Tuesday Sep 1, 2020

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

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PDP Legislator Files Complaint Against Pierluisi with FBI

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Governor Appoints New Secretary of State P3

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Malcolm X, Laurence Fishburne and ‘The Theater of Your Mind’ P20

PAS Emergency Line Calls Skyrocket Concerns Over Citizens’ Mental Health During Lockdown: Some Fearful of COVID-19, Others Anxious, Jobless ASSMCA Chief: More Than 200,000 Calls Have Been Received Since March

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

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September 1, 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.

Governor appoints new State secretary

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced appointed Raúl Márquez Hernández as Puerto Rico’s secretary of State on Monday.

After summoning the press via email for an “important message” to be delivered at La Fortaleza at 5 p.m., Vázquez said that after having conversations with government officials, mayors, and other leaders, she determined to designate Márquez Hernández for the seat that was left vacant after former State Secretary Elmer Román resigned to take a position in the U.S. Pentagon.

“His professional experience in municipalities, the Legislature, the executive branch and the private sector is part of the attributes of this young lawyer.

I am grateful for the commitment and availability of Márquez to accept this [appointment], give continuity to setting goals, and assume the State Department’s direction,” Vázquez said. “I not only thank the attorney for taking on this task, but also for taking it on during the most difficult moments that our people

have gone through and [when they especially need to] have honest and uncompromised officials still dedicated to serving the country.”

The designated State secretary thanked God as “not anything would be possible without Him,” and that he will continue in his commitment to helping the citizens of Puerto Rico. He said that even if there are just a little “more than 100 days left for the current government, there is work yet to be done.”

“Amid an unprecedented event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the highest priority for the Department of State is and will be the health and well being of all Puerto Ricans, particularly the elderly and people who have chronic or sensitive diseases,” Márquez said. “In the midst of this challenge brought by the pandemic, we will move our economy forward and will clear the way for the projects begun by this administration that had to pause after the lockdown.”

Earlier in the day, Vázquez announced via La Fortaleza’s Facebook page that the State Insurance Fund Corp. transferred $9 million to the island Department of Education to provide evaluations and therapies for some 100,000 special education students in the public school system.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

ASSMCA administrator: ‘We are living in hard times; our emotional state has been rattled’ Mental health services chief says PAS emergency line has received more than 200,000 phone calls related to COVID-19 since March

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

A

s more than six months have gone by since the COVID-19 pandemic emergency was declared, it’s reasonable to ask how Puerto Ricans’ mental health has been affected as the disease caused by the coronavirus has plunged the island into an economic recession and led citizens to abruptly readapt their daily routines for both their families’ and their own safety.

Mental Health & Anti-Addiction Services Administration (ASSMCA by its Spanish initials) Administrator Suzanne Roig Fuertes spoke recently to the Star about how the global pandemic has affected citizen’s emotional state and how the administration’s PAS hotline has received more phone calls than it received after Hurricane Maria.

“On Friday, we received 6,854 phone calls. When we compare it to the period

after the passing of Hurricane Maria, to be specific, five months after that atmospheric event, the most phone calls we got to our hotline was around 1,000 in a day,” Roig Fuertes said. “When you see that we got over 6,000 phone calls in one day, you can prove that citizens’ emotional health has been disrupted. We are living in hard times; our emotional state has been rattled.”

The ASSMCA chief also told the Star that the pandemic and other unexpected events such as the earthquakes in the southeast of Puerto Rico have affected every citizen whether they had a mental disorder or not as they have pushed many to change their lifestyles and habits abruptly. She added that both she and her associates have noticed the impact on the services they provide to both public entities and private companies.

“Truly, the pandemic has affected the emotions of every Puerto Rican regardless of whether we have mental disorders or not. Each of us has a mental condition that we take care of in different ways and many of the things we do to take care of them, and that we [the ASSMCA] commonly recommend, have been limited for our safety,” she said. “We have noticed changes in the number of calls we get to the PAS emergency line; we noticed it in our monitoring services; we noticed it in our employee assistance programs across our government, as public employees have also been affected by the pandemic; we

Since March 1, which is the starting point the administration chose to receive phone calls related to COVID-19, until last Friday, the head of the ASSMCA told the Star that 219,565 phone calls, around 31 percent of them, were about the disease.

have seen it from the support we give to private companies.”

Roig Fuertes said the PAS hotline has received 709,410 phone calls since 2020 began; however, since March 1, which is the starting point the administration chose to receive phone calls related to COVID-19, until last Friday, the head of the ASSMCA told the Star that 219,565 phone calls, around 31 percent of them, were about the disease.

“Now, even though we separate our calls into different categories, my impression from the services provided from our hotline is that 100 percent of the phone calls we receive have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, because, even though callers say [that their case] does not involve COVID-19, it involves their economic situation, which, consequently, has been affected by the pandemic that we have been facing since March, and, in many other cases, it goes back to the earthquakes,” she said. “Although the motive of the person’s phone call is due to an economic matter, that they have no fear of the virus and have no issues about going out and working, their real situation is related to the pandemic.

That’s why I always say that 100 percent of our phone calls [to the PAS hotline], in one way or another, are related to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Meanwhile, Roig Fuertes said the reasons citizens have called ASSMCA’s emergency line have varied over time. Some initial concerns were related to misinformation about the coronavirus, with some callers describing crippling anxiety amid the lockdown imposed by Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced on March 15. But later on, issues such as missing elder family members, being unable to be around friends and acquaintances, going back to work, feeling unsafe going outside, leaving their children at home, lack of income, shutting down businesses and unemployment have been some of the frequent reasons people have called the emergency line.

“It’s a complete readaptation not only from the spaces in which we take care of our mental health, it’s also a readaptation of our lifestyles, routines and habits. Experts have said that when changes happen drastically and in an unexpected form, these will cause a dislocation in our routines and, hence, a dislocation of citizens’ mental health,” Roig Fuertes said. “Also, people readapted to isolation, and once they adapted to the lockdown, they were told: ‘No, you have to go out again.’ They have to [shift] back to a change process.”

The Star asked Roig Fuertes how citizens can be expected to cope with COVID-19 during the Puerto Rican holiday season, including Thanksgiving and Christmas, as it is a time when both local and distant family members, friends and acquaintances tend to gather for celebrations, she said the ASSMCA recognizes how the virus might have a greater impact on citizens’ emotional state during the holidays and is working on guidelines for gathering safely.

“Now we can project that this [the COVID-19 pandemic] will have an effect going forward as there is no vaccine, as we know that there’s not a cure available yet. We know that people are dying due to the disease, mostly older people, and that the health condition of many others has been affected, even asymptomatic patients because they have to isolate from their loved ones,” she said. “As for Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, I cannot anticipate the guidelines that the governor will determine based on what the experts recommend to her. What I can anticipate is that we will keep on going forward with COVID-19; therefore, starting today, we can keep in mind that if we decide we are going to get together as a family, we must take safety measures.”

Roig Fuertes said that if people consider gathering in person, it is essential to practice social distancing, dine in open-air spaces, use face mask coverings at all times, prevent physical contact at all cost while using non-verbal language to express affection, use disposable cutlery and make guests bring their utensils. Nonetheless, she said islanders should not discard planning dinners via teleconference as it is a safer method to promote togetherness amid the physical separation necessitated by the public health emergency.

“Through a videoconference, you could have the chance to keep in contact with others through a screen; I know many others have done this during the quarantine as they were dining at their own homes, so families shouldn’t discard this idea,” she said. “These are just some suggestions that one could consider, but we know that it’s important to see each other, for the sake of our emotional health.”

Anyone needing emotional help is encouraged to call ASSMCA’s PAS hotline at 1-800-981-0023, which is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, or download the mobile app, available on Android and Apple devices.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

5

Superior Court judge dismisses charges against UPR students

By THE STAR STAFF

S

an Juan Superior Court Judge Eloina Torres Cancel on Monday dismissed charges against several University of Puerto Rico (UPR) students accused of restriction of freedom, violating a peaceful meeting and intimidation after they interrupted a UPR board meeting in 2017.

The judge dismissed the charges on the grounds that the Justice Department violated the due process rights of the students because a witness had informed the agency and the defense that another witness was not going to be able to testify.

“This decision arises from the 365-day extension of the terms, and after being analyzed by the magistrate after the defense and the public prosecutor had been notified that a witness would not be available to attend,” the decision reads.

“Contempt is a less serious crime and the witness

resides outside of Puerto Rico, so the service of the order, as well as its transfer to this jurisdiction are unlikely,” the ruling said, adding that “the Court does not have a real and effective mechanism to compel the witness to appear in this or in any other stage of the procedure.”

The case gained notoriety amid claims that the island Justice Department went on a fishing expedition by accessing the social media pages of thousands of students in order to file charges.

The Justice Department in a statement said it followed due process.

It also denied that it had created dossiers of students using their social media pages and based on their political ideology.

“The judge did not think the arguments brought by the defense had merit,” the agency said. “Therefore, the investigative actions, made pursuant to a subpoena, continue to be the legal state.”

PDP lawmaker refers complaint to FBI alleging use of phantom corporations to finance Pierluisi’s campaign

By THE STAR STAFF

P

opular Democratic Party Rep. Luis Vega Ramos filed a complaint Monday with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) against New Progressive Party gubernatorial candidate Pedro Pierluisi, accusing him of using shell corporations to finance his political campaign and get around limits on political donations.

Vega Ramos said a political action committee (PAC) led by an acknowledged friend of Pierluisi, Joey Fuentes, received $250,000 from questionably organized shell corporations as part of a scheme to violate federal law requiring that donors to PACs be identified. This scheme caused the PAC to issue false reports to the Federal Election Commission, the minority legislator said.

“Pierluisi’s allies and the NPP created a scheme to hide illegal donations that exceed the amounts established by law. That is why we have filed a complaint with the FBI detailing the federal crimes committed by these people in their scheme of shell corporations and donations in violation of the law,” Vega Ramos said.

“We have a long list of similar cases that have resulted in federal indictments for those involved.”

A complaint had previously been filed by Jorge Dávila, campaign director of Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced, against the same PAC. The PAC was originally known as PRP (the initials of Pedro R. Pierluisi) and received donations from Pierluisi’s relatives, but its name was later changed to hide its affiliation. The PAC was dormant until it was activated to receive two donations from entities created illegally with the clear purpose of hiding the origin of the funds, Vega Ramos said.

“We demand that the activities of the so-called

‘Save Puerto Rico’ PAC continue to be halted. The electoral comptroller has jurisdiction as the laundered money is being used to influence elections in Puerto Rico,” Vega Ramos said. “Likewise, we demand that the identities of the donors to this PAC used by the ghost entities be made public. We demand that this illegal scheme be stopped immediately and those responsible be investigated.”

The Puerto Rico Department of State determined that the non-profit corporations Fundación Pro Igualdad Inc. and Foundation for Progress Inc., which donated $250,000 to the super PAC Salvemos a Puerto Rico, which campaigns on behalf of Pierluisi, were registered without complying with the requirements of the General Law of Corporations, making them null.

Both corporations appear as canceled since Aug. 4 at 7:49 p.m., according to the State Department’s online Registry of Corporations.

On June 25, the super PAC received two transfers totaling $250,000 from the two phantom non-profit corporations that had been registered the same day, minutes apart, with the same postal address and without the name of a resident agent, as reflected in the Registry of Corporations.

“The corrupt scheme is obvious,” said Vega Ramos, who is seeking an at-large Senate seat. “In the record of the entities, there are only two emails with the name of each organization and two telephone numbers. The phone number listed for Foundation for Progress was in the name of a Wendy’s in Carolina, and it doesn’t work, while no one answers the phone for Fundación Pro Igualdad Inc.”

“Those who have knowingly donated or intend to donate to this scheme would be complicit in a conspiracy to blow up federal laws on contributions to political campaigns and risk criminal prosecution,” Vega Ramos added. “Likewise, we warn them that deleting messages or destroying evidence is obstruction of justice. To those who were deceived and donated thinking that this was a legitimate PAC, and in compliance with the law, I suggest cooperating with the authorities. They still have time to go to federal agencies and cooperate so as not to be considered complicit under 18 USC §2. And I warn the authors of the scheme that communicating with donors to coordinate stories is obstruction of justice.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

PDP House minority leader calls on NPP to reject oversight board’s property tax recommendations

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

P

opular Democratic Party (PDP) Rep. Rafael “Tatito” Hernández Montañez called on the Speaker of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Nuñez and the New Progressive Party (NPP) majority to reject the recommendations made by the Financial Oversight and Management Board for changes to the island’s property tax system.

“The Board’s proposal shows how alienated they are from the economic and social reality of the island,” Hernández Montañez said. “It can’t be possible that they would expect the neediest to pay more for their houses, many of them unrepaired or still with blue [tarp] awnings and whose owners do not have the necessary financial resources to live because they do not have a secure job.”

Hernández Montañez noted that in March 2019 he denounced the intention of the governing NPP administration to force the poorest to pay taxes when the demographic data of the country revealed fewer inhabitants.

“At that time I stated that there were just fewer people, but many of the companies have [since] left and there is less economic activity, so burdening the taxpayers’ pockets more with an additional $1 billion in property

taxes was not the solution,” he said.

“Once again, this idea of imposing more tax burdens on our people through a residential property tax resurfaces. On this occasion, the NPP Legislature cannot ignore it and again pretend to place all the blame on the Board,” the PDP legislator said. “They have to act and completely oppose it.”

Hernández Montañez also said “the NPP has to recognize that its public policy of taking $450 million from the municipalities failed.”

“They bankrupted the municipalities and caused the people to suffer unnecessary needs because they did not have the guts to stand up to the Junta,” he said. “Now, they cannot allow a tax to be imposed on the roofs of the poor as a remedy for the bad decision to bleed the municipalities.”

The leader of the PDP in the House highlighted the following reforms recommended by the oversight board: * The reduction of exemptions and exceptions, which is the equivalent of all properties being taxed. * That Puerto Rico should improve the uniformity of the effective tax rate on residential property and evaluate the increase of this rate for commercial property.

This eliminates the fairness of the progressive system, increasing contributions of all, and in a greater proportion

of employers who today cannot even pay their payroll.

“Undoubtedly, these proposals are wrong and are far from the current reality of a country that is facing the greatest economic crisis in its history, especially in the face of a pandemic that has caused the closure of hundreds of small and medium-sized companies, the unemployment of thousands of workers and the loss of homes by families that have no sources of income,” Hernández Montañez said. “My call to the NPP majority is to forcefully reject this absurd plan by the Board and to prevent our people from continuing to suffer the abuses of this fiscal entity.”

Loan approved for capital improvements at PRASA

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) on Monday announced the approval of financing totaling up to $163 million for 28 capital improvement projects through a loan agreement with the island Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DNER) and Infrastructure Financing Authority (AFI by its Spanish initials) through the State Rotary Fund Program (SRF) powered by funds provided by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The projects include improvements for sanitary infrastructure in the municipalities of Arroyo, Caguas, Carolina, Dorado, Guayama, Guayanilla, Patillas, Peñuelas and San Juan.

“After the successful restructuring of the debt of the pending loans of PRASA in July, 2019 under the SRF, the agency was able to regain access to the funds of the SRF Program with the agreement and collaboration of the EPA,” said PRASA Executive President Doriel Pagán Crespo.

The official also emphasized that “today we celebrate that good management of our finances allows us to invest continuously for the benefit not only of

ourselves but also of future Puerto Rican generations.”

“On behalf of all of us who work at PRASA, it is pertinent to thank our late finance director, Efraín Acosta Reboyras, to whom we owe the success of our restructuring process. Efraín no longer accompanies us on earth, but we continue to count on his legacy as a public servant committed to a better Puerto Rico,” Pagán Crespo said.

The loans will allow the public corporation to take the necessary measures to improve its infrastructure, which in turn will provide a material impact and encourage the entry of capital for the construction industry in Puerto Rico. At the same time the funds will allow improvements and modernization of the sanitary water system.

Natural and Environmental Resources Secretary Rafael Machargo Maldonado said that “in addition to providing financing for new infrastructure projects, the loan included several projects whose construction was interrupted and could not be completed prior to the restructuring.”

“These projects include the completion of the sanitary sewer system in the Las Croabas sector of Fajardo,” he said. “This project is located near the Bioluminescent

Bay, which is one of the resources of high ecological value on the island.”

Machargo also acknowledged that the signing of the loan is projected to expedite the use of federal funds from the SRF program.

“Through revolving funds we provide low-cost financing to carry out projects that ensure the well being of communities while protecting public health,” said AFI Executive Director Eduardo Rivera. “In times when we face a health emergency, it is essential to provide these resources that result in better infrastructure and living conditions.”

Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF by its Spanish initials) Executive Director Omar J. Marrero Díaz added that “[t]his financing is evidence of the progress that PRASA has made in putting its finances in order and regaining access to capital

at an extremely low cost.”

“With the consummation of this transaction, we were able to enable PRASA to continue implementing its capital improvement plan for the benefit of the people of Puerto Rico,” he said. “We thank the PRASA team for their demonstrated commitment in this and other large-scale projects that benefit the people of Puerto Rico.”

Specifically, the projects include a new sanitary trunk in Dorado, grit traps for the PAS of Puerto Nuevo, a wastewater receiving station (ideal plant) for the Puerto Nuevo PAS, the start-up of the third phase for the Aguas Buenas and Caguas Sanitary Trunk, improvements to the main sanitary sewer pump station in the municipality of Arroyo, and improvements to the Calle Nueva health trunk in Añasco, among others.

The executed loan contract provides for a 30-year amortization after completion of the relevant projects, with an interest rate of 1 percent.

The new financing was designated as “senior” debt according to the PRASA Trust Agreement, and was approved by the governing boards of PRASA, AFI and AAFAF, and by the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

7

Snapped poles, shredded roofs: A long road to recovery after Laura

By RICK ROJAS

I

n a neighborhood along the Calcasieu River, Hurricane Laura transformed the roads into a perilous labyrinth of snapped utility poles, tangles of wires and uprooted trees. In one spot, a broken pine was suspended over the asphalt by a single strained utility line — yet a parade of vehicles still passed beneath. People desperately wanted to get home.

In past storms, Patricia Broussard had been one of the lucky ones, spared from significant damage. But this time, the hurricane ripped through the mobile home where she lives with her grandson, just as it did to most of her neighbors’ homes. She had covered the enormous holes in the side of the house and was wielding a large lopper to cut off damaged siding.

“This trailer probably isn’t going to be good anymore,” said Broussard, 62, her face reddened by the blistering heat. “But I’m doing what I can with it.”

She had already been forced to leave her job at a convenience store in March, because of the coronavirus and a list of health issues that made her especially vulnerable. And now, a long year had just gotten longer.

In the working-class neighborhoods in and around Lake Charles, Louisiana, how difficult the path ahead would be was becoming clear. And on Sunday, Louisiana was staring down the toil of rebuilding both their homes and their broader community.

The damage the storm inflicted was so severe that it will be an immense undertaking just to clear debris. But beyond the physical labor, residents were also stepping into the thicket of bureaucracy that follows a hurricane, with insurance claims and applications for government aid. Federal emergency officials said that on Sunday alone, inspectors surveyed more than 200 damaged homes and issued more than $650,000 in assistance.

“We have a long road ahead of us,” Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said in a briefing Sunday.

Officials said that roughly 368,000 customers in the state remained without electricity. Some 17,000 linemen were at work on repairs, but they had a lot to tackle: some 500 transmission towers were destroyed or damaged. In some places, utility companies said, it could be at least four weeks before electricity is restored.

“This is the No. 1 priority for most people who want to resume some normalcy in their life,” Edwards said.

When Laura was roaring toward the Louisiana coast last week, officials offered grave warnings of a storm surge that meteorologists said would be “unsurvivable.” But the storm failed to deliver catastrophe on quite that scale.

Even so, Laura was the most powerful storm on record to hit Louisiana, swamping Cameron Parish on the coast and moving north with devastating winds, which were measured gusting up to 140 mph near Lake Charles. At least 16 deaths have been attributed to the storm.

CoreLogic, a data analytics firm in Irvine, California, estimated that the hurricane had caused insured losses of $8 billion to $12 billion. “The story here is going to be the wind damage,” said Curtis McDonald, a meteorologist with the firm. Of the total estimated damage, the firm said, just $500 million was probably attributable to the storm surge.

Much of the devastation has been concentrated in and around Lake Charles, a city of 78,000 heavily dependent on the

A fire burns at a BioLab industrial site in Westlake, La., near Lake Charles, on Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020, after Hurricane Laura passed through the region. oil and gas industry.

Rows of small businesses downtown were ransacked by the wind and rain. Windows of the tallest building in the city were blown out. Throughout the city, modest houses had shingles and siding shorn off, and trees that had stood for decades came crashing through roofs or spilled into impassable streets.

The destruction was especially brutal in Westlake, across the Calcasieu River from Lake Charles, with just shy of 5,000 residents and a skyline formed by the galvanized towers and flares of an oil refinery. The storm caused a fire Thursday at a Biolab chemical plant in Westlake, prompting Edwards to warn residents to “close your windows and doors and turn off your air conditioning units.”

Some residents acknowledged concerns over the community’s industrial surroundings and their unwelcome consequences. But those facilities also offered stable, decent-paying jobs, a kind of promise that might be tough to find in other places.

“You’re not going to get rich, but you can work an honest job, support your family, find a church community,” said Angela Handy, a nurse and lifelong resident of Lake Charles.

Still, a certain exasperation has taken hold, as powerful and destructive cyclones like Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Hurricane Rita in 2005 have hit the region with alarming frequency. Imelda last year was only a tropical storm, yet it led to major flooding.

“You hear it all over,” said Carl R. Griffith, a former county judge in Jefferson County, Texas, who oversaw the local response to Hurricane Rita and who served on a Louisiana commission for rebuilding after that storm. “It’s people are just frustrated, and trying

to do everything they can to protect their property, their lives and their families. But their jobs are here. It’s a great place to live.”

The region also remains in the grip of the coronavirus, with officials cautioning that the virus could become more of a threat as residents’ attention shifts to recovery work. Calcasieu Parish, which includes Lake Charles, has had 7,439 confirmed cases of the virus and 182 deaths, according to a New York Times database. As of Sunday afternoon, Louisiana as a whole has reported 148,030 cases and 4,931 deaths.

Handy sat on her front porch on a recent afternoon with her sister and their mother, who until the hurricane went by Willie Laura Williams. Now she’s begun editing out her middle name.

“She’s disavowed it,” Handy’s sister, Leah Reed, said.

Snapped limbs covered their lawn. Shingles had been shaved off the roof. The power was out and there was nowhere to go; local hotels had no room or were without electricity.

Reed had taken a drive around to survey the damage, checking on the homes of relatives and friends who had evacuated before the storm. She was disappointed to see that a buffet restaurant that opened this year was damaged. “We’ve been waiting for Golden Corral for forever and a day,” she said.

As much as she was awed by the destruction she saw on her tour, she was also heartened by the evidence of resilience in her community and a spirit of connection binding it. When her car got stuck in mud, two men walked over and pushed her free.

When she approached a fallen limb in the road, strangers lifted it up for her to pass.

8

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

U.S. will revive global virus-hunting effort ended last year

A photo provided by EcoHealth Alliance shows researchers in China preparing to collect samples from bats. A worldwide virus-hunting program allowed to expire in 2019 by the Trump administration, just before the coronavirus pandemic broke out, funded such research.

By DONALD J. McNEIL JR. andTHOMAS KAPLAN

A

worldwide virus-hunting program allowed to expire last year by the Trump administration, just before the coronavirus pandemic broke out, will have a second life — whatever the outcome of the presidential election.

Joe Biden has promised that, if elected, he will restore the program, called Predict, which searched for dangerous new animal viruses in bat caves, camel pens, wet markets and wildlifesmuggling routes around the globe.

The expiration of Predict just weeks before the advent of the pandemic prompted wide criticism among scientists, who noted that the coronavirus is exactly the sort of catastrophic animal virus the program was designed to head off.

In a speech Thursday, Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, briefly alluded to the controversy as she attacked President Donald Trump before the last night of the Republican National Convention.

“Barack Obama and Joe Biden had a program, called Predict, that tracked emerging diseases in places like China,” she said late in her 20-minute speech. “Trump cut it.”

The government agency that let Predict die last October has quietly created a $100 million program with a similar purpose as Predict, but it has a different name. The new program, set to begin in October, will be called Stop Spillover.

Predict, which was started in 2009 as part of the Obama administration’s Emerging Pan-

demic Threats program, was inspired by the 2005 H5N1 bird flu scare. Predict was run by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is an independent foreign-aid agency overseen by the State Department.

Predict was an odd fit for USAID, experts said. Unlike the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the National Institutes of Health, the agency is not normally a home to cuttingedge science.

The U.S. response to pandemics is strangely fragmented.The CDC investigates outbreaks, while the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases pursues vaccines. Much research into tropical diseases and bioweapons is done by the military, legacies of the Spanish-American War and the Cold War, while the State Department coordinates global campaigns against AIDS. Some experts have called for a more centralized arrangement, a sort of Pentagon for diseases.

In the public health arena, USAID is home to programs like the President’s Malaria Initiative and campaigns to bring clean drinking water to rural villages. But those programs rely on long-established interventions, like well-drilling, mosquito nets and anti-malaria drugs.

Interviews with former Predict officials and grantees indicate that the program was not actively targeted by the White House in 2019, but that it was allowed to die by cautious administrators who were already under pressure to cut budgets and who feared running afoul of Trump’s hostility to foreign aid.

Dennis Carroll, Predict’s creator and director, retired from government service when the virushunting program was shut down. In an interview Friday, he said Predict was closed by “risk-averse bureaucrats who were trying to divine what the Trump administration did and didn’t want.”

Carroll, a fellow at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M in College Station, is now an informal adviser on global health issues to the Biden campaign.

On Friday, a USAID spokeswoman, Pooja Jhunjhunwala, denied that Predict was canceled and said it simply came to the end of its 10-year “life cycle.”

The program was then extended twice for six months, she said — first to finish some analyses, then to help other countries fight COVID-19.

In the early days of the pandemic, Predict became a target of some administration officials because of a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based consultancy employing field veterinarians and wildlife biologists. The alliance had used the grant money to train Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to catch bats, take fecal and blood samples, and analyze them for viruses.

By then, the Wuhan institute had become the target of rumors that said it had accidentally released the lethal new coronavirus into the world.

Those rumors were repeated by national security officials without evidence, and were central to the administration’s efforts to divert blame to China, rather than to Trump, for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans from the virus.

(The rumors arose in part because one of the institute’s thousands of stored bat samples contained a virus that was a 96% match for SARSCoV-2. But because coronaviruses mutate slowly, that figure does not describe a close relative. Most evolutionary biologists interpreted the finding to suggest that the two viruses evolved from a common ancestor 40 years ago.)

During its 10-year existence, Predict spent $207 million to train about 5,000 scientists in 30 African and Asian countries, and to build or strengthen 60 laboratories to seek out animal viruses that could endanger humans. Scientists working for Predict collected more than 140,000 biological samples and found more than 1,000 new viruses, including a new strain of Ebola.

Even after Predict ended, gene-sequencing teams that it trained in Thailand and Nepal were the first to detect COVID-19 in their countries, even before they got test kits from the World Health Organization, said Dr. Jonna Mazet, a veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, who was Predict’s global director.

Both countries rapidly contained the spread

of the virus and have kept deaths from it very low, despite having cases early.

Now Predict’s five major grantees have formed a new consortium to apply for the $100 million Stop Spillover grant from USAID.The group includes the One Health Institute at UC Davis; the EcoHealth Alliance; the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo; the Smithsonian Institution, which manages the National Zoo in Washington; and the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University in New York.

“I don’t know who our competitors are, but I’m sure we have some,” said Dr. Christine K. Johnson, associate director of the One Health Institute.

The application process for the Stop Spillover grant was unusually brief, she said. USAID first discussed it with scientists in March as a possible $50 million grant, then doubled the amount and announced May 1 that applications had to be received by June 1.

The request for applications asked for expertise in known threats like the Ebola, Nipah and Lassa viruses, she said, but it also hinted that the work could be broadened to include emerging threats. The agency sought expertise in coronaviruses, filoviruses and other viral “families” that produce novel pathogens.

Carroll said Friday that he had designed Stop Spillover years ago and intended it as a “companion piece” to Predict that would focus on spotting outbreaks of known pathogens while Predict hunted for still-unknown ones.

Predict, he had hoped, would eventually be folded into the Global Virome Project, a multibillion-dollar effort to genetically sequence up to 800,000 potentially dangerous viruses discovered in dozens of animal species.

By making Stop Spillover sound like the revival of Predict, Carroll said, USAID is “trying to create an optic that gets them out of the blowback for ending Predict.”

Although Jhunjhunwala said Stop Spillover “is not a revival of Predict, nor a follow-on project,” she said it was designed to “implement the scientific gains of Predict to reduce the risk of viral spillover.”

In a statement to The New York Times, Biden vowed to restore many of the programs cut during the Trump administration, including Predict, that might have given the country more warning of an impending pandemic.

“As president, I will prioritize sustained longterm investments that ensure America is strong, resilient and ready in the face of new pandemic threats,” Biden said. Of the current crisis, he said: “It did not have to be this bad. That’s the greatest tragedy of all.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

9

Trying again: A plan for reopening California

By JILL COWAN

O

n Friday, more than a month after the state ordered most indoor businesses to close again, Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled California’s second attempt at a comprehensive plan to reopen.

“We’ve learned a lot over the last number of months,” Newsom said.

Gone is the county “monitoring list” system, which was rolled out piecemeal and has been criticized as confusing and fragmented.

In its place going forward, the governor said, is a framework that sorts each of the state’s 58 counties into a tier, which will determine how much businesses are restricted.

Unlike the monitoring-list model, which was based on a matrix of numbers that was difficult to parse, the new system is based largely on new daily case numbers per 100,000 residents, as well as positivity rates.

Gone is leeway for county public health officials to make their own case to reopen; counties now won’t be able to move to a less restrictive tier unless they have met that tier’s criteria for at least two consecutive weeks. And each county must stay in its current tier for at least three weeks before it can move.

If a county’s numbers worsen for two weeks in a row, it will be moved to a more restrictive tier.

“We’re going to be more stubborn this time,” Newsom said.

The state’s earlier moves to reopen businesses were criticized for being too hasty and driven by the impatience of some businesses and some smaller, largely rural counties, rather than by evidence. (The Los Angeles Times recently published a timeline showing how a rush to reopen businesses in Los Angeles County contributed to the virus’ alarming spread.)

Still, experts have said that the intense focus on whether to reopen nonessential businesses like restaurants, bars and movie theaters has come at the expense of what should have been more stringent enforcement of restrictions at large essential workplaces, where lower-wage workers were never able to stop working.

That is true particularly in the Central Valley, which has become the state’s most troubling and persistent hot spot.

Newsom said Friday that enforcement “strike teams,” including officials from various state agencies, have been doing spot checks aggressively for months, but that an expansion of enforcement capacity is “being negotiated” in the state’s Legislature.

Here are answers to questions you might have: Q: How did we get here?

A: All the way back in April, Newsom laid out what he described as a science-driven, deliberate phased process for reopening based on metrics such as hospitalizations, case growth and deaths.

But over the months that followed, the complexity of reopening a state with 58 very different counties spread across vast and varied geography became apparent.

Ceding to pressure from some businesses and officials mostly in smaller, more rural counties, Newsom announced a process for certain counties to move more quickly to reopen businesses than the rest of the state, effectively loosening the restrictions and adding complexity.

Then the state shifted to the “monitoring list,” which eventually came to encompass 90% of the state’s population.

In July, as cases surged, state officials announced that bars, which had been allowed to reopen indoors in many places, would have to shutter. Indoor operations of restaurants, card rooms and movie theaters were also ordered to close.

The result was a kind of emotional and economic whiplash.

Q: So what do the tiers mean?

A: There are four color-coded tiers ranging from most restrictive to least: purple, red, orange and yellow. (There is no green, the governor noted — no county should see this as an opportunity to go back to normal.)

Counties have already been placed in a tier based on their recent new case numbers and positivity rates. They’ll be able to reopen businesses that are allowed in their given tier as early as Monday.

But not a whole lot will change immediately for the vast majority of Californians. The most restrictive tier, the purple, applies to 38 counties, including Los Angeles and Orange, that are home to more than 80% of the state’s population.

In these counties, many kinds of businesses must remain closed, unless they can operate outdoors, including restaurants. All bars, breweries and distilleries must stay closed, too, even if they have outdoor space. Hair salons, barber shops and malls can reopen indoors with modifications, however.

Nine counties are in the second most restrictive tier, the red, including San Diego and San Francisco, where some indoor dining will be allowed starting today. Gyms, houses of worship and movie theaters will also be allowed to reopen indoors with limited capacity.

About a dozen mostly smaller and more rural counties are in the two least restrictive tiers, which allow them to reopen bars and other indoor businesses at higher maximum capacities.

Q: Will this affect school reopening?

A: According to state officials, the same school reopening rules that the governor laid out in July will still apply, except now, the counties in the most restrictive tier will be swapped in where the rules refer to the county monitoring list.

It’s still hardly straightforward. Teachers’ unions have expressed concerns about being forced to return to the classroom before it’s safe. The state has a waiver process for some elementary schools to reopen even in counties where in-person instruction isn’t allowed. And as thousands of college students have returned to campuses, challenges continue to emerge.

Corinne Lam and her husband, Anthony Lam, carried a chair in from an outside area as they prepared to receive clients back inside their salon Friday in San Diego.

10

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Shift on election briefings could create an information gap for voters

By DAVID E. SANGER and JULIAN E. BARNES

T

he decision by the nation’s top intelligence official to halt classified, in-person briefings to Congress about foreign interference in a presidential election that is just nine weeks away Gobierno de Puerto Rico

DEPARTAMENTO DE RECURSOS NATURALES Y AMBIENTALES

AVISO AMBIENTAL SOBRE INTENCIĂ“N DE MODIFICAR UN PERMISO PARA OPERAR UNA INSTALACIĂ“N DE DESPERDICIOS SĂ“LIDOS NO PELIGROSOS La Sra. MarĂ­a Lizardi, representante autorizada de la empresa Borinquen Metals & Scrap, Inc., cuya direcciĂłn postal es PO Box 9237, Caguas, Puerto Rico 00726, ha solicitado al Departamento de Recursos Naturales \ $PELHQWDOHV '51$ XQD PRGLÂżFDFLyQ DO 3HUPLVR SDUD 2SHUDU XQD InstalaciĂłn de Desperdicios SĂłlidos No Peligrosos, bajo las disposiciones del Reglamento para el Manejo de los Desperdicios SĂłlidos No Peligrosos (RMDSNP). /D PRGLÂżFDFLyQ GH SHUPLVR SUHVHQWDGD SRU SDUWH GH %RULQTXHQ 0HWD Is & Scrap, Inc. consiste en incluir el acopio de papel, cartĂłn, plĂĄsticos y componentes electrĂłnicos a su lista de materiales reciclables existentes {metales ferrosos, no ferrosos, baterĂ­as} en el permiso vigente para operar una instalaciĂłn de procesamiento de desperdicios sĂłlidos no peligrosos.

La referida instalaciĂłn estĂĄ ubicada en la Carretera PR-189, Km 9.1, Bo. Mamey, Gurabo, Puerto Rico.

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Copia de la solicitud de permiso, al igual que el borrador del permiso y otros documentos relevantes, estĂĄn a la disposiciĂłn del pĂşblico para ser H[DPLQDGRV HQ OD 2ÂżFLQD 5HJLRQDO GH +XPDFDR GHO 'HSDUWDPHQWR GH Recursos Naturales y Ambientales ubicada en la Ave. Boulevard del RĂ­o, 5DPDO +XPDFDR GH $ 0 D 3 0 GH OXQHV D YLHUQHV &RSLD GH GLFKRV GRFXPHQWRV SXHGHQ DGTXLULUVH HQ OD 2ÂżFLQD GH 6HFUHWDUtD ORFDOL]DGD HQ HO (GLÂżFLR GH $JHQFLDV $PELHQWDOHV &UX] $ 0DWRV &DUUHWHUD .P 6HFWRU (O &LQFR 5tR 3LHGUDV 3XHUWR 5LFR R HVFULELHQGR D OD GLUHFFLyQ Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales, San JosĂŠ Industrial Park, 1375 Ave. Ponce De LeĂłn, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00926.

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La fecha lĂ­mite para someter comentarios puede ser extendida si se estima necesario o apropiado para el interĂŠs pĂşblico. La solicitud para una vista pĂşblica deberĂĄ estar debidamente fundamentada y exponer la naturaleza de las cuestiones que se levantarĂĄn en la vista. De realizarse una vista pĂşblica los interesados o afectados tendrĂĄn la oportunidad razonable para SUHVHQWDU HYLGHQFLD R WHVWLPRQLR VREUH VL VH HPLWH R GHQLHJD OD PRGLÂżFDFLyQ de permiso, si el Secretario determina que dicha vista es necesaria o apropiada.

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Carr. PR 3, Km . 136.0, Bo. Algarrobos, Guayama , PR /2000 Avenida Los Veteranos , Guayama, PR 00784 Tel. (787) 866.0200 Fax (787) 866.0572 • www.drna.pr.gov

exposes the fundamental tension about who needs to know this information: just the president, or the voters whose election infrastructure, and minds, are the target of the hacking?

The intelligence agencies are built to funnel a stream of secret findings to the president, his staff and the military to inform their actions.

President Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he does not believe the overwhelming evidence, detailed in thousands of pages of investigative reports by the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee and indictments of Russian intelligence officers by his own Justice Department, that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election, and is at it again.

One of the bitter lessons of the last election is that intelligence about hacking into voter registration systems and the spreading of disinformation must be handled in a very different way. Those defending against misinformation include state and city election officials; Facebook, Twitter and Google; and voters themselves, who need to know who is generating or amplifying the messages they see running across their screens.

And if they do not understand the threat assessments, they will enter the most critical phase of the election — those vulnerable weeks when everything counts and adversaries have a brief window to take their best shot — without understanding the battle space.

So it is no surprise that as soon as word leaked about the decision by the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, to give Congress only written updates about the latest intelligence, former Vice President Joe Biden led the parade of accusations that Trump is paving the way for a second round of election interference. “Nothing is more important than the security and integrity of our elections,� Biden, the Democratic nominee, said in a statement on Saturday. “And we know that President Trump is unwilling to take action to protect them. That leaves Congress as the best defender of our democracy.� “There can be only one conclusion: President Trump is hoping Vladimir Putin will once more boost his candidacy and cover his horrific failures to lead our country through the multiple crises we are facing,� Biden added. “And he does not want the American people to know the steps Vladimir Putin is taking to help Trump get reelected or why Putin is eager to intervene, because Donald Trump’s foreign policy has been a gift to the Kremlin.�

Whether or not Biden’s accusation of malicious intent is correct, the White House is once again seeking to marginalize Congress and the committees that are charged with overseeing, and funding, the $80 billion intelligence enterprise.

Intelligence officials sorting through the complexities of the 2020 intelligence note that the real danger arises from the swirl of conflicting signals about how the Russians, the Chinese and the Iranians are writing new playbooks for 2020.

Interpreting their intentions — and their feints — would be hard enough in normal times.

Ratcliffe, a Trump partisan who is new to his job, is discovering that he does not have a monopoly on the intelligence. Every week dozens of cybersecurity firms issue reports that sift through evidence of malware and disinformation.

So Trump and Ratcliffe will not be stopping the flow of data about what foreign actors are up to, or whether they are succeeding. They will just be pulling the U.S. intelligence services back from publicly assessing what is important and what is background

Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), testifies during a confirmation hearing for the role of director of national intelligence on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 5, 2020. noise — at the most critical moment in a highly contested, highly divisive race that the president himself declared a month ago will be “the most rigged election� in history. “This is a new concept for the intelligence community,� Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who led a lengthy congressional study into enhancing the nation’s cyberdefenses, said in an interview on Saturday. “Their fallback position is always secret. And their second fallback position is that we only give this to the national security apparatus. Maybe we will give it to Congress. We will never give it to the American people unless someone demands it.� “But I argue the American people are the decision-makers and they are entitled to the information and it has to be given to them in a form that is useful and thoroughly examined,� he added, noting that “a cold written statement� does not meet that standard because those statements can be watered down to fit Trump’s agenda.

In fact, the challenge is that U.S. intelligence analysts do not write for the public. They employ code words understandable to those who read their reports, but which need translation for a public that is struggling to comprehend spear-phishing and ransomware and cannot agree on what constitutes disinformation. The result is that even the best-intentioned warnings often fail at their purpose.

That is one reason Democrats are pressing to interrogate the analysts and force them to state their conclusions in plain terms.

Ratcliffe insists that is too risky.

In an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, Ratcliffe said he had decided to end in-person briefings on election security because, a few weeks ago, “within minutes of one of those briefings ending, a number of members of Congress went to a number of different publications and leaked classified information, again, for political purposes to create a narrative that simply isn’t true: that somehow Russia is a greater national security threat than China.�

Ratcliffe insisted there was “a pandemic of information being leaked out of the intelligence community, and I’m going to take the measures to make sure that that stops.�

King disputes that any sources and methods were compromised, and several federal officials agreed.

What Ratcliffe ignored was the risk ahead. If the complaint about the intelligence agencies under President Barack Obama in 2016 was that they had their radar off and never saw the Russians coming until it was too late, the concern in 2020 may be a deliberate failure to communicate.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

11

Big oil is in trouble. Its plan: flood Africa with plastic.

A dump in Nakuru, Kenya, Aug. 8, 2020. Faced with plunging profits and a climate crisis that threatens fossil fuels, the fossil fuel industry is demanding a trade deal that weakens Kenya’s rules on plastics and on imports of American trash.

By HIROKO TABUCHI, MICHAEL CORKERY and CARLOS MUREITHI

C

onfronting a climate crisis that threatens the fossil fuel industry, oil companies are racing to make more plastic. But they face two problems: Many markets are already awash with plastic, and few countries are willing to be dumping grounds for the world’s plastic waste.

The industry thinks it has found a solution to both problems in Africa.

According to documents reviewed by The New York Times, an industry group representing the world’s largest chemical-makers and fossil fuel companies is lobbying to influence U.S. trade negotiations with Kenya, one of Africa’s biggest economies, to reverse its strict limits on plastics — including a tough plastic-bag ban. It is also pressing for Kenya to continue importing foreign plastic garbage, a practice it has pledged to limit.

Plastics-makers are looking well beyond Kenya’s borders. “We anticipate that Kenya could serve in the future as a hub for supplying U.S.-made chemicals and plastics to other markets in Africa through this trade agreement,” Ed Brzytwa, director of international trade for the American Chemistry Council, wrote in an April 28 letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

The United States and Kenya are in the midst of trade negotiations, and the Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has made clear he is eager to strike a deal. But the behind-the-scenes lobbying by the petroleum companies has spread concern among environmental groups in Kenya and beyond that have been working to reduce both plastic use and waste.

Kenya, like many countries, has wrestled with the proliferation of plastic. It passed a stringent law against plastic bags in 2017, and last year it was one of many nations around the world that signed on to a global agreement to stop importing plastic waste — a pact strongly opposed by the chemical industry.

The chemistry council’s plastics proposals would “inevitably mean more plastic and chemicals in the environment,” said Griffins Ochieng, executive director for the Centre for Environmental Justice and Development, a nonprofit group based in Nairobi that works on the problem of plastic waste in Kenya. “It’s shocking.”

The plastics proposal reflects an oil industry contemplating its inevitable decline as the world fights climate change. Profits are plunging amid the coronavirus pandemic, and the industry is fearful that climate change will force the world to retreat from burning fossil fuels. Producers are scrambling to find new uses for an oversupply of oil and gas. Wind and solar power are becoming increasingly

affordable, and governments are weighing new policies to fight climate change by reducing the burning of fossil fuels.

Pivoting to plastics, the industry has spent more than $200 billion on chemical and manufacturing plants in the United States over the last decade. But the United States already consumes as much as 16 times more plastic than many poor nations, and a backlash against single-use plastics has made it tougher to sell more at home.

In 2019, U.S. exporters shipped more than 1 billion pounds of plastic waste to 96 countries including Kenya, ostensibly to be recycled, according to trade statistics. But much of the waste, often containing the hardest-to-recycle plastics, instead ends up in rivers and oceans.

And after China closed its ports to most plastic trash in 2018, exporters have been looking for new dumping grounds. Exports to Africa more than quadrupled in 2019 from a year earlier.

Ryan Baldwin, a spokesman for the American Chemistry Council, said the group’s proposals tackle the global importance of dealing with waste. The letter says that there is “a global need to support infrastructure development to collect, sort, recycle and process used plastics, particularly in developing countries such as Kenya.” The Chemistry Council includes the petrochemical operations of Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Shell, as well as major chemical companies including Dow. The talks are in early stages, and it is not yet clear if trade negotiators have adopted the industry’s proposals.

But industries typically have a strong voice in shaping trade policy, and business lobbyists have won similar concessions before.

In talks with Mexico and Canada in 2018, for instance, chemicals- and pesticides-makers lobbied for, and won, terms making it tougher for those countries to regulate the industries. At the same talks, trade negotiators, urged on by U.S. food companies, also tried to restrict Mexico and Canada from warning people about the dangers of junk food on labeling but dropped the plan after a public outcry.

The Kenya proposal “really sets off alarm bells,” said Sharon Treat, a senior lawyer at the nonpartisan Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy who has worked for more than a decade advising trade talks in both the Trump and Obama administrations. Corporate lobbyists “frequently offer up very specific proposals, which the government then takes up,” she said.

The plastics industry’s proposals could also make it tougher to regulate plastics in the United States, since a trade deal would apply to both sides.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative did not respond to interview requests or to detailed lists of written questions, nor did officials at Kenya’s Trade Ministry.

Last year, Kenya was one of many countries around the world that signed on to a global agreement to stop importing plastic waste — a pact strongly opposed by the Continues on page 12

12

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

From page 11 chemical industry. Emails reviewed by The Times showed industry representatives, many of them former trade officials, working with U.S. negotiators last year to try to stall those rules.

The records, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by Unearthed, a London-based affiliate of the environmental group Greenpeace, paint a picture of close ties between the trade representatives, administration officials and industry representatives.

On March 29, 2019, for example, an executive at a recycling trade group wrote to several trade negotiators and other federal officials in order to show them a recent statement by environmental activists. “Hey ladies,” she wrote, “This gives us some good fodder to build a strategy.”

In an interview, the email’s author, Adina Renee Adler, a former senior U.S. trade official, said her trade group opposed bans on plastic waste exports because they would prevent viable plastic scrap material from being recycled. “My role is to provide them with information based on our expertise,” she said of her communications with the federal officials.

From Appalachia to Nairobi Royal Dutch Shell’s 386-acre plastics plant outside Pittsburgh is billed as the anchor for a new petrochemical hub in Appalachia, a region reeling from the collapse of the coal industry. Plants like these have revolutionized the plastics industry by turning fracked natural gas into the manufacturing material for millions of plastic bottles, bags, clamshell containers, drinking straws and a parade of other products, tapping into a seemingly endless supply of cheap shale gas from America’s booming oil and gas fields. Among local communities, the plants have raised air pollution concerns.

In Appalachia, Texas and nationwide, almost 350 new chemical plants are in the works, according to an industry tally, together representing oil companies’ life-ordeath bet on plastics as the future.

But now the coronavirus pandemic has caused not only oil and gas prices to plummet, but plastics prices, too. Last month, oil giants including Shell, Exxon Mobil and Chevron reported some of their worst financial results in history, leading some analysts to question whether the new plastics plants would deliver on the profits the companies expected.

A Shell spokesman said that while the “short-term outlook for this business is challenging,” over the long term, “products derived from petrochemicals will continue to grow and provide attractive returns.” An Exxon Mobil spokesman said the company “shares society’s concern about plastic waste” and aims to invest more in solutions to end it. Dow referred queries to the American Chemistry Council. Chevron did not respond to requests for comment.

Against that backdrop, Kenyatta visited the White House in February, eager to start trade talks. Kenya currently can send most of its exports to the United States duty-free under a regional program, but that expires in 2025.

The petrochemicals industry sensed an opening.

Exxon Mobil has forecast that global demand for petrochemicals could rise by nearly 45% over the next de-

cade, significantly outpacing global economic growth and energy demand. Most of that would come from emerging markets.

The American Chemistry Council’s April 28 letter to the trade representative’s office laid out the group’s vision.

Kenya’s growing ports, railways and road networks “can support an expansion of chemicals trade not just between the United States and Kenya, but throughout East Africa and the continent,” Brzytwa wrote.

To foster a plastics hub, he wrote, a trade deal with Kenya should prevent the country from measures that would curb plastic manufacture or use, and ensure Kenya continues to allow trade in plastic waste, demands that experts said were unusual and intrusive.

Those terms could “literally encapsulate every kind of bag ban, bottle ban,” said Jane Patton, a plastics expert at the Center for International Environmental Law. She called it an industry-led effort “to erode these democratically enacted policies” in foreign countries.

Daniel Maina, founder of the Kisiwani Conservation Network in Mombasa, Kenya, said the trade talks were coming at a particularly vulnerable time, as Kenya was starting to feel the economic effects of the pandemic. “If they were to force this sort of trade agreement on us, I fear we will be easy prey,” he said.

Kenya’s Tough Laws The American Chemistry Council is pushing back against the likes of James Wakibia, who helped inspire Kenya to enact one of the world’s toughest plastic bag bans.

As a university student walking to class, Wakibia, now 37, used to pass a noxious landfill in Nakuru, Kenya’s fourth-largest urban area. The stench and the plastic debris that spilled into the street, he said, prompted him to act.

He began campaigning, largely on social media, for the ban, and his plea soon gained traction across a country inundated with plastic. Bags were everywhere — in the air, clinging to trees, clogging waterways and causing flooding.

With strong public backing, a ban on plastic bags took effect in 2017, and it has teeth: Anyone caught breaking the law could face jail time. This year, the government followed up by banning other types of single-use plastic, including bottles and straws, in national parks and other protected areas.

“We have done something,” Wakibia said of the bag ban. “But we should not stop because there is so much pollution going on.”

Kenya is not the only country taking measures to curb plastics. A recent report by the United Nations counted 127 countries with policies on the books to regulate or limit use.

In response, the industry has tried to address the plastics issue. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste — formed by oil giants like Exxon Mobil and Chevron, as well as chemical companies like Dow — last year pledged $1.5 billion to fight plastic pollution. That figure, critics point out, is a small fraction of what the industry has invested in plastic infrastructure.

Manufacturers “say they will address plastic waste, but we say plastic itself is the problem,” Ochieng said.

“An exponential growth in plastics production is just not something we can handle.”

The San Juan Daily Star Plastics-Makers Fight Back For plastics-makers, direct deals with countries like Kenya have become more important after the industry suffered a major setback on another issue of global dimensions: plastic waste exports.

In May 2019, nations reached an agreement to regulate plastic as hazardous waste under the Basel Convention, making it far tougher to ship plastic waste to developing countries. The petrochemicals and plastics industries fought the deal, and trade negotiators largely adopted the industry’s position, according to internal emails from the Office of the United States Trade Representative and other negotiators present.

In the emails, the American Chemistry Council found a sympathetic ear among U.S. trade representatives. In April 2019, the council invited Maureen Hinman, a trade official, along with other agency officials, to discuss the industry’s $1.5 billion pollution-fighting proposal.

While environmental groups had criticized the industry’s proposals as inadequate, Hinman had a different response. “What you are doing with the alliance is an important counternarrative,” she said, referring to the industry’s Alliance to End Public Waste.

The trade office did not respond to requests to speak with Hinman or to written questions about the email.

Despite the industry opposition, last year more than 180 countries agreed to the restrictions. Starting next year, the new rules are expected to greatly reduce the ability of rich nations to send unwanted trash to poorer countries.

The United States, which has not yet ratified the Basel Convention, will not be able send waste to Basel member nations at all.

“It was the United States against the world,” said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, a nonprofit that lobbies against the plastic waste trade. “I think they were in shock.”

That setback has reenergized industry to seek deals with individual countries to boost the market for plastics and find new destinations for plastic waste, analysts say.

In Nairobi, local groups are worried. “My concern is that Kenya will become a dumping ground for plastics,” said Dorothy Otieno of the Centre for Environmental Justice and Development. “And not just for Kenya, but all of Africa.”

Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, meets with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, Feb. 6, 2020.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

13 Stocks

Global stocks dip but set for fifth month of gains; dollar weak

A

gauge of global stocks pulled back from a record high on Monday but was poised for a fifth straight month of gains while the dollar remained lethargic as investors adjust to the policy shift outlined by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell last week.

U.S. stocks were mixed, with the Dow Industrials in the red, the S&P 500 near unchanged while the Nasdaq rose solidly. The S&P is up more than 7% for the month, putting it on track for its best August since 1984; August is traditionally a softer month for stock performance.

The Nasdaq is on track to best the S&P’s performance for the month, up nearly 10%.

“It’s back to Nasdaq leadership and profit-taking in other parts of the market,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “I worry that sentiment has gotten frothy and there’s a lot of money in the market that doesn’t see any downside risk.”

Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida on Monday expanded on Powell’s comments from last week, saying that with the U.S. central bank’s new policy view, a low rate of unemployment does not on its own trigger higher interest rates. Last week, the Fed said its new strategy plan is to use higher inflation when the economy is robust to offset the impact of periods of weaker prices.

Monday marked the day first trading day for the revamped Dow, with Salesforce.com (CRM.N), Amgen Inc (AMGN.O) and Honeywell International Inc (HON.N) joining the 30-component index and Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N), Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) and Raytheon Technologies Corp RTX.N being removed. Each of the new components was lower on the session.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI fell 207.97 points, or 0.73%, to 28,445.9, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 0.27 points, or 0.01%, to 3,508.28, and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 117.00 points, or 1%, to 11,812.63.

The dollar edged lower against a basket of major currencies and was set for a fourth straight monthly decline.

In Europe, stocks closed lower on the day as financial shares were weighed down by soft inflation data in Germany and Italy, but managed to close higher for the month. Trading in London was closed for a public holiday.

MSCI’s world equity index .MIWD00000PUS, which has risen more than 6% in August, is set for a fifth month of gains as massive monetary and fiscal stimulus outweighs concern about the outlook for a world economy battered by the coronavirus. The index hit a record on Monday before reversing course on the day.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index lost 0.62% and MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe .MIWD00000PUS shed 0.14%.

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14

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Eye on Beirut, Senegal port rushes to truck away tons of ammonium nitrate

A densely populated neighborhood surrounds the port of Darkar, Senegal on Aug. 25, 2020. After nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate caused a devastating explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, the West African nation of Senegal discovered the same amount sitting in its port in Dakar.

By RUTH MACLEAN

A

t Dakar’s congested port last week, men in neon orange and yellow jackets waved their arms to speed up a line of trucks carrying away sacks of ammonium nitrate — the compound that exploded at the port in Beirut three weeks before.

Dock workers in this West African coastal city raised the alarm, port staff said, after news of the massive blast in Beirut, which killed around 200 people and injured at least 6,500. Soon Senegal was scrambling to transport more than 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate — slightly more than exploded in Beirut — out of Dakar, its densely populated capital.

The trucks were destined for gold mines in neighboring Mali, a landlocked country that has been grappling for eight years with insurgents and instability. And Mali is now in even more tumult, since less than two weeks ago its president was overthrown in a coup d’état.

The disaster in Beirut has prompted countries around the world to scrutinize their own stockpiles of ammonium nitrate and other hazardous chemicals routinely transported on ships, and sitting in ports, experts say. Sometimes, they are adjacent to large population centers.

Ammonium nitrate, used as fertilizer and as explosives in mines, is usually harmless by itself but can be dangerous under intense heat and pressure. It has been an ingredient in industrial accidents and acts of terrorism, as in 1995 when white supremacists blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City.

“After what happened in Beirut, many ports, many authorities are checking, reviewing their policies,” said Alfredo ParroquínOhlson, head of cargoes and technical cooperation coordination at the International Maritime Organization, a United Nations agency, “and of course, what they have in the storage.”

Since the blast in Beirut, Egypt has been trying to get rid of dangerous material abandoned at its ports, and the police in Romania have seized 8,500 tons of ammonium nitrate, news reports say. And in India, 700 tons of it lying near the port city of Chennai for five years was moved to Hyderabad, according to other reports.

More than 20 million tons of ammonium nitrate is produced every year, nearly half by Russia.

Inside Dakar’s port last week, trucks topped with tarpaulins and loaded with sacks of the chemical edged past trucks carrying metal wire and Buffalo brand rice.

As they awaited their chance to inch ahead in the gridlock, drivers leaned out of the windows of cabs decorated with pictures of sheikhs and slogans like Alhamdoulillahi — Praise be to God. “Fourteen hundred tons of it are already gone,” said Seydou Toure, a senior policeman at the port, last Wednesday. That was 40 trucks’ worth, he said.

On its own, ammonium nitrate is not particularly combustible, experts say, but if contaminated with gasoline or oil, or stored in containers that burn easily, like wooden boxes, it can become extremely flammable.

It is still not known exactly what triggered the explosion in Beirut.

Internationally agreed-upon recommendations apply to the transport of dangerous cargoes like oils, liquefied gases and materials like ammonium nitrate. But it is up to states themselves to enforce them.

“These recommendations are not mandatory, because all ports are different, all administrations are different,” said ParroquínOhlson at the International Maritime Organization.

This means there is room for serious gaps in policy, port procedures or staff training, he said.

In normal times, around 700 trucks leave Dakar for Mali every day. But coronavirus restrictions and instability in Mali have slowed the traffic, some port officials said.

At a truckers’ parking spot in Dakar’s warehouse district last week, Malian drivers looked at pictures of ammonium nitrate on their cellphones as they waited to get on the road, sitting on broken chairs and plastic mats by a weigh station.

The conversation on their truckers’ trade union WhatsApp group was all about the chemical.

“It’s the first I’ve heard of that product,” said Oudou Bamba, the head of his convoy of truck drivers, “but we got a message from one of our friends saying this is not something new. He’s been driving it for years.”

“It’s a bit dangerous, though,” said Salif Koné, another Malian driver.

They had already had a tough year. If the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting extra regulations at borders had been bad for business, Koné said, the Mali coup was going to make things even worse because of the uncertainty it brought.

But once the trucks do cross the border into Mali, one Senegalese port official said, the cargo is no longer his responsibility.

“How the stuff is organized when it gets to Mali, I don’t know. It’s not my job,” said the port official, who declined to be identified by name because he was not authorized to speak by his superiors. Many port officials, including those superiors, refused or ignored requests to speak.

“In all ports around the world you have the passage of dangerous cargo,” the official said.

If Dakar had not accepted the ammonium nitrate, a port in Ivory Coast or Ghana might have, and Senegal would have lost business.

Dakar has one of the oldest ports in West Africa, dating from 1867, and used to have a greater share of the goods going to landlocked countries in the region. But now Dakar faces competition.

Many of the region’s ports are trying to increase their capacity. Dakar is building a new container terminal. The port in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, is undergoing a $1.8 billion expansion financed mainly

by China’s Eximbank.

But restrictions on movement during the coronavirus pandemic and the associated economic downturns mean ports are more backed up than usual, experts said — so cargoes can sit around for longer, increasing the risk that they could be contaminated or forgotten.

As thunderclouds rolled over Senegal’s peninsular capital, prematurely darkening the late-afternoon sky, the lights coming from ships on the horizon began to gleam. They were waiting to dock.

“The threat is there,” said the port official who declined to be named. “We can’t deny it.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

15

Taliban violated Afghan deal with shelling of bases, U.S. officials say

By THOMAS GIBBONS-NEFF

R

ockets launched at a U.S. military base and a joint U.S.-Afghan airfield in southern Afghanistan in recent weeks are believed to have been fired by the Taliban, according to three U.S. military officials, in what would amount to a clear breach of the peace agreement between the United States and the insurgent group.

Roughly a dozen rockets struck in late July around Camp Bastion, a sprawling air base used by Afghan and U.S. forces in the southern province of Helmand. And several rockets were fired within the past week or so at Camp Dwyer, a large U.S. military base about 50 miles south of Bastion.

A Taliban commander familiar with the region denied that the group had carried out any strikes on U.S. bases in Helmand and said that the group would investigate. The rocket strikes may also have been carried out by a Taliban faction that is against the agreement, according to one military official who was briefed on the matter.

There were no U.S. casualties in either attack, nor a public response from Washington during a stretch in which U.S. officials have struggled to keep an already shaky peace process on track.

The U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan also declined to comment.

Helmand province, long considered the Taliban’s heartland and its opium-fueled financial breadbasket, is predominantly controlled by the insurgent group, although well-armed drug barons and differing tribal affiliations ensure that many allegiances and agendas in the region are murky. Afghan government forces there are mostly constrained to the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, and some villages that serve as district centers.

The February peace deal signed in Doha, the capital of Qatar, stipulates that the Taliban would refrain from striking U.S. or NATO forces as they gradually withdrew from the country. And the U.S. military would attack the Taliban only to defend Afghan forces.

The Taliban, long thought to be a conglomerate of various factions with differing agendas, seem to have largely stayed true to the agreement as a unified front, at least publicly, when it comes to not attacking U.S. or coalition forces. But as the Taliban have continued to mount heavy assaults against the Afghan military forces, the United States has carried out dozens of airstrikes to help the Afghans, officials say.

Another sticking point is the Taliban’s reluctance to condemn al-Qaida, the terrorist group that carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and was harbored by the Taliban. A clearly defined tenet of the Feb. 29 peace agreement calls for the Taliban to sever all ties with al-Qaida before the total withdrawal of U.S. troops. Pentagon officials believe that al-Qaida fighters continue to be well ingrained with Taliban rank and file.

Gen. Austin S. Miller, the commander of the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan, said last week that there was a “debate” on Taliban ties to al-Qaida.

“There are very strict commitments there, and they must be upheld,” Miller told 1TV, an Afghan news outlet.

Violations of the Feb. 29 deal are often raised privately by Taliban and U.S. officials through a communication channel established after the agreement’s signing. Publicly, the Taliban have denounced the United States for carrying out airstrikes on their fighters, claiming the Americans were violating the deal.

“This is one part of a bigger picture,” said Andrew Watkins, a senior analyst on Afghanistan for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based conflict resolution organization.

“The military’s general silence or lack of comment of what seems to be an ongoing dynamic in the conflict feels like a reflection of a larger trend of the Americans willing to overlook ambiguities in how the February agreement is being upheld in the interest of not jeopardizing an agreement that already feels very fragile.”

In the recent attacks, the Taliban fired rockets from several miles away that were mostly inaccurate, said one military official familiar with the events. After rockets struck Camp Dwyer, U.S. aircraft retaliated by striking the launch site, destroying a cluster of munitions that had yet to be fired, the official said.

Camp Dwyer, a British base that was turned over to the Americans at the height of the war, is quietly becoming the strategic hub for U.S. troops remaining in southern Afghanistan.

The U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan has plans to shuttle troops to Camp Dwyer from its large airfield in Kandahar before closing the base in Kandahar altogether in the coming months, according to military officials. Under the February agreement, five U.S. bases were closed and handed over to Afghan forces.

Camp Bastion was once the logistics hub for U.S. and NATO troops in Helmand province. Conjoined by the U.S. Marine base Camp Leatherneck, the base was handed over to Afghan security forces in 2014.

Several months later, as the Taliban began retaking much of the province, U.S. forces returned, establishing a small base there and using the airfield for helicopter refueling and other operations.

There are roughly 8,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, with plans to draw down to about 4,500 by the fall. Four U.S. service

members have been killed during combat operations this year, a relatively small number compared to this time in 2019, when more than a dozen U.S. troops had been killed.

The Afghan government and the Taliban are stalled on the cusp of direct negotiations in Qatar as a dispute continues about a prisoner exchange on both sides.

Under the deal between the United States and the Taliban, which initiated the phased withdrawal of U.S. troops, direct peace negotiations between the Afghan sides were conditioned on swapping 5,000 Taliban prisoners with 1,000 Afghan security forces held by the insurgents.

While the Taliban has released the Afghan prisoners, President Ashraf Ghani was reluctant to release 400 Taliban prisoners accused of serious crimes until a consultative assembly, convened this month, approved their release.

The talks were expected to begin in a matter of days after Ghani decreed the release of the last prisoners. But new hiccups have emerged: The Afghan government has conditioned the release of the Taliban on the freeing of more than a dozen Afghan commandos and pilots the insurgents are holding. Australia, France and the United States have also expressed concerns about the release of half a dozen prisoners.

While France and Australia do not want those members of the Taliban accused of attacks on their citizens released, the United States has said it has reason to believe that two of the Taliban fighters to be released would join the Islamic State group, a senior Afghan official said.

Taliban prisoners lined up at Bagram military base in Afghanistan before being released, May 26, 2020.

Rockets that U.S. officials say were fired by the insurgent group have landed around two bases used by American forces in recent weeks.

16

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Belarus president hunkers down as crowds demand he leave

By ANTON TROIANOVSKI

T

ens of thousands of people marched on the palace of President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus on Sunday, demanding he resign, as large-scale protests against the longtime, authoritarian leader entered their fourth week.

The crowd appeared to be at least as large as those of the previous two Sundays, when estimates put the protesters’ numbers at more than 100,000.

The demonstrators deployed an angry, acerbic wit but virtually no violence, and for the third weekend in a row, authorities refrained from widespread use of force or mass detentions.

The large turnout indicated that the explosion of popular fury against Lukashenko that began with the Aug. 9 presidential election is nowhere close to abating. He claimed a landslide victory that is widely believed to have been falsified and responded to the mass demonstrations that followed with a violent crackdown.

Belarus, like Ukraine, is a strategically located former Soviet republic, wedged between Russia and the former eastern bloc nations that have become democracies and joined NATO and the European Union. Lukashenko, who turned 66 on Sunday, has led Belarus since 1994, aligning himself with Russia while building a government tougher on political dissent than any other in Eu-

Tens of thousands of people demonstrate on Sunday, Aug. 30, 2020, outside the presidential palace in Minsk, Belarus. rope.

On Sunday, protesters marched through the main streets of Minsk, the capital, past a war monument encircled by razor wire and camouflage-clad soldiers and toward the Independence Palace, one of Lukashenko’s residences. At the palace, the protesters stopped when they were met by an imposing line of riot police officers that was backed by at least three military-armored personnel carriers.

They chanted, “Go away!” in the direction of the palace. Since it was his

birthday, there was also: “Lukashenko, come out! We will congratulate you!”

Lukashenko did not come out, but his press secretary released a photograph of him in a white T-shirt and black bulletproof vest in front of the palace, clutching a rifle.

Police said more than 100 people had been detained in Minsk, but protesters felt safety in numbers in the city streets amid the sea of white-and-red national flags used by the opposition.

One group staged a mock funeral procession for Lukashenko, complete with a makeshift coffin; another carried a huge cloth figure of a cockroach, one of the nicknames that Belarusians have given to their president.

“People have gotten tired of everything and stopped being afraid,” Karina Romanovskaya, a 37-year-old protester who works in retail, said shortly after a column of riot police officers marched by to chants of “Shame!”

“I am proud to live in such a wonderful country,” she said.

But a path to unseating Lukashenko, who insists the West is fomenting the demonstrations, remains far from clear.

He faced a backlash after mass beatings and the detention of thousands of protesters in the days after the election and is now avoiding scenes of violent repression that could discredit him further.

Instead, he appears determined

to wait out the protests, detaining activists and expelling foreign journalists while touting the backing of his most important ally, President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Putin recently said that Russian law enforcement officers were prepared to come to Lukashenko’s defense should the situation in Belarus spin “out of control.”

The Belarusian Association of Journalists said that the accreditation of 19 journalists had been revoked, the Reuters news agency reported Sunday.

They included a video journalist and a photographer from Reuters, as well as journalists from the BBC and the French news agency Agence France-Presse, the news organizations said.

Lukashenko’s political opponents have stressed that they are not trying to loosen ties between Belarus, a country of 9.5 million people, and Russia. They are all too aware of what happened after a popular uprising toppled a proMoscow president of Ukraine in 2014.

Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine and backed a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine.

Many of Lukashenko’s prominent critics have been jailed or forced into exile, including protest leaders and three men who had planned to run against him. His leading opponent in the election, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, said she had won, but fled the country.

The protests have been largely led by women, and thousands of women marched against Lukashenko in Minsk on Saturday, setting the stage for Sunday’s demonstration. At one point, the women pushed through a line of riot police officers, video footage showed, who hesitated to use force against them.

On Sunday, one of the few protest leaders who is still free and in Belarus, Maria Kolesnikova, walked up to the masked riot officers guarding the presidential palace and flashed a heart sign with her hands, a symbol of the protests.

“Take care of yourselves, guys,” she told the police, in a scene recorded on video and posted on social media.

“We will save you. We’re with you until the end.”

She then turned with a megaphone to the protesters and urged them to remain peaceful.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

17

French magazine sparks outrage over racist depiction of black lawmaker

By CONSTANT MÉHEUT

A

conservative French magazine is under fire after it published a fictional narrative and illustration depicting a French lawmaker as an enslaved African who was put up for auction in the 18th century.

The legislator, Danièle Obono, an anti-racism activist who is Black and was born in the former French colony of Gabon, called it “an insult to my history, to my family and ancestral histories, to the history of slavery,” and described it as a “political and racist attack.”

The seven-page fictional narrative, published this week in the magazine Valeurs Actuelles, had a series of images, including one of Obono with chains around her neck. By Saturday, French politicians from across the political divide had criticized the magazine for its highly offensive portrayal of Obono.

“This revolting publication calls for unambiguous condemnation,” Prime Minister Jean Castex wrote on Twitter. President Emmanuel Macron sent Obono a message of support.

On the far right, Wallerand de SaintJust, a top official in Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party, wrote on Twitter that what the magazine had done was unjustified. “The political fight does not justify this type of humiliating and hurtful representation of an elected representative of the republic,” he wrote.

Yves de Kerdrel, the magazine’s managing editor until 2018, said the story was “explosive,” and contributed to the “normalization of racism.” The current editors of the magazine, a weekly aimed at right-wing and far-right readers, denied that the story was racist, but issued an apology.

“I regret that people might have thought that we were racist,” Tugdual Denis, the

deputy editor of the magazine, told French channel BFMTV on Saturday. “We are nonconformist, we are politically incorrect. That is the DNA of this paper.”

The story was part of a series of short summer narratives depicting contemporary political figures in earlier historical periods and written by an anonymous author using the pseudonym Harpalus.

In it, Obono returns to the 18th century and finds herself in a small village in present-day Chad. At first, she is delighted to “reconnect with her roots.” But she soon becomes disillusioned by the village’s “patriarchal order,” and falls into the inter-African slave trade.

The story then recounts how Obono is taken to markets where enslaved Africans are sold, but found no buyers: “Danièle did not find a buyer, without knowing whether she should rejoice or lament, and not without feeling, absurdly, a small blow to her pride.”

The story ends when Obono is bought by a French cleric, freed and taken to a monastery in France to recover from the experience.

In a phone interview, Obono said she refused to read the whole story and called it, “a degrading and demeaning representation of myself and 18th-century Africa.”

The magazine’s editors said their goal was to remind readers that slavery in Africa had not only been perpetrated by Europeans, but also by Africans.

Obono, 40, is a seasoned left-wing activist who has long been involved in antiracist organizations. Critics have accused her of exaggerating the scars left by colonization as well as France’s participation in the slave trade, a subject that remains sensitive in the country.

In a statement, the magazine’s editors said they had chosen to illustrate Obono in the narrative because she had contributed to

the “ideological enterprise of the falsification of history.”

Obono said that the magazine’s story was part of a “revisionist strategy well known among the far-right, which aims to minimize responsibility for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its political, economic and social consequences.”

Valeurs Actuelles, a small, general newsmagazine established in 1966, has often been accused of offensive coverage.

In recent years, it has portrayed George Soros, the American business magnate, as “the billionaire plotting against France,” part of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. It has also described Assa Traoré, a Black antiracist activist, as willing to “bring France to its knees.”

Last year, Macron raised eyebrows when he gave an exclusive interview to the magazine and described the publication as

a “very good paper.”

France has struggled to face its colonial legacy and has often been accused of failing to successfully integrate immigrants from its former colonies. Critics say the country’s commitment to universalism — a belief that no group should be given preference — has muted the discussion and shielded France from facing its colonial past.

But some have said a slow reckoning has started to take place, with tens of thousands of people gathering to protest against racism and police violence in France in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by police officers in Minnesota earlier this year.

Obono said Valeurs Actuelles’ decision to publish the illustration was a “signal that a line has been crossed,” and that people in France were beginning to confront the country’s “systemic, structural racism.”

“This is an insult to my history, to my family and ancestral histories, to the history of slavery,” Danièle Obono, a French lawmaker, said of a published magazine story.

18

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Trump, vicar of fear and violence

By CHARLES M. BLOW

T

he use of white fear and white victimhood as potent political weapons is as old as the country itself. Donald Trump is just the latest practitioner of this trade.

As Robert G. Parkinson wrote in “The Common Cause,” his book about patriot leaders during the American Revolution, politicians used fears of insurrectionist slaves, Indian “massacres” and foreign mercenaries to unite the disparate colonies in a common fight.

Does this sound similar to Trump’s rhetoric on Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, Black Lives Matter and supposed anarchists?

Even the Founding Fathers used white fear of the “other” for political benefit. And when they didn’t have the facts, they were not above fabrication.

In 1782, before the peace treaty that officially ended the Revolutionary War had been negotiated, Benjamin Franklin, fearing some form of reconciliation between Britain and the colonies, sought to inflame passions of the colonists and embarrass the British by concocting a report of packages, including “8 large ones containing SCALPS of our unhappy Country-folks, taken in the three last Years by the Senneka Indians

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President Trump speaking at the White House during the final night of the Republican National Convention on Thursday. from the Inhabitants of the Frontiers of New-York, NewJersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia,” purportedly sent to the governor of Canada for him to transmit to England.

Among the scalps were supposedly 88 women’s scalps, 193 boys’ scalps, 211 girls’ scalps and “29 little infants’ scalps of various sizes.”

None of this was true. Franklin may be a progenitor of fake news.

White fear of rebellions by the enslaved marked American life before the Civil War and informed the legal code. As the National Park Service explained: “Slaveholding elites also regulated white behavior in attempts to increase security. One example among many occurred in 1739, when the South Carolina Legislature passed the Security Act. A response to white fear of insurrection, the act required that all white men carry firearms to church on Sundays.”

This white fear also pervaded Reconstruction. As Cornell University history professor Lawrence Glickman wrote in The Atlantic in May: “During Reconstruction, opponents of the blackfreedom struggle deployed preemptive, apocalyptic, slippery-slope arguments that have remained enduring features of backlash politics up to the present. They treated federal support for African-American civil rights, economic and social equality — however delayed, reluctant, underfunded, and incomplete it may have been — as a cataclysmic overreaction and framed it as a far more dangerous threat to liberty than the injustice it was designed to address.”

This white fear of Black violence was part of what gave birth to the Black Codes and Jim Crow, and it pervaded pop culture. It was a central theme in “The Birth of a Nation,” which helped revive the Ku Klux

Klan and was the first movie ever screened at the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, a racist who once wrote: “The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant Negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.”

More recently, white fear of Black violence and Black dominance has led to misguided urban policies, white flight from urban areas, the rise of the suburbs, difficulties enacting common-sense gun measures and the militarization of policing.

One could argue that Trump’s law and order mantra has its roots in Richard Nixon’s success with it in the 1968 presidential campaign. As Time magazine reported at the time, to some it was “a shorthand message promising repression of the black community”— and to that community, it was “a bleak warning that worse times may be coming.”

This sentiment, if not the phrase itself, has been part of presidential politics ever since. George H.W. Bush used it in 1988 with his Willie Horton campaign ad. Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill was an effort to demonstrate that Democrats could be tough on crime.

George W. Bush ran his campaign for governor of Texas using a Willie Horton-style ad, promising to be tough on crime and asserting that his opponent, Ann Richards, was soft on it.

The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, may have tapped into it a bit when she claimed that Barack Obama was “palling around with terrorists.”

And now Trump has brought it raging back. He knows, as politicians have known before him, how white fear of violence can be exploited and used as a political tool. He has done it before, and he will do it again.

White people still, for now, are the majority of the population in this country and hold the lion’s share of the country’s power. Trump knows that if he can convince enough of them that they are under threat — that their personal safety, their way of life, their heritage, and their hold on power are in danger — they will act to protect what they have.

Trump believes what his departing counsel Kellyanne Conway told “Fox and Friends” last week: that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”

But Trump isn’t the originator of law and order demagoguery, he’s just its latest vicar.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

19

Senador de Ponce es hospitalizado a causa del COVID-19 Por THE STAR

E

l senador del Distrito de Ponce, Luis Berdiel Rivera, se encuentra hospitalizado tras desmejorar ante su condición de salud a causa del coronavirus (COVID-19).

“Durante el fin de semana, mi padre, el senador Luis Berdiel Rivera experimentó mayores síntomas como consecuencia de su padecimiento de COVID-19. Siguiendo las recomendaciones de sus médicos estará siendo ingresado en un hospital para poder brindarle los tratamientos requeridos. Pedimos

a todos que lo mantengan en sus oraciones para que pueda regresar pronto a su hogar”, escribió Luis Berdiel, Jr en sus redes sociales.

Por su parte, el presidente del Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), Pedro Pierluisi Urrutia, se expresó ante la hospitalización del senador.

“Mis deseos de pronta recuperación para nuestro amigo y Senador del Distrito de Ponce, Luis Berdiel. ¡Nos unimos en oración por tu salud para que puedas vencer esta batalla! ¡Estamos contigo! “, expresó Pierluisi Urrutia en sus redes sociales.

CFSE aporta $9 millones al Departamento de Educación Por THE STAR

L

a gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced anunció el lunes, junto al administrador interino de la Corporación del Fondo del Seguro del Estado (CFSE), Juan Carlos Benítez Chacón, la otorgación de nueve millones de dólares por parte de la corporación pública al Departamento de Educación destinados al programa de Educación Especial, específicamente para evaluaciones y terapias para estudiantes, entre otras ayudas.

“Nuestros niños y jóvenes del programa de Educación Especial tendrán una ayuda adicional para enfrentar los nuevos retos que tiene el De-

partamento de Educación para educar bajo una pandemia. Ningún estudiante debe quedarse rezagado durante el nuevo semestre escolar pese a las situaciones que estemos enfrentando como pueblo. Hoy, gracias a esta ayuda que les brinda el Fondo del Seguro del Estado, nuestros estudiantes podrán tener acceso a una mejor educación”, expresó la gobernadora.

“Bajo nuestra administración, hemos trabajado para allegar fondos a tan importante programa de manera que los servicios continúen ofreciéndose a nuestros estudiantes. Esta millonaria aportación, unida a los esfuerzos que estamos llevando a cabo, no tan solo garantizan los servicios, sino también una educación de calidad. Agradezco al administrador por contribuir con la enseñanza de nuestros niños”, sostuvo la mandataria en comunicación escrita.

Por su parte, Benítez Chacón añadió que: “Nosotros los profesionales que laboramos en la Corporación del Fondo del Seguro del Estado, no tan solo tenemos un compromiso con los patronos y lesionados, sino que también procuramos que miles de niños y jóvenes con condiciones es-

peciales bajo el programa de educación especial puedan tener oportunidades para desarrollarse y avanzar en su camino al éxito”.

“Es sumamente gratificante para este servidor y para todos los que formamos parte de la CFSE el tener la oportunidad de aportar nuestro granito de arena en la educación de Puerto Rico”, agregó Benítez Chacón.

El secretario de Educación, Eligio Hernández Pérez, agradeció esta asignación para el programa de educación especial.

“Esta aportación, sin duda, permitirá que podamos ofrecer más ayudas a nuestros estudiantes. El reto de la educación en tiempos de pandemia se hace más complicado para la población de educación especial, pero nuestro equipo está buscando alternativas para asistirlos a ellos, a los padres y cuidadores. Seguiremos haciendo los ajustes que sean necesarios para que puedan tener acceso al proceso de aprendizaje”, indicó Hernández Pérez.

El Programa de Educación Especial está dirigido por Eliezer Ramos y cuenta con 105, 000 estudiantes.

20

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Malcolm X, Laurence Fishburne and ‘the theater of your mind’

By LAUREN CHRISTENSEN

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ublished in 1965, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” was not, originally, Malcolm X’s idea.

But in 1963, Alex Haley, a writer who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for “Roots,” convinced his skeptical subject to share the story of his life. During allnight interviews in Haley’s cramped Greenwich Village studio, Malcolm X recalled his upbringing in Omaha, Nebraska, by parents who decried racism and supported Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalism; his turn to hustling and crime as a young man in New York City; and how he found, was transformed by and eventually departed from the Nation of Islam.

The resulting memoir has become a foundational document not just in the history of American civil rights, but in 20th-century thought. Asked to narrate its first-ever unabridged audiobook recording, which Audible will release Sept. 10, Laurence Fishburne — an Oscar-nominated actor whose roles have included Nelson Mandela and Justice Thurgood Marshall — knew he had a tall order ahead of him.

“I don’t think Malcolm was all that trusting of Alex Haley in the beginning,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles. “He had to earn his trust.”

But this narrative is a testament to the intimacy they developed over time. “If I’ve done my job well,” Fishburne said, “the listener will come away feeling as if they’re Alex Haley, and Malcolm is speaking directly to them.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Q: In your 50 years as an actor, this is your first audiobook role. How did the format compare to performing on the screen or the stage?

A: It’s great. Once upon a time in this country, there was this thing called radio. I liken Audible to radio theater. It’s the reader and the listener engaged in this experience together.

Q: And of course, none of us are able to go to any kind of theater right now.

A: No, but you can be in the theater of your mind.

Q: You’ve said this role presented a “heavy responsibility” for you. What did you see as your greatest challenge in taking on this project?

A: Trying to capture the essence of a personage like el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz [the name Malcolm X adopted in 1964 when he left the Nation of Islam] is very, very big. He was a larger-than-life figure. As he was greatly loved, he was also greatly misunderstood. The responsibility I felt was to try and illuminate his humanity as much as possible.

What a gift he gave all of us in the way in which he lived his life. To have the foresight to record his experiences here on Earth with the clarity that the had, after growing up the way he did, in that time and place

“The responsibility I felt was to try and illuminate his humanity as much as possible,” Laurence Fishburne said of the role. and under those circumstances; after his experiences as a criminal living outside of the law, being incarcerated; being inspired and enlightened and liberated by the honorable Elijah Muhammad and Islam; and then having a change of mind about the world and the way in which he could be a part of changing it for the better.

He was really an extraordinary individual. With every chapter of the book he becomes more and more human.

Q: You began recording it before George Floyd was killed, before this year’s Black Lives Matter protests. What was it like to perform Malcolm X’s words in the new context of the civil rights movement today?

A: The timing of this audiobook doesn’t change my perspective so much as it amplifies it, and brings it into clearer focus. This has been the major theme of my life’s work: the struggle of African American people to be treated as first-class citizens in this country. When I started doing “Blackish,” the question I’d often get would be, “Why is it now that people are ready for this kind of show?” And I used to say, “Well, you know, I’ve been Black all my life.”

I was asked to read his book almost 30 years ago, and for reasons beyond my understanding that didn’t happen. Evidently the time is right. I just feel doubly blessed

to have been asked to read his book at this moment.

Q: How did you tackle the difficulty of mirroring the escalation in Malcolm X’s tone, as a man and as a narrator, over the course of the book?

A: I was blessed with a gift for the dramatic art.

So my job is just to use my instrument in the service of Malcolm, the brilliant thinker and political activist, and of this brilliant writer, the wordsmith Alex Haley.

The other secret weapon is Nicole Shelton, our director. She was my audience, and she was not just an avid listener, she was an active listener. She would stop me if even an inflection was a little wrong, and we would go back over it. We went back over things many times to get them right.

Q: When you were growing up, your father was a prison guard. How did your own upbringing impact your reading and perception of the police brutality in this book?

A: Yes, my father worked with juveniles in the correctional system in New York City. His brother, my uncle, was a beat cop for years, and then he became a detective. The stress of the job was unreal — my uncle died of a massive heart attack at the age of 49, and I think most largely due to the stresses of the job. My relationship to them, and to their father, my grandfather, who was also a civil servant — he was a postal worker — gave me a clear understanding of what was permissible and what was not. There was only a certain amount of trouble I could get into, let’s put it that way.

Q: Can you remember the first time you read this autobiography?

A: I remember reading this book when I was in my early 20s and feeling inspired by his journey. Someone who was so steeped in criminality, to be incarcerated as a result of a life of crime, and to use your incarceration to educate yourself? To come out a wiser, more well-spoken, thoughtful man — a full-grown man — with not just a fire in his belly but a real sense of mission to galvanize people, to open their eyes? That’s really, really inspiring.

Q: Here’s an unanswerable question for you: Do you think society has made progress since 1965?

A: That’s a very good question. If I were to ask you that question, what would you say?

Q: I would say not enough.

A: Right, so we can say that the answer to that question is really yes and no. We still live under systemic racism in this country. That is a fact. That has not changed. Things have changed within that system, but the system itself has not changed. And hopefully we are in a moment — and this is partly why this book is so important now, and why it may have the ability to effect more change — where it seems that more people are aware of just how much change needs to happen, and are willing to do what is necessary to create it. And that’s where things have changed.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

21

Samira Wiley and Uzo Aduba still remember struggling

By TRISH BENDIX

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ight years ago, Samira Wiley and Uzo Aduba were struggling New York actors working service jobs when they auditioned for a new series from a movierental service-turned-streaming site called Netflix.

After “Orange Is the New Black” premiered in the summer of 2013, they found themselves at the center of both a new hit show and a TV sea change, as Netflix continued its evolution into an industry-reshaping force.

This year, Netflix set an Emmy record with 160 total nominations, and Wiley and Aduba received nods of their own. Wiley was nominated for best supporting actress in a drama for playing feminist lesbian activist Moira in Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” her third nomination for the role.

Aduba is up for best supporting actress for playing pioneering congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who ran for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1972, in FX’s limited series “Mrs. America.”

“For actors, it’s not a given that you get a part on a show where, No. 1, it’s an amazing part, and, No. 2, it’s a show that people watch,” Wiley said. “I don’t know how it’s happened that both the shows that I was on have permeated the zeitgeist, but it’s amazing.”

The triumph of “Orange Is the New Black” was due partly to the tapestry of its diverse cast; Aduba and Wiley, playing Black queer characters, were fan favorites. Aduba won two Emmys for her affectionate and affable take on Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren.

(Thanks to her indelible performance and a shift in the Emmy classification rules, she won awards for the role in both the comedy and drama categories.) Wiley’s truehearted, androgynous Poussey Washington was so beloved that some viewers stopped watching the show after her character was killed by a prison guard at the end of Season 4 — Aduba among them.

“It made me too sad,” Aduba said during a recent Zoom call with Wiley. Aduba said she cried when she read the final line of the script, which described Poussey offering her signature smile one last time.

As Season 5 was being shot, Wiley remembered calling Aduba or another castmate, and they’d be together on set. “It was really hard in the beginning when all of them were still there,” she said

In a conversation, the actors Samira Wiley and Uzo Aduba look back on how “Orange Is the New Black” changed their lives and discuss their Emmy-nominated roles in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Mrs. America.”

The actors’ mutual affection was apparent during the call in late August. What began as an interview about the Emmys quickly turned into Aduba and Wiley interviewing each other about “Orange” and how it helped to shape their careers, their approaches to new roles and themselves.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: How does it feel to be nominated again? Is it still as exciting as the first few times?

SAMIRA WILEY: It still feels amazing to me. An Emmy is the highest thing that you can aspire to in our line of work. This time is no different.

UZO ADUBA: The morning of, I was on the phone with (her nominated “Mrs. America” co-stars Margo Martindale and Tracey Ullman), and they were equally excited. Tracey has like 95 Emmys; Margo the same. I also think there’s an element of realizing — Samira and myself, I know for sure — that there was a lifetime of famine.

The appreciation is there. It’s not like it was 50 years ago when I used to work at that restaurant. We can touch that time.

WILEY: And for you, Uzo, being nominated for a completely different role, I imagine that feels different.

ADUBA: It felt good. It was the same

feeling I felt when I got the job, where I was like, “Thank God I’m not not going to work again.” I’m being 100% honest — that was the feeling.

WILEY: It felt amazing to just get a job.

When I wanted to be an actor, it wasn’t like I was little and looking at TV seeing people everywhere that looked like me. And I think it started with “Orange,” because it felt like a real departure from having this idealized woman on television, going all the way back from the age of, like, “Leave It to Beaver.” Where there’s this unattainable beauty and perfection rather than having women that you’re like, “Oh, that’s me. That’s my auntie. That’s my mom.”

ADUBA: I hear you on the “Orange” of it all and the specialness of that — people who were not getting space now getting space. Now shows are getting made for women and people of color, and they’re hitting the zeitgeist in a way that’s powerful. Partly because of the social climate, but also because there is something recognizable.

WILEY: Also, the relevancy of the shows. Like “Mrs. America” — we’re living in a time where we actually have a Black woman vice-presidential candidate (Sen. Kamala Harris). And “The Handmaid’s Tale” — we know the parallels there.

Q: Let me ask you: What is it like to have now been part of two culture-shaping stories?

WILEY: Playing Poussey, getting to know her — I spent four years with her, and I was so in touch with the things that she taught me. She’s so loyal. Her moral center is so centered; it’s immovable. That show helped me understand the kind of person I want to be. And Moira is someone who taught me to embrace my activism; to be a champion for the LGBT community, to be a champion for the Black community and to not be afraid to speak up. It’s such a gift to be able to have lived with these women, to be able to shape who Samira is.

ADUBA: Did they shape Samira? Or do you think Samira shaped them as well?

WILEY: I remember being in school, trying to create a character and telling my teacher I couldn’t access something. I will never forget what my teacher said: “Well, it’s nobody up there but you.” You can’t create something up there out of nothing; it lives within you somewhere. So that’s always in my head: It has to come from me.

But these people, it’s almost like therapy.

Having internal conversations with Moira and Poussey has made me aware of these things that are deep inside me that I am now comfortable bringing to light.

22

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

The most comforting dish of all

One-pan crispy spaghetti and chicken in New York on Aug. 2, 2020. A beloved dish from Yotam Ottolenghi’s father inspired this one-pan spaghetti dinner.

By YOTAM OTTOLENGHI

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y father passed away last December. In his final months, he wasn’t the dad I’d known — always terrifically absorbed in anything that came up in conversation. Regardless of whom he was talking to, he would find something genuinely engrossing, an opportunity to learn a fact or communicate one. He also lost his appetite, which was equally shocking, because food remained a spring of little joys for him, even when everything else seemed pointless, painful and confusing.

A couple of weeks before he died, I cooked him Jerusalem artichoke soup. I say that I cooked, but, once he found out, through the mist of bewilderment that enfolded him, that someone was about to prepare one of his favorite dishes, he began telling my niece, who was sitting next to him, how to make it. “Sauté half an onion in olive oil,” he said in his barely heard voice. “Then add two small potatoes, and two artichokes and cook them, but not too much, with a little water and chicken bouillon. Add raw garlic, and process with a stick blender. You can add some parsley.” That’s all.

I was listening to this closely and followed his instructions to the letter.

My niece walked him to the kitchen to

check if I had done a good job. My dad looked inside the pan and seemed uncertain. He sat down, had a couple of spoonfuls, and then, in an uninhibited way reserved for the very old (or the very young), passed his verdict. I hadn’t gotten it right.

Remarkably, his judgment didn’t get to me. By then, we had already reversed roles: I was the father, and he was the son. He could say whatever he wanted with the brutal honesty of a child. I really didn’t mind. My father had given me, over five decades, a love of good food, curiosity for cooking and respect for anything perfectly done. Nothing he said could take that away. I also suspected that his disappointment didn’t have to do with the actual soup, but the loss of joy from eating.

(Years earlier, he’d stopped tasting the aroma of olive oil, which agonized him.) The evident satisfaction he got out of teaching was not, frustratingly, matched by the eating.

Not long after my father’s death, I went into lockdown with my husband and our two young boys, but I was far from over grieving. The loss was still alive, replaced only by more urgent needs. Lockdown also coincided with the first time my kids showed a real interest in cooking. Let’s make a lemon drizzle cake, they would say, or crispy pasta, referring to pasta al forno, the cheesycrunchy-swirly gratin my dad used to pre-

pare with leftover spaghetti. Recreating this textural bliss, even when there aren’t any leftovers around, was the impetus behind my one-pan crispy spaghetti and chicken. It has a crunchy layer on top, helped by a sprinkle of Parmesan crumbs, and another one at the bottom, where the pasta touches the hot pan and fries a little. I, of course, loved it that my boys were keen to learn how to cook. Like my father, the gratification I got out of cooking food could only be surpassed by talking about it.

The lessons, though, were normally not terribly successful. My boys’ attention span did not come anywhere near the time it actually takes to cook a dish from start to finish, not to mention cleaning up. So I would remain in the kitchen, cooking, cleaning and conceding that the knowledge wasn’t quite passed down as intended.

It didn’t matter.

Whatever “they” cooked gave my boys great pleasure, the kind of joy my dad was so irritated at losing. Seeing them hunched over a pan for pasta, fighting over the crispy bits as if they were gold dust and then devouring them with urgency, gave me all the comfort I needed then. The teaching could wait.

One-Pan Crispy Spaghetti and Chicken Yield: 4 servings Total time: 1 hour 2 tablespoons olive oil 2 1/2 pounds/1 kilogram bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (4 to 6 thighs), deboned Kosher salt and black pepper 1 large yellow onion (about 8 ounces/220 grams), cut into 1/2-inch/1-centimeter dice 3 tablespoons tomato paste 3 garlic cloves, finely chopped 2 tablespoons fresh thyme leaves 2 cups/480 milliliters boiling water 8 ounces/230 grams spaghetti, broken into thirds

1/3 lightly packed cup finely grated Parmesan (about 3/4 ounce/20 grams) 3 tablespoons/20 grams fresh breadcrumbs 1/2 cup/10 grams finely chopped fresh parsley 1 1/2 teaspoons freshly grated lemon zest 1. Heat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit/220 degrees Celsius.

2. Add 1 tablespoon oil to a large, ovenproof lidded skillet and heat over high. Season the chicken with 3/4 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper, then add to the hot oil, skin-side down. Cook for 7 minutes, without turning, to brown well.

3. Turn the heat down to mediumhigh, then stir in the onion and turn over the chicken. Cook for 5 minutes, until the onion has softened and is lightly browned. Add the tomato paste, garlic and 1 tablespoon thyme, and cook, stirring the paste into the onions, for 2 minutes, until fragrant and everything is nicely browned.

4. Add the boiling water, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper, then add the spaghetti, stirring to submerge and evenly distribute. Use tongs to lift the chicken pieces so they sit on top of the spaghetti, skin-side up. Bring to a simmer, cover with a lid and transfer to the oven for 30 minutes, until the liquid is absorbed.

5. While the pasta is in the oven, in a small bowl, mix together the Parmesan, breadcrumbs, parsley, lemon zest and remaining 1 tablespoon thyme.

6. After the pasta has baked for 30 minutes, remove it from the oven and reset the temperature to a high broil (grill) setting. Sprinkle the Parmesan breadcrumbs over the pasta and chicken, drizzle with the remaining oil and return to the center rack to broil (grill) for 3 to 4 minutes, until nicely browned and crisp.

Leave to settle for about 5 minutes before serving warm, directly from the pan.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

23

E-bikes are all the rage. Should they be?

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

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s riding an e-bike good exercise? Is riding an e-bike safe?

With interest in and sales of pedal-assisted electric bikes surging during the pandemic, those questions share a growing urgency. Two timely and soothing new studies of e-bike riders’ exertions and injuries suggest that the answer to both questions can be a qualified yes, although anyone riding an ebike needs to remain aware that the experience is certainly cycling with a kick to it.

As most of us are likely aware, bike riding has become extremely popular and aspirational this year, since so many of us are otherwise housebound. Riding gets us outside, active and heading somewhere — anywhere — else. But it also involves distance, hills, wind and sometimes leaden legs, which can be daunting.

Enter e-bikes. Short for electric bikes, these are road or mountain bikes with an added battery-powered motor to goose pedaling power. Most e-bikes fall into one of three types. Class 1 e-bikes provide assistance while you pedal, up to a speed of 20 mph. Class 2 models power your ride even if you are not pedaling, but click off at 20 mph. And Class 3 e-bikes assist pedaling up to 28 mph. (Local regulations vary about which bikes are allowed on bike paths, trails or roads. For information about ebike rules, see peopleforbikes.org/our-work/e-bikes.)

Given their ability to help us cover multiple miles without requiring a spousal sag wagon, e-bikes sales have soared by 70% or more each month since the pandemic began, according to industry statistics. But this popularity may carry a price.

Simon Cowell, the acerbic judge on “America’s Got Talent,” reported on Twitter he was hospitalized this month after fracturing his back during his first ride on a new electric trail bike, an exceptionally high-powered British version of an electric bicycle.

Many of us have heard other (sometimes apocryphal) stories about e-bike accidents. And some people wonder if riding one, with its pedal assistance, counts as a workout.

On that last count, though, the first of the new studies is reassuring. Published in July in The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, it involved 101 healthy adult men and women in Hamburg, Germany, who agreed to alternate riding either a standard bicycle or an e-bike over two separate two-week periods.

Each volunteer chose his or her preferred e-bike model, with most picking road bikes having top assisted speeds of about 20 mph. To compensate for the novelty factor, participants spent a couple of weeks getting used to their e-bikes before the study period. The researchers also provided their volunteers with activity monitors, heart rate monitors and a specialized phone app where the riders could record their trips, distance and how physically draining each ride had felt.

The scientists did not offer their volunteers any suggestions, however, about where, when or how often to ride, said Hedwig Stenner, a research associate at the Institute of Sports Medicine at Hannover Medical School, who led the new study.

The researchers wanted to see how people, on their own initiative, would use the different bikes and whether their riding would change with the e-bikes.

Electric assistance did change their habits. In general, the

men and women rode more often during the two weeks with e-bikes, averaging about five rides a week then, versus three a week with standard cycles. The distances of most people’s rides did not budge, whichever type of bike they rode; their rides were not lengthier on the e-bikes, but they were more frequent.

Their heart rates also differed. In general, people’s heart rates were about 8% lower when they pedaled e-bikes, but still consistently hovered within the range considered moderate exercise. As a result, during the two weeks when the volunteers rode e-bikes, they accumulated sufficient minutes of moderate physical activity to meet the standard exercise recommendation of 150 minutes of moderate activity. When they rode the standard bikes, they did not.

Most also reported liking the pedal assist, Stenner said.

More than two-thirds of the participants told the researchers they enjoyed the e-bikes and could imagine using them “for many years,” according to a final study questionnaire.

But whether e-bikes might pose a greater risk for injuries than standard bicycles remains an open question. “No serious injuries were reported to us,” during the research, Stenner said.

The other new study of e-bikes, which was published in December in Injury Prevention, is more cautionary, however.

For it, researchers at New York University’s School of Medicine combed a national database of emergency room visits for information about accidents related to riding a standard bicycle, motorized scooter or an e-bike from 2000 to 2017.

They found plenty of reports. More than 9 million men, women and children showed up in an emergency room after being hurt while riding a standard bike during those 17 years.

Another 140,000 injured themselves on scooters, and about 3,000 on e-bikes (an uncommon novelty in the early years of the study). In general, the e-bike injuries were the most severe and likely to require hospitalization.

Why e-bikers tended to hurt themselves more seriously than other riders is not clear from the data, said Charles DiMaggio, an injury epidemiologist at NYU Langone Health, who led the new study. But speed likely played a role. “We know that e-bikes can go faster than traditional pedal cycles,” he said, unless you are a racer who bombs down hills at more than 20 or 30 mph. “And we know that increased speed often results in more-severe injuries.”

But there is encouraging news embedded within the injury statistics, he said. In the earliest years covered by the study, a majority of e-bike injuries involved children under 18, who seem to have been the earliest adopters of this technology. The incidence among this group declined precipitously in the later years of the study, though, even as it rose among people 45 to 65. This shift could indicate that the younger riders became “more familiar” with how to ride e-bikes safely, DiMaggio said, a development that, with time and experience, should reduce injuries among other, older riders. Or the numbers could suggest that fewer young people are using e-bikes, leaving their parents or grandparents to be the ones now to try out e-bikes, and fall off them.

In either case, though, the study’s takeaway is clear, DiMaggio said. Before venturing out onto roads or paths on an e-bike, “familiarize yourself with the bike,” he said. “Wear a helmet. Follow traffic rules. Don’t drink and ride.”

24 LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA BAJA.

ORIENTAL BANK DEMANDANTE VS.

SUCESIÓN DE ÁNGEL MANUEL RAMOS CALDERA COMPUESTA POR SU VIUDA MARÍA MERCEDES RODRÍGUEZ FRANCO, POR SÍ; SU HEREDERO CONOCIDO ÁNGEL RAMOS RODRÍGUEZ; FULANO DE TAL Y SUTANA DE TAL COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS Y/O PARTES CON INTERÉS EN DICHA SUCESIÓN; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA

DEMANDADA CIVIL NÚM.: BY2019CV05819.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA .

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

otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Representa a la parte demandante, la abogada cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono se consigna de inmediato: LCDO. JUAN C. FORTUÑO FAS RÚA NÚM: 11416 FORTUÑO & FORTUÑO FAS, C.S.P. PO BOX 9300 SANTURCE, PR 00908 TEL: 787- 751-5290/ FAX: 787-751-6155 E-MAIL: ejecuciones@fortuno-law.com Se le apercibe que, si no compareciere usted a contestar dicha demanda dentro del término de 30 días a partir de la publicación de este edicto, radicando el original de la contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente, con copia a la parte demandante, se le anotaría la rebeldía y se le dictará sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. Se le apercibe que conforme al Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. § 2787, usted tiene 30 días para aceptar o repudiar la herencia desde la publicación de este edicto. A esos efectos, de no rechazarla, se tendrá la herencia por aceptada. En Vega Baja, Puerto Rico a 25 de agosto de 2020. LCDA. I SANTA SANCHEZ, Sec Regional. Carmen Melendez Hernandez, Sec Auxiliar.

referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Representa a la parte demandante, la representación legal cuyo nombre, dirección y teléfono se consigna de inmediato: JUAN R RIVERA FONT, LLC LCDO. JUAN R. RIVERA FONT RÚA NÚM.: 13,988 27 González Giusti, Suite 602 Guaynabo, PR 00968 Tel: (787) 751-5290 Fax: (787) 751-6155 EMAIL: juan@riverafont.com En Bayamón, Puerto Rico a 26 de agosto de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Sec Regional. Yariliz Cintron Colon, SubSecretaria.

Demandante V.

JUAN CARLOS MATOS VAZQUEZ

Demandado Civil: BY2020RF00773. Sobre: A: ÁNGEL RAMOS CUSTODIA Y PATRIA POTESLEGAL NOTICE RODRÍGUEZ COMO TAD. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENHEREDERO CONOCIDO ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE TENCIA POR EDICTO. PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE DE LA SUCESIÓN DE A: JUAN CARLOS INSTANCIA SALA SUANGEL MANUEL RAMOS PRIMERA MATOS VAZQUEZ PERIOR DE BAYAMÓN. (Nombre de las partes a las que se CALDERA Y FULANO North 112, LLC. le notifican la sentencia por edicto) DE TAL Y SUTANO DE Demandante vs.

EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscriTAL COMO HEREDEROS Blackhorse Construction, be le notifica a usted que el 26 de agosto de 2020 , este Tribunal DESCONOCIDOS Y/O Corp.; United Surety ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia PARTES CON INTERES & Indemnity Co.; Parcial o Resolución en este DE DICHA SUCESIÓN Compañías A, B, C; caso, que ha sido debidamente COMUNIDAD RURAL Compañías Aseguradoras registrada y archivada en autos MONSERRATE X, Y, Z; Sutano de Tal; donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos PARCELA 229-B (LOTE 1 Mengana Mas Cual de la misma. Esta notificación se Demandados CALLE 7), VEGA BAJA PR publicará una sola vez en un peCIVIL NÚM.: BY2020CV01718.

00693-4838 riódico de circulación general en SALA: 505. SOBRE: INCUMla Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de BO. PUEBLO NUEVO PLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO. 10 días siguientes a su notifi1 CALLE 7, VEGA BAJA EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDIC- los cación. Y, siendo o representanTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE PR 00693-4838 do usted una parte en el procePOR LA PRESENTE se le AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE dimiento sujeta a los términos de emplaza para que presente al LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial tribunal su alegación responsiva ASOCIADO DE P.R. ss. o Resolución, de la cual puede dentro de los 30 días de haber A: BLACKHORSE establecerse recurso de revisión sido diligenciado este emplazaCONSTRUCTION, CORP. o apelación dentro del término miento, excluyéndose el día del POR LA PRESENTE se le em- de 30 días contados a partir de diligenciamiento. Usted deberá plaza para que presente al tribu- la publicación por edicto de esta presentar su alegación responsinal su alegación responsiva den- notificación, dirijo a usted esta va a través del Sistema Unificado tro de los 30 días a partir de la notificación que se considerará de Manejo y Administración de publicación de este edicto. Usted hecha en la fecha de la publiCasos (SUMAC), al cual puede deberá presentar su alegación cación de este edicto. Copia de acceder utilizando la siguiente responsiva a través del Sistema esta notificación ha sido archivadirección electrónica: https://uniUnificado de Manejo y Adminis- da en los autos de este caso, con red.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se tración de Casos (SUMAC), al fecha de 26 de agosto de 2020. represente por derecho propio, cual puede acceder utilizando la En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico, el 26 en cuyo caso deberá presentar siguiente dirección electrónica: de agosto de 2020. LCDA. LAUsu alegación responsiva en la https://unired.ramajudicial.pr, sal- RA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secresecretaría del tribunal. Si usted vo que se represente por dere- taria. YANIRA GARCIA COSME, deja de presentar su alegación cho propio, en cuyo caso deberá Secretaria Auxiliar. responsiva dentro del referido presentar su alegación responsiLEGAL NOTICE término, el tribunal podrá dictar va en la secretaría del tribunal. sentencia en rebeldía en su conSi usted deja de presentar su ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE tra y conceder el remedio solicialegación responsiva dentro del PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE tado en la demanda, o cualquier

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PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SU- 20 de agosto de 2020. LCDA. PERIOR DE TOA ALTA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, SeAMERICAS LEADING cretario Regional. LIRIAM HERNANDEZ, Secretaria.

FINANCE, LLC Demandante, v.

ALEXIS VÁZQUEZ BURGOS, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: TA2020CV00358.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN DE VEHÍCULO). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. DE LEGAL NOTICE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE SS. JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera A: Alexis Vázquez Burgos, Instancia Sala Superior de BAsu esposa, Fulana de Tal YAMON.

SHIARA BELMARIE DIAZ MORALES

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesta por ambos.

Quedan emplazados y notificados que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que los demandados, Alexis Vázquez Burgos, su esposa, Fulana de Tal y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales compuesta por ambos, le adeudan solidariamente al Americas Leading Finance, LLC, la suma de principal de $11,273.65, más los intereses que continúen acumulando, las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado según pactados. Además, solicitamos de este Honorable Tribunal que autorice la reposesión y/o embargo del Vehículo. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que, si no comparecen a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr/ sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarles ni oírles. El abogado de la parte demandante es el Lcdo. Gerardo M. Ortiz Torres, cuya dirección física y postal es: Cond. El Centro I, Suite 801, 500 Muñoz Rivera Ave., San Juan, Puerto Rico 00918; cuyo número de teléfono es (787) 946-5268, el facsímile (787) 946-0062 y su correo electrónico es: gerardo@ bellverlaw.com. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, en TOA ALTA, Puerto Rico, hoy día

(787) 743-3346

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE CAGUAS.

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante V.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO, CUSTODIO DE LOS ARCHIVOS WESTERNBANK PUERTO RICO JOHN DOE & RICHARD ROE

Demandados CIVIL NÚM. CG2020CV01657.

SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS.

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

SENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento excluyendo el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría de! tribunal.

Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro de! 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. JAVIER MONTALVO CINTRÓN RUANÚM. 17682 DELGADO & FERNÁNDEZ, LLC PO Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 00910-1750, Tel. (787) 274-1414; Fax (787) 764-8241 E-mail: jmontalvo@ delgadofernandez.com Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 21 de agosto de 2020. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, Secretaria. JESSENIA PEDRAZA ANDINO, SubSecretaria.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE Se les notifica que en la Deman- PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUda radicada en el caso de epí- PERIOR DE BAYAMON. grafe se alega que el 26 de junio AMERICAS LEADING de 2003, se otorgó un pagaré a FINANCE, LLC favor de Westernbank Puerto Demandante V. Rico, o a su orden, por la suma CHRISTIAN de $125,000.00 de principal, con AGOSTO NIEVES intereses al 9.99% anual, con Demandado vencimiento a la presentación, ante e! Notario José M. Biaggi CIVIL NÚM.: BY2020CV00514.

Junquera. En garantía del paga- SOBRE: COBRO DE DINEré antes descrito se otorgó la es- RO POR LA VIA ORDINARIA Y critura de hipoteca número 243, EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 26 MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN DE de junio de 2003, ante el Notario VEHÍCULO). EMPLAZAMIENJosé M. Biaggi Junquera, inscrito TO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS al folio 230 del tomo 290 de San UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRELorenzo, finca 6854, inscripción SIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. DE 13, Registro de la Propiedad de AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE Caguas, Sección II. El inmueble ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO gravado mediante la hipoteca SS. antes descrita es la finca número 6854 inscrita al folio 230 del tomo 290 de San Lorenzo, Registro de la propiedad de Caguas, Sección II. La obligación evidenciada por el pagaré antes descrito fue saldada en su totalidad. Dicho gravamen no ha podido ser cancelado por haberse extraviado el original del pagaré. El original del pagaré antes descrito no ha podido ser localizado, a pesar de las gestiones realizadas. Westernbank Puerto Rico es el acreedor que consta en el Registro de la Propiedad. El último tenedor conocido de! pagaré antes descrito fue Oriental Bank. POR LA PRE-

A: CHRISTIAN AGOSTO NIEVES

Quedan emplazados y notificados que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que las demandadas, CHRISTIAN AGOSTO NIEVES, la suma de principal de $8,110.00, por concepto de deficiencia, más los intereses que continúen acumulando, las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado según pactados. Además, solicitamos de este Honorable Tribunal que autorice la reposesión y/o embargo del Vehículo.

The San Juan Daily Star Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que, si no comparecen a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https:/tunired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarles ni oírles. La abogada de la parte demandante es la Lcdo. Gerardo M. Ortiz Torres, cuya dirección física y postal es: Cond. El Centro I, Suite 801, 500 Muñoz Rivera Ave., San Juan, Puerto Rico 00918; cuyo número de teléfono es (787) 946-5268, el facsímile (787) 946-0062 y su correo electrónico es: gerardo@bellverIaw. com. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, en Bayamon, Puerto Rico, hoy día 21 de agosto de 2020. LCDA LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Sec Regional. Sandra I Cruz Vazquez, Secretari a Servicios a Sala.

LEGAL NOT ICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAROLINA.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante v.

SUCESIÓN DE ELIAS FLORES MORALES, compuesta por: FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, como posibles herederos desconocidos, IRIS MILAGROS MONTAÑEZ APONTE, por sí y en la cuota viudal usufructuaria

Demandado CIVIL NÚM: CA2019CV04014 (404). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE GARANTÍAS. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://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. Este caso trata sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Garantías en que la parte demandante solicita que se condene a la parte demandada a pagar: la suma principal de $94,309.87, más intereses a razón de 3.875%, desde el 1 de abril de 2019, que se acumulan diariamente hasta su total y completo pago, más la suma de $87.36 por cargos por mora, más la suma de $311.43 en conexión con la cuenta de reserva, más la suma de $9,872.40 por concepto de costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado hipotecariamente asegurados. Se le apercibe que si dejare de hacerlo, se dictará contra usted sentencia en rebeldía, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la demanda enmendada, sin más citarle ni oírle. Se ordena a los herederos a que dentro del mismo término de treinta (30) días contados a partir de la fecha de notificación, ACEPTEN O REPUDIEN la participación que les corresponda en la herencia del causante Elias Flores Morales.

Se les apercibe que de no expresarse dentro del término de (30) días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia, se tendrá por aceptada.

Lcda. Ivonne González Medrano, Número del Tribunal Supremo 11,623 PO Box 195553, San Juan, PR, 00919-5553, Teléfono: (787) 449-6000, Facsímile: (787) 474-3892, Correo Electrónico: igonzalez@splawpr.com EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y Sello del Tribunal, hoy día 4 de marzo de 2020 LCDA. MARILYN APONTE RODRIGUEZ, Sec Regional. Ruth M Colon, Secretaria Aux del Tribunal.

LEGAL NOTICE

A: FULANO Y MENGANO ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE DE TAL, como posibles PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE INSTANCIA SALA SUherederos desconocidos PRIMERA PERIOR DE JUANA DfAZ. de Elias Flores Morales J R MORTGAGE DIRECCIÓN HOME INC. DESCONOCIDA Parte Demandante Vs. DE: BANCO POPULAR BANCO Y AGENCIA DE DE PUERTO RICO FINANCIAMIENTO DE LA POR LA PRESENTE se le emVIVIENDA DE PUERTO plaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva den- RICO; John Doe y Richard tro de los 30 días siguientes a la Doe como posibles publicación de este edicto. Usted tenedores desconocidos deberá presentar su alegación

Parte Demandada

The San Juan Daily Star CIVIL NUM. JD2020CV00242.

SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTOS. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE COMO posibles tenedores desconocidos

POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto. Usted deberá radicar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y· Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicíal.pr/ sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, Lcda. Marjaliisa Colón Villanueva, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-843-4168. En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cancelación de pagare extraviado. Se alega en dicho procedimiento se constituyó s favor de Sana Mortgage Corporation, o a su orden, por la suma de $33,300.00 con un interés anual de 7%, vencedero el primero de noviembre de 2027. Que mediante la escritura número 319, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 7 de octubre de 1997, ante el notario Rita Lynne rodr[guez De la Rocha, en el cual se constituyó hipoteca en garantía de pagaré , a favor de Sana Mortgage Corporation, o a su orden, por la suma de $33,300.00 con un interés anual de 7%, vencedero el primero de noviembre de 2027, y cuya obligación hipotecaria fue inscrita al folio ciento dieciocho (118) de tomo ciento cincuenta y seis (156) de Santa Isabel, finca número cinco mil novecientos ochenta y cinco (5,985). inscripción segunda (2da). La propiedad que garantiza dicho pagaré: URBANA: Solar radicado en el Barrio Velázquez del Municipio de Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico marcado en el plano de inscripción con el número veinticuatro (24) del Bloque D de la Urbanización Estancias de Santa Isabel, con una cabida de trescientos tres punto seiscientos (303.600) metros cuadrados.

En lindes por el NORTE, con el lote tres (3) , en una distancia de doce punto seiscientos cincuenta (12.650) metros; por el SUR, con la calle número cuatro (4), en una distancia de doce punto seiscientos cincuenta (12.650) metros; por el ESTE, con el lote número veintitrés (23) , en una distancia de veinticuatro punto cero cero (24.00) metros; y por el OESTE, con le lote número veinticinco (25), en una distancia de veinticuatro punto cero cero (24.00) metros. Afecto a servidumbre de un ancho de cinco pies (5’) a lo largo de su colindancia Sur a favor de Puerto Rico Telephone

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Company. Enclava una casa.

Inscrita al folio ciento dieciocho (118) del tomo ciento cincuenta y seis (156) de Santa Isabel, finca número cinco mil novecientos ochenta y cinco (5,985). Registro de la Propiedad de Guayama. SE LES APERCIBE que, de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aqul dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni olrle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Juana Díaz, Puerto Rica, a 21 de agosto de 2020. Luz Mayra Caraballo Garcia, Secretaria. Doria A Rodriguez Colon, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE SAN JUAN SALA SUPERIOR 807.

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante Vs.

NELSON ABRAHAM FREYRE GALLARDO, KARENNIE MALAVE COTT’O Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES POR ESTOS COMPUESTA; JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

Demandados CIVIL NÚM: SJ2020CV03502.

SOBRE: SUSTITUCIÓN DE PAGARE HIPOTECARIO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: JOHN DOE y RICHARD ROE

Se les notifica que en la Demanda que se presentó en el caso de epígrafe se alega que un pagaré hipotecario otorgado el 30 de noviembre de 2011, Nelson Abraham Freyre Gallardo y Karennie Malave Cotto otorgó en San Juan, Puerto Rico un pagaré hipotecario por la suma principal de $75,000.00, con intereses a razón del 5.875% anual, a favor de Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria Puerto Rico (hoy Oriental Bank), con vencimiento el 1 de diciembre de 2026, ante el Notario Ignacio José Gorrín Maldonado, mediante el afidávit número 4515, se extravió, sin embargo la deuda evidenciada y garantizada por dicho pagaré hipotecario no ha sido salda, por lo que la parte demandante solicita que se ordene la sustitución del mismo.

En garantía de dicho pagaré el 30 de noviembre de 2011, Nelson Abraham Freyre Gallardo y Karennie Malave Cotto constituyó hipoteca número 325 ante el Notario Ignacio José Gorrín Maldonado en garantía del pago del pagaré antes descrito, inscrita al folio 219 del tomo 693 de Rio Piedras Sur, finca 16853, inscripción lima, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección IV. La hipoteca que garantiza dicho pagaré

grava la propiedad inmueble que se describe a continuación: SOLAR marcado con el #5 del bloque J de la Sección Guayacán en la Urbanización Montehiedra radicada en el Barrio Caimito de Río Piedras, del término municipal de San Juan, Puerto Rico, compuesto de 1,073.3984 metros cuadrados, equivalentes a 0.2731 cuerdas y en lindes por el NORTE, con el solar #J-6, en distancia de 37.599 metros lineales; por el SUR, con el solar #J-4, en distancia de 39.980 metros lineales; por el ESTE, con área verde #1, en distancia de 33.218 metros lineales; y por el OESTE, con la calle Bien Te Veo, en un arco de 22.758 metros lineales.

Finca 16853 inscrita al folio 219 del tomo 693 de Río Piedras Sur, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección IV. POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requieren que presenten al Tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los treinta (30) días de haber sido publicado este emplazamiento excluyéndose el día de la publicación. 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: http//united.raniajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante LCDO. JAVIER MONTALVO CINTRÓN, DELGADO & FERNÁNDEZ, LLC., PO Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 009 10-1750,Tel. (787) 2741414 ¡Fax (787) 764-824; E-mail: jmontalvo@delgadofernandez. com. SE LE APERCIBE que, de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aquí dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA y el Sello del Tribunal, hoy día 13 de julio de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Sec Regional. Sonia I Rivera Gambaro, Sec Tribunal Conf.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO

PARTE DEMANDANTE VS.

DORAL FINANCIAL CORPORATION POR CONDUCTO DE SU AGENTE RESIDENTE, DORAL MORTGAGE CORPORATION T/C/C DORAL MORTGAGE, LLC., POR CONDUCTO DE SU AGENTE RESIDENTE CT CORPORATION SYSTEM FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE

CORPORATION (FDIC) COMO SÍNDICO DE DORAL BANK; LA SUCESIÓN DE GONZALO ESTRADA GARCÍA COMPUESTA POR FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; LA SUCESIÓN DE GLORIA PAGÁN RIVERA T/C/C GLORIA PAGÁN DE ESTRADA COMPUESTA POR GONZALO ESTRADA PAGÁN, FULANEJO Y SUTANEJO DE TAL, POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; NANCY ESTRADA T/C/C NANCY ESTRADA PAGÁN, GLORIA MARGARITA ESTRADA PAGÁN, MARITZA ESTRADA PAGÁN, IRIS ENEYDA ESTRADA PAGÁN y LUCÍA ESTRADA PAGÁN COMO HEREDERAS DE GONZALO ESTRADA GARCÍA Y DE GLORIA PAGÁN RIVERA T/C/C GLORIA PAGÁN DE ESTRADA; SUTANO Y PERENCEJO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ

PARTE DEMANDADA CIVIL NÚM. CG2020CV00020 (702). SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO POR LA VÍA JUDICIAL. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: GONZALO ESTRADA PAGÁN, HEREDERO DE GLORIA PAGÁN RIVERA T/C/C GLORIA PAGÁN DE ESTRADA a sus últimas direcciones conocidas: URB CARIBE GDNS J26, CALLE DALIA CAGUAS, PR 00725-3410, 1212 WOODLAWN AVE., VINELAND, NJ 083604414 y 121 N EAST AVE., VINELAND NJ 083603809.

Queda usted notificado que en este Tribunal se ha radicado demanda sobre cancelación de pagaré extraviado por la vía judicial.

El 28 de diciembre de 1999, Gonzalo Estrada García y su esposa Gloria Pagán Rivera t/c/c Gloria Pagán de Estrada constituyeron una hipoteca en San Juan, Puerto Rico, conforme a la Escritura núm. 598 autorizada por el notario Miguel A. Hernandez Sanabria, en garantía de un pagaré por la suma de $85,500.00 a favor de Doral Mortgage Corporation o a su orden, con intere-

ses al 8.75% anual y vencedero el 1ro enero de 2030, sobre la siguiente propiedad: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número 26 del bloque J de la Urbanización Caribe Gardens, radicada en el Barrio Tomás de Castro del término municipal de Caguas, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de 300.00 metros cuadrados.

En lindes por el NORTE, en una distancia de 24.00 metros, con el solar número 27 del bloque J de la Urbanización; por el SUR, en una distancia de 24.00 metros.

Con el solar número 25 de dicho bloque J: por el ESTE, en una distancia de 12.50 metros, con el solar 29 del expresado bloque J de la Urbanización: y por el OESTE, en una distancia de 12.50 metros, con la calle número 7 de la expresada Urbanización.

Enclava una casa La propiedad y la escritura de hipoteca constan inscritas al folio 250 del tomo 1502 de Caguas, Finca 14430.

Registro de la Propiedad de Caguas, Sección I. Inscripción octava. La parte demandada 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.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal Se le advierte que si no contesta la demanda, radicando el original de la contestación en este Tribunal y enviando copia de la contestación a la abogada de la Parte Demandante, Lcda. Belma Alonso García, cuya dirección es: PO Box 3922, Guaynabo PR 009703922, Teléfono y Fax: (787) 7891826, correo electrónico: oficinabelmaalonso@gmail.com, dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, excluyéndose el día de la publicación, se le anotará la rebeldía y se le dictará Sentencia en su contra, concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle.

EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y el sello del Tribunal, hoy 24 de agosto de 2019, en Caguas, Puerto Rico. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, SECRETARIA (O). YAMAIRA M. RIOS CARRASCO, SUB-SECRETARIA(O).

25

SÁNCHEZ, CARLOS AUGUSTO RIVERA SÁNCHEZ, CARLOS ERNESTO RIVERA SÁNCHEZ, AND CARLOS SÁNCHEZ MATOS by himself and as member of the ESTATE OF NYDIA PIÑEIRO CARMONA;

Defendants.

Civil No. 3:20-cv-1062 (GAG).

COLLECTION OF MONIES AND FORECLOSURE OF MORTGAGE. SUMMONS BY PUBLICATION.

TO: CARLOS AUGUSTO RIVERA SÁNCHEZ by himself and as member of the Estate of Nydia Piñeiro Carmona 9935 Warm Stove Street Thonotosassa, FL 33592

The plaintiff, Abbey Cayman Asset Company (“Abbey”) has filed proceedings for the foreclosure of mortgage executed by the Defendant on a property situated at: Lot of land marked with number 221 of the Rural Community of Sabana Seca Ward, of the municipality of Toa Baja, Puerto with a capacity of 793.96 square meters recorded in the Registry of Property of Bayamon, Second Section, at page 180 of volume 369 of Toa Baja, Registry of Property of Bayamon, Second Section, property number 21,756. The property is subject to a mortgage which secures payment of the mortgage loan and the mortgage note payable to Abbey Cayman Asset Company, which mortgage appear recorded in the Registry of Property of Bayamon, Second Section, at page 85 of volume 547 of Toa Baja, Registry of Property of Bayamon, Second Section, property number 21,756. As of December 31, 2019, the defendant(s) owe(s) plaintiff the following amounts: (a) $81,008.05 in principal; accrued interests in the amount of $45,236.08 which continues to accrue, even post-judgment as per the agreement of the parties, until full payment of the debt at $17.89 per diem, accrued late charges in the amount of $26.83; other expenses in the amount of $1,253.50, plus any other advance, charge, fee or disbursements LEGAL NOTICE made by Abbey Cayman Asset United States District Court for the Company, on behalf of Defendants, in accordance with the District of Puerto Rico. FORM H. Mortgage Note and Mortgage, ABBEY CAYMAN plus costs and agreed attorney’s ASSET COMPANY; fees in the amount of $12,800.00.

Plaintiff, v.

Defendants are responsible and THE ESTATE OF NYDIA jointly liable for the payment of the Obligations in accordance PIÑEIRO CARMONA the Mortgage Note and Mortformed by MARISBEL with gage, as well as under the other SÁNCHEZ PIÑEIRO A/K/A loan documents. Carlos Augusto Rivera Sánchez as member of MARIBEL SÁNCHEZ the Estate of Nydia Piñeiro CarPIÑEIRO, CALUIN mona must express his accepSÁNCHEZ PIÑEIRO, tance or rejection of his participaRAMÓN EDGARDO tion in the estate within thirty (30) days of notification of the instant SÁNCHEZ PIÑEIRO, action and upon failure to do so, it HÉCTOR MANUEL will be understood that the estate SÁNCHEZ PIÑEIRO, or inheritance was accepted by CARLOS EDGARDO him. See, Rivera Rivera v. Monge Rivera, 17 P.R. Offic. Trans. 561 RAFAEL RIVERA

(1986), 117 D.P.R. 464 (1986), 1986 WL 376778 and P.R. Laws Ann. tit. 31, § 2787 You are requested and required to notify Luis G. Parrilla Hernández, Esq., FERRAIUOLI LLC, 221 Ponce de León Avenue, 221 Plaza, 5th Floor, San Juan, PR 00917, P.O. Box 195168, San Juan, PR 00919-5168, telephone number (787) 766-7000, email: lparrilla@ ferraiuoli.com, attorney for plaintiff, with a copy of the answer to the Complaint within thirty (30) days of the publication of this summons and file the original of said answer in this Court where you can find out its content. This Court has entered an order providing for summons by publication in accordance with the provisions of Rules 4.6 and 4.7 of the Rules of Civil Procedure for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. THEREFORE, notice is hereby given to you so that you may appear and answer the Complaint within thirty (30) days after publication of this summons and in case of failure to do so, judgment by default will be rendered for the relief demanded in the complaint and the court shall proceed to an adjudication without further notice.

San Juan, Puerto Rico, on this 15th day of July, 2020. MARIA ANTONGIORGI, ESQ., CLERK OF THE COURT U.S.

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

Reverse Mortgage Funding, LLC DEMANDANTE VS.

Jacinto González Trías, t/c/c Víctor Jacinto González Tríaz; Sucesión de Iris García Méndez compuesta por Jacinto González Trías, t/c/c Víctor Jacinto González Tríaz, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos desconocidos; Centro de Recaudación de Ingresos Municipales; y a los Estados Unidos de América.

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: BY2019CV05880.

SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: Jacinto González Trías, t/c/c Víctor Jacinto González Tríaz, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos desconocidos de la sucesión de Iris Garcia Méndez

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 Master Mortgage Corp., o a su orden, por la suma principal de $246,000.00, más intereses computados sobre la misma desde su fecha hasta su total y completo pago a razón de la tasa de interés de 2.75% anual, la cual será ajustada mensualmente, obligándose además al pago de costas, gastos y desembolsos del litigio, mas honorarios de abogados en una suma de $24,600.00 equivalente al 10% de la suma principal original. Este pagaré fue suscrito bajo el afidávit número 183 ante la notaria público Jennifer Córdova Córdova. Lo anterior surge de la hipoteca constituida mediante la escritura número 307 otorgada el 19 de diciembre de 2008, en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, ante la notaria público Jennifer Córdova Córdova, inscrita al tomo Karibe, inscripción 8va, de Bayamón Sur, Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección I Bayamón, finca número 25,316. La Hipoteca Revertida grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar cuarenta de la Manzana M en la Urbanización Bayamón Gardens en el Barrio Pájaros en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, con un área de 498 m.c. con 88 cm. En lindes por el NORTE, con los solares 11 y 12, distancia de 15 m con 30 cm; por el SUR, con la Calle 13, distancia de 15 metros; por el ESTE con solare 39, distancia de 34 metros con 82 cm y por el OESTE, con solar 41, distancia de 31 metros y un metros con ochenta cm. Contiene una casa de concreto reforzado para una familia. Finca número 23,316, inscrita al folio 217 del tomo 556 de Bayamón Sur, Sección I de Bayamón. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva de esta publicación a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio. Se apercibe y advierte a ustedes como personas desconocidas, que de no contestar la demanda radicando el original de la contestación ante la secretaria del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Bayamón, o a través de SUMAC y notificar copia de la contestación de esta a la parte demandante por conducto de su abogada, GLS LEGAL SERVICES, LLC, Atención: Lcda. Genevieve López Stipes, Dirección: P.O. Box 367308, San Juan, P.R. 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 26 de agosto de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Sec Regional.

26

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

It’s confusing sometimes, but the Yankees manage to stay on track

By JAMES WAGNER

I

f you had somehow forgotten the uniqueness of the 2020 Major League Baseball season, the New York Yankees’ weekend series against the New York Mets had plenty of reminders. They played five games in three days at Yankee Stadium after a Mets player and staff member tested positive for the coronavirus, forcing a postponement of the previous weekend’s series at Citi Field.

They played doubleheaders Friday and Sunday, which were made a bit more manageable thanks to the seven-inning games and expanded rosters. But all the cramming led to a moment Friday that encapsulated the Yankees’ fortunes of late.

When closer Aroldis Chapman surrendered a walkoff, two-run home run to Mets shortstop Amed Rosario in the seventh inning of the second game, both players seemed to forget the Mets were the home team even though the game was in the Bronx.

Rosario said he did not realize his blast had won the game until he saw his teammates streaming out of the dugout in delight. Dominic Smith said he thought he had seen Chapman signaling to the home plate umpire for a new ball so he could continue pitching.

“I was a little confused,” Chapman said later.

The Yankees, who improved to 19 -13 after sweeping Sunday’s doubleheader, have witnessed similar scenes, although with less awkwardness, over parts of the last two weeks: Their offense struggled to produce enough runs, and their bullpen squandered opportunities. Both are normally strengths — even last season, when the Clint Frazier had three hits, including a homer, in his 2020 team was depleted by injuries.

That has not always been the case this year, which debut on Wednesday. was why general manager Brian Cashman said over the weekend that he was looking for outside help, particularly for pitching, ahead of the trade deadline, which different players landing on the injured list in the 162game regular season last year, they have faced more was 4 p.m. Eastern time Monday.

Entering Sunday, the Yankees had lost seven of their of a challenge over the current 60-game season. Eight previous eight games. In that stretch, their offense aver- players were on the injured list as of Sunday, with relief aged an anemic 2.6 runs per game, and their bullpen pitcher Zack Britton and backup catcher Kyle Higashproduced a 7.65 ERA while blowing leads or falling be- ioka expected to return this week.

Infielder D.J. LeMahieu, the Yankees’ best all-around hind in ties in six games.

The Yankees reversed course in the first game Sun- player last season, returned Saturday after missing 10 day, beating the Mets, 8-7, on a game-tying, two-run games with a sprained left thumb. But other important home run by Aaron Hicks in the bottom of the seventh Yankees — infielder Gleyber Torres, starter James Paxinning, and a game-ending single by Gio Urshela in the ton and outfielders Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Judge — will need more time. A key relief pitcher, Tommy eighth. They trailed, 7-2, entering the seventh.

“You usually don’t win many of those,” manager Kahnle, is out for the year.

Judge’s injury, in particular, has proved troublesome Aaron Boone said, “but they just continued to battle.”

In the nightcap, the Yankees won, 5-2, in eight in- for the Yankees, who revamped their health and perfornings thanks to a dazzling major league debut by pitch- mance staff in January. Although he begged not to go ing prospect Deivi García, who allowed one unearned on the injured list this month, Judge did, and he missed run over six innings, and a pinch-hit grand slam by Gary nine games with a strained right calf. He lasted only Sánchez, who was hitting .130 entering the day. The six innings in his first game back, on Wednesday, before exiting with renewed calf discomfort. He was again Mets fell to 15-19.

While the Yankees successfully used their deep placed on the injured list Friday with what Cashman pockets and savvy to overcome an MLB record of 30 called a lesser strain of the same calf.

Even though Cashman said three doctors had agreed on Judge’s original recovery time, it was considered a “failed rehab” because the outfielder was again dealing with the same injury. As a result, Cashman said Judge might need double the recovery time, or up to four weeks.

It probably did not help that Judge, with the minor league season canceled this year, could not test his calf in the minors before returning to the major leagues. But that is a reality faced by all teams in this pandemic-affected season.

The Yankees have been particularly affected by an inconsistent schedule over the last few weeks. Hitters and pitchers have said it has been difficult to get into any sort of rhythm. They had an unexpected five-day break because of coronavirus-related postponements and a rainout. Then came the weekend cramming, which strained their pitching staff. When Chapman lost Friday night, it was his first appearance in 11 days.

Given certain areas of weakness and the backlog of injuries, Cashman said the Yankees “could definitely use some help.” But he explained that the coronavirus crisis had introduced new elements into the Yankees’ decision making, and their rivals’, ahead of the trade deadline.

“It’s a risky marketplace,” he said.

With no fans expected in the stands across MLB, Cashman said there was “very little money to be had” by teams, thus making it harder to trade for proven players who are surely earning millions. Another factor, he said, was the expanded 16-team postseason, in which all teams will play a first-round, best-of-three-game series, thus increasing the odds of an early exit. And, he said, the pandemic was not over, so how much does a team want to trade away prospects and take on salary for as little as one month with so much uncertainty?

“There’s no guarantee that this season finishes, even though I think there’s a lot of optimism that we’ve gotten this far that we can get all the way through,” he said, adding later: “That risk-reward factor is certainly something we all are aware of.”

(The Yankees have one of the highest payrolls in MLB, but are also one of its most lucrative franchises.)

Whether or not the Yankees would bolster their roster by Monday afternoon, another hurdle awaited that day: They began a three-game series in the Bronx against the Tampa Bay Rays, who sit atop the American League East. Going into Monday the Yankees had won only one of their seven games against the Rays this season.

“Regardless of the playoff format, we’re circling everybody on the calendar this time of the year,” said pitcher Gerrit Cole, who was scheduled to start Monday.

“We still feel like we have a lot of games left, but at the same time, every series is important.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

27

After leading NHL play stoppage, Golden Knights and Canucks redraw swords

By CAROL SCHRAM

L

ast Thursday, when the NHL Players Association announced that there would be a two-day suspension of the postseason, the league showed solidarity with other professional leagues that shut down in the wake of another police shooting.

But notably, hockey’s work stoppage was championed by two teams that have played perhaps the most contentious series of the postseason — the Vegas Golden Knights and the Vancouver Canucks. It was a proverbial laying down of swords all the more notable for the intensity that was temporarily set aside for a bigger cause.

With their second-round series tied at 1-1, and after a Game 1 that featured nearly 100 hits, the two teams led the decision made by all eight remaining NHL playoff teams to suspend games for two days in recognition of racial injustice and the desire to foster a more inclusive environment in the predominantly white sport of hockey. “Black and Brown communities continue to face real, painful experiences,” the league and players’ union said in a joint statement.”

The NHL’s postponements followed those in the NBA, WNBA, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer reacting to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin.

“I think that’s all part of the statement,” Vancouver coach Travis Green said. “There’s sports, and then there’s things that are bigger than sports.”

At Thursday’s video conference with media, Vegas enforcer Ryan Reaves and Canucks captain Bo Horvat stood alongside dozens of masked-up players from the four remaining clubs in the Western Conference hub city. Reaves, whose father is Black and mother is white, had previously knelt at center ice during the playing of the Canadian and American national anthems and suggested his teammates link arms before a July exhibition game.

“I go to war with these guys,” said Reaves, referring to the many white players who agreed to the postponements.

“I hate their guts on the ice, but I couldn’t be more proud of these guys.”

When the Golden Knights-Canucks series resumed Saturday, so too did the animus of their two previous games.

The Golden Knights withstood heavy early pressure from the Canucks thanks to some great goaltending from Robin Lehner, then counterattacked with two goals before the first period was six minutes old.

Mark Stone added his sixth goal of the playoffs on a third-period power play, and Lehner made 31 saves for his second shutout of the series in the 3-0 win. Vegas now leads the best-of-seven series, 2-1.

“I knew our team was going to come out and play really hard from the drop of the puck,” said Vegas forward Alex Tuch, who opened the scoring 4:05 into the first period and is now riding a four-game goal streak, the longest of any player this postseason. “We were ready two days ago, and we were ready today.

Tuch continued: “With everything that happened, I think it brought our team closer together. Being able to come together under such interesting times was huge for our team. We wanted to continue that in the hockey part of it, too.”

“I go to war with these guys,” Vegas winger Ryan Reaves said Thursday of N.H.L. players who supported a work stoppage.

The first two games between the Western Conference’s top-seeded Golden Knights and the fifth-seeded Canucks were among the most entertaining of the playoffs. Reaves was front and center in Game 1 on Aug. 23. In a game that featured 99 total hits, he led both clubs with 11 in a 5-0 Vegas win.

Ever the agitator, Reaves at one point was caught on camera clucking like a chicken from the bench in response to Vancouver’s Antoine Roussel having turned down a fight.

The Canucks had leveled the series with a 5-2 win in Game 2. Horvat picked up his seventh and eighth goals of the playoffs, leading all players, and Vancouver’s skaters helped preserve the win by blocking 40 shot attempts, just one short of the NHL playoff record for a non-overtime game.

On Thursday, the clubs came together to initiate talk of suspending play in support of the other professional sports leagues and teams that had shuttered Wednesday. Reaves was debating whether or not to play.

“Last night, I struggled with what I wanted to do,” he said. “Am I really going to walk out on my team and be the only guy, or is there going to be a couple guys?

“But I woke up to a text from Kevin Shattenkirk, and he had a bunch of guys out East there, and they wanted to talk.

And then I got a text saying Vancouver wanted to talk.”

“We met as a team in the morning and we felt it was the best decision to go to Vegas and get their take on everything,” said Horvat, the first-year Canucks captain, in a video that played on the big screens at Rogers Place before Game 3. “We talked to Ryan and he made some amazing points and really got the ball rolling.

“We agreed with everything, wanted to be supportive and felt it was the best course of action to take two days, reflect and learn about everything that’s going on in the world.”

Reaves and Shattenkirk had previously spent seven sea-

sons as teammates with the St. Louis Blues. Shattenkirk, now a defenseman with the Tampa Bay Lightning, and the other players from the four teams in the Eastern Conference hub city of Toronto took their cue from the conversations that were happening out West.

The Eastern series resumed Saturday, with Tampa Bay taking a 3-1 lead over Boston and the New York Islanders going up 2-1 over Philadelphia.

“We got to speak with some of the players in the bubble in Edmonton,” Shattenkirk said Thursday. “When we realized that Vancouver and Vegas, I think, were considering sitting out tonight, and got to speak with them and speak with Ryan Reaves and talk about the issue at hand and how important this is, I think it was something that we were all fully behind.”

The Golden Knights beat Vancouver 5-3 on Sunday night to take a 3-1 series lead and improve to an impressive 10-2 in round robin and playoff games.

Vancouver’s best chance for fending off elimination will be to reignite its offense, especially with the man advantage, and playing with a lead. The Canucks scored early to take control of Game 2 but have been blanked by Vegas when they’ve failed to score first. Their normally dominant power play, which had clicked for 11 goals in the first 10 games in the bubble, had gone just 1 for 11 in the series going into Sunday. It failed on three early attempts Saturday.

In the bigger picture, the NHL and its players have plenty of work ahead if they hope to maximize the long-term effect of this week’s playoff postponement.

“I think there’s a long way to go,” Lehner, who knelt with Reaves and Dallas’ Jason Dickinson and Tyler Seguin on Aug. 3, said after Saturday’s game.

“I’ve said before, it’s time to start doing something. Everyone deserves the same chance in society and at the end of the day, I think we all just need to do better. It’s time to start pitching in and stop talking and have respect for one another.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

With some big names missing, US Open men’s draw still looks strong

By MAX GENDLER

A

s a majority of the world’s best tennis players gather in Flushing Meadows once again, there are some friendly faces we’ll be missing. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, two of the Big Three, will not be participating, among others.

Some fans have tried to argue that this year’s U.S. Open champion should be met with a lot of skepticism because of those absences, but here are some of the reasons nobody can truly call this a weak playing field.

Novak Djokovic Djokovic is the world No. 1, a 17-time Grand Slam champion and a member of the vaunted Big Three, along with Federer and Nadal. More important, he has fundamentally changed the way that professional tennis is played. Outside of a fanatical devotion to fitness, Djokovic introduced a defensive style of movement that is copied widely by the younger generation of players who actively seek to usurp him. The new stars of tennis are built in his image: lean, with the minimum amount of muscle necessary and an emphasis on extreme flexibility. The big question, then, stands: Can Djokovic hold them off while he hunts down Federer’s record of 20 Grand Slam titles, or Nadal’s 19?

Dominic Thiem Thiem, the world No. 3, has on three occasions faced off against a member of the Big Three in a final at his opponent’s favorite Grand Slam. In 2018 and 2019, Thiem tried to dethrone Nadal on the red clay of Roland Garros, and at this year’s Australian Open, he pushed Djokovic to five sets before ultimately losing to him. After a disappointing loss to Thomas Fabbiano in the first round of last year’s U.S. Open, Thiem will be trying not just to make a run into the later stages of the tournament but to clinch his first Grand Slam title and to become just the 11th player since Federer won his first Wimbledon in 2003 to claim a Grand Slam men’s title.

Daniil Medvedev On the hard courts of North America, it would be hard to argue that anyone had a better summer last year than Medvedev.

The world No. 5, Medvedev reached the finals at Washington and Montreal and then won his first Master’s 1000 title in Cincinnati. With only a week’s rest before the U.S. Open, many wondered if the lanky Russian

Novak Djokovic, above, is coming off a win at the Western & Southern Open, also in New York. Can he win the bubble double? would have the energy necessary to manage the best-of-five-set format. Not only did he manage it, he found time to play the part of the villain: He openly mocked hostile New York crowds on his way to an appearance in the final and then pushed Nadal to five sets before losing in one of the most entertaining U.S. Open finals of the decade. Medvedev’s grueling summer ended with 20 wins in 23 matches. With the shortened schedule, could Medvedev improve on that and prove that he was not a one-season wonder?

Stefanos Tsitsipas Tsitsipas, the fourth seed at this year’s U.S. Open, has never been past the semifinals of a Grand Slam tournament and crashed out in the first rounds of last year’s Wimbledon and U.S. Open. After he clinched the victory at the ATP Tour Finals at the end of 2019, it would be understandable to feel a sense of whiplash about Tsitsipas’ prospects, but the 22-yearold still has plenty of time to improve on his consistency and the mental side of his game. If he does, it seems inevitable that Tsitsipas will contend for Grand Slam titles soon.

Alexander Zverev Zverev, the world No. 7, comes from a tennis family. His father, Alexander Zverev Sr., was a professional tennis player, and his older brother, Mischa, also plays on the ATP Tour. Alexander, however, has been the star of the family, winning the ATP Tour Finals in 2018 and, at 23, continuing to challenge for titles. Still, there is much to learn. While Mischa is the tour’s biggest proponent of serve-and-volley tennis, Alexander’s serving is often seen as one of the weakest points in his game.

Matteo Berrettini Berrettini was the 24th seed at the U.S. Open last year. He catapulted himself to the semifinals, where he lost to the eventual champion, Nadal. Now, seeded sixth, Berrettini is no longer a true underdog. Although he performed poorly at the Australian Open this year, his powerful groundstrokes should help him make another strong run at this year’s U.S. Open.

David Goffin Goffin, the world No. 10, is a clay court specialist but has reached the round of 16 at the U.S. Open the last three years and was

a finalist at the Western & Southern Open in 2019. While few can see him challenging for a Grand Slam title, he’s a joy to watch, especially on days when his two-handed backhand is in full swing.

Roberto Bautista Agut In Spain, it is customary for players to develop impressive defensive skills from years of playing on baked red clay. Bautista Agut, the world No. 12, took that education and adapted it to hard courts, becoming one of the rare Spaniards who isn’t just a “dirt rat” — a player whose yearly rankings are almost solely reliant on performances on the red clay of Southern Europe and Latin America.

Diego Schwartzman Schwartzman is one of the most entertaining players on the ATP Tour. On and off the court, he possesses a charm that makes you want him to do well. At 5 feet, 7 inches tall, Schwartzman became the shortest player since 1994 to reach a Grand Slam quarterfinal when he did so at the U.S. Open in 2017, the French Open in 2018 and the U.S. Open again in 2019.

Andrey Rublev Last year’s U.S. Open was Rublev’s return to the spotlight. Rublev reached the quarterfinals in Queens in 2017 and then missed most of 2018 with a back injury. At last year’s U.S. Open, as an unseeded player, he beat Tsitsipas in the first round before making his way to the round of 16, losing to Berrettini.

Notable absences: Nadal, Federer, Gaël Monfils, Fabio Fognini, Stan Wawrinka, Kei Nishikori, Nick Kyrgios and Jo-Wilfred Tsonga.

A Few More to Watch Andy Murray, a three-time Grand Slam tournament champion, is returning to major competition after his second hip surgery and a subsequent hip injury. He looked like a promising competitor during the Western & Southern Open this past week.

Grigor Dimitrov, a quarterfinalist at last year’s U.S. Open, was once called “Baby Fed” for the similarities in his game to that of Federer. Although he has yet to win a Grand Slam, he is a fierce competitor.

Felix Auger-Aliassime, a 20-year-old Canadian, has lost to his fellow countryman, Denis Shapovalov, the world No. 17, in the first round of the U.S. Open in the last two years. Now, without Shapovalov in his way, he is set for his first deep run.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 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

(Mar 21-April 20)

You’re fighting for a cause you feel strongly about. Some people will try to make trouble for you. Everyone has a right to their own views including you. If somebody who should know better stands in your way, you will find there are those who support your actions.

People can’t use their position to intimidate others. Keep fighting for what you believe in.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Being a mentor suits you. People are inspired by the passionate way you share your skills.

Take this opportunity to showcase your expertise. It will feel tremendously rewarding to be able to help a colleague or youngster develop their talents. Encourage their every attempt to make progress. By showing your approval they will work even harder.

Gemini

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

(May 22-June 21)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Someone you have known for years will try to rake up things from the past that you would rather not think about or talk about. They won’t be easily discouraged. All you can do is refuse to join in the conversation and hope they will get the hint. Giving some practical support to a charity could pave the way to some interesting opportunities.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Housemates aren’t pulling their weight. You’re overwhelmed with chores that need to be done but you shouldn’t have to shoulder these burdens on your own. If your partner or a close relative is placing too much of a priority on outside interests, they need to be reminded they have family commitments too.

An intimidating personality will try to browbeat you into submission. Just because they disagree with you doesn’t mean you are wrong. The more flexible you are to other people’s ideas, the more harmonious relationships will be. If you make an effort to see a situation through someone else’s eyes, it would be helpful if they did the same.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

(June 22-July 23)

You might enjoy a stroke of luck but there’s nothing mystical or magical about your good fortune. It will be due to your positive outlook along with a willingness to make the best of the opportunities that come your way. If you sense someone in the family needs you, be ready to drop what you are doing to be there for them.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

It might feel as if there is less opportunity to use your expertise. Your skills are impressive but the job market is not always strong. Don’t get drawn into other people’s arguments. If someone has unintentionally caused offence, it will be up to them to apologise and explain themselves more clearly. You don’t have to make excuses for anyone.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

You haven’t been neglecting your friendships.

You just haven’t been able to be as sociable as you would like to have been. Someone is talking about arranging a fun event and this will renew your interest in your social life. A new partner needs someone to talk to. Nothing makes a better impression than being a good listener.

A new interest or hobby is turning out to be more costly than you expected. You may not have looked into the probable expense before getting involved. Now that a project is shaping up beautifully, you don’t want to give up on it now. One way or another you will keep going.

A loving union or close friendship has been through some troubling times. Neither of you want to end it because you do care about each other. Thanks to the effort you are both putting into this relationship, it will take a turn for the better. Life is suddenly more spontaneous and exciting.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Distant affairs will thrive. Take advantage of the positive energy around you by applying for jobs, going on interviews and updating your CV. New doors are opening up for you.

Your job prospects will dramatically improve due to the efforts you are now making to better your situation. Keep reaching for the stars.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Keep out of other people’s arguments.

Avoid getting caught up in a workmate or neighbour’s problems. If you allow yourself to be drawn in, you could end up spending more time trying to justify your words and actions than you can be bothered with. Some people aren’t just looking for advice. They want someone to do all the work.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

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Ziggy

32

28 EDITORIAL SEMANA, INC • Jueves, 27 de agosto de 2020 Tuesday, September 1, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

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