thickened with distortion.

Van Halen’s solos stunned, inspired and frustrated fellow guitarists who tried to perform them, but rock is full of dazzling technicians who seem to play with three hands and whose music never catches on beyond Guitar Center employees. Van Halen, who died Tuesday at 65, also wrote great, immediately gratifying riffs that identified his band’s songs within the first two bars. He called himself “a very rhythmic player,” which he attributed to the many hours he’d spent jamming with his brother Alex, a drummer, as a duo.

And even calling him a great rock guitarist sells Van Halen short; he was also a great songwriter, producer and keyboard player. He sought out new challenges, although the band’s lineup changes and his health problems slowed him down. The band’s last tour, in 2015, featured Van Halen’s son, Wolfgang, on bass, and finished with two nights at the Hollywood Bowl, about 11 miles from Pasadena, California, where the band got its start playing pool parties and strip clubs. Here are 12 of Eddie’s greatest songs.

Van Halen, ‘Jamie’s Crying’ (1978) Try to imagine the chorus of singer David Lee Roth’s sympathetic plaint about a girl who regrets wasting a one-night stand on a bum (“Oh-oh-oh, Jamie’s crying”) without immediately hearing Van Halen’s complimentary reply: two perfectly chosen notes that work like the tag on a good punchline. Fans who found the band kind of funky were vindicated when the music was sampled for Tone Loc’s 1989 rap smash “Wild Thing.”

Nicolette Larson, ‘Can’t Get Away From You’ (1978) Nicolette Larson is best known for her first single, a softpop cover of Neil Young’s “Lotta Love” that adds a Spinnersstyle drum sound. She recorded with a sterling selection of Los Angeles session players including members of Little Feat and the Doobie Brothers, but one song, “Can’t Get Away From You,” featured some uncharacteristic, rocking honky tonk, with a sharp guitar solo credited to “?,” who Larson later revealed to be Van Halen. His solo anticipates some of his future work on “Finish What Ya Started” and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” but Van Halen didn’t want to confuse fans by having his name on Larson’s album.

Van Halen, ‘Beautiful Girls’ (1979) The second Van Halen album is the embodiment of don’tfix-what-ain’t-broke, and it ends with this brazen come-on to the band’s favorite type of fan: the ones that get backstage. Roth’s lyrical patter about “a snappy little mammy” has overtones of

Eddie Van Halen created a stunning array of sounds from his guitar and wrote immediately recognizable riffs for his band.

Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” and Van Halen’s riffs, which owe a little debt to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, swagger like he owns the world — which he kind of did.

Van Halen, ‘Unchained’ (1981) An unaccompanied guitar lick starts the song, and it’s as thick and heavy as a Fort Knox vault. This anthemic, major-key rocker is one of Roth’s most playful songs about the life of a Sunset Strip bounder (“blue-eyed murder in a size-five dress,” he howls), and Van Halen uncorks a solo that starts with divebombing single notes, then romps contrapuntally across the song’s pulse.

Van Halen, ‘Mean Street’ (1981) Eddie had to keep proving his supremacy over legions of imitators, and he opens the band’s fourth album with a tangled flourish of neck tapping that speeds by like the tape is stuck on fast forward. “I tapped on the 12th fret of the low E and on the 12th fret of the high E and muffled both with my left hand down by the nut,” he said in a Guitar World interview, and even if you know what he’s talking about, you probably can’t reproduce it.

Van Halen, ‘So This Is Love?’ (1981) Van Halen stands in the back at first, as the track opens with a galloping bass-and-drums groove. Even when he joins, he’s supporting the beat, with only a little trickery in his syncopation. Roth sings about being smitten, and Eddie adds two sensible solos, played in phrases, that simulate the sound of laughter.

Van Halen, ‘Little Guitars’ (1982) After an acoustic intro played on a nylon string guitar and inspired by flamenco great Carlos Montoya, Van Halen resumes regular programming: Roth woos a señorita who’s just not that into him, and Eddie picks out staggered chords that scoot over and between the chorus’ downbeats.

Michael Jackson, ‘Beat It’ (1982) When the producer Quincy Jones called Van Halen and asked him to play on a new Michael Jackson album, he didn’t think he was the right guitarist for an R&B track. “Beat It” is a song about being tough, and given free rein, Van Halen played

a virtuosic, expansive solo, during which speakers in the studio control room caught fire. Eddie played on the song for free and wasn’t billed in the album’s credits. As he told CNN in a 2012 interview, one day when he was shopping at Tower Records, “Beat It” came on and he heard a kid snorting, “Listen to this guy trying to sound like Eddie Van Halen.” (“That is me!” Van Halen told them.)

Van Halen, ‘Jump’ (1984) Van Halen was never a zeitgeist band; it didn’t sound like anyone else or fit into any radio format when it started. That changed in 1984, when its album of the same name became part of one of pop music’s greatest calendar years. Eddie had first played the song’s synthesizer riff for the band in 1981, but they shot it down. The band’s longtime producer, Ted Templeman, later suggested they revive it, and the band was more open to it the second time. Van Halen played the distinctive synthesizer hook, which proved startling and sometimes obnoxious to longtime fans who loved hard rock, and halfway through, bursts in with a shredding guitar solo, to prove he still can.

Van Halen, ‘Finish What Ya Started’ (1988) Roth left Van Halen for a solo career, and the band replaced him with Sammy Hagar, who lacked Roth’s wit and self-mockery. “Finish What Ya Started” is a highlight of the “Van Hagar” era, thanks to Sammy’s uncharacteristically subtle singing style and Van Halen’s slippery, twangy finger picking, which is closer to Vince Gill than to Ritchie Blackmore — a hybrid you could call Van Haggard. In the video, Eddie even wore a cowboy hat and cowboy boots.

Van Halen, ‘Poundcake’ (1991) Four Van Hagar albums yielded more than a little keyboard-heavy dreck that seemed to be auditioning for a Tony Scott or Taylor Hackford soundtrack, including “Dreams,” “When It’s Love” and “Love Walks In,” which could pass for a second-rate Journey song and is about contact with aliens. But on the right occasion, Eddie would break out the guitar like an old gunfighter showing young outlaws how fast he can draw.

“Poundcake” makes you wonder how he got his guitar to sound like an electric drill, until you look at the credits and see he played an actual drill. The fact that people believed he’d somehow made a guitar sound like an electric drill is testament to his unpredictable and experimental talent.

LL Cool J, ‘We’re the Greatest’ (2013) Let’s fast forward: Hagar left Van Halen in 1996, the band made a dismal album with singer Gary Cherone of the band Extreme, then Hagar returned briefly in 2004 before leaving again, and Roth rejoined in 2007 to tour and record the group’s only studio album of the last 22 years. Eddie was slowed by a period of drug and alcohol abuse, a divorce from actress Valerie Bertinelli, hip replacement surgery in 1999 and surgery for tongue cancer the next year. But he rose up to help produce and play on LL Cool J’s “The Greatest,” adding some careening (if undermixed) guitar. Van Halen and LL both sound chuffed to still be doin’ it, and doin’ it well. “I got Van Halen, I don’t need a bass line,” the rapper crows.

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

21

Morgan Wallen loses ‘SNL’ music spot for violating virus rules

By DAVE ITZKOFF

M

organ Wallen, a country musician who was scheduled to perform on “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, said Wednesday evening that he would not be appearing on the show, citing its coronavirus protocols.

Wallen made the announcement in an Instagram post after he was seen in videos posted to social media last weekend, showing him celebrating in Tuscaloosa after a University of Alabama football victory. In these clips, which appeared on TikTok and elsewhere, Wallen is seen drinking shots, kissing fans and mingling in groups while not wearing a mask or following other social-distancing guidelines.

In the video he posted to Instagram on Wednesday, Wallen said that he was speaking from a hotel room in New York.

“I got a call from the show letting me know that I will no longer be able to play, and that’s because of COVID protocols, which I understand,” Wallen said. “I’m not positive for COVID, but my actions

“I’m not positive for Covid, but my actions this past weekend were pretty shortsighted,” the country musician Morgan Wallen said.

this past weekend were pretty shortsighted, and they have obviously affected my long-term goals and my dreams. I respect the show’s decision because I know that I put them in jeopardy, and I take ownership for this.”

Wallen said that he planned to “take a step back from the spotlight for a little while and go work on myself.” He added that Lorne Michaels, the “SNL” executive producer, “gave me a lot of encouragement by letting me know that we’ll find another time to make this up.”

“Saturday Night Live,” which is broadcast from NBC’s headquarters in Rockefeller Plaza, halted its live episodes in March amid the pandemic. The show’s longtime music coordinator, Hal Willner, died in April of complications consistent with the coronavirus.

Last weekend, “SNL” aired its first new live episode in several months, employing new coronavirus protocols required by the state of New York. A press representative for the show did not immediately say Wednesday night who would replace Wallen in this weekend’s broadcast.

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The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

California fires take a deep toll on wine country

By ERIC ASIMOV

T

he 2020 vintage was already difficult in Napa Valley. It was born in a drought, matured through terrible heat spikes and had endured smoky conditions from the haze of numerous Northern California fires.

Then, on the last weekend of September — in the middle of harvest — savage wildfires seemed to attack the northern end of the valley from all directions.

The Glass Fire started in the early morning of Sept. 27 in Deer Park, east of St. Helena, near the Silverado Trail, the northsouth artery of the eastern valley. It swept east, destroying the winery and barrel warehouse at Burgess Cellars and leveling the turreted stone building at Chateau Boswell. It engulfed the threeMichelin-star restaurant at the Meadowood luxury resort and licked the edges of vineyards at Viader and Failla.

It had begun climbing the hills on the east side of the valley when the wind shifted, blowing the fire back west.

In the Spring Mountain District on the west side of the valley, windblown embers from the Glass Fire ignited another blaze, while a fire in Sonoma County to the west swept in over the hills, consuming the winery at Cain Vineyard and Winery, along with three houses and all the wine in the 2019 and 2020 vintages.

Newton was gravely damaged, losing its signature pagoda building, which had just been completely rebuilt, its terraced estate vineyard and a lot of wine. A large warehouse and winery area at Castello di Amorosa were destroyed, and at least 10,000

cases of wine were ruined.

Numerous other wineries, including Hourglass, Merus, Behrens Family, Fairwinds Estate, Paloma Vineyard, Tuck Beckstoffer Estate, Spring Mountain Vineyard and Sterling Vineyards, were all assessing the damage in a volatile situation. Late last week, the situation seemed dire, with bleak forecasts for hot, dry and windy weather.

But after several days of touch and go, on Monday morning the fires seemed less immediately threatening as the winds shifted, said Frank Dotzler, the general manager at Outpost Wines, on Howell Mountain.

Despite the devastation to structures and property, nobody appears to have been hurt. Beyond Newton, the damage to vineyards, the most important part of the wine industry, appears to have been minimal, limited mainly to scorching around the edges.

To lose a vintage, much less a vineyard, is devastating.

“It was such an uphill battle, but we made it,” said JeanBaptiste Rivail, Newton’s general manager, speaking of the arduous 2020 vintage.

While the entire crop had not been picked, much of the wine had been fermented and put into vats and barrels at Newton’s newly constructed winemaking facility.

“Everything is gone,” Rivail said. “It’s all gone.”

When Rivail and his team, who had been evacuated, were finally able to return to Newton to inspect the site, they were greeted by streams of wine flowing downhill.

“Every drop of wine was like a miracle this year, the viticulture was so hard,” he said. “It’s almost like losing a living thing. And

it’s violent, to go back on site to find ashes and gutters full of wine.”

Christopher Howell, the general manager and wine grower at Cain, not only lost the winery and the ’19 and ’20 vintages, but he and his wife, Katie Lazar, also lost their house.

“It’s not a good part of nature, but it is part of nature,” he said. “Nobody said nature is benign.”

For the first time since 1978, Chateau Montelena, a historic producer near Calistoga, will not make an estate cabernet sauvignon because the grapes were tainted by ash and smoke.

At Kamen Estate, across the Mayacamas Mountains in neighboring Sonoma County, the proprietor, Robert Mark Kamen, has concluded that he will most likely not make any red wines in 2020 because of smoke taint, which can make a wine taste disagreeably smoky, or worse, like ashes.

“To say I’m bummed is an understatement,” he said. He has already sold off some wine that might eventually have fetched $100 a bottle for $5 a gallon, to huge producers who will use it as a minuscule, undetectable part in the vast tanks of wine they will bottle and sell cheaply.

For Kamen, a screenwriter with movies like the “Taken” series, the “Transporter” series and “The Karate Kid” on his résumé, the last month or so, with the intense heat and the smoke, has been surreal. Almost all the grapes were picked by Oct. 1, when in an ordinary year the harvest would have just begun.

“Every day has looked like a Chinese watercolor, muted and gray,” he said. “The heat combined with the particulate matter in the air made it hotter, and the grapes started freaking out.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

23

A potential downside of intermittent fasting

By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

I

ntermittent fasting is a trendy weight loss strategy.

But a new study found that a popular form of intermittent fasting called time-restricted eating produced minimal weight loss and one potential downside: muscle loss.

The new research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, is one of the most rigorous studies to examine time-restricted eating, which involves fasting for 12 or more hours a day. Many followers of the diet, which has been popularized in diet books and touted by celebrities, routinely skip breakfast and eat all their meals between roughly noon and 8 p.m., resulting in a daily 16-hour fast.

Research over the years has suggested that the practice spurs weight loss and improves metabolic health, although much of the data has come from animal experiments or small studies of relatively short duration in humans. Experts say the diet works because it allows people the freedom to eat what they want so long as they do it in a narrow window of time, which leads them to consume fewer calories overall.

But the new research found that overweight adults who were assigned to routinely fast for 16 hours daily, eating all their meals between noon and 8 p.m., popularly known as the 16:8 diet, gained almost no benefit from it. Over the course of the three-month study, they lost an average of just 2 to 3 1/2 pounds — only slightly more than a control group — and most of the weight they shed was not body fat but “lean mass,” which includes muscle.

While it is normal to lose some muscle during weight loss, the fasting group lost more than expected. That is concerning because muscle provides many health benefits: It protects against falls and disability as people age, and it is linked to lower mortality. It also increases metabolism and can help prevent weight that is lost during dieting from returning later on. The researchers speculated that one reason for the muscle loss may have been that the fasting diet led people to consume less protein.

The new findings were surprising to the study’s senior author, Dr. Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Weiss had been practicing time-restricted eating since 2014, eating all of his daily meals between noon and 8 p.m. But when he analyzed the data and saw the results of his study, he stopped his daily fasts and began eating breakfast again.

“My bias was that this works and I’m doing it myself, and so I was shocked by the results,” he said.

But some experts cautioned that the study was too short for a weight loss trial. They said it was very

A rigorous three-month study found that people practicing intermittent fasting lost little weight, and much of that may have been from muscle. likely that the fasting group would have showed greater weight loss had the study been longer and included more participants. They also pointed out that previous research has shown that people do better when they consume the bulk of their calories relatively early in the day, which is when our bodies are better able to metabolize food, rather than skipping breakfast and eating most of your food in the afternoon and evening, which goes against our biological clocks.

Studies have found, for example, that overweight adults lose more weight and have greater improvements in their cardiovascular risk factors when they eat a large breakfast, a modest lunch and a light dinner, compared with when they eat a small breakfast and a big dinner.

“It could be that the benefits of time-restricted eating are smaller than we thought, or that you just get better results when you eat earlier in the day,” said Courtney Peterson, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who studies intermittent fasting and who was not involved in the new study. “The jury is still out.”

Many cultures around the world practice fasting for religious or spiritual reasons. But fasting became popular for health reasons after small studies suggested it promoted longevity and a wide range of metabolic

benefits, such as improved cholesterol profiles and reductions in insulin resistance. Some of the other common forms of intermittent fasting are alternate day fasting, in which followers eat no more than 500 calories every other day, and the 5:2 diet, which entails eating normally for five days a week and fasting for two.

Many people, however, have trouble going an entire day with little or no food. Krista Varady, a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has found in her research that people lose weight more slowly with time-restricted eating than other forms of fasting but that it is generally the easiest form of fasting to adopt. People tend to eat 300 to 500 calories fewer per day when they restrict themselves to an eight-hour window, said Varady, who was not involved in the new research.

“The best part is there are no limitations during the window,” she said. “There is no carb or calorie counting, and people don’t have to switch out all the food in their pantries.”

Varady said she was planning to start a yearlong study of time-restricted eating in the near future. “I find it fascinating that this diet has become so popular and there are so few studies,” she said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

Sometimes food fights back

By PRIYANKA RUNWAL

P

eering through a microscope in 2016, Dania Albini gazed at an algae-eating water flea. Its gut appeared full and green with all the ingested teeny-tiny Chlorella vulgaris algae. But she also observed bright green blobs of this phytoplankton in an unexpected place: the herbivore’s brood pouch.

“I was really surprised to see them there,” said Albini, an aquatic ecologist then at Swansea University in Wales.

As the colonization continued, the algae enveloped the tiny creature’s eggs, killing some eggs and resulting in fewer newborns, according to a study led by Albini and published in Royal Society Open Science.

With the algae still alive, the researchers suspect that Chlorella deploy an offense strategy as opposed to a typical defense to protect themselves from herbivory.

“You don’t expect a food to attack a predator in this way,” Albini said. “You expect it from a parasite, but not food. It’s fascinating.”

Phytoplankton are typically single-celled photosynthetic organisms that form the foundation of aquatic food chains. Among them are microalgae like Chlorella vulgaris that float on surfaces of ponds and lakes, making them easy meals for widespread zooplankton like Daphnia magna. To keep grazers at bay, some microalgae form spines, release toxins or aggregate to a size that’s larger than a predator can swallow.

But sometimes, Chlorella make their way inside a grazer’s body — not in the belly as food, but into the chamber housing the zooplankton’s offspring. Water circulates through this brood chamber and supplies oxygen and nutrients to the young, and seems to pull in some algal cells. While in this chamber, the researchers found during lab experiments mimicking some natural conditions, the algae were alive and able to double in abundance.

When algae managed to colonize a brood chamber, the zooplankton barely produced any viable eggs.

Kam Tang, a plankton ecologist also at Swansea and coauthor of the study, reckons that the “biological glue” that Chlorella cells produce helped them stick to each other and possibly to the brood chamber and the eggs, smothering most of the zooplankton’s next generation.

Why do Chlorella engage in this harmful intrusion? The researchers suggest that this offense strategy might protect algae cells from being grazed upon and trigger a reduction in zooplankton populations in lakes in the long run.

But what remains unknown is whether the live Chlorella inside Daphnia brood chambers actually make their way out into the water or remain trapped?

“There is no reason to assume that this is beneficial for the algae,” said Dieter Ebert, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who wasn’t involved in the study. “They have no chance to get out.”

Daphnia magna, a type of tiny water flea, with an invasion of algae in its brood chamber. Its eggs, orange, are smothered by Chlorella vulgaris, in green.

Meet a bee with a very big brain

By ELIZABETH PRESTON

P

anurgus banksianus, the large shaggy bee, lives alone, burrowed into sandy grasslands across Europe. It prefers to feed on yellow-flowered members of the aster family.

The large shaggy bee also has a very large brain.

Just like mammals or birds, insect species of the same size may have different endowments inside their heads. Researchers have discovered some factors linked to brain size in back-boned animals.

But in insects, the drivers of brain size have been more of a mystery. In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists scrutinized hundreds of bee brains for patterns. Bees with specialized diets seem to have larger brains, while social behavior appears unrelated to brain size. That means when it comes to insects, the rules that have guided brain evolution in other animals may not apply.

“Most bee brains are smaller than a grain of rice,” said Elizabeth Tibbetts, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the research. But, she said, “Bees manage surprisingly complex behavior with tiny brains,” making the evolution of bee brains an especially interesting subject.

Ferran Sayol, an evolutionary biologist at University College London, and his co-authors studied those tiny brains from 395 female bees belonging to 93 species from across the United States, Spain and the Netherlands. Researchers beheaded each insect and used forceps to remove its brain.

One pattern that emerged was a connection between brain size and how long each bee generation lasted. Bees that only go through one generation each year have larger brains, relative to their body size, than bees with multiple generations a year.

Looking at the bees’ diets revealed a more surprising tendency.

In birds, “we know that species that have a broader diet tend to have bigger brains,” Sayol said. The challenge of finding and consuming a wide variety of foods may demand a large brain. However, Sayol said, “We found the opposite in bees.” The biggest brains were in dietary specialists, such as the aster-loving large shaggy bee.

Sayol speculated that a broad diet might be less of a challenge for bees than it is for birds, because all bees feed on flowers. A bee with a broad diet can fly into a field and drink the first nectar it finds. But a bee with a specialized diet may have to spot its preferred bloom, with its specific color and fragrance, among a whole field of similar flowers — a task that might require more brain.

Larger brains have also been linked to social behavior in primates and other mammals. But scientists found no connection between brain size and whether a bee lived in hives like honeybees or was a loner like our big-brained aster-eater.

The San Juan Daily Star

Friday, October 9, 2020

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ORIENTAL BANK

MMG I PR, LLC

SOBRE: Ejecución de HipoteDemandante V. ca. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS WILLIAM DE LEON DE ÁMERICA EL PRESIDENTE RODRIGUEZ DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL Demandado(a) ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE Civil: GB2019CV01181. SALA: PUERTO RICO. 201. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE GARAN- A: Norma Yolanda Donate TIAS. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SEN- Laureano, Norma Yolanda TENCIA POR EDICTO. Donate Laureano, t/c/c

A: WILLIAM DE LEON RODRIGUEZ

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) GABRIEL RIVERA ORTIZ, EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que 30 LUIS RIVERA ORTIZ, de septiembre de 2020 , este FULANA DE TAL Y LA Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, SOCIEDAD LEGAL Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debiDE GANANCIALES damente registrada y archivada COMPUESTA POR en autos donde podrá usted AMBOS enterarse detalladamente de los Demandado(a) términos de la misma. Esta notifiCivil: TA2019CV0111. SALA: cación se publicará una sola vez 403. Sobre: COBRO DE DINEen un periódico de circulación RO POR LA VIA ORDINARIA. general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA dentro de los 10 días siguientes POR EDICTO. a su notificación. Y, siendo o reA: GABRIEL RIVERA presentando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los térORTIZ, LUIS RIVERA ORTIZ, FULANA DE TAL minos de la Sentencia, Sentencia o Resolución, de la cual Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL Parcial puede establecerse recurso de DE GANANCIALES revisión o apelación dentro del COMPUESTA POR término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto AMBOS (Nombre de las partes a las que se de esta notificación, dirijo a usted le notifican la sentencia por edicto) esta notificación que se consiEL SECRETARIO(A) que sus- derará hecha en la fecha de la cribe le notifica a usted que 30 publicación de este edicto. Copia de septiembre de 2020, , este de esta notificación ha sido archiTribunal ha dictado Sentencia, vada en los autos de este caso, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución con fecha de 1 de octubre de en este caso, que ha sido debi- 2020. En GUAYNABO, Puerto damente registrada y archivada Rico, el 1 de octubre de 2020. en autos donde podrá usted LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANenterarse detalladamente de los CHEZ, Secretaria. F/MAIRENI términos de la misma. Esta notifi- TRINTA MALDONADO, Secretacación se publicará una sola vez ria Auxiliar. en un periódico de circulación LEGAL NOTICE general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE a su notificación. Y, siendo o re- PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE presentando usted una parte en PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE Demandante vs.

@

Yolanda Donate Laureano, Francisco Javier Donate Laureano, t/c/c Frantisco J. Donate Laureano, y Carlos Daniel Domde Laureano, t/c/c Carlos D. Donate Laureano de la Sucesión de Norma Laureano Rosario, t/c/c Norma Laureano.

POR LA PRESENTE, se les emplaza y se les notifica que se ha presentado en la Secretaria de este Tribunal la Demanda del caso del epígrafe solicitando la ejecución de hipoteca y el cobro de dinero relacionado al pagaré suscrito a favor de Metro Island Mortgage, Inc.,, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $255,000.00, con intereses computados sobre la misma desde su fecha hasta su total y completo pago a razón de la tasa de interés de 5.060% anual, la cual será ajustada mensualmente , obligándose además al pago de costas, gastos y desembolsos del litigio, más honorarios de abogados en una suma de $25,500.00, equivalente al 10% de la suma principal original.

Este pagaré fue suscrito bajo el affidávit número 1943 ante el notario Jennifer Córdova Córdova .

Lo anterior surge de la hipoteca constituida mediante la escritura número 103 otorgada el 22 de agosto de 2012, ante el mismo notario público , inscrita al folio 63 del tomo de 970, finca número 13,072, Sección I de Carolina.

La Hipoteca Revertida grava la

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

propiedad que se describe a continuación: por el OESTE, en trece punto cincuenta (13.50) metros, con el solar número catorce (14) del mismo bloque. Contiene una casa. Finca número 13,072, inscrita al folio 36 del tomo 341 de Carolina, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección I de Carolina Se apercibe y advierte a ustedes como personas desconocidas, que deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.jamajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal. De no contestar la demanda radicando el original de la contestación ante la secretaria del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Carolina, y notificar copia de la contestación de esta a la parte demandante por conducto de su abogada, GLS LEGAL SERVICES, LLC, Atención: Leda. Genevieve López Stipes, Dirección: P.O. Box 367308, San Juan, P.R. 00936-7308, Teléfono: 787-7586550, dentro de los próximos 60 días a partir de la publicación de este emplazamiento por edicto, que será publicado una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general en la isla de Puerto Rico, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia, concediendo el remedio solicitando en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle.

Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal hoy 5 de octubre de 2020. Lcda. Marilyn Aponte Rodriguez, Secretaria Regional.

IDA FERNANDEZ RODRÍGUEZ, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal.

LEGAL NOT ICE Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior Municipal de SAN JUAN.

MERCHANT ADVANCE LLC Demandante vs.

PFL CORPORATION D/B/A: LA MONTANARA; MANUEL A. ALSINA MIRANDA, FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS; GABRIEL ALBERTO GIL, SUTANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

25 RO POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y EJECUCIÓN. DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN DE VEHÍCULO).

NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: PFL CORPORATION D/B/A: LA MONTANARA; MANUEL A. ALSINA MIRANDA, por si y como representante de la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesta por el y su esposa; FULANA DE TAL, por si y como representante de la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesta por ella y su esposo Manuel A. Alsina Miranda; GABRIEL ALBERTO GIL, por si y como representante de la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesta por el y su esposa; SUTANA DE TAL, por si y como representante de la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesta por ella y su esposo Gabriel Alberto Gil

TORRES SEDA y IRENES TORRES; NORMA IRIS LOPEZ TORRES; DENNIS LOPEZ COLLAZO; KAREN LOPEZ COLLAZO v.

ALEX LOPEZ COLLAZO

Demandada CIVIL NÚM. BY2020CV02959.

SOBRE: LIQUIDACION SOCIEDAD LEGAL POSTGANANCIAL,DIVISIÓN DE COMUNIDAD HEREDITARIA Y AUTORIZACION DE VENTA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA SSS EL PRESIENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: ALEX LOPEZ COLLAZO

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: httrs://unired.ramaiudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal.

Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término , el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal , en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

LCDO. EDGAR A. MOLINA JORGE PO Box 733, Sabana Seca PR. 00952 Tel. (787) 472-3444 E-mail: emolinalaw@gmail.com EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y el sello del Tribunal, en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy día 28 de septiembre de 2020. LCDA. LAURA l. SANTA SÁNCHEZ, Secretaria Regional. Sandra I. Cruz Vázqucz, Secretaria Servicios a Sala.

(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 10 de julio 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 LEGAL NOTICE usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha IN THE UNITED STATES DISde la publicación de este edicto. TRICT COURT FOR THE DISCopia de esta notificación ha sido TRICT OF PUERTO RICO. archivada en los autos de este ACM CDGY caso, con fecha de 6 de octubre VI LN CFL, LLC de 2020. En SAN JUAN, Puerto Plaintiff, vs.

Rico, 6 de octubre de 2020. GRIJUAN ULISES VEGA SELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, MORALES, HIS WIFE, Secretario (a). YARILIS CASTRO VALLE, Secretaria Auxiliar.

YADIRA RIVERA ISAAC

LEGAL NOTICE

AND THE CONJUGAL

PARTNERSHIP ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE CONSTITUTED THEREIN, Defendants.

PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUCIVIL NO. 20-1131 (PAD). RE: PERIOR DE BAYAMÓN. IRENE LUISA TORRES COLLECTION OF MONIES, FORECLOSURE OF MORTGAGE. Demandado SEDA, t/c/c IRENE SUMMONS. Civil: SJ2019CV08748 (503).

TORRES SEDA, IRENES TO: JUAN ULISES VEGA SOBRE: COBRO DE DINE-

(787) 743-3346

MORALES, HIS WIFE, YADIRA RIVERA ISAAC AND THE CONJUGAL PARTNERSHIP VEGARIVERA

The Plaintiff has filed proceedings for the collection of monies and foreclosure of mortgage executed by the defendants over the property that is described in Spanish as follows: URBANA: Solar radicado en la Urbanización Coco Beach, situada en el término municipal de Rio Grande, Puerto Rico, que se describe en el plano de inscripción de la Urbanización con el número, área y colindancias que se relacionan a continuación: Solar número catorce (14) del bloque “D” y con un área de trescientos setenta y cinco punto ochenta y cinco (375.85) metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, en una distancia de dieciséis punto nueve (16.9) metros, con la calle número uno (1); por el SUR, en una distancia de quince punto sesenta y cuatro (15.74) metros, con el solar (15) quince de dicho bloque; por el ESTE, en una distancia de veintidós punto cuarenta y ocho (22.48) metros con la calle número uno (1) y por el OESTE, en una distancia de veintitrés punto veinticuatro (23.24) metros, con el solar número trece (13) de dicho bloque Enclava una casa. Inscrita al folio 84 del tomo 352 de Rio Grande, finca número 27,793, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección Tercera (III) de Carolina. The property is subject to a mortgage which secure payments of the mortgage note payable to Plaintiff or its order, as described in the Complaint.

As of November 15th, 2019, the defendants owed to plaintiff the sums of $145,209.37 in principal, $5,736.27 in accrued interest which continues to accrue until full payment of the debt at the rate of 5% per annum, $1,880.64 in accrued late charges, escrow deficiency of $618.13, and any other advance, fee or disbursements made by plaintiff on behalf of defendants, in accordance with the mortgage deed, plus costs, and ten (10) percent attorney fees. This Court has entered an order providing for summons by publication in accordance with the provisions of Rule 4.6 of the Rules of Civil Procedure for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

ACCORDINGLY, you are notified so that you may appear and answer the complaint within thirty (30) days after publication of this summons, sending copy of such answer to Plaintiff’s attorney Francisco Fernández Chiqués, Esq., FERNANDEZ CHIQUES, LLC - PO Box 9749, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00908. Tel. (787) 722-3040 Fax (787) 722-3317. Email: ffc@ffclaw.com. If you fail to do so, default judgment may be entered against you for the relief

demanded in the complaint, and the court will proceed to adjudicate the case without further notice.

A copy of the complaint and the summons is being sent to the defendant’s last known address by certified mail, return receipt requested within ten (10) days of the one and only publication of this summons. San Juan, Puerto Rico,October 1st, 2020.MARIA ANTONGIORGI-JORDAN, ESQ. CLERK OF COURT. By: Vivian Diaz Mulero, Deputy Clerk.

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

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante V.

ANGEL ANIBAL NEVAREZ RAMOS Y OTROS

Demandado(a) Civil: CA2019CV04076. Sala: 409. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO, EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA POR LA VIA ORDINARIA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: YUDELKA IDANIA SORIANO, POR SI Y COMO COADMINISTRADORA DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES QUE CONSTITUYE CON SU ESPOSO ANGEL ANIBAL NEVAREZ RAMOS.

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que 30 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 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 5 de octubre de 2020.

En CAROLINA , Puerto Rico, el 5 de octubre de 2020. LCDA. MARILYN APONTE RODRIGUEZ, Secretaria. MARICRUZ APONTE ALICEA, Secretaria Auxiliar.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

LeBron James is Mr. October this year

By MARC STEIN

T

his has never been the month that basketball players were meant to peak.

October is for baseball glory, and there can only be one Mr. October.

By swatting three home runs on three swings in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Reggie Jackson cemented one of the most fitting, enduring nicknames in all of sports.

In 2020, of course, little proceeds as is expected. LeBron James is chasing one more win for his fourth NBA championship at Walt Disney World at the same time Jackson’s beloved New York Yankees are scuffling with the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League Divisional Series at a neutral site in San Diego.

The schedule glut across so many sports has posed an unexpected quandary for Mr. October, because Jackson is also an unabashed LeBron James fan.

“I enjoy watching him as much as I do the baseball,” Jackson said. “The basketball is winding down, so if they’re both on at the same time, I’m going to be flipping back to baseball, because I’m going to be on the basketball. You need to see this guy.”

I had a feeling that was the case when I saw Jackson gushing on Twitter after the 38-point, 16-rebound, 10-assist masterpiece that James uncorked in Game 5 of the Western Conference finals to close out the Denver Nuggets.

So I called him over the weekend to confirm that Jackson would be tracking James closely, even amid the fleshiest baseball postseason ever — with 16 of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams invited after a pandemic-abbreviated regular season spanning just 60 games instead of 162.

Mr. October, at 74 now, is a lifelong basketball fan who has been watching the game long enough to cite Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Julius Erving as some of his favorites before he got to Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and, eventually, Kobe Bryant. Jackson knows as well as anyone that James, to some, will never have a

The pandemic has caused a collision between LeBron James’s quest for a championship and the playoffs in Major League Baseball. case to rival Jordan in the ever-contentious GOAT (greatest of all time) debate.

But he surmised that this doesn’t bother James as much as many of us think.

“Once in a while you get a detractor, but the comparisons for LeBron are at the highest level,” Jackson said. “He’s one of the Mount Rushmore guys.

“Is he the greatest? I would say it doesn’t really matter. When you’re in the last paragraph, you’re pretty damn good.”

Miami’s Jimmy Butler was so good in Game 3, outplaying James in the game of his life, that it prompted James to label Tuesday’s Game 4 as a must-win game to his teammates in a pregame text. Although the Lakers delivered, now they must guard against another letdown, with Bam Adebayo (neck) back in Miami’s lineup from injury and Goran Dragic (foot) potentially returning for Friday’s Game 5.

The big-picture view, though, has looked as inviting for James for much of this series as he has ever had it at playoff time. In his nine previous trips to the NBA finals, James often arrived with the decidedly weaker team (2007, 2017 and 2018). Or the team, like Miami in Games 2 and 3, was missing its second- and third-best player; Cleveland, remember, had no Kevin Love and lost Kyrie Irving in Game 1 of the 2015 finals.

Maybe this season’s landscape is James’ compensation for past inequities.

James is flanked by Anthony Davis, who even Dwyane Wade said last week was the best sidekick James has ever had.

The league, as Golden State’s Draymond Green described it in our last newsletter, is “wide open” for James, Davis and their modest supporting cast to seize with the Warriors out of contention in 2020 after five consecutive trips to the NBA Finals.

Even the abrupt halt of the NBA season

nearly seven months ago has not seemed to affect him. James initially feared that the hiatus would set him back physically; he lamented in late March that his body was in shock because the season’s suspension took him out of his usual playoff rhythm just as he was “rounding third base.”

If the Lakers blow it from here, up 3-1 and after seizing the first 2-0 finals lead of James’ career, count on the opprobrium directed at James to be louder and harsher than ever. If the Lakers finish the Heat off as widely expected, James will become the first player to win finals MVP honors with a third team.

The Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo was an overwhelmingly deserving choice to win the regular-season MVP trophy, but James’ on- and off-court deliverance, from last summer to the championship series, has been unmatched. Davis wouldn’t have forced a trade from New Orleans to the Lakers if James wasn’t already there. Frank Vogel couldn’t have coached through his first season in LA so free of drama after the collapse of the team’s negotiations with Tyronn Lue, without such support from James.

Year 1 in Hollywood was disastrous for James — and he certainly wasn’t blameless as the Lakers capitulated to a franchise-record sixth successive season without a playoff berth in 2018-19.

But he has been a beacon of reliability in leading the Lakers to the brink of the club’s 17th championship.

A planned meeting with James when he was still in high school was scuttled by a scheduling conflict, but Jackson met him in the bowels of Oracle Arena in 2016 on the night of James’ biggest triumph. Jackson made numerous trips to the Warriors’ former arena in Oakland, Calif., that season and had a close-range view of James’ chasedown rejection of an Andre Iguodala layup in Game 7 of the NBA Finals. The block helped the Cleveland Cavaliers complete a historic comeback from a 3-1 series deficit and clinch the city’s first major championship in 52 years.

“I walked up to him, shook his hand and asked him, ‘Do you know me?’”

Jackson said. “He said: ‘I know who you are. You’re Mr. October.’”

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

27

NFL’s coronavirus count rises with new positive tests

By KEN BELSON and BEN SCHPIGEL

F

or the second straight week, the NFL is grappling with the fallout from positive coronavirus tests, an existential threat to the league’s adherence to playing the season according to its schedule.

As most of the league practiced, as usual, on Wednesday, more discouraging developments surfaced in New England and Tennessee. The Patriots’ star cornerback, Stephon Gilmore, the league’s defensive player of the year in 2019, was revealed to have tested positive just four days after a positive test by the team’s quarterback, Cam Newton, was confirmed. In Nashville, two more Titans tested positive, running the team’s total of players and employees who are known to have contracted the virus since Sept. 24 to 22.

The positive tests were announced two days after the league put into place new measures meant to halt the spread of infections, protocols added after the NFL scrambled to push back two games in response to new cases.

“We just have to continue to close any loopholes,” Dr. Allen Sills, the league’s chief medical officer, said Wednesday on NFL Network. “We’ve said all along, ‘We know this is going to be hard.’ This virus is a relentless opponent. It needs only a small crack. And even 90 or 95 percent with our protocols is not enough. That’s not a passing grade because that still leaves us a bit vulnerable.”

The NFL’s battle with the virus has been made tougher by its decision not to play the regular season in a closed community, or bubble, to reduce the risk of infection from the coronavirus that it anticipated for months. Its heightened measures in light of the outbreak include video surveillance of players and team personnel to ensure maskwearing, a prohibition against traveling during bye weeks and limiting the number of free-agent tryouts.

Gilmore’s infection forced the team to cancel practice Wednesday and jeopardized the Patriots’ home game Sunday against the Denver Broncos, the second time New England would have a game moved, after their meeting with the Kansas City Chiefs was delayed a day in the wake of positive tests from Newton and a Chiefs practice squad quarterback, Jordan Ta’amu.

Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes,

Aaron Rodgers, the union representative for the Green Bay Packers, has opposed the proposed collective bargaining agreement. who played Monday against the Patriots, said it was “a little bit of a mental lapse” that after the game he high-fived Gilmore, who at that point had not tested positive.

“Just trying to show respect to a great football player who I hope is getting better very quickly,” Mahomes said Wednesday, “and I’ll try to keep away from that and try not to do it again.”

Mahomes added that after Ta’amu tested positive last week, he started sleeping in a different bedroom from his pregnant fiancée.

With no new positive tests emerging for either the Chiefs or the Patriots on Sunday or Monday — and after the league took the additional step, Sills said, of reviewing video from the Patriots’ facility to confirm compliance with wearing masks and tracking devices — the league went ahead with the game. The Patriots chartered two planes to fly to Kansas City, Mo. on Monday morning: one for players who had been in contact with Newton, another for those who hadn’t.

While the Patriots have so far reported only two confirmed cases, the Titans are dealing with a much less contained outbreak. The team must now return two consecutive days of negative tests before it can

be cleared to re-enter its facility. The Titans have not been permitted by the league to hold in-person practices since playing the Minnesota Vikings on Sept. 27.

The Titans’ initial outbreak, reported after that game, caused the NFL to reschedule the team’s Week 4 game against the Pittsburgh Steelers for Oct. 25. The latest round of positive tests this week imperils their home game Sunday against Buffalo.

But even as the league has chastised teams for their lax adherence to health protocols and threatened increased penalties for violations, some players have been vocal about maintaining their regular-season routines.

Rodger Saffold, a Titans offensive lineman, defended his teammates on social media after a report that several worked out together last week at a private school, in violation of league rules.

“Guys just don’t work out for fun this is for their lively hood, their family, their opportunity,” Saffold wrote on Twitter. “Say what you want but I’m standing up for my team always.”

For now, neither the league nor its players have moved to adjust or delay the regular-season schedule beyond moving games on an ad hoc basis rather than canceling games, expanding the length of the season or putting teams

into quarantine between games, something the NBA and other leagues have done.

The juggling act is likely to continue because even players and coaches who follow the league’s protocols to the letter are still at risk once they leave their team’s facilities.

“Once players go home or walk into Chipotle or go to their chiropractor, they are at risk because COVID is everywhere,” said David Canter, an agent who represents more than two dozen NFL players. “The best way to get through an entire season would be to consider individual bubbles for every team.”

Even as the league punishes teams, players and noncompliant coaches for violating coronavirus safety measures, a growing number of franchises are planning to increase the number of fans in their stadiums on game days.

The Steelers said this week that it would allow as many as 5,700 fans at their game against the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, following the lead of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Carolina Panthers and others who have opted to allow spectators after beginning the season without them.

Some teams are resisting the temptation. The Green Bay Packers said that because of a surge in infections in Wisconsin, they will keep playing without fans in attendance. The Miami Dolphins will continue to have no more than 13,000 fans, or about 20 percent of capacity, at their games even though state rules allow them to fill their stadium, if they choose.

The uneven response, with fans at some games and none at others, is meant to give teams flexibility to recoup some of the billions of dollars in lost revenue from games this season. But a virus this capricious could thwart further efforts by the NFL to return to something that feels like normal.

Gerardo Chowell, the chairman of the Department of Population Health Sciences at Georgia State’s School of Public Health in Atlanta, suggested economic pressures might be taking precedence as the league pressed ahead with games when teams like the Patriots and the Chiefs both reported positive cases just days ahead of their matchup.

“Once you have the data and you are seeing this type of event happening,” Chowell said in a telephone interview, “it’s hard to justify that you should continue moving forward.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

After a Cinderella British Open win, a new star adjusts to golf’s majors

By BILL FIELDS

I

t was well past midnight in Scotland by the time Sophia Popov FaceTimed with her parents, Philipp and Claudia, and older brothers Alex and Nicholas after winning the Women’s British Open at Royal Troon Golf Club in August.

The victory by Popov, then ranked 304th, shocked the golf world. It wasn’t just that she had claimed a major title following a handful of meager seasons as a professional, but how impervious the 27-year-old had seemed to the final-round pressure on one of the world’s famous courses.

“There was a lot of joy and excitement on that call,” said her brother Alex, 31. “We were super happy for her because she is super deserving. She had the skills. It was just a matter of getting over the hump and believing in herself.”

Popov, who turned 28 last week, is a player to watch in the Women’s PGA Championship, which began Thursday at Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square, Pa., a Philadelphia exurb. After seemingly coming from nowhere to win at Royal Troon, Popov’s ascendance was briefly halted by missing the ANA Inspiration — the second major on the reshuffled 2020 schedule — when the LPGA didn’t offer her an exemption to the already determined field. Having soared to No. 25 in the world rankings and possessing a twoyear exemption on the LPGA Tour, Popov is adjusting to her new status entering only the fifth major of her career.

“It’s been crazy, a little bit of a whirlwind,” Popov said. “Winning the Open was surprising not just to everyone else but to me, too. I’ve been trying to let it soak in while at the same time having a lot more on my plate. It’s changed my life in a really great way. I still wake up and can’t quite believe where I’m at now opposed to six weeks ago.”

Six months ago, Popov was competing on the Cactus Tour, an Arizona-based circuit for fledgling women’s golf pros. Before that, she had competed on the Symetra Tour, the developmental arm, after having lost exempt status on the LPGA Tour, but it and most of the world’s other major golf tours were on hiatus because of COVID-19. Employing safeguards like cup liners and individual riding carts, the Cactus Tour played on.

Popov holds dual American and German citizenship, so when she wasn’t playing in lower tier events, she worked hard

“It’s changed my life in a really great way,” Sophia Popov, 28, said of winning the Women’s British Open. “I still wake up and can’t quite believe where I’m at now opposed to six weeks ago.” on her game and fitness in Arizona, where her parents have a home and she spends time when not at her Florida residence.

“She treated it like a little boot camp for two or three months,” Rob Rashell, her swing coach, said.

Beyond getting in reps, Popov rediscovered her winning touch, claiming her first professional trophy at a tournament in mid-April and then taking two of the tour’s next five events. “It was important because I hadn’t won in six years, since I was a senior in college,” said Popov, who played at Southern California. By the time the larger tours resumed this summer, Popov had a dozen Cactus Tour events under her belt and renewed confidence.

“There is a craft to playing and winning no matter the stage,” said Rashell, who has worked with Popov since the spring of 2019. “You have to beat the players that are around you down the stretch. You have

to get used to how that feels. There is pressure regardless of where you’re playing.”

For the first two rounds at Royal Troon, the field battled severe weather conditions — the wind was so strong Popov had to use a 4-iron from 126 yards on her approach to No. 1 the first day — that tested strategy and resolve.

Not only was Popov buoyed by her trio of mini-tour victories but also from caddying this summer for fellow player and good friend Anne van Dam, a Dutch professional, in an LPGA event at Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio. Popov had urged van Dam to make conservative choices she often had eschewed when playing herself. “I thought a lot more about strategic things as caddie than as a player,” Popov said. “Sometimes you don’t need to be that aggressive, don’t need to go right for the flag.”

As Rashell watched the television

broadcasts of the Open, he was struck by Popov’s distance control. “It was amazing how many times she hit the ball pin-high,” Rashell said. “Tiger Woods has talked about that. If you can get the ball to fly the distance you want, even if you’re a little right or left, it’s a superpower in golf.”

Popov’s competitive instincts were groomed early in her life trying to keep up with her older siblings in a sports-loving family that pursued activities regardless of the season. “Between the three of us, it was always a competition,” said Nicholas, 30, who swam at the University of Arizona. “If you aren’t first, you’re last. Sophia wanted to beat us whether it was sports, academics or a card game.”

Popov’s mother was on the swim team at Stanford. Her maternal grandmother, Sabine Schwarzer, qualified to represent West Germany in the high jump at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome but, recovering from an injury and already having moved to the United States where her fiancé, Dieter, had relocated, she did not compete. As a tall teenager in the 1950s, Sabine was recruited to join her brother, Albrecht, at track and field practice.

“I saw the girls doing high-jumping, a meter 25, not even to your hips,” Schwarzer said. “I pulled up my skirt, pushed off my shoes and jumped over just like that.

I thought, ‘What’s so hard about this?’”

As her granddaughter was clearing a new bar at the British Women’s Open, Schwarzer couldn’t get the telecast on her TV at home on Nantucket. She hustled over to a friend’s house. “I needed to watch the golf. And we went crazy when Sophia won.”

A talented golfer had fulfilled longheld potential.

“Mentally, it was a huge breakthrough,” Popov said. “I’ve always battled the game between the ears more than anything else my whole golf career. For me that was the most important thing.

But I still had to execute” Popov’s $675,000 winner’s share didn’t count as official earnings because she wasn’t an LPGA member. It almost didn’t seem real when the funds were deposited in her bank account.

“It came later in the week and you look at it and go, ‘Man, it feels like something illegal is happening on your account,’” Popov said.

But like the career-changing victory itself, the money is totally on the up and up.

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

29

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

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

(Mar 21-April 20)

It might feel as if the world is spinning around you. Changes occurring now are out of your control so why stress over it? Instead, accept this is how it is going to be. There will be a pause to enable you to determine where you stand and what you can do about it. Fresh starts are likely. Just think of all the wonderful things you can do with this new energy.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

You’re trying to do too much, you’re overwhelmed with responsibility and you are asking yourself whether it’s all worth it. You might benefit from dropping some tasks or postponing a commitment until a time when you aren’t under so much pressure. You want to enjoy your work and you can’t do this when there are so many other things to do.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Scorpio

Work and financial matters cannot be ignored. You might wish someone else would deal with these for you. Since the one person who could help is conspicuous by their absence it will be up to you to clear these issues out of the way. Be sure to turn your mind to less weighty concerns this evening.

Taking a step back from activity will give you a chance to reconnect with your spiritual side.

You are more able to reassess your priorities in a quiet environment. Your aim now is to invest more time and energy into the relationships and situations in your life that are most meaningful for you.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Plans friends are making may not be your cup of tea but you will go along with them, anyway. You don’t want to be the one who rocks the boat. As it is once everything gets underway and you get into the right frame of mind, you could find some events interesting and you’ll be pleased you agreed to go.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Helping someone out could take you into an unfamiliar situation or environment. Your curiosity will be sparked as you see this as a perfect time to learn something new. This is your chance to expand your options and interests.

Look into possibilities you hadn’t considered before. Change takes you in a constructive direction. Embrace new opportunities.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

It’s OK to refuse offers, proposals and suggestions that don’t sound right for you. Go into negotiations with the aim to get what you deserve. Stay calm and remember that you should only agree on issues you are happy about. Be selective and don’t settle for second best. Look after your own interests.

You are unable to sort out practical matters when you’re working with people who insist on going with the flow. The atmosphere is disorganised and you can’t think straight. When a colleague refuses to help you deal with a complicated task, this is your chance to retreat to the background and work on your own.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Even though you are short of cash, some tempting offers will be hard to resist. Don’t get lost in temporary indulgence. Be thoughtful about what you accept and what you turn away from and what you are investing your energy into. Think about your long-term goals.

Make choices accordingly.

Changes in a loved one’s career or relationships will affect your life too. This is your chance to make some minor adjustments which have needed to be made for some time. You will also be proving that you are willing to make changes to suit other people. A balance of give and take makes for stronger relationship bonds.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

A friend or relative is too emotional and sensitive. They aren’t making good choices. You may have to help them see reason. Instead of getting caught up in conflict or instability, you will step away and move into a more peaceful environment. This helps you think more clearly and make rational and realistic decisions.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Your thoughts keep going back to a time before all the changes and challenges you have recently been through. You can’t seem to bring your focus to the present. There is a time and place for nostalgia. This isn’t it. You are stronger now and you’re a different person because you have learned so much from past experiences.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

October 9-11, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

October 9-11, 2020

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