Monday Sep 14, 2020

Monday, September 14, 2020

San Juan The

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DAILY

Star

Film ‘Cuties’ Sparks Firestorm After Its Netflix Release P20

Failures in Highway Surveillance System?

Citizen Victory Movement Signs Commitment to Dignified Retirement P4

PDP Candidates: ‘Permit Regulation Is Obstructive, Manipulable’ P4

Police Don’t Know Status of Cameras Along Baldorioty Highway in Wake of Incident in Which Driver Was Hit by Debris

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

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September 14, 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.

Inoperative Baldorioty surveillance cameras no help in determining who threw debris that injured driver

Today’s

Weather

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

Day

Night

High

Low

89ºF

79ºF

Precip 40%

Precip 20%

Cloudy with Showers

Partly Cloudy

Wind: Humidity: UV Index: Sunrise: Sunset:

F

From ESE 11 mph 73% 10 of 10 6:11 AM Local Time 6:26 PM Local Time

INDEX Local 3 Mainland 7 Business 11 International 14 Viewpoint 18 Noticias en Español 19 Entertainment 20

Travel Science Legals Sports Games Horoscope Cartoons

22 23 24 26 29 30 31

ollowing an incident in which a 21-year-old woman was hit by a piece of concrete while driving with her husband on the Baldorioty de Castro Expressway on Saturday evening, Puerto Rico Police Bureau (PRPB) Carolina Norte Headquarters Director Fermín González said on Sunday that the cameras along the highway have not been in working order for years.

“Those cameras worked a few years ago; from my understanding, they are not working [anymore]. They weren’t given any maintenance, or I don’t know, but seriously, they are not working,” González said, adding that the cameras’ maintenance was not under the PRPB’s jurisdiction.

When the Star asked if such an incident has occurred before, González said that for the Carolina Norte region, it was the first time that he has received a report since he began working at the precinct.

“According to [the] Statistics [Department], in this area, in this region, it is something new, something that happened [for the first time] yesterday [Saturday]; in this sector, we have never seen something like this sort of incident. We will be working on a plan to find the perpetrators of this incident and prevent something like this from happening again,” González said. “This situation, even though I have been in this [precinct] for two months, it’s the first time that I have been informed that objects have been thrown at drivers [traveling on PR]-26.”

As for Michelle Rodríguez, the woman who was injured in the incident, González said she is “alert, conscious, and waiting for maxillofacial surgery.” Her husband, 21-year-old Roberto Medero, is in stable condition, he added.

“We are working on a plan to correct this matter, to find the perpetrators and to minimize such practice,” González said.

Ex-DTOP communications and press adviser: Agency’s highway cameras ‘are only for traffic monitoring’ Police cameras are not the only ones on the highway.

In some sections of the Baldorioty de Castro Expressway the Department of Transportation and Public Works (DTOP by its Spanish acronym) also has cameras installed, but with a different purpose.

Former DTOP communications and press adviser Juan José Díaz told the Star that the cameras installed along the Baldorioty de Castro highway by that agency are for live traffic monitoring. They are part of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) whose aim is to provide services for transport and traffic management. Díaz said the ITS cameras were

not installed for surveillance as were the PRPB’s cameras installed in the aforementioned area.

“On that highway, there have only been two [types of] cameras, the ones from the PRPB, which were installed for recording … and the ones from DTOP, which never record; those cameras are only for traffic monitoring,” Díaz said.

He added that the DTOP cameras, which are monitored by the department’s Traffic Monitoring Center in Caguas, are used to look out for any driver-citizen who needs road service in case of an emergency. When the Star asked if those cameras have any been used in a police investigation, he said their function is only for traffic monitoring.

“The cameras from either the Highways and Transportation Authority [ACT by its Spanish acronym] or DTOP do not record,” Díaz said. “They are not cameras used for surveillance, used to [investigate] any felony. These cameras, which have been allocated through federal funds, are used for live traffic monitoring. Their maintenance is under their own jurisdiction.”

No response from DTOP officials, including Secretary Carlos Contreras, on the matter had been received as of press time.

According to Roberto Medero, partner of the injured woman, they were on the Baldorioty De Castro highway when, upon reaching Fragoso Avenue, an impact was felt on the front window of the Chevrolet Lumina vehicle.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

CVM candidates sign commitment to advocate for decent retirement

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

V

arious candidates from the Citizen Victory Movement (CVM) signed a commitment from community organization Pensions Defense Front on Sunday to fulfill their promise to approve House Bills (HB) 2434 and 2575, which aim to guarantee protections for public servants’ pensions and the University of Puerto Rico’s (UPR) retirement system, respectively.

CVM president and at-large Senate candidate Ana Irma Rivera Lassen said the commitment comes as part of the movement’s agenda as it “appears crosswise to defend workers’ rights” and signing such a petition would ratify the CVM’s commitment to restore them.

“One of the reasons that brought CVM into existence is, precisely, Puerto Rico’s reconstruction in social, economic, financial, environmental and political aspects, and, as part of our agenda, the payment of pensions that go above any other governmental disbursement,” Rivera Lassen said.

“As a part of defending workers’ rights, we have a commitment to bring back all the rights that have been taken away from them in exchange for gruesome laws that have thrown years of pure work to the floor.”

Meanwhile, CVM gubernatorial candidate Alexandra Lúgaro said the movement has centered on their collective purpose to defend not only workers’ rights but also other program areas that benefit Puerto Rican citizens. She said the movement does not intend to repeat what the “old policy parties have done for decades.”

“In recent decades, old policy parties

have committed over and over again to defending the retirement system, they have committed to protecting workers’ rights over and over again, and they failed again and again while having control of both the executive and legislative branches,” Lúgaro said.

Likewise, Lúgaro said the movement and its legislative team, once they get into the government, not only will commit to adopting measures that prevent pension cuts and protect workers’ welfare, but will also offer different alternatives for auditing and canceling the island’s public debt.

“Once we get into the government, we will approve these measures immediately,” Lúgaro said. “However, these bills cannot be viewed as isolated bills. They are part of the different initiatives that the CVM supports to face the fiscal crisis, such as the auditing [of the debt] and its cancellation,

in addition to our opposition to the Financial and Oversight Management Board.”

HB 2434, known as the Law for a Dignified Retirement, seeks to defend the pensions of public workers and government retirees in the bankruptcy process. The bill has been supported and reviewed by the Pensions Defense Front and more than 20 union and professional organizations in Puerto Rico.

HB 2572, meanwhile, proposes to maintain the UPR Retirement System as one of the defined benefits and pass the Retirement System Trust into the hands of the System Retirement Board, composed of elected representatives of the university community. The bill has the support of the UPR Retirees Association and various organizations such as the Puerto Rican Association of University Professors, the Brotherhood of Non-Teaching Exempt Employees and the UPR Workers’ Union.

PDP candidates call permit regulation inefficient, obstructive and manipulable

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

S

en. José Luis Dalmau and Enid Monge de Pastrana, a Popular Democratic Party (PDP) at-large candidate for the Puerto Rico House of Representatives, are describing the current Joint Permit Regulation as inefficient, obstructive and manipulable.

In a Sunday press conference, the pair charged that the current permitting regulations do not simplify the application processes, but rather impose more complex regulations as well as increase the cost of the application when opening a business or renewing annual permits.

“We have a regulation that brings with it new and onerous requirements, contrary to the repeated suggestion of studies such as Doing Business 2020,” said Monge, an island business leader. “This regulation does not promote greater economic development, and if it is not addressed promptly, it will cause the closure of thousands of businesses.”

The PDP legislative candidates pointed out that despite the fact that the current government is aware of the adverse impact of the regulation’s requirements on the business sector, it has not done anything to address or solve the problems.

“Knowing the failure of the current regulation, now they are trying to approve a new regulation expeditiously, which is even more damaging to the country’s productive sector, in order to legalize the current regulation in force, which has already been declared null on two occasions by the courts,” Dalmau said.

“It is a contradiction of the government to try to superficially approve a regulation that does not address the concerns of the business sector and that will not generate economic development on the island.”

Monge noted that “[w]e have heard first-hand, from the main business organizations in the country, about the difficulties, delays and costly requirements of this regulation, as well as the impact of the Single Permit application, which is being used as a subterfuge to impose new taxes on business permits.”

“A Single Permit, which, beyond being a registry and consolidating licenses and authorizations to operate a business, as provided by law, is treated as a request for a new permit, segregating uses that make up the operation of the business, for which businesses have a use permit issued,” she said. “We must speak clearly to the country: the objective of the Permit Regulation is to impose greater contributions on the business operation. This is very worrying, taking into account that the companies on the island are hardly generating [enough business] to survive.”

Dalmau pointed out that “[t]he impact on costs can be significant, at a time when the business sector is in a worrying state of weakness.”

“The objective of the so-called Permit Reform was to simplify the processes and minimize the associated requirements, but the regulation does not meet that objective,” he said. “There are permits that have to wait six and eight months to be issued. So nothing has been fixed. If there was already a system to process permits that was functional, why change it and integrate others, with the expense of public funds that this entails, and when the clients of the Permit Management Office themselves, which is the business sector and the citizen, are alerting you that it is

useless? Which cronies are you trying to benefit from this? What economic interests are you aiming to satisfy with this regulation?”

Both candidates agreed that the regulation only benefits an exclusive group of people, to the detriment of the entire business chain.

“It does not have controls, or any supervision parameters that guarantee the transparency of the process. While thousands of companies are debating whether to continue their operations, we have an agency investing substantial amounts [of money] in lawyers to defend a regulation that is disastrous for their productive sector,” Monge warned. “We wonder, is this the step forward to boost the economic growth that the country was promised?”

Monge and Dalmau said that if elected the issue of permits will be a priority in their work agenda, since the economic development of the island depends on it, as does the subsistence of thousands of small and midsize companies.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

5

ERS bondholders seek validation of $3 billion in pension bonds

By THE STAR STAFF

H

olders of nearly $3 billion in Employees Retirement System (ERS) bonds have asked the U.S. District Court to issue a summary judgment declaring that their claims are valid, a petition opposed by the Puerto Rico government, the Unsecured Creditors Committee (UCC) and the Financial Oversight and Management Board’s special claims committee.

At issue is whether the ERS was authorized to issue $3 billion in bonds in 2008. As part of the ERS’s bankruptcy process, which began in 2017, the government parties sought to invalidate the claims of the ERS bondholders, who are for the most part hedge funds and financial institutions.

According to the bondholders in a motion last week, ERS borrowed nearly $3 billion in 2008, via a sale of three series of ERS bonds to a syndicate of underwriters.The transaction was authorized by ERS’s board of trustees and by the Government Development Bank.Virtually every Puerto Rico financial institution of any size participated in the offering. The validity of the resulting debt was confirmed repeatedly by legal opinions from the island Secretary of Justice, from ERS’s general counsel, and from the Puerto Rico law firm Fiddler, González, & Rodríguez. All three nationally recognized bond-rating firms rated the bonds investment grade. At the time of the issuance, there was no hint, from any quarter, that the bonds might not be valid, the bondholders said.

Under an initial proposal discussed between

2004 and 2006, the commonwealth itself would have issued $2 billion in bonds payable from the commonwealth’s General Fund, and transferred the net proceeds from that issuance to ERS. That initial proposal discussed between 2004 and 2006, like other issuances of general obligation bonds by the commonwealth itself, required approval by the island Legislature, the bondholders said. The necessary legislation to issue bonds from the commonwealth’s General Fund and transfer the proceeds to ERS was introduced but was never approved.

Beginning in 2006 and 2007, ERS considered an alternative proposal under which ERS itself, rather than the commonwealth, would issue bonds and be the direct obligor on the bonds. In March 2007, ERS received a legal opinion from Fiddler, González, & Rodríguez that concluded that “[t]he System is authorized pursuant to Section 4-105(d) of Act 447 [codified at 3 L.P.R.A. § 779(d)] to incur debt secured by the assets of the System, and the Bonds are such a debt,” and that no additional legislative approval was needed for ERS to issue the ERS bonds.

The bondholders submitted expert testimony saying that the English translation of the statute was incorrect. The statute reads: “The Board of Trustees may authorize the Administrator to seek a loan from any financial institution of the Government of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico or the Federal Government of the United States of America or through the direct placement of debts, securing said debt with the assets of the System.” The bondholders argued that instead of “to seek a loan” the statute should have read “to borrow,” which is the correct translation to English of the Spanish “tomar prestado.”

“The [Unsecured Creditors and Special Claims] Committees and Government Parties’ own expert witness admitted that the sale of bonds is both borrowing and a loan, and it is undisputed that ERS sold all of the ERS Bonds directly to a syndicate made up of indisputable financial institutions,” the bondholders argued. “The ERS Enabling Act therefore expressly authorized ERS to issue the ERS Bonds, so the ERS Bonds are valid and enforceable, requiring summary judgment for the Bondholders.”

The island government enacted laws dismantling ERS and currently pensioners are being paid through a Pay-Go system.

The UCC noted that ERS was allowed to seek a loan under the law but that instead it went with bond issues.

The bonds were sold by the usual publicly offered bond minimum denomination of $5,000 in principal amount (or for capitalized interest Bonds, $5,000 maturity amount).

The issuances were marketed and sold by underwriting syndicates, led by UBS. ERS did not engage in any direct negotiations with the public investors in setting these terms or establishing bond prices. Instead, ERS provided necessary documentation — ERS’s Official Statements, Bond Resolutions and other Bond documentation — to UBS and the other underwriters to use in their direct discussions and negotiations with public investors.

The ERS bond issuances contemplated that UBS and the underwriting syndicates would fulfill an intermediary function by buying ERS bonds for resale to public investors.

“ERS used the underwriting syndicates not as lenders in a borrowing or a loan, but as intermediaries who would distribute and offer the ERS Bonds for sale to the public,” the UCC said.

In 2011, the Legislature amended the ERS Enabling Act to ensure ERS would not engage in another public bond issuance. In the statement of motives for the 2011 amendment, the Legislative Assembly recognized that the issuance of the ERS bonds “was illegally made by [ERS] even though such transaction was submitted to the Legislative Assembly for approval and rejected by the House of Representatives for deeming it detrimental to the System.” The Legislature amended the ERS Enabling Act to prohibit public bond issuances like the ERS Bonds as part of ERS’s ability to engage in “direct placements of debt” — the purported basis for the ERS Bonds — thus clarifying the intent of the original language of the statute.

US Justice Dept. appeals lower court decision that ruled denying PR access to benefit programs unconstitutional

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he United States Department of Justice is appealing to the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals a lower court decision that ruled as unconstitutional denying Puerto Rico residents access to Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Medicare Part D Low-Income Subsidy (LIS) benefits just because they live in the U.S. territory.

The appeal of the Peña Martínez et al. vs Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) decision comes over a week after the U.S. government appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court a Boston court ruling in the case U.S. vs Vaello Madero, which had ruled as unconstitutional the failure to grant SSI benefits to Puerto Rico residents.

U.S. District Court Judge William Young issued a judgment last week in favor of the plaintiffs in the Peña Martínez et al. v DHHS after first ruling in their favor on Aug. 3 as part of a memo of findings of fact, rulings of law and orders.

The nine plaintiffs in Peña Martínez had sued HHS Secretary Alex Azar in April 2018 seeking parity for Puerto Rico in the SSI and SNAP programs, and the LIS for Medicare Prescription Drug Program.

“The Court enjoins the government from enforcing the unconstitutional provisions and implementing regulations of the SSI, SNAP, and LIS programs insofar as they exclude residents of Puerto Rico, against the plaintiffs and all similarly situated applicants residing in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico,” Judge Young said in his Aug. 3 ruling. “The Court grants the government’s

request for a 60-day administrative stay of the injunction, except as to the nine named plaintiffs in the case.”

In a consent motion, U.S. Justice Department Attorney Daniel Riess askedYoung last Thursday to issue a judgment in favor of the plaintiffs because he was going to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. U.S. attorneys also announced they will be seeking a stay of the implementation of the ruling.

“Defendants plan to file a notice of appeal and a stay pending appeal in short order,” Riess said.

As it did in the Vaello case, the U.S. government says there is a rational basis for excluding residents of Puerto Rico from the three welfare programs. It notes that Puerto Rico residents are exempted from paying personal federal income taxes, that

the cost of including Puerto Rico residents in the three programs will be very high and that extending the programs to the U.S. commonwealth will disrupt the economy because it will deter people from seeking jobs as it will have a negative impact on labor incentives.

The nine plaintiffs in Peña Martínez had sued HHS Secretary Alex Azar in April 2018 seeking parity for Puerto Rico in the SSI and SNAP programs, and the LIS for Medicare Prescription Drug Program.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

Gov’t grants temporary moratorium on public housing evictions

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he Public Housing Administration (AVP by its Spanish initials) on Sunday granted a temporary forbearance on evictions for non-payment of rent for residents of public housing and the Section 8 Program, pursuant to the order issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The moratorium began on Sept. 4 and will last until Dec. 31 in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

“The order issued by the CDC is independent of the eviction moratorium granted by the federal CARES [Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security] Act, which has now expired,” said AVP Administrator William Rodríguez Rodríguez. “Participants in the programs that require it will be able to take advantage of this benefit if they deem it necessary.”

Rodríguez also pointed out that “in keeping with the public policy of Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced, we will continue to seek and

implement measures that allow us to protect the participants in both programs [AVP and Section 8] and also contribute to citizen collaboration in order to put an end to this pandemic that we continue to endure.”

Participants in public housing and Section 8 must submit a statement certifying, among other matters, the inability of the participant to make payments on time and efforts to meet rent payments, as well as their responsibility to comply with fees, penalties and interests that accrue during this period.

It was announced that the extension does not exempt residents from the obligation to pay rent and comply with the terms of the lease.

The extension also doesn’t stop landlords from charging fees, penalties or interest as a result of tenants’ inability to pay rent in a timely manner.

The AVP administrator also clarified that evictions not related to non-payment of rent can still take place, for example in the case of any criminal activity.

People interested in obtaining a copy of

the declaration or obtaining additional information may contact their regional Section 8 offices or the administrative offices of the managing agent.

Once the moratorium is suspended, evictions will proceed in accordance with the processes previously established by the legislation and regulations in force.

Vega Alta residents decry proposal to build tourist attraction in floodplain

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he announcement by María Vega, the New Progressive Party candidate for mayor of Vega Alta, to build an agritourism complex on the grounds of the old Carmen Central sugar mill where the famous chiminea, a local icon, is located has caused consternation among residents

of the town.

Residents learned of the proposal from a campaign poster located in the vicinity of the Carmen Central, an antique sugar mill.

Vegalteños are well aware that the area is flood prone, since it is on the banks of the Cibuco River, which floods in times of heavy rain.

“I was very surprised that María Vega [is making this proposal],” said Carmen

Ramos, a resident of the sector. “It must be that since she is not from here, she does not know that it is flooded.”

In recent days, a municipal team was on land parallel to highway PR-2 cleaning the area as part of the rigorous work in the hurricane season.

“To win votes they promise anything, but it floods there,” added Ramos’ niece, a resident of the Bajura neighborhood who

has known the reality of the land around Carmen Central since she was a child.

In fact, a study called the Vega Alta Territorial Plan, prepared in 2010 by the Technical Studies firm at the request of the Municipality ofVega Alta and then-Mayor Isabelo “Chabelo” Molina, specified on page 27 that the land where the project would be built in the area known as Bajura is within the floodplain.

Correction and clarification

By THE STAR STAFF

A

story on page 4 in the Sept. 11 issue of The San Juan Daily Star should have said that while the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s (PREPA) Retirement System benefits could not be guaranteed because the entity is in bankruptcy and has a $4.3 billion liability, Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority head Omar Marrero

said that if PREPA workers decide to work for LUMA Energy but keep their retirement savings with PREPA’s retirement system, LUMA Energy will make the employer’s pension contributions to the retirement system “and the employee as well as the system will be in a better position because the contribution will be there.” PREPA workers who opt to work for LUMA Energy will keep their acquired rights.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

7

As the west coast burns, communities unravel with each death

By THOMAS FULLER and GIULIA McDONNELL NIETO DEL RIO

T

hey lived more than 500 miles from each other — one in the wooded foothills of the Sierra Nevada, northeast of California’s capital, Sacramento, the other in a thickly forested canyon east of Oregon’s capital, Salem.

Josiah Williams, 16.

Wyatt Tofte, 13.

They were young lives cut short, victims of the great western wildfires of 2020.

The arrival of fire season in the American West always brings fear of fatalities, especially among the elderly and infirm, unable to escape the flames.

But the deaths of Josiah and Wyatt, two athletic teenagers, speak to the speed and the ferocity of the fires that this year have burned a record number of acres, 4 million in California and Oregon combined.

With thick smoke blanketing large parts of Washington, Oregon and California and tens of thousands of people evacuated, the fires have been the worst in decades, exacerbated by climate change. By Saturday, fires in California had burned 26 times more territory than they had at the same time last year.

Across the West this weekend, law enforcement authorities were scouring incinerated communities for missing persons. An emergency management official in Oregon said Friday that the state was bracing for a “mass fatality incident.”

At least 20 people have died in the fires, with dozens more missing and peak fire season only beginning in many parts of the West.

Among those who have died was a 1-yearold boy, Uriel, killed when his parents became trapped by fire while visiting their property in Okanogan, Washington. They were rescued by the side of a river with serious burns after trying to escape with the baby in a truck. A 77-year-old woman died when flames overtook her home and her car in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Although fires in previous years have proved more deadly — a firestorm in 2018 that decimated the town of Paradise in California killed more than 80 people in a single night — the numbers obscure the trauma that each death brings to the small communities where wildfires have caused such terror.

The fires this year have mostly burned in less populated areas, keeping the death toll relatively low, although the fires in Oregon are inching near Portland’s suburbs. Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil has worsened the fires, experts say.

In Scio, Oregon, the logging and farming town in the Willamette Valley where Wyatt Tofte went to middle school, a teacher and school administrator went door to door to Wyatt’s classmates Friday to check on them. The start of school, which will be held remotely, has been delayed by the fires.

In a community like Scio with a population of around 1,000 people and one blinking traffic signal, children grow up together and know one another well.

“Everybody is family in Scio,” Nancy Dickerman, a resident, said.

And the coronavirus pandemic has robbed fire-ravaged communities from being able to grieve as a group. When schools in Scio begin their fall term Sept. 18, students will be logging in from home.

“The realization will hit the kids when they have to physically go back to school, and he’s not there anymore,” said Margot Cooper, whose daughter was Wyatt’s classmate.

Wyatt loved football and video games, was exceedingly polite and did a great imitation of the alien dog character, Stitch, from the Disney movie, “Lilo and Stitch,” his friends said. He was surrounded by animals at home and was inseparable from Duke, his giant bull mastiff, said his classmates.

Berry Creek, on the edge of the Sierra Nevada, is a similarly tight-knit town. A community of about 1,200 people, it sits at the edge of the Plumas National Forest. Neighbors have grown up knowing one another’s families for years, sometimes decades. When the fires destroyed hundreds of homes, residents in the area jumped in to assist one another.

Josiah Williams, nicknamed “Jojo” by family and friends, was described as a caring teenager who was quick to smile. Josiah, who loved living in the mountains — and was fond of riding horses and playing video games — was a “great lovable sweet” son, his mother, Jessica Williams, said.

His aunt, Bobbie Zedaker, described him as “one of the kindest souls,” someone who could make the family laugh even in the toughest of times.

The fires that claimed Josiah and Wyatt both flared suddenly and unexpectedly.

The Bear Fire, which had been burning northeast of Sacramento at a moderate pace for days, exploded. Propelled by winds as strong as 45 mph, it burned 230,000 acres in the span of a night.

Most Berry Creek residents evacuated the town in a panic, a narrow country road the only

Members of the National Guard cut a fire line on the West Zone Fire, part of the North Complex Fire, on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020, near Feather Falls, Calif. At least 17 people have died in the fires, with dozens more missing and peak fire season only beginning in many parts of the West. route to safety. More than 100 people had to be rescued Tuesday evening.

Josiah was missing.

On social media, his mother, Jessica Williams, and community members pleaded for the public to help authorities find him.

“Please everyone my son is missing and not to be found so please dear God help my family and find my son,” Williams wrote on Facebook.

Josiah’s father and brother had left the area, but he seemed to have stayed behind and was last seen on Bean Creek Road near the town, his mother wrote. Josiah’s father had driven away from the home to check on family, and Josiah and his older brother had planned to leave the house in their separate cars, according to an account in the Los Angeles Times.

Josiah’s father said that he soon realized that his sons hadn’t made the evacuation, so he tried to return to the house only to find the roads were blocked. Josiah’s brother, Jason, was soon found. But Josiah was not.

On Thursday, the sheriff told family that they had found Josiah’s remains, confirmed by a DNA test.

“I’m so sorry son I wasn’t there to protect you,” Josiah’s mother said in a Facebook post. “I love you so much and miss you.”

In the evergreen forests southeast of Salem, the situation was equally chaotic.

On Monday evening, Kevin Cameron,

a Marion County commissioner, awoke to the sounds of sirens in his neighborhood.The Beachie Creek Fire, which had been burning nearby since mid-August, swept down the canyon that runs along the Santiam River.

“That fire just blew up,” Cameron recounted in a briefing.

He grabbed what he could and drove his pickup truck through burning forests to safety.

“The fire on both sides was so hot I thought my car was going to melt,” he said.

The Tofte family lived in a home in the canyon, three generations on the same property.

According to a devastating account in the Salem Statesman Journal, Wyatt’s mother fled the fire on foot, her clothes burned off. She is now in a Portland hospital with severe burns. Wyatt’s father led a desperate search for his son, a mission that would end with the discovery of Wyatt’s remains on the family property in the driver’s seat of a car.

The remains of his grandmother, Peggy Mosso, 71, were also found in the vehicle, as were those of Duke, according to the Marion County Sheriff.

Mosso had recently fallen and broken her leg; Wyatt, it appears, was trying to drive her to safety.

Word of their deaths spread through Scio, among Wyatt’s classmates and parents who remembered his smile and his unceasing thank yous.

“All the moms we’ve been talking,” Cooper said. “All of these kids are our kids,” she said, her voice trembling. “It’s hard.”

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Monday, September 14, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Political appointees meddled in CDC’s ‘holiest of the holy’ health reports

By NOAH WEILAND, SHERYL GAY STOLDBERG and ABBY GOODNOUGH

P

olitical appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have repeatedly asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to revise, delay and even scuttle weekly reports on the coronavirus that they believed were unflattering to President Donald Trump.

Current and former senior health officials with direct knowledge of phone calls, emails and other communication between the agencies said on Saturday that meddling from Washington was turning widely followed and otherwise apolitical guidance on infectious disease, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, into a political loyalty test, with career scientists framed as adversaries of the administration.

They confirmed an article in Politico on Friday night that the CDC’s public morbidity reports, which one former top health official described on Saturday as the “holiest of the holy” in agency literature, have been targeted for months by senior officials in the health department’s communications office. It is unclear whether any of the reports were substantially altered, but important federal health studies have been delayed because of the pressure.

The reports are written largely for scientists and public health experts, updating them on trends in all infectious diseases, COVID-19 included. They are guarded so closely by agency staff members that political appointees only see them just before they are published. Health department officials have typically only received notice of the titles of the reports.

Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official installed by the White House in April as the top department spokesman, said on Saturday that the person most involved in reshaping the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports was Paul Alexander, an

assistant professor of health research at McMaster University in Canada and an adviser Caputo hired to help with him on the science of the pandemic.

“He digs into these MMWRs and makes his position known, and his position isn’t popular with the career scientists sometimes,” Caputo said. “That’s called science. Disagreement is science. Nobody has been ever ordered to do anything. Some changes have been accepted, most have been rejected. It’s my understanding that that’s how science is played.”

But Caputo and Alexander appeared to view the reports, which have presented dire new findings about the spread of the virus, as incompatible with the Trump administration’s push to move beyond the pandemic and present the country as on the upswing, officials said.

The New York Times interviewed five current and former federal health officials Saturday with direct knowledge of efforts to warp the weekly reports. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to frankly discuss internal deliberations at the Department of Health and Human Services.

In an email obtained by Politico and confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of the message, Alexander accused CDC scientists of trying to “hurt the president” with the reports, which he referred to as “hit pieces on the administration.” Alexander asked Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC director, to edit reports that had already been published, which he believed overstated the risks of the virus for children and undermined the administration’s efforts to encourage schools to reopen.

Caputo and Alexander also tried to stop the publication of a report — issued last week after a delay — on use of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment that Trump and conservative allies have heralded and used as a kind of litmus test of resistance to scientific consensus. In discussions with the

Michael Caputo, the health department’s top spokesman, with the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, at the White House in May.

CDC, they questioned the political beliefs of the report’s authors.

The political involvement “undermines the credibility of not only the MMWR but of the CDC. And the CDC’s credibility has been tarnished throughout COVID already,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University who sits on the external editorial board of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports.

“The MMWR had an unblemished reputation as being accurate, objective and science-based, free from political influence,” he said.

Caputo, who is known to promote conspiracy theories, occupies a job at the health department typically conducted in an apolitical way, coordinating the messaging of an 80,000-person department that functions as the center of the American public health bureaucracy.

But since his arrival, during the biggest health crisis the department has ever faced, he has turned his office into what current and former senior administration officials have referred to as a bullying operation. Caputo still uses social media to attack reporters and Democratic politicians.

Caputo has also helped install allies in other communications positions at health agencies under the Health and Human Services Department, and even an interim chief of staff at CDC. Alex Azar, the health secretary and a member of the coronavirus task force, said in a statement that he had insisted that the president have direct access to the country’s top doctors during the pandemic. “He has always been receptive to the data and science presented by me and other members of the task force,” he said.

The meddling from Washington has concerned Redfield, who often pushed back when Caputo called to pester him about the morbidity reports, according to former senior government health officials with direct knowledge of the conversations.

The efforts were an attempt to write an alternate reality into official CDC literature, one of the former senior health officials said.

One CDC scientist working on the coronavirus response said in an interview Saturday that some career officials at the agency were so fed up with political meddling that they were considering resigning. Political officials have repeatedly tried to undermine the research of CDC employees, the scientist said, even going as far as canceling interviews with the news media before the release of high-profile reports, depriving them of the chance to explain their own work.

The CDC earlier this year was first asked for titles and synopses of the reports before their publication. Agency officials were then asked for full drafts, a request that Redfield resisted. Caputo and his aides “wanted to add caveats and add commentary,” according to one of the officials.

Alexander at one point demanded the CDC stop publishing the reports until he had the ability to review and edit them in their entirety.

One federal health official emphasized that while the CDC now sends portions of draft weekly reports to the Health and Human Services Department, their publication is not conditioned on department approval. Still, the official said, the draft reports are returned with specific critiques from Alexander and demands for revisions.

Noncoronavirus reports, such as those on tuberculosis and the flu, have been passed over, the former official said. But reports on the coronavirus have received extra scrutiny.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

9

Trump pressed for a plasma treatment. Officials worry, is a vaccine next?

By SHARON LaFRANIERE, NOAH WEILAND and MICHAEL D. SHEAR

I

t was the third week of August, the Republican National Convention was days away, and President Donald Trump was impatient.

White House officials were anxious to showcase a step forward in the battle against the coronavirus: an expansion of the use of blood plasma from recovered patients to treat new ones. For nearly two weeks, however, the National Institutes of Health had held up emergency authorization for the treatment, citing lingering concerns over its effectiveness.

So on Wednesday, Aug. 19, Trump called Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, with a blunt message.

“Get it done by Friday,” he demanded.

It wasn’t done by Friday, and on Sunday, regulators at the Food and Drug Administration still had not finished a last-minute data review intended to ease NIH doubts.

But on Sunday night, the eve of the convention, the president announced, with the FDA’s approval, that plasma therapy would be available for wider use, and he declared that it could reduce deaths by 35%, vastly overstating what the data had shown about the benefits.

Trump’s call to Collins was a flash point in a pressure campaign by the White House to bend the nation’s public health agencies to his desire to show progress in the fight against a pandemic that has killed more than 192,000 people in the United States. And it was just one in a series of moments that have left scientists and regulators across the public health bureaucracy increasingly worried that the White House could exert greater pressure to approve a vaccine before Election Day, even in the absence of agreement on its effectiveness and safety.

On the night of the plasma announcement, Collins was told to show up at the White House, where he was given a coronavirus test and then shunted to the Roosevelt Room as Trump and others spoke to journalists in the briefing room.

There, Collins and Dr. Peter Marks, one of the top regulators at the FDA and the person most directly responsible for maintaining the independence and scientific rigor of the vaccine approval process, watched helplessly as the president and other top administration officials oversold plasma’s effectiveness, creating a public relations debacle that reverberated for days.

Collins left the White House after the announcement. But Marks, who had pushed for the plasma approval, was escorted to the Oval Office to spend a few minutes with Trump and his top aides, who were celebrating with cupcakes

with white icing. In an interview on Friday, Marks said he was “a little bit in a state of shock” to find himself there being thanked by the president for his work on the plasma approval.

Although he described it as “a brief interaction that really didn’t have any substance,” health officials who had heard about the encounter said they feared it could create the impression that the guardrails between politics and science were being further eroded at a time when the public is already concerned about political pressure in assessing the safety of vaccines and treatments.

Some of those present were taken aback whenTrump, who a day earlier had tweeted about a “deep state” at the FDA blocking quick approvals of treatments and vaccines to hurt him politically, jokingly asked whether Dr. Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner, was doing a good job.

With Election Day just over seven weeks away, Washington is witnessing the collision of two worlds: a community of largely anonymous government scientists and doctors who operate in a culture guided by research, data sets and peer review, and a president famously disdainful of science, politically wounded by his failures to contain the coronavirus and now determined to cast himself as moving as fast as possible to provide Americans with vaccines and treatments.

Government scientists and pharmaceutical companies have begun taking extraordinary steps to counter any impression that they could sacrifice public safety to political expediency, pledging publicly that they are committed to impartial scientific decisions about fighting the coronavirus.

The rushed plasma approval rollout is far from the only aspect of the government response to the virus that was shaped by pressure from the White House. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly waffled on how much testing is recommended and for whom, and according to emails first reported on Friday by Politico, political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services have tried to revise or delay CDC reports on the coronavirus they believed were unflattering to the president.

The FDA first gave emergency authorization for use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 after Trump promoted it, only to be forced to reverse itself.

But the battle over approval of convalescent plasma is particularly telling because it involves many of the players who would figure in a far more momentous decision over whether to authorize an emergency approval for a vaccine.

Over the summer, the debate over plasma evolved from a purely scientific discussion about its merits to a kind of political loyalty test, laid

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, testifies at a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing in Washington, Thursday, May 7, 2020, about new tests for the coronavirus. bare in presidential remarks in the days before the announcement.

In a news briefing on Aug. 19, Trump complained that “people over there” — an apparent reference to the FDA — wanted to limit plasma treatment until after the election. In a Twitter post three days later, he accused “deep state” officials at the agency of slow-walking approvals of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments to harm him politically.

Like other approaches to dealing with the virus, convalescent plasma was a subject of scientific debate and disagreement. The pale yellow liquid that remains after blood is stripped of its red and white cells has been used since the 1890s to treat infectious diseases, including the flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (or SARS) and Ebola.

Regulators at the FDA, which approves new treatments, were willing to evaluate convalescent plasma for emergency approval on the basis of tens of thousands of case studies from a federally supported Mayo Clinic program. Collins and other officials at the NIH wanted its benefits tested with randomized trials, for which scientists across the country had struggled to recruit patients. Although NIH did not have regulatory authority, the administration wanted agreement among all the health agencies on moving ahead with expanded use of plasma.

In June, Marks alerted Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, that early data from the Mayo Clinic program

looked promising. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, quickly began agitating for emergency approval, senior administration officials said.

Dr. John Fleming, a top adviser to Meadows, holds a weekly meeting with Hahn, Marks, Dr. Janet Woodcock, a top FDA drug official, and Eric Hargan, the deputy health secretary. Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and sonin-law, was also closely involved in tracking progress on vaccines and treatments.

For weeks, FDA regulators, backed by Hahn, insisted the data from the plasma research was not strong enough to justify approving wider use. By Aug. 12, though, they were ready to move ahead, deciding plasma met the comparatively low bar for emergency authorization in which the potential benefits outweighed the risks.

NIH officials were still arguing for a clinical trial, but the scientists arrived at a compromise: The FDA would analyze the data again with fresh results from the Mayo Clinic program.

Frustrated by the delay, Trump pressed his case with Alex Azar, his health secretary.

At the FDA, officials were expecting to finish the new analysis for the NIH and to announce emergency approval of plasma as early as Monday, Aug. 24.

But on the preceding Thursday, they were told that was too late: The decision had to be announced on Sunday, the day before the start of Continues on page 10

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

The maitre d’ will take your temperature now

Temperature checks are like getting the oil checked before a long car trip, said one expert: “It makes you feel better,” but “it’s not going to make your trip any safer.”

By RONI CARYN RABIN

I

n recent weeks, a new cadre of gatekeepers armed with thermometer guns has appeared at the entrances of hospitals, office buildings and manufacturing plants to screen out feverish individuals who may carry the coronavirus.

Employees at some companies must report their temperature on apps to get clearance to come in. And when indoor dining resumes at restaurants in New York City later this month, temperature checks will be done at the door.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the practice of checking for fever has become more and more commonplace, causing a surge in sales of infrared contact-free thermometers and body temperature scanners even as the scientific evidence indicating they are of little value has solidified.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York last week called for checking patrons’ temperatures as one of several ground rules for resuming indoor dining in restaurants, along with strict

limits on the number of tables and a mask mandate for diners when they are not seated. Restaurants also will be required to obtain contact information from one guest at each table.

There is ample reason for concern. Coronavirus outbreaks — like one in East Lansing, Michigan, this summer that infected 187 people — have been traced to superspreading gatherings at bars and restaurants. And a new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that one difference between people who contracted the virus and those who did not is that infected individuals were twice as likely to have eaten at a restaurant in the two weeks preceding their illness. The study, however, did not distinguish between outdoor dining and indoor seating, which most experts consider more hazardous.

But while health officials have endorsed masks and social distancing as effective measures for curbing the spread of the coronavirus, some experts scoff at fever checks. Taking temperatures at entry points is nothing more than

theater, they say, a gesture that is unlikely to screen out many infected individuals, and one that offers little more than the illusion of safety.

Cuomo has allowed businesses to demand that patrons undergo temperature checks and to deny admission to those who refuse or have a fever, and he is requiring restaurants in New York City that resume indoor dining to check customers’ temperatures. The CDC defines a fever as a temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or higher; some reports have questioned the accuracy of thermometer guns, however.

While temperature checks may identify people who are seriously ill, those are the people who probably won’t be socializing much or going out for meals. And a growing body of evidence suggests that many of those who are driving transmission are so-called silent carriers — people who have been infected but feel fine and don’t have a fever or any other symptoms.

Temperature checks are akin to “getting the oil checked before you go on a long car trip,” said Dr. David Thomas, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “It makes you feel better, but it’s not going to keep you from wrecking the car or prevent the tires from falling off. It’s not going to make your trip any safer.

“It’s something you can do, and it makes you feel like you’re doing something,” he said.

“But it won’t catch most people who are spreading COVID.” Most people who spike a fever feel lousy and presumably would cancel their dinner plans, said Dr. Thomas McGinn, Northwell Health’s senior vice president and deputy physician in chief. Temperature checks might pick up a few individuals who are unaware of their fever, he said.

But the absence of fever “means nothing,” he said. “It’s not a very sensitive test.”

It does, however, convey a strong public health message, serving as a reminder that people must take precautions, and that itself may be of benefit, McGinn said. “It makes people think twice and reminds them that this

is a big deal, we still need to be careful, you need someone to stand by the door to do that,” he said.

But here’s the rub: While fever can be a symptom of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, not everyone infected with the virus develops a fever — or many other symptoms, for that matter. Physicians writing in the New England Journal of Medicine have called the phenomenon of symptomless spread the “Achilles’ heel of COVID-19 pandemic control.”

Evidence of asymptomatic spread dates back to early in the pandemic but has been mounting ever since. A recent study from South Korea published in JAMA Internal Medicine in August offered even more proof, finding that infected individuals who don’t feel ill may carry just as much virus in their nose, throat and lungs as those with symptoms — and for almost as long.

A. David Paltiel, a professor of health policy and management at Yale School of Public Health, said these individuals are the “silent spreaders” who are driving transmission and sparking superspreading events.

“You are maximally infectious before you exhibit symptoms, if you exhibit any symptoms at all,” Paltiel said. “You can be exposed and incubating the virus, and be beginning to shed massive amounts of transmissible virus and be a superspreader, without actually exhibiting any symptoms like a fever.”

Temperature checks will do nothing to stop these “ticking time bombs,” he said. “It’s a bad idea.”

Instead, he said, restaurants should push for access to rapid-turnaround, point-of-care tests for patrons.

Interestingly, even seriously ill coronavirus patients who need medical attention don’t always have a temperature. Of nearly 6,000 patients in the New York area who were so sick last spring that they were admitted to Northwell Health hospitals, only 30% were febrile when they came in, according to a study by McGinn that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Trump pressed for a plasma treatment. Officials worry, is a vaccine next?

From page 9 the Republican National Convention, ostensibly because making the announcement during the gathering would appear to be politically driven.

Another obstacle emerged that weekend: New Mayo Clinic data was missing key entries and could not be used, foiling the reanalysis.

White House officials said they were told by Azar and Hahn that they were ready to make the announcement on Sunday. The president’s communications team quickly put together an event in the White House briefing room, with Trump flanked by Hahn and Azar.

The FDA called the approval “another achievement” in the administration’s battle against

the pandemic.

The rush contributed to serious mistakes.

Hahn misinterpreted agency data and claimed that plasma reduced the mortality rate of COVID-19 patients by 35% — a substantial exaggeration of what the research actually showed.

Immediately after the announcement,

however, the mood in the Oval Office was celebratory. Cupcakes were served. Photographs were taken.

Before him on the Resolute Desk, the president had multiple copies of that day’s Wall Street Journal. He noted with pleasure a prominent article stating that he had forever changed the Republican Party.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

11

How the pandemic has changed apartment building amenities

By C.J. HUGHES

A

fter the Sept. 11 attacks, some landlords installed sturdy posts outside their buildings to guard against future strikes.

A legacy of the current health crisis? Kettlebells with handles made of copper.

Opting for the brown metal known for its antimicrobial properties instead of steel is among the steps some developers are taking to keep viruses out of their amenity spaces.

While slow to embrace major changes — some developers say they’re hopeful that pandemics will not be a concern when their projects finally open in 2023 — developers are making tweaks in the face of the COVID era.

They’re adding cabana-lined roof decks, repurposing lounges as outdoor schools and switching out builtin couches for more movable versions to facilitate social distancing, as well as adding ventilation systems that are deluxe even by the standards of luxury apartments.

“We haven’t had drastic changes,” said Whitney Kraus, the director of architecture and planning for Brown Harris Stevens Development Marketing, but added, “I don’t think amenities will ever go back to the way they were before.”

Some upgrades will likely appeal whether a disease is rampaging or not.

The residents of Astoria Lights, a co-op redevelopment on 38th Street in Queens, for instance, will probably enjoy a new roof deck long after the COVID crisis has passed.

After watching residents throng to an existing public roof deck after it reopened in July and noticing that units with private terraces at the Rowan, a nearby project, were hot commodities during the lockdown, the coop decided to boost the complex’s amount of outdoor space, said John Petras, a RockFarmer co-managing principal.

The planned new deck will be the third at the buffbrick four-building co-op, which has 167 apartments, 138 of which are being converted from rentals in phases.

One-bedrooms start at $575,000.

Plans for the deck, which will be presented to the co-op board for approval this fall, will offer about a dozen private cabanas, curtain-lined seating areas measuring about 100 square feet with starting prices of about $45,000 a pop. Putting them atop a prewar structure won’t be a snap, Petras said: “It’s a major job and a major expense,” about $250,000 for the deck alone. “But there is a demand.”

In fact, six of seven cabanas on the building’s second deck, which had been planned pre-COVID and is about to be constructed, sold quickly, he added.

Quarantine has forced tweaks to other amenities.

A planned basement co-working center will now install

A rooftop deck at Astoria Lights, a residential building in Queens, on Sunday, Sept. 6, 2020. The deck has been so popular, the building may add another on a different part of the roof. dividers around workspaces, to make them more private, while hammocks in courtyards will be similarly cordoned off. And a rooftop garden on the second deck, has been redesigned to include walking paths.

“We’re not going to go all in on protecting the building against pandemics, assuming they will keep happening,” Petras said. “But for now, we’re doing everything we can.”

Rental complexes seem to be rationing amenities differently. Gotham Organization, a rental developer at work on new projects, is undertaking a sort of test drive on some existing properties to see what works.

Properties like Gotham West in Manhattan and the Ashland in Brooklyn, for example, now require tenants to use an app called Amenity Boss — created this spring in response to lockdowns — to reserve their outdoor time in public courtyards, roof decks and terraces.

And when Gotham reopens its gyms this month, capacity will be limited to 33% of what is permitted.

Six-foot social distancing will also be required, which Gotham will enforce by unplugging some treadmills and other workout machines.

To make up for the reductions, Gotham will keep gyms open round the clock, said Phil Lavoie, Gotham’s chief operating officer, who added, “What can we do to allow people to enjoy themselves but also be as safe as they can be?”

Other apartment building gyms are going even further by imposing 20% capacity restrictions, including Level BK, a 554-unit rental in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from Douglaston Development, and Aro, a 426-unit tower in midtown Manhattan from Algin Management.

“You really want to be conscientious of the endusers at the end of day,” said Jeremy Brutus, a co-founder of Urbn Playground, which manages the gyms at both properties.

Brutus said that since only about a quarter of a

building’s tenants ever use the gym, developers probably shouldn’t spend endless amounts of cash on germ-free products. “Everybody is really searching for creative solutions right now.”

One sparing-few-expenses example might be 378 West End Ave., a 58-unit condo from Alchemy Properties that is under construction on the Upper West Side and will start sales this fall.

In the building’s gym, Alchemy has opted for equipment with copper handles instead of steel ones, including barbells, dumbbells, weight machines and kettlebells, which are made by Black Iron Strength, a Washington state company.

Studies have found that the coronavirus can’t survive as long on copper as on steel, although copper equipment can cost at least six times more than steel.

But Alchemy seems to believe in its antimicrobial properties. All doors in the condo’s 11,000-square-foot amenity area, which features a half-basketball court, a squash court and a recording studio, have copper handles.

The developer is also emphasizing air quality. The entire building uses hospital-grade MERV 13 filters, and amenity rooms will have an extra safeguard: a special ionization system, tucked into ducts, that zaps viruses that might sneak through.

Similarly, key fobs unlock lobby doors, so no touching is required. Kraus, of Brown Harris Stevens, said that motion-triggered faucets and automated toilets are also bound to be deployed in shared spaces soon. “Amenity spaces are prime locations to really embrace the current technology,” she said.

Other changes are less physical and more programmatic. At One West End, a 3-year-old condo with 246 units from the Elad Group and Silverstein Properties with 246 units, 234 of which have sold, residents have repurposed a portion of a stylish sixth-floor terrace.

White couches where adults might have once sipped cocktails will be pushed aside to make way for socially distanced classes for children after their onlineschool day is through. There will be acting lessons and chemistry experiments, according to a project spokeswoman. When the weather turns chilly, the building might roll out heat lamps.

But as couches can be repositioned, and gym machines plugged back in, many of the COVID-era fixes will be short term, according to Nancy Packes, the principal of Nancy Packes Data Services, which consults developers on projects.

Indeed, people may be scared to gather in amenity spaces today, she said, but they will likely pack them again soon.

“The immediate changes are just about concerns about transmitting the disease,” she said, “but in the long run, developers feel that concerns about density will go away.”

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

The woman taking over TikTok at the toughest time

Vanessa Pappas, general manager of TikTok North America, at the company’s office in Culver City, Calif., Sept. 8, 2020. Pappas is keeping a focus on the app’s community of creators and users as it deals with pressure from President Trump, Beijing and a possible sale.

By MIKE ISAAC and TAYLOR LORENZ

S

ix weeks ago, as TikTok grappled with escalating tensions between the United States and China, the social media app’s top executives huddled together to figure out their next steps.

Vanessa Pappas, 41, was worried.

TikTok’s North American business, which she has run since 2018, was dealing with an uproar. President Donald Trump had threatened to ban TikTok because of its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and many of the more than 100 million people who use TikTok in the United States were up in arms.

So in the early hours of Aug. 1, Pappas recorded a 59-second video from her home office in Los Angeles to calm the creators on TikTok and its fans. “We’ve heard your outpouring of support, and we wanted to say thank you,” she said in the video, which quickly went viral under the hashtag #SaveTikTok. “We’re not planning on going anywhere.”

Pappas is now repeating that message as she lands in an even hotter hot seat.

Last month, Kevin Mayer, TikTok’s chief executive, said he was leaving the com-

pany, citing its uncertain political status.

Pappas was appointed TikTok’s interim global head, just as the app faces an even murkier future.

Under an executive order from Trump, ByteDance must essentially strike a deal to sell off TikTok’s U.S. operations

by Sept. 20; it will have a few weeks after that to close a sale. Yet after weeks of negotiations with potential buyers such as Microsoft, Walmart and Oracle, the discussions were thrown into disarray when the Chinese government signaled that it would weigh in on TikTok’s future.

In a recent 30-minute interview over Zoom from her home, Pappas said TikTok’s predicament was “unique” and described what it was like to navigate it through “a challenging time.” She declined to discuss specifics about TikTok’s deal talks and said she was not involved in them.

Instead, Pappas said, she is focused on what TikTok’s future could look like if the app’s ownership is bifurcated.

Most of all, she said, she is doubling down on putting TikTok’s community of creators and users — ranging from those who post videos of cake decora-

ting to those who break dance — first.

Pappas later added that she regularly talked to Zhang Yiming, ByteDance’s founder and chief executive, about all of these issues.

To focus on its community, TikTok in July formed a Creator Fund, where creators can earn cash for views, starting with $200 million. And with the pandemic forcing people indoors for the foreseeable future, Pappas said she and her team were working on making TikTok an uplifting place to visit. Last month, the company launched a largest national advertising campaign on television and digital media, highlighting more than 30 popular creators under the tagline “It starts on TikTok.” “We’ve built this product for hundreds of millions of people, and we’re not looking for that to change,” said Pappas, a former YouTube executive.

But keeping TikTok’s community happy in such a turbulent period may be challenging. Some creators and fans have been rattled by Trump’s moves against the app. Since his executive order, people in the United States have installed TikTok about 6.5 million times, down 13% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm.

Competitors have also pounced. Facebook introduced Reels, a TikTok clone inside Instagram, in August. The social network has also doled out millions of dollars to some of TikTok’s biggest stars to lure them over to using Reels.

Pappas said she wasn’t worried about Facebook and Instagram Reels.

“You can certainly copy a feature, but you can’t copy a community,” she said.

“I think that’s really hard to replicate.”

Tom Keiser, chief executive of Hootsuite, a social media management company, said TikTok was right to make its power users a priority.

“They need to be investing in those folks,” he said. “There’s so many things out of their control, but their future growth is based on influencers and content creators continuing to evolve and grow and leverage the new capabilities TikTok is rolling out.”

Pappas has worked in the online influencer world since some of its earliest days. Half Greek by birth, she grew up in Australia and speaks with an Aussie twang. She moved to London when she

was 20, and eventually migrated to New York. In 2007, she joined Next New Networks, a company that helped web video creators earn money from their efforts.

YouTube bought Next New Networks in 2011. Pappas joined YouTube and quickly rose through the ranks. She was YouTube’s first audience development lead, a role that led her to connect with video makers. Her division at YouTube developed and popularized the term “creator” and helped transform video blogging, or vlogging, into a fulltime job.

Pappas also wrote a book, “The YouTube Creator Playbook,” on how creators could make money from their followings, in 2011. She went on to develop YouTube’s Creator Academy, an educational content portal that teaches creators how to build a business on YouTube, and a channel certification program, which teaches creators about digital rights management, legal issues and advanced analytics.

TikTok lured her from YouTube at the end of 2018 to be its general manager and head of North America, based in Los Angeles. At the time, TikTok had just expanded globally. It was a new challenge for Pappas, who said she had wanted to get in on the ground floor of the next big creator movement.

Pappas said that unlike Facebook or Twitter, TikTok wasn’t wholly dependent on one’s social graph, or how many friends someone had. The app’s discovery algorithm instead surfaces popular trending content from people with followings both large and small, keeping users in the app longer and coming back more frequently.

“Anyone feels like they can be a creator,” said Greg Justice, TikTok’s head of content programming. “I’ve had friends with only a few followers who have gone viral.”

Justice, who works closely with Pappas, said that her leadership style was driven by data and that she often asked people to provide information to back up their projects and proposals. That helped the company avoid allowing dominant personalities and workplace politics dictate the way it was run, he said.

“She really democratizes the decision-making and leads to more objectivity at the company,” Justice said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

13 Stocks

India’s secondary listing plan for firms joining foreign markets irks investors, sources say

I

ndian companies that list overseas will have to later launch on a domestic bourse under policy changes being considered by government officials, sources told Reuters, a move that global investors fear will harm valuations.

India said in March it would allow local firms to directly list abroad to better access foreign capital for growth, but the rules have yet to be decided. Currently only certain types of securities such as depository receipts are able to be listed in foreign markets, and only after the companies go public in India.

The new policy, aimed at helping local firms achieve better valuations, could be a shot in the arm for Indian unicorn start-ups valued at over $1 billion and Reliance’s RELI.NS digital unit which is eyeing a U.S. listing after raising over $20 billion from global names like KKR & Co KKR.N. But in recent weeks Indian officials told global investors and companies in meetings they were considering mandating a secondary listing for local companies on Indian bourses after they list abroad, five sources said.

The time period under consideration for such a requirement ranges from 6 months to 3 years, sources said.

A separate senior regulatory source in India said “dual listing was being considered by the (finance) ministry for sure,” but a final position on the matter has not been reached.

Japan’s SoftBank 9984.T and an Indian payment firm it backs, Paytm, as well as Reliance and U.S.-based Sequoia Capital have conveyed to the government the secondary listing provision risks splitting trading volumes, hurting long-term valuations and raising compliance needs and costs, the sources added.

“To require companies to subsequently list in India will make these rules meaningless,” said a senior executive working at a global venture-capital firm.

SoftBank and Sequoia have invested in various Indian firms like ride-hailing company Ola and hospitality firm Oyo. Foreign listings could provide exits for such investors at higher valuations but also allow Indian firms, especially from the tech sector, to access specialised investors abroad who can better value their companies.

The rules are being drafted by the finance and corporate affairs ministries, in discussion with the capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), and will be finalised in coming weeks.

Spokespeople for SEBI and the two ministries did not respond to a request for comment. A SoftBank spokeswoman said “we never comment on confidential policy discussions”. Sequoia, Paytm and Reliance did not respond to requests for a comment.

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14

Monday, September 14, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Protecting Brazil’s uncontacted tribes for 30 years, then killed by an arrow.

Rieli Franciscato, an expert on isolated tribes, was struck in the chest with an arrow and killed on Wednesday.

By LIS MORICONI and ERNESTO LINDOÑO

S

ightings of the isolated tribes that Rieli Franciscato devoted his career to protecting are rare and fraught with danger.

So in June, when a handful of unclothed Indigenous people emerged from the forest in Rondônia state and approached a small hamlet, Franciscato, a Brazilian government official specializing in uncontacted tribes, sprang into action.

His frantic efforts the last few months to keep Rondônia’s isolated tribes safe, and to try to figure out why they had begun to venture out of the Amazon rainforest, ended on Wednesday when Franciscato was struck in the chest with an arrow and killed.

Colleagues and police investigators believe a member of an uncontacted tribe fired on Franciscato, 56, mistakenly perceiving him as a threat.

Moises Assaup Kampe, 35, a friend of Franciscato who was with him that day, said they had been retracing the footsteps of the tribesmen in the rainforest, following the most recent sighting by villagers in a rural area near the town of Seringueiras.

“We were looking for information about where they had come from and try-

ing to see if they had left anything behind,” Kampe said.

Suddenly, Franciscato yelped. Kampe watched in horror as his friend yanked out the tip of a 5-foot bamboo arrow that had pierced his chest.

“He pulled it out and began running,” Kampe said. “He ran about 50 meters, passed out and dropped to the ground.”

Brazil’s Amazon rainforest is home to dozens of Indigenous tribes that have chosen to remain in isolation. Since the 1980s, Brazil’s government has sought to prevent outsiders, including missionaries, from coming into contact with those tribes.

Such encounters in the past have been devastating for Indigenous people, who lack immunity to common pathogens.

Upholding the no-contact policy is the responsibility of the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI, the federal agency where Franciscato worked for more than three decades.

Its mission has become increasingly hard in recent years as loggers and miners have invaded Indigenous territories in violation of federal law, usually facing no consequences. President Jair Bolsonaro, who favors opening up more of the Amazon to development, has called Indigenous territories archaic and a hindrance to economic

growth. He has compared communities living in the forest to animals in a zoo.

Even as FUNAI’s budget was slashed, with several of its remote field offices shuttered and its ranks reduced in recent years, Franciscato remained steadfast in his conviction that the last few humans living in isolation deserved protection.

“He was an excellent person,” Kampe said. “Everything he did was motivated by a desire to protect isolated communities and uphold their right to a dignified life.”

Ivaneide Cardozo, an Indigenous rights activist in Rondônia, said she and Franciscato often spoke about the dangers of what they both regarded as a labor of love. Franciscato, she said, feared that he could be killed by loggers, who are frequently armed, or by a tribesman, if he were mistaken for an invader.

In June, when Franciscato got word that a handful of isolated tribesmen had approached a ranch, he devised a plan to keep them safe. The possibility that one of those people could be exposed to the coronavirus and spread it among relatives was a worst-case scenario. So Franciscato pleaded with villagers in the area to avoid close contact with the tribesmen at all cost. “‘I’m going to do everything in my power to protect those Indigenous people

Mr. Franciscato on the Purus River, an Amazon tributary, in 1997. He worked for the National Indian Foundation for more than three decades.

and I’m not going to allow them to make contact,’” Cardozo recalled him telling her.

But he saw it a daunting task, she said, since Franciscato had effectively become a solo operation tracking several tribes in a vast area. “‘The problem is I’m all alone, I don’t have a team and I need people,’” Cardozo said he had told her recently.

Cardozo said Franciscato was tireless as he studied the tribes from a distance.

The work entails getting close enough to gather clues about how these communities are faring by studying their movement, their diet and any tools they leave behind.

“He made a note of every single thing,” Cardozo said. “Even the weather.”

FUNAI’s president, Marcelo Xavier, called him an “exemplary” public servant.

“He dedicated more than 30 years to the protection of isolated Indigenous people,” Xavier said in a video message.

When the group emerged from the forest in June, villagers said the tribesmen left a slab of meat and took a chicken from a ranch. That was interpreted as an amicable exchange.

When Franciscato came within eyesight of those tribesmen a few days later, he gestured to them that they should return to the forest, Cardozo said. He believed that was the safest course as long as a highly infectious pandemic was rippling across Brazil.

That fear is what motivated him to rush back to the field this week after hearing that five naked tribesmen had emerged from the jungle in another area of Rondônia, walking in a V-shaped formation.

Dhuliana Pereira, 18, was gathering wood near her house when the men approached carrying bows and arrows.

“My father started screaming,” she said. “We didn’t know what their reaction would be.”

A few hours later, Franciscato came by and interviewed all the villagers about what they had seen. Then he set out into the woods, tracing fresh footprints.

A few minutes later, Pereira saw Franciscato’s body on a wheelbarrow, which friends used to carry him to a police vehicle that rushed him to the hospital.

“He looked unconscious,” she said. “I saw no signs of life.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

15

How China brought nearly 200 million students back to school

By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

U

nder bright blue skies, nearly 2,000 students gathered this month for the start of school at Hanyang No. 1 High School in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus first emerged.

Medical staff stood guard at school entrances, taking temperatures. Administrative officials reviewed the students’ travel histories and coronavirus test results. Local Communist Party cadres kept watch, making sure teachers followed detailed instructions on hygiene and showed an “anti-epidemic spirit.”

“I’m not worried,” a music teacher at the school, Yang Meng, said in an interview.

“Wuhan is now the safest place.”

As countries around the world struggle to safely reopen schools this fall, China is harnessing the power of its authoritarian system to offer in-person learning for about 195 million students in kindergarten through 12th grade at public schools.

While the Communist Party has adopted many of the same sanitation and distancing procedures used elsewhere, it has rolled them out with a characteristic all-out, command-and-control approach that brooks no dissent. It has mobilized battalions of local officials and party cadres to inspect classrooms, deployed apps and other technology to monitor students and staff, and restricted their movements. It has even told parents to stay away for fear of spreading germs.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said in a speech Tuesday that the country’s progress in fighting the virus, including the opening of schools, had “fully demonstrated the clear superiority of Communist Party leadership and our socialist system.”

China’s top-down, state-led political system allows the party to drive its vast bureaucracy in pursuit of a single target — an approach that would be nearly impossible anywhere else in the world.

In many ways, China is applying the same heavy-handed model to reopen schools that it has used to bring the virus under control. To stop the epidemic, authorities imposed harsh lockdowns and deployed invasive technologies to track residents, raising public anger in some places and concerns about the erosion of privacy and civil liberties.

With schools, the government’s effort

has in some places been met with similar frustrations. Teachers, who are at times doubling as medical workers, checking for fevers and isolating sick students, say they are exhausted by the new protocols. Students have complained that some policies, such as lockdowns on university campuses, are excessive.

China is introducing many of the same measures as countries in Europe and elsewhere where schools have recently reopened.

Principals are instructing students and teachers to keep a distance inside classrooms, although seating arrangements remain largely the same. Teachers are trying to keep students separated by grade, assigning specific routes and entrances for different age groups to avoid crowding. Masks are mostly optional inside classrooms for students and staff.

But China’s approach is also much more demanding, as it has been throughout the pandemic. Students and staff in areas where outbreaks had previously been reported, or who had traveled to areas considered risky, were required to show coronavirus test results before the start of school. Education officials have urged students to avoid “unnecessary outings” aside from going to school, although the rule is unlikely to be enforced. Students are also discouraged from speaking while eating or taking public transportation.

“One heart and one mind to prevent and control the epidemic,” reads a propaganda slogan plastered around school grounds.

China still faces the possibility of fresh outbreaks, epidemiologists say, especially in the fall and winter months. But so far, the measures appear to be effective, with no outbreaks or school closures reported.

The opening of schools has given Xi a propaganda win in a time of slowing economic growth and international criticism over his government’s early cover-up and mishandling of the outbreak.

While the central government has warned school officials to avoid becoming “paralyzed or lax,” it is unclear whether the measures are sustainable. The government’s blanket rules have provoked ire in some corners.

Many schools are already short on staff and resources, and educators say they are struggling to keep up with long lists of virus-control tasks. Some teachers are rising at 4 a.m. just to review protocols.

“There are too many things, and we

aren’t compensated,” Li Mengtian, a teacher at a primary school in the city of Shenzhen, said in a telephone interview. “We need to spend a lot of time and energy on our work.”

At other schools, educators say that officials are blindly following policies to satisfy higher-ups, even if they are not effective.

Kang Jinzhi, a teacher at a high school in Jingzhou, a city about 130 miles west of Wuhan, said a thermal camera at the entrance of her school constantly provided inaccurate data, labeling everyone who enters as feverish.

“The machine is useless,” she said in an interview. “But the school must set this up because the policies make such demands.”

At public universities, which serve some 40 million students in China, anger has erupted over campus lockdowns that have targeted students while exempting faculty and staff. Officials have also banned students from receiving takeout meals and packages. In recent days, videos have circulated online showing long lines at cafeterias and students trying to hug their dates through campus fences.

“Do you plan to lock us up for life?” complained Pan Sheng, a sophomore at Changshu Institute of Technology in the eastern province of Jiangsu, on Weibo, a microblogging site.

“I feel like I’m in high school,” Pan said in an interview. “We came to college to gather knowledge and learn how to conduct

ourselves in a society, not just sit in class at school every day.”

The Ministry of Education’s guidelines call for temperatures to be taken at least three times a day and reported to school officials.

The rules are tighter in areas that the government sees as particularly vulnerable to an outbreak. In Beijing, for example, masks are required at all times.

Some measures go even further in expanding the scope of what is typically expected of the country’s educators. The ministry has ordered schools to help students cope with the stress and trauma of the pandemic by providing them with counseling.

Officials are being held accountable for reducing myopia among schoolchildren, rates of which rose sharply during the pandemic, the government says, as students spent more time using computers to learn (and probably play).

Despite the hassle of some of the restrictions, many families welcome the resumption of classes. After months of leading makeshift lessons in their living rooms and nagging their children about playing too many video games, parents are relieved to be able to send them back to classes and after-school tutoring programs.

“We controlled the epidemic well, and it will be good for our country,” said Sofia Tang, mother of a high school freshman in the eastern city of Hangzhou. “If we handled this at all like they are handling it overseas, there would be riots.”

Students at Changchun Street Primary School in Wuhan, China, during a media tour organized by the local authorities last week.

16

Monday, September 14, 2020

As both sides dig in, what’s the endgame for Belarus?

A demonstration against the embattled president of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, outside Independence Palace in Minsk, Aug. 30, 2020. Protesters have defied expectations by turning out in huge numbers each Sunday for the past four weeks despite government threats.

By ANDREW HIGGINS

V

iewers of a news show on Belarusian state TV got an unpleasant surprise recently when a disparaging report about protests sweeping their East European nation got the country’s name wrong. It referred to Belarus as Belorussia, a Soviet-era designation that was dropped nearly three decades ago but is still widely used in Russia.

The blunder followed a flood of Russian journalists into Belarusian state media to fill posts left vacant by locals who have quit in droves in solidarity with protesters.

The slip highlighted what is now perhaps the biggest obstacle confronting opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko: They are no longer struggling against just their own president but also the Kremlin.

After more than a month of protests, there is still no clear endgame in sight for either side, with Lukashenko and his foes both insisting they can prevail but neither offering a clear and plausible path to victory — other than continued peaceful defiance by protesters and relentless repression by the government.

On Saturday in Minsk, the capital, burly security agents wearing masks to hide their identities arrested dozens of protesters attending what has become a weekly

demonstration by women. Videos posted on social media showed women pulling off the masks of agents as they grabbed protesters.

But Lukashenko “will have to stop eventually,” said Ivan Kravtsov, the executive secretary of the opposition’s Coordinating Council, a body set up last month but now denuded of its leading members by a wave of arrests and expulsions.

Kravtsov was forced to flee to Ukraine on Tuesday, leaving Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, as the sole member of the council’s leadership now still at large inside Belarus.

Unidentified men tried to enter her apartment Wednesday but she avoided detention, probably thanks to a visit by several European diplomats.

Lukashenko, Kravtsov said in a telephone interview from Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, where he is now sheltering, cannot possibly expel or jail everyone in Belarus who wants him gone, and so “does not know what to do anymore. Our strategy of peaceful protest really works.”

But the opposition does not seem to know what to do next either, beyond staging yet more protests and pleading, as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the main rival to Lukashenko in a disputed Aug. 9 election, recently did from exile in Lithuania, for the

United Nations to send monitors to Belarus to “document the situation on the ground.”

Confident that President Vladimir Putin of Russia will not, at least for the moment, let him fall, Lukashenko has no need to worry about the United Nations: Russia is a permanent member of the Security Council and can block any move that might weaken his grip.

Nor does he have to worry much about pressure from the West generally.

The United States and the European Union have both condemned the violence against protesters but have taken no concrete steps to punish Lukashenko and his security officials or to support his opponents.

One way to break the stalemate that all sides, including Russia, say they could support would be constitutional changes to pave the way for new elections. But Lukashenko, having declared in August that “until you kill me, there will not be any more elections,” has shown no real interest in changing anything any time soon. He refuses to even talk with his foes, denouncing them as treasonous “rats” and “tricksters” who belong in jail, not at the negotiating table.

Instead, he has focused on rounding up workers who organized strikes and methodically dismantling the opposition, whose most prominent figures have, one by one, been forced to flee abroad or been thrown in jail.

Speaking to state prosecutors in Minsk on Thursday, Lukashenko mocked those calling for him to leave office.

“They often reproach me saying ‘He will not give up power,’” he said. “They are right in their reproaches.” Power, he added, is “not given away.”

Maryna Rakhlei, a Belarusian researcher at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin who supports the protesters, conceded: “It is a total deadlock. It does not look as if either side is going to give up.”

But, she warned, “at some point there will be a mistake by either side” that could turn peaceful protests into a dangerously violent confrontation.

With Russia on his side, Lukashenko seems confident he can win, either by waiting out the protesters or, in the event of a violent conflagration, crushing them with overwhelming force, as the Chinese Communist Party, the Belarusian leader’s only vocal foreign supporter other than Russia,

did with protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

That his fate now rests with Russia as much or more than with the people of Belarus was made clear this past week when, for his first interview since his implausible election victory with 80% of the vote, Lukashenko chose to speak not to representatives of his own country’s media but to editors from Russian state television.

Telling the Russians that “only I can really protect Belarusians now,” he warned: “If Belarus collapses today, Russia will be next.”

His opponents, who insist they have no desire to see Belarus tilt away from Russia and toward the West, as Ukraine did after it toppled its president in 2014, are hoping that Russian support is far more tentative than Lukashenko has made out.

“Russia is giving only verbal support,” said Kravtsov, and “understands that a leader who does not have real support in his own country is not worth anything.”

Russia, he added, would be “more comfortable with a leader who is supported by his people.”

But Russia has so far shown no inclination to dump Lukashenko in favor of a more popular alternative. Although many analysts believe that Moscow will eventually cut him loose, they do not believe it would do so under pressure from the street.

While initially lukewarm in his backing of Lukashenko, with whom he has long had testy relations, Putin announced at the end of August that he had formed a “reserve force” of Russian security officers ready for action in Belarus “if the situation gets out of control.”

About the last thing Putin wants, said Nigel Gould-Davies, Britain’s former ambassador to Belarus and a onetime diplomat in Moscow, is “to see the strongman leader of a neighboring Slavic country overthrown by peaceful people power” because that would only set an example Russians might be tempted to follow.

“Now it is Russia and Belarus together. There has been a visible escalation of Russian support,” said Gould-Davies, a researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Lukashenko, according to the Kremlin, will visit Russia on Monday for talks with Putin on strengthening ties between the two countries.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

17

Afghanistan peace talks open in Qatar, seeking end to decades of war

By MUJIB MASHAL

“The Afghan tragedy has been not being able to get to an agreement on a formula and then stick to it,” Khalilzad said. “There was a great victory after the Soviet departure, the Afghans had this great victory. The rest of the world benefited from it a lot: we became the only superpower, Eastern Europe got liberated, Central Asia got freed. But Afghanistan continued this disintegration. The Afghans — they won, but they lost.

“But now they have another chance to get to a formula — where imposing one group’s will on the rest with the force of arms has not been a successful formula. The historic record is not encouraging, but the lessons could be instructive for them.”

T

he Taliban and the Afghan government began historic peace talks in Qatar on Saturday, aimed at shaping a power-sharing government that would end decades of war that have consumed Afghanistan and left millions dead and displaced.

If realized, a peace deal would be the first time in generations that a new form of Afghan government was not being established at the point of a gun: The current model was ushered in by the American invasion that toppled the Taliban’s harsh Islamic regime in 2001, and each previous one back to the 1979 Soviet invasion was set off by coup, collapse or conquest.

But as the Qatar talks begin, against the backdrop of an American troop pullout and grievous violence against Afghan officials and civilians, some critics of the process argued that the Taliban insurgency was still, in essence, holding a gun to the government’s head.

The peace talks opened Saturday morning in Doha, the Qatari capital, with formal ceremonies held under tight security and strong coronavirus restrictions. The negotiations will be complicated at every turn by the threat of continued insurgent assaults, deep political divisions after a disputed election, decades of loss and grievance, and by foreign powers pulling Afghan factions in opposing directions.

Still, the arrival of the delegations from the two sides, who were finally coming to the table after repeated delays, offers the nation a rare opportunity in its recent history: a chance to find a formula of lasting coexistence before the withdrawal of another foreign military creates a vacuum, potentially repeating the country’s cycle of misfortune.

“We have come here with the good will and good intention to stop the 40 years of bloodshed and achieve a countrywide and lasting peace,” Abdullah Abdullah, chairman of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation and the leader of the delegation from Kabul, said at the opening ceremony. “The current conflict has no winner through war and military means, but there will be no loser if this crisis is resolved politically and peacefully through submission to the will of the people.”

The Taliban’s deputy leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, said the insurgents would participate in the talks “with full sincerity,” and he urged both sides to exercise calm and patience.

Baradar offered little detail about the Taliban’s vision for a future Afghanistan, except in broad strokes. But many on the Afghan negotiating team said that his tone — in contrast to previous Taliban speeches in public forums — was measured and offered hope.

“We seek an Afghanistan that is independent, sovereign, united, developed and free — an Afghanistan with an Islamic system in which all people of the nation can participate without discrimination and live harmoniously with each other in an atmosphere of brotherhood,” he said.

The direct negotiations became possible after the United States signed a deal with the Taliban in February that began a 14-month phased withdrawal of the remaining American troops from Afghanistan and pressured the Afghan government

Taliban prisoners at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan before their release on May 26, 2020. The Afghan government and the Taliban are finally coming to the table, after repeated delays. But the violence continues, and the challenges are vast. to free 5,000 of the Taliban’s prisoners.

The Taliban have been so singly focused on securing the withdrawal of U.S. troops that they have provided little clarity on how they envision the country’s political future — beyond broad statements about establishing an “Islamic government.”

When in power in the 1990s, they curtailed civil liberties and deprived women and minorities of basic rights.

While many in the Taliban indicate that they have learned from the experience of struggling to govern in the 1990s, others fear that the intervening decades of fighting may have propped up an even more hard-line generation of insurgents, limiting their negotiators’ ability to compromise.

Diplomats and officials said that getting the Taliban to agree to a permanent cease-fire right away would be difficult, as the insurgents will be reluctant to give up their main leverage before a political settlement is finalized. On the eve of the talks, the insurgents carried out attacks in 18 of the country’s 34 provinces, Afghanistan’s defense ministry said.

Before the talks began, Gen. Austin Miller, commander of the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said that international forces would continue to support the Afghan forces on the battlefield and make clear to them that “their sacrifice is not lost on us.”

But in Doha, as hundreds of diplomats and dignitaries took their seats in the large ballroom, Miller walked in uniform under the chandeliers and across the hall to the Taliban side and offered greetings — an image that made clear his direct war with the Taliban was largely over.

The Taliban team includes some of the delegates who negotiated the deal with the United States. But they have brought in a new chief negotiator: Mawlawi Abdul Hakim Haqqani, an influential religious scholar who has led the Taliban’s network of Islamic courts in recent years.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy for Afghan peace, said there was still an opportunity for the country to reach some sort of equilibrium. A veteran diplomat, Khalilzad was an adviser to the American government during the Cold War when the United States was funding insurgents to push Soviet troops out of Afghanistan.

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CĂůŝĮĐĂĐŝſŶ͗ DŝƌĞĐĐŝſŶ ĚĞ ůĂ ĂĐĐŝſŶ ƉƌŽƉƵĞƐƚĂ͗ ŝƐƚƌŝƚŽ ZĞƐŝĚĞŶĐŝĂů /ŶƚĞƌŵĞĚŝŽ ;ZͲ/Ϳ ĚĂ͘ ĂŵƉĂŵĞŶƚŽ͕ ĂůůĞ ηϮϱϱ 'ƵƌĂďŽ͕ WƵĞƌƚŽ ZŝĐŽ Ŷ ůĂ ǀŝƐƚĂ ĚĞů ĐĂƐŽ ĚĞ ƌĞĨĞƌĞŶĐŝĂ ƐĞ ŝŶƚĞƌĞƐĂ ĚŝƐĐƵƟƌ͕ ƉĞƌŽ ƐŝŶ ůŝŵŝƚĂƌƐĞ͕ ƵŶĂ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ ĚĞ ƉĞƌŵŝƐŽ ĚĞ ƵƐŽ ǀşĂ ǀĂƌŝĂĐŝſŶ ĞŶ ƵƐŽ ƉĂƌĂ ĞƐƚĂďůĞĐĞƌ ƵŶ ^ĂůſŶ ĚĞ ĞůůĞnjĂ͕ ĞŶ ƵŶĂ ĞƐƚƌƵĐƚƵƌĂ ƵďŝĐĂĚĂ ĞŶ ůĂ ŽŵƵŶŝĚĂĚ ĂŵƉĂŵĞŶƚŽ ĂůůĞ ͕ >ŽƚĞ ϭ ĚĞů ĂƌƌŝŽ ZŝŶĐſŶ ĚĞ 'ƵƌĂďŽ͘ >Ă ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ ƐĞ ĞǀĂůƵĂƌĄ Ă ƚĞŶŽƌ͕ ƉĞƌŽ ƐŝŶ ůŝŵŝƚĂƌƐĞ͕ Ă ůŽ ĞƐƚĂďůĞĐŝĚŽ ĞŶ ůĂƐ ZĞŐůĂƐ Ϯ͘Ϯ͘ϭϬ͕ ϲ͘ϭ͘Ϯ LJ ϲ͘ϯ͘ϭ ĚĞů ZĞŐůĂŵĞŶƚŽ ŽŶũƵŶƚŽ͘ >Ă ƉĂƌƚĞ ƉƌŽƉŽŶĞŶƚĞ ƚĞŶĚƌĄ ƋƵĞ ũƵƐƟĮĐĂƌ ƐƵ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ ƉĂƌĂ ůĂ ĐŽŶĐĞƐŝſŶ ĚĞ ůĂ ǀĂƌŝĂĐŝſŶ͘ Ŷ ůĂ ǀŝƐƚĂ ĚĞů ĐĂƐŽ ĚĞ ƌĞĨĞƌĞŶĐŝĂ ƐĞ ŝŶƚĞƌĞƐĂ ĚŝƐĐƵƟƌ͕ ƉĞƌŽ ƐŝŶ ůŝŵŝƚĂƌƐĞ͕ ƵŶĂ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ ĚĞ ƉĞƌŵŝƐŽ ĚĞ ƵƐŽ ǀşĂ ǀĂƌŝĂĐŝſŶ ĞŶ ƵƐŽ ƉĂƌĂ ĞƐƚĂďůĞĐĞƌ ƵŶ ŽůŵĂĚŽ͘ >Ă ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ ƐĞ ĞǀĂůƵĂƌĄ Ă ƚĞŶŽƌ͕ ƉĞƌŽ ƐŝŶ ůŝŵŝƚĂƌƐĞ͕ Ă ůŽ ĞƐƚĂďůĞĐŝĚŽ ĞŶ ůĂƐ ZĞŐůĂƐ Ϯ͘ϭ͘ϭϬ͕ ϲ͘ϭ͘Ϯ LJ ϲ͘ϯ͘ϭ ĚĞů ZĞŐůĂŵĞŶƚŽ ŽŶũƵŶƚŽ͘ >Ă ƉĂƌƚĞ ƉƌŽƉŽŶĞŶƚĞ ƚĞŶĚƌĄ ƋƵĞ ũƵƐƟĮĐĂƌ ƐƵ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ ƉĂƌĂ ůĂ ĐŽŶĐĞƐŝſŶ ĚĞ ůĂ ǀĂƌŝĂĐŝſŶ͘ ^Ğ ĐŽŶǀŽĐĂ Ğ ŝŶǀŝƚĂ Ăů ƉƷďůŝĐŽ ĞŶ ŐĞŶĞƌĂů Ă ĐŽŵƉĂƌĞĐĞƌ LJ ƉĂƌƟĐŝƉĂƌ Ă ůĂ ǀŝƐƚĂ ƉƷďůŝĐĂ Ă ĐĞůĞďƌĂƌƐĞ ŵĞĚŝĂŶƚĞ Ğů ŵĠƚŽĚŽ ĂůƚĞƌŶŽ ;͞ǀŝƌƚƵĂů͟Ϳ͕ ŶŽ ŽďƐƚĂŶƚĞ͕ ĐŽŶ ĂĐĐĞƐŽ Ăů ƉƷďůŝĐŽ ŐĞŶĞƌĂů͕ ĂĚĞŵĄƐ ĚĞ ůĂƐ ƉĂƌƚĞƐ ƌĞĐŽŶŽĐŝĚĂƐ͘ Ɛ ŵĂŶĚĂƚŽƌŝŽ ƋƵĞ Ğů WƌŽƉŽŶĞŶƚĞ LJͬŽ ĚƵĞŹŽ ĚĞ ůĂ ƉƌŽƉŝĞĚĂĚ Ž ƐƵ ƌĞƉƌĞƐĞŶƚĂŶƚĞ ĂƵƚŽƌŝnjĂĚŽ ĂƐŝƐƚĂ Ă ůĂ ǀŝƐƚĂ ƉƷďůŝĐĂ͕ ĚĞ ŶŽ ĂƐŝƐƟƌ ƐĞ ƉƌŽĐĞĚĞƌĄ Ăů ĂƌĐŚŝǀŽ ĚĞ ůĂ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ͘ Ŷ Ğů ĐĂƐŽ ĚĞ ŽƚƌĂƐ ƉĂƌƚĞƐ LJĂ ƌĞĐŽŶŽĐŝĚĂƐ ĞŶ Ğů ƉƌŽĐĞĚŝŵŝĞŶƚŽ͕ ůĂ ŶŽ ĐŽŵƉĂƌĞĐĞŶĐŝĂ Ă ůĂ ǀŝƐƚĂ ƉƷďůŝĐĂ ƐĞƌĄ ĐŽŶƐŝĚĞƌĂĚĂ ĐŽŵŽ ĨĂůƚĂ ĚĞ ŝŶƚĞƌĠƐ ĞŶ Ğů ĐĂƐŽ͘ ^Ğ ĂĚǀŝĞƌƚĞ ƋƵĞ ůĂƐ ƉĂƌƚĞƐ͕ ŝŶĐůƵLJĞŶĚŽ ĐŽƌƉŽƌĂĐŝŽŶĞƐ LJ ƐŽĐŝĞĚĂĚĞƐ͕ ƉŽĚƌĄŶ͕ ƉĞƌŽ ŶŽ ĞƐƚĄŶ ŽďůŝŐĂĚĂƐ͕ Ă ĐŽŵƉĂƌĞĐĞƌ ĂƐŝƐƟĚĂƐ ƉŽƌ ĂďŽŐĂĚŽ͘ ^ĂůǀŽ ũƵƐƚĂ ĐĂƵƐĂ͕ ůĂ ǀŝƐƚĂ ŶŽ ƉŽĚƌĄ ƐĞƌ ƚƌĂŶƐĨĞƌŝĚĂ͘ ƵĂůƋƵŝĞƌ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ ĚĞ ƚƌĂŶƐĨĞƌĞŶĐŝĂ ĚĞ ǀŝƐƚĂ ƚĞŶĚƌĄ ƵŶ ĐĂƌŐŽ ĚĞ ΨϭϬϬ͘ϬϬ͕ LJ ĚĞďĞƌĄ ƐĞƌ ƉƌĞƐĞŶƚĂĚĂ ĐŽŶ ŶŽ ŵĞŶŽƐ ĚĞ ĐŝŶĐŽ ;ϱͿ ĚşĂƐ ĚĞ ĂŶƚĞůĂĐŝſŶ Ă ůĂ ĨĞĐŚĂ ĚĞ ůĂ ŵŝƐŵĂ Ă ƚƌĂǀĠƐ ĚĞů ^ŝƐƚĞŵĂ hŶŝĮĐĂĚŽ ĚĞ /ŶĨŽƌŵĂĐŝſŶ ;͞^ŝŶŐůĞ ƵƐŝŶĞƐƐ WŽƌƚĂů͟Ϳ ĚĞ ůĂ K'WĞ͕ ĞdžƉƌĞƐĂŶĚŽ ůĂƐ ƌĂnjŽŶĞƐ ƋƵĞ ũƵƐƟĮĐĂŶ ůĂ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ͘ ĞďĞƌĄ ĂĚĞŵĄƐ ĐƵďƌŝƌ ůŽƐ ĐŽƐƚŽƐ ƋƵĞ ĐŽŶůůĞǀĞ ůĂ ŶŽƟĮĐĂĐŝſŶ ĚĞ ůĂ ƚƌĂŶƐĨĞƌĞŶĐŝĂ LJ ĂŶƵŶĐŝĂƌ Ğů ŶƵĞǀŽ ƐĞŹĂůĂŵŝĞŶƚŽ ŵĞĚŝĂŶƚĞ ůĂ ƉƵďůŝĐĂĐŝſŶ ĚĞ ƵŶ ŶƵĞǀŽ ĂǀŝƐŽ ĚĞ ƉƌĞŶƐĂ͘ ů ƉĞƟĐŝŽŶĂƌŝŽ ĚĞ ůĂ ƚƌĂŶƐĨĞƌĞŶĐŝĂ ĚĞ ůĂ ǀŝƐƚĂ ŶŽƟĮĐĂƌĄ LJ ĞŶǀŝĂƌĄ ĐŽƉŝĂ ĚĞ ůĂ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ ƐŝŵƵůƚĄŶĞĂŵĞŶƚĞ Ă ůĂƐ ŽƚƌĂƐ ƉĂƌƚĞƐ LJĂ ƌĞĐŽŶŽĐŝĚĂƐ ĞŶ Ğů ƉƌŽĐĞƐŽ LJ ĐĞƌƟĮĐĂƌĄ Ğů ĐƵŵƉůŝŵŝĞŶƚŽ ĐŽŶ ůŽ ĂƋƵş ĞdžƉƵĞƐƚŽ ĞŶ ůĂ ƉƌŽƉŝĂ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ ĚĞ ƚƌĂƐĨĞƌĞŶĐŝĂ͘ ů ZĞŐůĂŵĞŶƚŽ ŽŶũƵŶƚŽ͕ ĨĂĐƵůƚĂ Ăů KĮĐŝĂů džĂŵŝŶĂĚŽƌ Ă ŝŵƉŽŶĞƌ ƵŶĂ ŵƵůƚĂ ĚĞ ΨϱϬϬ͘ϬϬ Ă ƚŽĚĂ ƉĞƌƐŽŶĂ ƋƵĞ ŽďƐĞƌǀĞ ƵŶĂ ĐŽŶĚƵĐƚĂ ŝƌƌĞƐƉĞƚƵŽƐĂ ĚƵƌĂŶƚĞ ůĂ ǀŝƐƚĂ͕ ŝŶƚĞŶĐŝŽŶĂůŵĞŶƚĞ ŝŶƚĞƌƌƵŵƉĂ Ž ĚŝůĂƚĞ ůŽƐ ƉƌŽĐĞĚŝŵŝĞŶƚŽƐ ƐŝŶ ĐĂƵƐĂ ũƵƐƟĮĐĂĚĂ͘ ƵĂůƋƵŝĞƌ ƉĞƌƐŽŶĂ ƉŽĚƌĄ ƌĞƋƵĞƌŝƌ ĞdžĂŵŝŶĂƌ Ğů ĞdžƉĞĚŝĞŶƚĞ Ž ƐŽůŝĐŝƚĂƌ ĐŽƉŝĂ ĚĞů ŵŝƐŵŽ ŵĞĚŝĂŶƚĞ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ ;^ Ϳ Ă ƚƌĂǀĠƐ ĚĞů ^ŝŶŐůĞ ƵƐŝŶĞƐƐ WŽƌƚĂů ĞŶ ůĂ ƉĄŐŝŶĂ ǁǁǁ͘ŽŐƉĞ͘ Ɖƌ͘ŐŽǀ͘ WŽĚƌĄ͕ ĂĚĞŵĄƐ͕ ŚĂĐŝĞŶĚŽ ƌĞĨĞƌĞŶĐŝĂ Ăů ŶƷŵĞƌŽ ĚĞ ƐŽůŝĐŝƚƵĚ͕ ƉƌĞƐĞŶƚĂƌ ƉŽƌ ĞƐĐƌŝƚŽ ƐƵƐ ĐŽŵĞŶƚĂƌŝŽƐ Ă ƚƌĂǀĠƐ ĚĞ ŶŽƟĮĐĂĐŝŽŶΛĚĚĞĐ͘Ɖƌ͘ŐŽǀ͘ ĞďŝĚŽ Ă ůĂ ĞŵĞƌŐĞŶĐŝĂ ĐĂƵƐĂĚĂ ƉŽƌ ůĂ ƉĂŶĚĞŵŝĂ ĚĞů ŽǀŝĚͲϭϵ Ğů ^ĞƌǀŝĐŝŽ Ăů ůŝĞŶƚĞ ĚĞ ůĂ K'WĞ ƚĂŶƚŽ ĞŶ ƐƵ KĮĐŝŶĂ ĞŶƚƌĂů ĞŶ ^ĂŶ :ƵĂŶ ĐŽŵŽ KĮĐŝŶĂƐ ZĞŐŝŽŶĂůĞƐ͕ ƐĞƌĄ ůŝŵŝƚĂĚŽ LJ ŵĞĚŝĂŶƚĞ ĐŽŽƌĚŝŶĂĐŝſŶ Ăů ƌĞƐƉĞĐƚŽ͘

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Monday, September 14, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

What if Trump fought the virus as hard as he fought for his wall?

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

W

hat would America be like today if President Donald Trump had acted decisively in January to tackle the coronavirus, as soon as he was briefed on the danger?

One opportunity for decisive action came Jan. 28, when his national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, told Trump that the coronavirus “will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.” Trump absorbed the warning, telling Bob Woodward days later how deadly and contagious the virus could be, according to Woodward’s new book, “Rage.”

Yet the president then misled the public by downplaying the virus, comparing it to the flu and saying that it would “go away.” He resisted masks, sidelined experts, held large rallies, denounced lockdowns and failed to get tests and protective equipment ready — and here we are, with Americans constituting 4% of the world’s population and 22% of COVID-19 deaths.

There’s plenty of blame to be directed as well at local officials, nursing home managers and ordinary citizens — but Trump set the national agenda.

Suppose Trump in January — or even in February — had warned the public of the dangers, had ensured

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President Donald Trump walks along the border wall in San Luis, Ariz., June 23, 2020. “Suppose he had tried as relentlessly to battle the virus as he has to build his wall,” writes New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof. that accurate tests were widely distributed (Sierra Leone had tests available before the United States) and had built up a robust system of contact tracing (Congo has better contact tracing than the United States).

Suppose he had ramped up production of masks and empowered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to lead the pandemic response, instead of marginalizing its experts.

Suppose he had tried as relentlessly to battle the virus as he has to build his wall?

If testing and contact tracing had been done right, then we would have known where hot spots were and large-scale lockdowns and layoffs might have been unnecessary.

The United States would still have made mistakes.

We focused too much on ventilators and not enough on other things that might have been more useful, like face masks, blood thinners and high-flow nasal cannulas. Because of mask shortages, health messaging about their importance was bungled. Governors and mayors dithered, and nursing homes weren’t adequately protected.

But many of our peer countries did better than we did not because they got everything right but because they got some things right — and then learned from mistakes.

Because of COVID-19, Trump called himself a wartime president, but he didn’t heed his generals and never ordered ammunition. In World War II, a Ford plant was configured to turn out one new B-24 bomber every hour, yet today we display none of that urgency even though Americans are dying from the virus at a faster pace than they fell in World War II.

It wasn’t as if the United States was unready. A 324-page study in October found that America was the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic — but it didn’t imagine that the United States would fumble testing, data collection, contact tracing, communications and just about every other facet of managing a novel virus.

“The administration made every single mistake you could possibly make,” Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who early in his career helped eradicate smallpox, told me.

“We could have beaten it back,” Brilliant said. “We could have prevented the horror story we have now.”

Jeffrey Shaman, a public health expert at Columbia University, calculated that if each county in the United States had acted just two weeks earlier to order lockdowns or other control measures, then more than 90% of COVID-19 deaths could have been avoided through early May. Shaman told me that his team didn’t model even earlier interventions, in January or February, but that he believes it would have been plausible for the United States to enjoy the COVID-19 mortality rate of South Korea.

That would mean almost a 99% reduction in mortality.

Linsey Marr, an expert on disease transmission at Virginia Tech, isn’t sure that we could have achieved South Korean or (somewhat higher) Japanese levels of mortality, because both of those countries have more of a tradition of mask-wearing. But she does believe that we could have perhaps achieved German levels (meaning an 80% reduction in deaths).

“We would have saved a lot of lives,” she said.

“Kids would be going back to school.”

Natalie Dean, an expert in infectious diseases at the University of Florida, said she is troubled by a public fatigue, a desensitization to a death toll that has continued to pile up recently at the rate of about 1,000 a day.

Trump still hasn’t embraced the basic step public health officials sought more than a century ago during the 1918 pandemic of encouraging mask-wearing. Instead, he seems to have surrendered to the virus at least until a vaccine is available — while encouraging delusions among his supporters.

“There’s no COVID,” an unmasked man attending a Trump rally the other day told CNN. “It’s a fake pandemic.”

When a pandemic response has become so politicized, when leadership is so absent, when health messaging is so muddled, when science is so marginalized, it’s easier to understand how the best-prepared country in the world for a pandemic could have lost 190,000 citizens to the virus.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

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Ombudsman espera que la solidaridad sea el arma más efectiva para combatir el COVID-19 Por THE STAR

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nte la reapertura de todos los sectores comerciales y del gobierno, el Ombudsman de Puerto Rico, Edwin García Feliciano, reclamó este domingo que sea la presión social la que eduque a la ciudadanía sobre la importancia de atender las medidas de distanciamiento social y salubridad para contener el contagio del COVID-19.

“Es una nueva manera de medir la solidaridad. Si un consejo, una alerta de precaución y hasta una amonestación puede crear el ambiente para salvar vidas, pues nos toca a cada cual asumir nuestro rol en defensa de Puerto Rico”, expresó el funcionario en declaraciones escritas.

García Feliciano dijo que cada ciudadano “tiene la responsabilidad de educar

con su comportamiento personal, consejo y llamada de alerta a su familiar, compañero de trabajo y vecino, de que usar la mascarilla, lavarse constantemente las manos y mantener seis pies de distancia, sí salva vidas”.

“Este es un proceso que requiere madurez de todos. De cada uno de nosotros depende que no haya que regresar a medidas extremas de lockdown, confinamiento y toque de queda. Está en nuestras manos ciudadanas promover el cumplimiento de normas que protegen nuestra vida personal y colectiva”, sostuvo el Ombudsman.

Aunque el Procurador del Ciudadano reconoció que el gobierno debe utilizar todos los mecanismos a su alcance para salvar vidas y proteger a la ciudadanía de males mayores, insistió que la acción afirmativa ciudadana puede sustentar una

diferencia de resultados positivos.

En ese sentido, García Feliciano destacó que cada ciudadano debe ser el custodio de que se cumplan las normas fijadas para bajar la curva de contagio y preservar vidas, siendo proactivo en recordarle de manera constante a cada persona, que hay que atender las directrices salubristas.

“Es un llamado a protegernos todos.

Mi responsabilidad es velar por la seguri-

dad y el bienestar de mi familia y de los míos. Pero para hacerlo, tengo que ser consciente de que debo alertar al prójimo cuando su conducta es perniciosa para él, pero que también puede ser perjudicial para los míos y el resto de la sociedad. Y la madurez para aceptar que sea el prójimo quien me alerte a mí”, afirmó.

García Feliciano manifestó que debe germinar en el sentimiento ciudadano el orgullo de que su ejemplo y acciones salvan vidas, y también motivan a otros a imitar su conducta para salvar las de otros. Lo visualiza como un efecto en cadena que promueve resultados positivos.

El Ombudsman destacó que detener y contener el avance del COVID-19, debe ser una agenda ciudadana que se convierta finalmente en un orgullo patrio por defender el futuro de Puerto Rico.

Acevedo Vilá revela apoyo de congresistas y un senador demócrata a su candidatura Por THE STAR

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l senador demócrata por Nueva Jersey, Bob Menéndez, así como los congresistas Nydia Velázquez, Adriano Espaillat, Gregory Meeks, Hakeem Jeffries y Tom Suozzi, de Nueva York, Chuy García y Raja Krishnamoorthi, de Illinois, y Albio Sires de Nueva Jersey, anunciaron este domingo su endoso a Aníbal Acevedo Vilá para que regrese a la capital federal como comisionado residente de Puerto Rico en Washington.

Según declaraciones escritas de Acevedo Vilá, los endosos provenientes de “este poderoso grupo de líderes congresionales, demuestran el arraigo” de su candidatura a la capital federal.

El senador Menéndez es uno de los miembros más poderosos del Comité de Finanzas del Senado, el cual tiene jurisdicción sobre los incentivos contributivos que tanto necesita Puerto Rico. Por su parte, la congresista Velázquez es la presidenta del Comité de Pequeños Negocios en el Congreso, mientras que el representante Hakeem Jeffries es el cuarto en la jerarquía en el liderato demócrata cameral, y presidente del Caucus Demócrata en la cámara federal, indica el candidato en un comunicado.

Suozzi es miembro del Comité de Medios y Arbitrios, que tiene jurisdicción sobre el tema de los incentivos federales.

De igual manera, el grupo demócrata BOLD PAC, brazo político del Caucus Hispano del Congreso, se sumó al grupo de líderes demócratas que endosan al candidato popular a Washington.

“Aníbal tiene la pasión y la inteligencia para hacer bien el trabajo de representar a los puertorriqueños en Washington.

Endosé sus iniciativas cuando él trabajó junto al senador Edward ‘Ted’ Kennedy y doy fe cómo ha trabajado fuera de líneas partidistas con legisladores republicanos para lograr paridad en los fondos para los niños de las escuelas públicas de Puerto Rico”, dijo el senador Menéndez, quien previamente ejerció como congresista del 13er distrito congresional de Nueva Jersey en la Cámara federal.

Menéndez aseguró que “estamos viviendo momentos muy determinantes tanto en Puerto Rico como en Estados Unidos y necesitamos un comisionado residente que conozca y haga frente a los retos socioeconómicos actuales. Yo estoy listo para trabajar con Aníbal en la expansión a Puerto Rico de la industria farmacéutica, de biotecnología y equipo médico, que tanta necesidad hace falta en estos momentos. Necesitamos un comisionado residente que trabaje tanto con demócratas como con republicanos, sobre todo lo que ha pasado con el peor presidente en la historia, que ha tratado a Puerto Rico con desdén. Puerto Rico ne-

cesita a Aníbal en Washington y estoy listo para recibirlo acá en enero del 2021”.

Por su parte, Nydia Velázquez, una de las congresistas de más ranking en la Cámara federal, y quien representa al Distrito Congresional #7 de Nueva York, expresó que “como puertorriqueña, necesito a Aníbal en el Congreso para juntos dar las importantes batallas pendientes por Puerto Rico. Salvar los fondos de Medicaid y lograr un nuevo incentivo para atraer la inversión en manufactura y crear los empleos que la gente en Puerto Rico necesita, van a ser temas vitales en el próximo Congreso”.

Mientras, Adriano Espaillat, representante demócrata por Nueva York y primer dominicano en ser electo al Congreso de Estados Unidos, describió su experiencia con Acevedo Vilá. “He trabajado con Aníbal desde antes de mi llegada al Congreso. Conozco de su compromiso con Puerto Rico y me solidarizo con la lucha que está dando para volver a traer la manufactura y las farmacéuticas a la Isla. En ese empeño, tiene todo mi respaldo”.

“Pero además, como el primer y único dominicano que ha llegado al Congreso, puedo dar fe del compromiso que tiene Aníbal con la comunidad dominicana que vive en la Isla del Encanto”, dijo Espaillat.

Recientemente, el presidente del BOLD PAC, Tony Cárdenas, declaró que

“en los momentos de mayor necesidad para Puerto Rico, luego de tanto sufrimiento luego del paso del Huracán María y el rechazo del presidente Trump para asignar los recursos necesarios, la comisionada residente Jenniffer González prefirió seguir ciegamente a Trump. Por eso el BOLD PAC anuncia con orgullo su endoso a Aníbal Acevedo Vilá”.

De su parte, el candidato popular a la comisaría residente agradeció las expresiones de todo este liderato demócrata “con quienes he trabajado y mantengo magníficas relaciones de amistad y trabajo. En Washington se reconoce ampliamente que Puerto Rico ha estado desprovisto de una representación digna, que ponga las necesidades de nuestra gente primero y no la obsesión por la estadidad y el sometimiento a Trump, que es lo que hemos visto este cuatrienio”.

20

Monday, September 14, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘Cuties’ sparks a firestorm after its Netflix release

“Cuties” tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf), a young daughter of Senegalese immigrants struggling to find her place growing up on the outskirts of Paris.

By CHRISTINA MORALES

N

etflix is facing renewed backlash from subscribers and members of Congress after it released the award-winning French film “Cuties” on its platform this past week.

Some senators are even calling for an investigation into the movie, which has been criticized for sexualizing young girls.

Here’s what we know about the movie.

What is ‘Cuties’?

The film, which was released as “Mignonnes” in France and won a directing award from the Sundance Institute in February, follows an 11-year-old girl named Amy (Fathia Youssouf) as she tries to find her place growing up in a poor suburb of Paris. At home, Amy has to please her family, who are observant Muslims from Senegal, but she eventually falls in with a group of friends who have their own dance troupe in defiance of her family’s strict rules.

Maïmouna Doucouré, the film’s director, said in an interview with Netflix that the movie incorporated elements of her own childhood in its portrayal of Amy’s struggles between two distinct modes of femininity: one dictated by the

traditional values of her Senegalese and Muslim upbringing, the other by Western society.

“I re-created the little girl who I was at that age,” she said. “Growing up in two cultures is what gave me the strength and the values I have today.”

“As a child, that question of how to become a woman was my obsession,” she added.

Doucouré has said that the idea for the film came to her after she attended a neighborhood gathering in Paris where she saw a group of 11-year-olds performing a “very sexual, very sensual” dance.

She said she spent a year and a half doing research and meeting with hundreds of preteens to prepare for the film.

“I needed to know how they felt about their own femininity in today’s society and how they dealt with their selfimage at a time when social media is so important,” she told Netflix.

The more sexualized a woman appears on social media, the more girls will perceive her as successful, Doucouré said.

“Children just imitate what they see to achieve the same result without understanding the meaning,” she said.

“And yeah, it’s dangerous.”

Why is the movie controversial?

In France, where the film was released in theaters Aug. 19, “Cuties” did not stir much controversy.

But in the United States, the hashtag #CancelNetflix has trended on Twitter, with parents, politicians and conspiracy theorists calling to remove the film or even get the Department of Justice involved. Last month, Netflix apologized for the artwork it created to market “Cuties” to streaming audiences after many criticized it for inappropriately sexualizing the film’s young stars.

An IMDb parents guide rates the film’s sex and nudity as “severe.” Several scenes show young girls dancing suggestively in short outfits.

Calls to remove the film have been amplified by supporters of a conspiracy theory that top Democrats and celebrities are behind a global child trafficking ring.

Reviewers at the Sundance Film Festival didn’t find the film exploitive.

“The sight of twerking preteen bodies is explicitly designed to shock mature audiences into a contemplation of today’s destruction of innocence,” film critic Fionnuala Halligan wrote in Screen Daily.

A spokeswoman for Netflix said in a statement that the film was “a social

commentary against the sexualization of young children.”

“It’s an award-winning film and a powerful story about the pressure young girls face on social media and from society more generally growing up — and we’d encourage anyone who cares about these important issues to watch the movie.”

What are politicians saying?

Several members of Congress have called for the film to be removed from Netflix or for a formal investigation.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr on Friday asking the Justice Department to investigate whether Netflix, the company’s executives or the filmmakers violated federal laws “against the production and distribution of child pornography.”

Similarly, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., called on the Justice Department to “take swift action.”

“Like any parent, I find @netflix decision to peddle child pornography disgusting,” Cotton said on Twitter on Saturday. “And it’s criminal.”

But like many of the film’s detractors, Cruz has not seen “Cuties,” according to a spokeswoman.

“Of course he has not watched a movie that sexualizes and fetishes young girls,” she said in a statement Saturday.

“The content has been widely reported and is not in dispute. There should be absolutely no place for the filming and distribution of these scenes — regardless of the purported objective of the filmmaker.”

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a former Democratic presidential candidate, said on Twitter on Friday that the film “will certainly whet the appetite of pedophiles & help fuel the child sex trafficking trade.”

“Netflix, you are now complicit,” Gabbard wrote.

Representatives for Cotton and Gabbard did not immediately respond to requests for comment Saturday, and it was not clear whether either had seen the film.

Alex Marshall contributed reporting.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

21

Fauci says it could be a year before theater without masks feels normal

By SARAH BAHR

A

s theaters look to see how they might reopen with safety accommodations including mask use, Dr. Anthony Fauci says it will likely be more than a year before people feel comfortable returning to theaters without masks.

“If we get a really good vaccine and just about everybody gets vaccinated,” he said in an Instagram Live interview with actress Jennifer Garner on Wednesday, “you’ll have a degree of immunity in the general community that I think you can walk into a theater without a mask and feel like it’s comfortable that you’re not going to be at risk.”

He said that would likely not be until mid- to late 2021.

But that doesn’t mean he is saying when it would be safe to go to the theater without a mask. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, clarified in a phone interview Friday that he was referring to when people could return to theatergoing at their pre-coronavirus comfort levels. “Words like ‘safe’ are charged,” he said. “I’m talking about the general trend of when we’ll start to feel comfortable going back to normal if we get a safe and effective vaccine.”

Fauci said that although a vaccine might be available as early as the end of this year or the beginning of 2021, it would likely be well into next year before enough people were vaccinated to ensure broad protection.

But Fauci said that in green-zone areas — those with very low community transmission — indoor theaters may be able to return sooner if people wear masks. “As long as there is infection in the community, you do not want indoor

The August Wilson Theatre in Manhattan’s theater district, which is closed during the coronavirus pandemic, April 16, 2020. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said a vaccine would need to exist for nearly a year before people might feel comfortable returning to theaters unmasked, which he said would likely be mid- to late 2021. spaces with crowds,” he said Friday.

“But in states, cities or counties in the green zone with low levels of infection, I imagine theaters could maybe open at 25% capacity, with people wearing masks, sometime as early as next year.”

Experts said Fauci’s comments help set the expectation that the coronavirus will be around for some time.

“We should not be thinking of the vaccine as a silver bullet,” Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University who previously served as Baltimore’s health commissioner, said Friday. “It will take months to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people, and the

vaccine may be, at best, 75% effective.”

Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said the first vaccines “are not magic solutions.”

“So we’ll likely still need to continue masks and contact tracing,” he said.

The Broadway League said in a statement Friday that it would continue to put the health of employees and audiences first as it works to help theaters reopen. “We are working closely with medical experts and members of Governor Cuomo’s recovery team to ensure that all proper health and safety protocols will be in place when the time comes to reopen our theaters,” it said.

Producers have said they will refund all tickets purchased for performances through Jan. 3. Some Broadway theaters are hoping to reopen as soon as March — the earliest planned opening night right now is for the Tracy Letts play “The Minutes,” which is set for March 15.

Two more shows, a revival of David Mamet’s play “American Buffalo” and a new show about Michael Jackson, “MJ the Musical,” aim to follow nearly a month later on April 14-15. The much-anticipated revival of “The Music Man,” headlined by Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, which was originally set for the fall, now plans to open May 20.

22

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

What month is it? Pandemic scrambles the travel calendar

By ELAINE GLUSAC

F

or classic summer destinations such as New York’s Hamptons, Nantucket, Massachusetts, and Saugatuck, Michigan, business was surprisingly brisk in late summer as travelers sought outdoor diversions at a safe and healthy distance.

Now, during back-to-school season, with families once again looking at the prospects of remote learning and working from home, many summer resorts are hoping to stretch the season into fall. The appeal of autumn activities is, they hope, an irresistible incentive.

“There’s a term out here, Tumbleweed Tuesday, when everyone leaves after Labor Day,” said Kristen Jarnagin, the president and chief executive of the tourism agency Discover Long Island, on New York’s Long Island, a few days before the New York City school system delayed its start. “We don’t anticipate experiencing that this year.”

“Stretch” and value season begins According to the travel marketing firm MMGY Global, in the seventh instance of an ongoing survey of 1,200 American adults on their travel intentions, 61% said they were likely to take a domestic trip in the next six months. The firm uses the term “stretch season” to describe the extended interest in fall travel.

“People are looking to extend their summer or, if they don’t have children going back to school, to come out here and operate from Nantucket,” said Jason Curtis, the general manager of the Jared Coffin House, a 48-room inn on Nantucket Island, where reservations are trending stronger and longer — four or five days on average versus the normal two to three — for fall.

Many resorts are repositioning themselves for long-term stays. A week after offering roughly half of its 67 rooms at Baron’s Cove in Sag Harbor, New York, for rent from Oct. 12 to April 1 at $14,000, the owners, Cape Resorts, said they were nearly sold out. The company is also offering four-month terms from January to April at its rooms and rentals in Cape May, New Jersey, for $4,100.

For those with tight budgets, fall also

In an undated image provided by Mohonk Mountain House, the 151-year-old Mohonk Mountain House In New Paltz, N.Y. The resort is adapting its rooms to suit mobile workers. represents value season, as lodging rates tend to decline after Labor Day. The home rental site Vrbo said rates in popular destinations like Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and Cape May, have fallen 20% on average from August through October compared to the busiest summer dates.

“For weekends in fall, in some respects, it’s harder to get rooms than in summer,” said Reg Smith, the vice president for hotels with Stafford’s, which owns three hotels in the Petoskey, Michigan, area.

Midweek stays offer value for those with flexible schedules. In mid-September, a room at Stafford’s Perry Hotel in Petoskey was recently listed at $169 versus $459 on a Saturday earlier in the month.

Students and remote workers: Come on over, the Wi-Fi is great Resorts and home rental agencies are eager to attract more shoulder-season visitors with an array of amenities designed to assure workers and parents that they can maintain their productivity during work and school hours, while enjoying the great outdoors thereafter.

“We’re seeing a lot of hotels promoting how good their Wi-Fi is to appease those people working from home or people attending school digitally,” said Jim Paino, the executive director of the Cannon Beach Chamber of Commerce in Can-

non Beach, Oregon, a popular summer coastal town.

On the East Coast, Gurney’s Newport Resort & Marina in Newport, Rhode Island, is offering a “Work from Hotel” package that includes breakfast, midday coffee, letterhead and a “business butler” to help with printing and scanning (from $379 a night).

Historic Smithton Inn in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, used its virus-enforced slowdown to upgrade its internet system and just introduced “workcations,” including a “video conferencing menu” of complimentary breakfast items to be delivered during online meetings (from $143).

In New Paltz, New York, the 151-yearold Mohonk Mountain House, which offers access to 85 miles of hiking trails on and around its 1,200 acres, is adapting its vintage rooms to suit mobile workers with its new “Work from Our House,” providing a power strip, printing services and a desk chair (from $656, including meals).

Some resorts are even offering remote educational programs. Beginning Nov. 1, the Coppola Family Hideaways, which include three resorts in Belize and Guatemala, will offer a daily slate of inperson classes for children staying at the properties. The classes, which will be adjusted based on the ages of guests, may

include Spanish language, studying birds or medicinal plants as scientific subjects, and working on sustainability projects like mangrove restoration ($150 a day for three to four hours; room rates from $179).

The Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay Golf Resort, Spa and Marina in Cambridge, Maryland, has set up a classroomstyle “learning room” for guest use and will provide a list of area tutors for hire on an hourly basis (rooms from $199).

“Instead of ‘How close is this to the beach?’ people are asking, ‘Do you have a spot where the kids can quietly work and how’s the Wi-Fi?’” said Chris Dekker, the general manager of Michigan properties for Vacasa, the home rental agency. “The amenities have shifted a lot.”

“Flexcations” on the rise Since the pandemic freed many workers from their offices and prevented children from attending school in person, flexible vacations — or what some call “flexcations” — have been on the rise.

They often take the form of longer stays or midweek visits and have accounted for periods of sellouts this summer in the Hamptons.

In a survey of 887 of its customers in July, Vrbo found 67% said they needed a “change of scenery” via a family vacation and half agreed that flexible school schedules offered more opportunity in how and when to go, including longer stays and visits during nonpeak seasons. Interest in one-week stays is up 25% over last year, according to searches on the site.

Travel accounts for 80% of the local economy in Cook County, Minnesota, home to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and the Gunflint Trail Scenic Byway. Officials there were bracing for summer business, its busiest season by far, to be down at least 50% after the pandemic. Instead, it’s been up at least 10% over last year.

Linda Jurek, the executive director of Visit Cook County, a regional tourism group, said she expects the upswing to continue into fall. “Now that people are being forced to work from home,” she said, “they’re saying, ‘OK, but I can wake up from a home that overlooks Lake Superior.’”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

23

These black holes shouldn’t exist, but there they are

An image provided by the Max Planck Institute shows a simulation of the black hole merger GW190521, which resulted in a chirp heard 7 billion years later by the LIGO and Virgo antennas.

By DENNIS OVERBYE

W

ell, that was some clash of the heavyweights.

Astronomers reported last week that they had detected the loudest, most massive and most violent collision yet between a pair of black holes. Two Goliaths of darkness crashed into each other 7 billion years ago, vibrating space-time and producing a loud, sharp chirp — almost a bang, one astronomer said — lasting just one-tenth of a second in the antennas of the Laser Interferometer GravitationalWave Observatory and the Virgo interferometer observatory.

That short signal from a galaxy far, far away has left astrophysicists with new questions about how black holes form and grow.

Daniel Holz, a theorist at the University of Chicago and a member of the LIGO team, called the new discovery “the first LIGO/Virgo detection that’s truly surprising. All the other binary systems that we’ve detected fit reasonably well within expectations. But the black holes in this event aren’t supposed to exist!”

One and perhaps both of the colliding holes were too massive to have been produced by the collapse of a star, according to conventional theories. Moreover, the merger created an even larger black hole, 142 times as massive as the sun, belonging to a whole new category of intermediate-mass, or “missing link,” black holes never reliably seen before.

“Another discovery from the worldwide gravitationalwave detector network that rewrites what we know about our universe,” Zsuzsanna Marka, an astrophysicist at Columbia University who works on LIGO, wrote in an email.

Janna Levin, a cosmologist at Barnard College who is

not part of the LIGO group, added: “Yes! I’ve been waiting for something like this since I first became interested in gravitational waves.”

The event unfolded at an almost unimaginable distance from Earth — 17 billion light-years away according to standard cosmological calculations that describe an expanding universe. One black hole with 85 times the mass of the sun, and a second with 66 solar masses, collided, creating a black hole 142 times as massive as the sun.

Another eight or so suns’ worth of mass and energy disappeared into gravitational waves, ripples of the space-time fabric, in a split second of frenzy, ringing the universe like a bell on the morning of May 21, 2019.

An international team of scientists who compose the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration reported their findings in two papers published Wednesday in Physical Review Letters and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Their papers largely affirm a preliminary analysis of the event, known as GW190521 (after the date when it was recorded), made by a group outside the collaborations. In June, a team led by Matthew Graham of the California Institute of Technology, going on publicly available data, ran a preliminary analysis, hoping to beat the LIGO and Virgo groups to the answer.

Using a telescope in California called the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, Graham’s team detected a flash of light that could have been caused by the newly formed black hole racing through a disk of dense gas surrounding the center of a faraway galaxy.

They predicted that a final analysis would show that the

combined masses of the colliding black holes would exceed 100 solar masses, and that the resulting black hole would spin wildly and have a large recoil velocity.

“This is exactly what LIGO is now reporting,” Graham wrote in an email. “This is a great discovery from LIGO and provides strong evidence in support of the merger model and environment that we have been promoting.”

Most known black holes are the corpses of massive stars that have died and collapsed catastrophically into nothing: dark things a few times as massive as the sun. But galaxies harbor black holes millions or billions of times more massive than that. How these objects can grow so big is an abiding mystery of astronomy.

Until recently there had been scant evidence of black holes of intermediate sizes, with 100 to 100,000 solar masses.

The black hole created in the GW190521 merger is the first solid example of this missing link.

“I was searching for heavy black holes for 15 years and here it is!” Sergey Klimenko, a physicist at the University of Florida, wrote in an email. “This discovery is a milestone in gravitational wave astronomy.”

As a result, he said, astronomers may have glimpsed the process by which the universe builds black holes, transforming pipsqueaks into leviathans like the one in the galaxy M87 that was the first ever imaged.

“This is the first and only firm/secure mass measurement of an intermediate mass black hole at the time of its birth,” Vicky Kalogera, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, wrote in an email. “Now we know reliably at least one way” these objects can form, “through the merger of other black holes.”

This merger process could be an important clue to the origin of the heavier of the two black holes that collided in June. That black hole had a mass of 85 suns, and it should not have been existed, according to standard astrophysical logic.

Black holes with masses between about 50 and 120 suns cannot be formed, at least from a dying star, so the story and the calculations go.

In stars massive enough to make such a beastly hole, the interior grows so hot when collapsing that light spontaneously creates pairs of electrons and positrons. This makes the star even hotter, which produces more particles, in a runaway reaction that results in a particularly violent explosion called a pair-instability supernova. Such a conflagration leaves nothing behind.

“No neutron star,” Holz said. “No black hole. Nothing.”

He mentioned the black hole in GW190521 with 85 solar masses: “The bigger black hole is right smack in the middle of the region where black holes don’t belong. Nature seems to have ignored all of our careful theoretical calculations arguing that black holes of this mass don’t exist.”

He added: “A discovery like this is simultaneously disheartening and exhilarating. On the one hand, one of our cherished beliefs has been proven wrong. On the other hand, here’s something new and unexpected, and now the race is on to try to figure out what is going on.”

24 LEGAL NOTICE Estado libre asociado de puerto rico CENTRO JUDICIAL DE HUMACAO Tribunal de primera instancia Sala superior.

MUNICIPIO DE HUMACAO representado por su Honorable Alcalde, Luis R. Sánchez Hernández Peticionario vs.

CARLOS M. CRUZ BENÍTEZ, MIRTA I. SANTIAGO GONZÁLEZ, DYNAMIC GROUP, LLC, JJ INVERSIONES, INC., UNIVERSAL PROPERTIES, CRIM, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

Partes con interés CIVIL NÚM.: HU2020CV00520.

SOBRE: expropiación forzosa. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R.

A: CARLOS M. CRUZ BENÍTEZ, MIRTA I. SANTIAGO GONZÁLEZ, JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

RE: El MUNICIPIO DE HUMACAO se propone adquirir el título de pleno y absoluto dominio de la propiedad que se describe a continuación localizada en la Calle 7 #276, Punta Santiago Comm., Humacao, P.R. para llevar a cabo los fines y propósitos del Proyecto: ESTORBOS PUBLICOS. Parcela marcada con el #276 en el Plano de Mensura preparado por el Municipio de Humacao, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de 1513.1996 metros cuadrados, equivalentes a 0.384 cuerda. En lindes por el NORTE, con la Parcela 255, por el SUR, con la Calle 7, por el ESTE, con la Calle 18 y por el OESTE, con la Parcela 275.

Enclava una estructura utilizada para residencia y otras mejoras las cuales se encuentran en un alto grado de deterioro. Dado a su alto grado de deterioro se recomienda la demolición.

CODIFICACION: 282-051-06106-901. El MUNICIPIO DE HUMACAO, representado por su Honorable Alcalde, Luis R. Sánchez Hernández, a tenor con la autoridad conferida mediante la Ley General de Expropiación Forzosa del 12 de marzo de 1903, según enmendada, la Regla 58-Expropiación Forzosa de Propiedad, de las Reglas de Procedimiento Civil, según enmendada, 32 L.P.R.A. Ap. V, R-58, el Artículo 2.001(c) de la ley de Municipios Autónomos, Ley Núm. 81 del 30 de agosto de 1991, según enmendada;

@

Ley Núm. 84 del 29 de octubre de 1992, según enmendada; la Ley Núm. 31 del 18 de enero de 2012, según enmendada; y la Ordenanza Municipal Número 21, Serie Núm. 2015-2016, adoptada por la Legislatura Municipal del Municipio Autónomo de Humacao, interesa adquirir dicha propiedad en pleno dominio para el Proyecto Estorbos Públicos y por exceder la cantidad de la deuda por gastos necesarios y convenientes al valor de tasación no se requiere el depósito de suma alguna en el Tribunal como justa compensación por la propiedad. No habiéndose podido emplazar personalmente a usted por desconocerse su paradero, este Tribunal ha ordenado que conforme lo establecido en la Regla 58.4 C-2 de Procedimiento Civil se emplace por edicto que se publicará una vez por semana durante tres (3) semanas consecutivas en un periódico de circulación general en Puerto Rico. El Tribunal releva a la parte peticionaria del envío a los diez (10) días de la publicación del último edicto por correo con acuse de recibo de una copia del emplazamiento y de la demanda por desconocerse su dirección actual y/o paradero.

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días si fuese emplazado por edictos, notificando copia de la misma al (a la) abogado(a) de la parte peticionaria o a ésta, de no tener representación legal.

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

MARIA A. MERCADO PADILLA Número RUA 14,225 Ave. Ponce de León #1605 Oficina 701 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00909 Tel./Fax.: 787-945-7455/ Email: mercado.maria@gmail.com ABRAHAM FREYRE MEDINA RUA 19,280 COLEGIADO 19585 The Executive BLDG. Banco Cooperativo #623 Ave. Ponce de León, Suite 806-B San Juan, PR 00917 Ofic.: 787-631-2644/ Cel.: 787-392-6692 Email: freyrelex@gmail.com El Tribunal ha señalado el día 19 de octubre de 2020, a las 10:30 AM en Sala 206 para la vista del caso, en cuyo día se determinará el justo valor de la propiedad y las partes a ser compensadas, y a cuya vista podrá usted comparecer y ofrecer prueba de valoración aunque no haya contestado la Petición. Se le advierte que si dentro del mencionado término no contesta la petición ni com-

parece a la vista señalada, este Tribunal entenderá que no tiene interés en el caso y procederá a dictar sentencia conforme a las alegaciones de la Petición. Expedido por Orden del Tribunal en Humacao, Puerto Rico, hoy 25 de agosto de 2020. Dominga Gomez Fuster, Sec Regional.

Dalias Reyes de Leon, Sec Auxiliar. ****

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA MUNICIPAL DE TOA BAJA.

CAPITAL TITLE SERVICES INC Demandante V.

ASSOCIATES INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS CORPORATION; JUAN DEL PUEBLO Y JUANA DEL PUEBLO y cualquiera persona desconocida con posible interés en Ia obligación cuya cancelación por decreto judicial se

solicita.

Demandados CIVIL NUM. TB2020CV00178.

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

A: JUAN DEL PUEBLO Y JUANA DEL PUEBLO COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES Y CUALQUIER PERSONA DESCONOCIDA CON POSIBLE INTERES EN LA OBLIGACION CUYA CANCELACION POR DECRETO JUDICIAL SE SOLICITA

Por Ia presente se le notifica que ha sido presentada en este Tribunal una Demanda en su contra en el pleito de epígrafe. En este caso Ia parte demandante ha radicado una Demanda para que se decrete judicialmente el saldo de un (1) pagaré hipotecario a favor de ASSOCIATES INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS CORPORATION, por Ia suma principal de $18,019.99 con intereses al 14.45%, vencedero el 17 de abril de 2012. Dicho pagare fue suscrito el día 12 de abril de 2002, ante el notaria Marta I. Ojeda, garantizado por hipoteca constituida mediante la Escritura número 299, sobre Ia siguiente propiedad: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número nueve del bloque E de Ia calIe

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

numera dos en el plano de inscripción de Ia Urbanización San Pedro, localizada en el Barrio Candelaria del término municipal de Toa Baja, Puerto Rico can una cabida superficial de cuatrocientos veinticuatro metros con dieciséis centímetros cuadrados (424.16), en lindes por el NORTE, en una distancia de veintiun metros can seiscientos ochenta y cinco milímetros lineales (21.685 m) con Ia carretera nCimero ochocientos sesenta y tres (863); por el SUR, en una distancia de nueve metros lineales (9.0 m) con Ia calle numero dos (2); par el ESTE, n una distancia de treinta y tres con ochocientos sesenta y cinco milímetros lineales (33.865 m.), can el solar numero E diez (E-10); y par el OESTE, en una distancia de veintiséis metros con veinticuatro milímetros lineales (26.024 m), can el solar numera E ocho (E-8). Finca Numera 23,445, inscrita al folio 115 del tomo 407 de Toa Baja, Registro de Ia Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección 2 de Bayamón. La parte demandante alega que dicha pagaré ha sida saldado según mas detalladamente consta en Ia Demanda radicada que puede examinarse en Ia SecretarIa de este Tribunal. Por tratarse de una obligación hipotecaria y pudiendo usted tener interés en este caso a quedar afectada por el remedio solicitada, se le emplaza par este edicto que se publicará una vez en un periódico de circulación diana general de Puerta Rica. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificada de Maneja y Administración de Casas (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando Ia siguiente dirección electrónica: https:// unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salva que se represente par derecha propia. Debe notificar con copia de ella a Ia abogada de Ia parte demandante Ia Lcda.

Lizbet Avilés Vega, Urb. Los Sauces, Calle Pomarrosa #222, Humacao, PR 00791; TeL (787) 354-0061, dentro de las treinta (30) días siguientes a Ia publicación de este Edicto, apercibiéndole que de no hacerla así dentro del término indicada, el Tribunal podrá anotar su rebeldía y dictar sentencia concediendo el remedia solicitada en Ia Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle. EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, enToa Alta, Puerto Rica, hoy día 20 de agosto de 2020. Lcda. Laura I. Santa Sanchez, Sec Regional.

Liriam Hernandez, Sub Secretaria.

LEGAL NOT ICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTAN-

(787) 743-3346

Monday, September 14, 2020 CIA SALA DE VEGA BAJA.

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante V.

DAMARIS GARCÍA PANTOJAS; JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

Demandados CIVIL NÚM. VB2020CV00288.

SOBRE: SUSTITUCIÓN DE PAGARÉ HIPOTECARIO. EMPLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. 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 el presente edicto, que se publicará una sola vez.

Se les notifica que en la Demanda radicada en el caso de epígrafe se alega que un pagaré hipotecario otorgado el 31 de enero de 2003, Damaris García Pantojas otorgó en San Juan, Puerto Rico un pagaré hipotecario por la suma principal de $62,930.00, con intereses a razón del 6.50% anual, a favor de la Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria Puerto Rico (hoy Oriental Bank), o a su orden, con vencimiento el 1 de febrero de 2033, ante el Notario Andrés J. García Arregui, mediante el afidávit número 15038, se extravio, 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 31 de enero de 2003, Damaris García Pantojas constituyó hipoteca número 4 ante el Notario Andrés J. García Arregui en garantía del pago del pagaré antes descrito, inscrita al folio #114 del tomo #402 de Vega Baja, finca #25489, inscripción 7ma y última, Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección IV. La hipoteca que garantiza dicho pagaré grava la propiedad inmueble que se describe a continuación: RUSTICA: Parcela marcada con el #498 en el plano de parcelación de la comunidad rural Sabana del Barrio Ceiba del término municipal de Vega Baja, con una cabida superficial de 300.58 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, con calle de la comunidad; por el SUR, con la Autoridad de Tierras; por el ESTE; con parcela #499 de la comunidad; y por el OESTE, con parcela #497 de la comunidad. Finca 25489 inscrita al 114 del tomo 402 de Vega Baja, Registro de

la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección IV. POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.rmajudicial. 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 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 RUA NÚM. 17682 DELGDO & FERNÁNDEZ, LLC PO Box 1750, Fernández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 009 10-1750, Tel. (787 274-1414 / Fax (787) 764-8241 E-mail: inontalvocdelgadofernandez.com Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 27 de agosto de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Regional. YVONNE CAMERON MALDONADO, Secretaria del Tribunal Conf. I.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE BAYAMÓN SALA SUPERIOR DE TOA ALTA.

DLJ MORTGAGE CAPITAL, INC.

Parte Demandante Vs.

SUCESIÓN DE DOLORES MORALES ORTIZ Y LA SUCESION DE CARMEN LIDIA COLON ESPADA compuesta por Y AD IRA MORALES COLÓN, LUIS MORALES COLON, LUZ M. MORALES COLON, JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE herederos desconocidos, ADMINISTRACION PARA EL SUSTENTO DE MENORES Y CENTRO DE RECAUDACION SOBRE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES

Parte Demandada CASO CIVIL NUM: DO2020CV00022.

SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA POR LA VIA ORDINARIA Y COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZA-

The San Juan Daily Star MIENTO Y NOTIFICACION DE INTERPELACION POR EDICTO. Estados Unidos de América Presidente de los Estados Unidos de América Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico.

A: LUIS MORALES COLON COMO MIEMBRO DE LA SUCESION DE DOLORES MORALES ORTIZ Y DE CARMEN LIDIA COLON ESPADA; JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION DE DOLORES MORALES ORTIZ Y DE CARMEN LIDIA COLON ESPADA

POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) dias 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.ramajudicial.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, Leda. Marjaliisa Colón Villanueva, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-843-4168. En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cobro de dinero y ejecución de hipoteca bajo el número mencionado en el epígrafe. Se alega en dicho procedimiento que la parle Demandada incurrió en el incumplimiento del Contrato de Hipoteca, al no poder pagar las mensualidades vencidas correspondientes a los meses de octubre de 2018, hasta el presente. más los cargos por demora correspondientes.

Además, adeuda a la parte demandante las costas. gastos y honorarios de abogado en que incurra el tenedor del pagaré en este litigio. De acuerdo con dicho Contrato de Garantía Hipotecaria la parte Demandante declaró vencida la totalidad de la deuda ascendente a la suma $41,643.78 de principal, más los intereses sobre dicha suma al 10.322º/o anual, así como todos aquellos créditos y sumas que surjan de la faz de la obligación hipotecaria y de la hipoteca que la garantiza, incluyendo la suma estipulada para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. La parte Demandante presentó para su inscripción en el Registro de la Propiedad correspondiente. un A VISO DE PLEITO PENDIENTE (“Lis Peodcns”) sobre la propiedad objeto

de esta acción cuya propiedad es la siguiente: URBANA: Parcela marcada con el número sesenta y seis guion E (66-E) en el plano de parcelación de ta comunidad rural Mameyal del Barrio Mameyal del término municipal d Dorado, con una cabida superficial de seiscientos ochenta y uno guion veinte uno (681.21) metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, con parcelas número sesenta y seis guion C (66-C) y sesenta y seis guion D (66-0) de la comunidad; por el SUR, con la parcela sesenta y cinco (65) de la comunidad; por el ESTE, con la parcela número sesenta y seis F (66F) de la comunidad y por el OESTE, con calle central de la comunidad. Inscrita al folio dos cientos siete (207) del tomo doscientos cuarenta (240) de Dorado, finca número once mil cuatrocientos cincuenta y ocho {l l,458) del Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección IV. SE LES 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. Además, como miembro de la SUCESION DE DOLORES MORALES ORTIZ Y DE CARMEN LIDIA COLON ESPADA se ha presentado una solicitud de interpelación judicial para que sirva en el término de treinta (30) días aceptar o repudiar la herencia. Se le apercibe que si no compareciera usted a expresarse dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto en torno a la aceptación o repudiación de la herencia, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia del causante SUCESION DE DOLORES MORALES ORTIZ Y DE CARMEN LIDIA COLON ESPADA y por consiguiente, responderán por las cargas de dicha herencia conforme dispone el Art. 957 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. S2785. En Humacao, Puerto Rico, a 27 de agosto de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Regional. Liriam Hernandez, SubSecretaria.

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

MTGLQ INVESTORS, L.P. Parte Demandante Vs.

ASSOCIATES INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS CORPORATION h/n/n ASSOCIATES FINANCE; JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, Como posibles

The San Juan Daily Star

tenedores desconocidos

Dorado, finca número seis mil ciento cincuenta y cuatro (6, 154). Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón Sección IV. SE LES 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 Desin más citarle ni oírle.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD manda, Expedido bajo mi firma y sello ROE COMO posibles del Tribunal en Toa Alta, Puerto tenedores desconocidos Rico, a 27 de agosto de 2020.

POR LA PRESENTE se les em- LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANplaza y requiere para que con- CHEZ, Sec Regional. LIriam teste la demanda dentro de los Hernandez, Sec Auxiliar. treinta (30) días siguientes a la LEGAL NOTICE publicación de este Edicto. Usted deberá radicar su alegación ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO responsiva a través del Sistema DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUUnificado de Manejo y Adminis- NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA tración de Casos (SUMAC), al SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN cual puede acceder utilizando la JUAN. siguiente dirección electrónica: AMERICAS LEADING http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/suFINANCE, LLC mac/, salvo que se presente por Demandante v. derecho propio, en cuyo caso BENIGNO COLLAZO deberá radicar el original de su RODRÍGUEZ; ZINDIA I. contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con BENÍTEZ COLÓN copia a los abogados de la parDemandados te demandante, Lcda. Marjaliisa CIVIL NÚM.: SJ2019CV06664.

Colón Villanueva, al PO BOX SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Telé- POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA Y fono: 787-843-4168. En dicha EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN demanda se tramita un procedi- MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN miento de cancelación de paga- DE VEHÍCULO). EMPLAZAre extraviado. Se alega en dicho MIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTAprocedimiento que se extravió DOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL un pagaré a favor de Associates PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. lntemational Holdings Corpora- DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LItion h/n/n Associates Finance., BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO por la suma de $10,917.99, con RICO SS. intereses al doce punto sesenA: BENIGNO COLLAZO ta y dos por ciento (12.62%) RODRÍGUEZ Y ZINDIA I. anual, vencedero el dieciséis BENÍTEZ COLÓN (16) de agosto de dos mil quince (2015), según consta de la Quedan emplazados y notificaescritura número trescientos dos que en este Tribunal se ha treinta y seis (336), otorgada radicado Demanda sobre cobro en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, el de dinero por la vía ordinaria día once (11) de agosto de dos en la que se alega que los demil cinco (2005), se constituyó mandados, BENIGNO COLLAhipoteca en garantía de pagaré ZO RODRÍGUEZ Y ZINDIA I. suscrito ante la notario público BENÍTEZ COLÓN, le adeudan Adela Surillo Gutiérrez y cuya solidariamente al Americas obligación hipotecaria se en- Leading Finance, LLC la suma cuentra inscrita al folio sesenta de principal de $15,393.09, (60) del tomo dos cientos trein- más los intereses que contita y nueve (239) de Dorado, núen acumulando, las costas, finca número seis mil ciento gastos y honorarios de abogacincuenta y cuatro (6, 154), ins- do según pactados. Además, cripción sexta (Sta). Que grava solicitamos de este Honorable la propiedad que se describe a Tribunal que autorice la reposecontinuación: RUSTICA: Par- sión y/o embargo del Vehículo. cela marcada con el número Se les advierte que este edicto ciento cuatro (104) en el plano se publicará en un periódico de parcelación de la comunidad de circulación general una sola rural Espinosa del Barrio Espi- vez y que, si no comparecen a nosa, Sector Kuilan del término contestar dicha Demanda denmunicipal de Dorado, con una tro del término de treinta (30) cabida superficial de cero punto días a partir de la publicación cero nueve cuatro cero (0.0940) del Edicto, a través del Sistema cuerdas, equivalentes a tres- Unificado de Manejo y Adminiscientos setenta punto cero cero tración de Casos (SUMAC), al (370.00) metros cuadrados, en cual puede acceder utilizando la lindes por el NORTE, con la siguiente dirección electrónica: parcela ciento tres (103) de la https://unired.ramajudicial.pr/ comunidad, por el SUR, con la sumac/, salvo que se represenparcela ciento cinco (105) de la te por derecho propio, en cuyo comunidad, por el ESTE, con la caso deberá presentar su alecalle de la comunidad, y por el gación responsiva en la secreOESTE, con quebrada. Enclava taría del tribunal, se le anotará una casa. Inscrita al folio dos- la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencientos veintitrés (223) del tomo cia concediendo el remedio así doscientos veintisiete (227) de solicitado sin más citarles ni Parte Demandada CIVIL NÚM: BY2020CV01936.

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

Monday, September 14, 2020 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 San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy día 27 de agosto de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Secretario. Marilyn Ann Espinosa Rivera, Sec Serv a Sala.

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

Wilmington Savings Fund Society, FSB, as trustee of Finance of America Structured Securities Acquisition Trust 2019-HB1 DEMANDANTE VS.

Sucesión de Adriana Rodriguez Gonzalez t/c/c Adriana Rodríguez compuesta por David Antonio Figueroa Rodríguez, Jose Miguel Figueroa Rodríguez, Zaida Figueroa Rodriguez, Ramón Adalberto Figueroa Rodríguez, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de tal; Centro de Recuadaciones de Ingresos Municipales; United States of America

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: CA2019CV04315.

SALA: 406. SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria. MANDAMIENTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. Por Cuanto: Se ha dictado en el presente caso la siguiente Orden: “ORDEN” Examinada la demanda radicada por la parte demandante, la solicitud de interpelación contenida en la misma y examinados los autos del caso, el Tribunal le imparte su aprobación y en su virtud acepta la Demanda en el caso de epígrafe, así como la interpelación judicial de la parte demandante a los herederos del codemandado conforme dispone el Artículo 959 deI Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 2787.

Se Ordena a los herederos del causante a saber, David Antonio Figueroa Rodríguez, Jose Miguel Figueroa Rodríguez, Zaida Figueroa Rodriguez, Ramón Adalberto Figueroa Rodríguez, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de tal, herederos de nombres desconocidos a que dentro del término legal de (30) días contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participa-

ción que les corresponda en la herencia de la causante Adriana Rodriguez Gonzalez t/c/c Adriana Rodríguez. Se le Apercibe a los herederos antes mencionados: (a) Que de no expresarse dentro del término de 30 días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia la misma se tendrá por aceptada; (b) Que luego del transcurso del termino de 30 días contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia del causante y por consiguiente, responden por la cargas de dicha herencia conforme dispone el Artículo 957 deI Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 2785. Se Ordena a la parte demandante a que, en vista de que la sucesión de la causante Adriana Rodriguez Gonzalez tic/c Adriana Rodríguez incluyen como herederos a David Antonio Figueroa Rodríguez, Jose Miguel Figueroa Rodríguez, Zaida Figueroa Rodriguez, Ramón Adalberto Figueroa Rodríguez, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de tal, como posibles herederos desconocidos, proceda a notificar la presente Orden mediante un edicto a esos efectos una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general de la Isla de Puerto Rico. DADA en Carolina, Puerto Rico, hoy día 27 de febrero de 2020. FDO. HON. IGNACIO E. MORALES GOMEZ, JUEZ. Por Cuanto: Se le advierte a que, dentro del término legal de 30 días contados a partir de la fecha de notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia de la causante Adriana Rodriguez Gonzalez t/c/c Adriana Rodríguez. Por Orden del Honorable Juez de Primera Instancia de este Tribunal, expido el presente Mandamiento, bajo mi firma y sello oficial, en Carolina, Puerto Rico hoy día 26 de mayo de 2020. Lcda.

Marilyn Aponte Rodriguez, Sec Regional. Analista Rivera Medina, Sec de Servicios a Sala.

LEGAL NOTICE

St. Rd. 143, Km. 6.8 San Patricio Ward Ponce, P.R. 00731; St. Rd. 143, Km. 3.6 San Patricio Ward Pence/ P.R. 00731

Pursuant to the Order for Service by Publication entered on March 6th, 2020 by the United States District Court/ you are hereby SUMMONED to appear/ plead or answer the Complaint filed herein no later than thirty (30) days after publication of this Summons by serving the original plea or answer in the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico/ and serving a copy to counsel for plaintiff: Attorney Juan C. Fortune Fas/ at PO Box 13786 San Juan/ PR 00908/ telephone numbers 787-751-5290 and 787- 751-5616.This Summons shall be published by edict only once in anewspaper of general circulation in the island of Puerto Rico.Within ten (10) days following publication of this Summons/ a copyof this Summons and the Complaint will be sent to codefendantsYAHAIRA RIGS MEJIAS and EDGAR RIOS MEJIAS/ as known members of theEstate of DAVID RIOS RIVERA; JOHN DOE and RICHARD ROE as unknownmembers of said estate, by certified mail/return receiptrequested/ addressed to their last known address.Should you fail to appear/ plead or answer to the Complaint asordered by the Court and noticed by this Summons/ the Court willproceed to hear and adjudicate this cause against you based on therelief demanded in the Complaint.

BY ORDER OF THE COURT/ summons is issued pursuant to Fe . R.Civil P. 4 (e) and Rule 4.5 of the Rules of Civil Procedure forthe Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.In San Juan/ Puerto Rico/ this 9th of March/ 2020. MARIA ANTONGIORGI-JORDAN/ ESQ., CLERK, U.S. DISTRICT COURT By: ANA E. DURANCAPELLA, Deputy Clerk.

25

SHARE; JOHN DOE AND RICHARD DOE,

Defendant.

CIVIL NO. 17-1714 (DRD). Foreclosure of Mortgage. NOTICE OF JUDGMENT BY PUBLICATION.

TO: John Doe and Richard Roe as unknown heirs to the Estate of Santa Colon Reyes

THE CLERK OF THIS COURT hereby notifies you that on February 19, 2020, this Court entered judgment in favor of plaintiff.

Said judgment has been duly registered and the terms of such judgment are available for review in the Clerks’ office. THEREFORE, this notice is hereby given to you that judgment has been entered against you in the instant proceedings. Notice will be deemed effective, and the thirty (30) day term to file the notice of appeal will begin the day this judicial notice is published in a newspaper of general circulation. A copy of the Notice of Judgment by Publication and Judgment in this case will be sent by plaintiff to the defendants’ last known address by certified mail, return receipt requested within ten (10) days of the one and only publication of this judicial notice.

In San Juan, Puerto Rico, this 10th day of March, 2020. MARIA ANTONGIORGI JORDAN, Clerk, United States District Court, For the District of Puerto Rico. By: ANA E. DURAN-CAPELLA, Deputy Clerk.

término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 9 de septiembre de 2020. En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico, el 9 de septiembre de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Regional. NERI A SANFELIZ RAMOS, Secretario (a) Auxiliar.

partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 9 de septiembre de 2020. En FAJARDO, Puerto Rico, el 9 de septiembre de 2020. WANDA I SEGUI REYES, Secretaria Regional. F/ZULMA I RIVERA VEGA, Secretario (a) Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

Estado Libre Asociado de PuerLEGAL NOTICE to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL Estado Libre Asociado de Puer- DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Prito Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL mera Instancia Sala Superior DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Pri- de BAYAMON. mera Instancia Sala Superior AMERICAS LEADING de FAJARDO.

MERCHANT ADVANCE, LLC Demandante

AMERICA GROUP INC., h/n/c/ PHARMACY EXPRESS; MAYRA M. CAMACHO CINTRON Y FULANO DE TAL, AMBOS EN SU CARACTER PERSONAL Y COMO MIEMBROS DE LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandado (a) Civil Núm.: RG2019CV00488.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

FINANCE LLC Demandante

JUAN LUIS BURGADO BELTRAN, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandado (a) Civil Núm.: BY2020CV00519.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO POR LA VIA ORDINARIA Y EJECUCION DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSISION DE VEHICULO). NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: JUAN LUIS BURGADO BELTRAN Y SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA LEGAL NOTICE SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE A: FULANO DE TAL Estado Libre Asociado de PuerGANANCIALES ENTRE to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL POR SI Y COMO AMBOS DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriREPRESENTANTE DE LA EL SECRETARIO (A) que susmera Instancia Sala Superior SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE cribe le notifica a usted que el de BAYAMON. ARACELIS PEREZ NIETO BIENES GANANCIALES 6 de septiembre de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, COMPUESTA CON Demandante MAYRA M. CAMACHO Sentencia Parcial o Resolución HECTOR en este caso, que ha sido debiCINTRON JERMAINE ALVARADO damente registrada y archivada Demandado (a) * Física: Urb. San Pedro en autos donde podrá usted Civil Núm.: BY2019RF01122 Estates E-3 Calle San enterarse detalladamente de los (3001). Sala: 407. Sobre: DIFrancisco, Caguas PR términos de la misma. Esta noVORCIO (R.I.). NOTIFICACIÓN tificación se publicará una sola 00725; DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. vez en un periódico de circula* Postal: 1357 Ave. A: HECTOR ción general en la Isla de Puerto Ashford Ste 401 San Rico, dentro de los diez (10) JERMAINE ALVARADO días siguientes a su notifica(Nombre de las partes a las que se Juan, PR 00907-1400

UNITED STATES DISTRICT LEGAL NOTICE COURT FOR THE DISTRICT UNITED STATES DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO. COURT FOR THE DISTRICT UNITED STATES OF OF PUERTO RICO UNITED le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO (A) que susSTATES OF AMERICA,.

AMERICA/ acting cribe le notifica a usted que el ACTING THROUGH through the United States 4 de septiembre de 2020, este THE UNITED STATES Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Department of Agriculture DEPARTMENT OF (Farm Service Agency) Sentencia Parcial o Resolución Plaintiff V. en este caso, que ha sido debiAGRICULTURE, damente registrada y archivada Plaintiff, V. DAVID RIOS RIVERA/ en autos donde podrá usted ESTATE OF SANTA ET ALS enterarse detalladamente de los Defendants COLON REYES, términos de la misma. Esta noCIVIL NO. 19-1338 CCC. FoCOMPOSED BY HER tificación se publicará una sola reclosure of Mortgage. SUMKNOWN HEIRS PAULINO vez en un periódico de circulaMONS BY PUBLICATION. ción general en la Isla de Puerto DE JESUS COLON, TO: YAHAIRA RIOS Rico, dentro de los diez (10) WILMA JANETTE DE MEJIAS and EDGAR días siguientes a su notificaJESUS COLON, LUZ ción. Y, siendo o representando RIOS MEJIAS/ as known CELENIA DE JESUS usted una parte en el procedimembers of the Estate COLON, PAULINO DE miento sujeta a los términos de Of DAVID RIOS RIVERA; JESUS SOTO AS CO- la Sentencia, Sentencia ParJOHN DOE and RICHARD o Resolución, de la cual SIGNER AND AS TO THE cial ROE as unknown puede establecerse recurso de members of said estate WIDOW USUFRUCTUARY revisión o apelación dentro del

EL SECRETARIO (A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 8 de septiembre de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los diez (10) días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a

ción. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 10 de septiembre de 2020. En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico, el 10 de septiembre de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Regional. IVETTE M MARRERO BRACERO, Secretario (a) Auxiliar.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

Naomi Osaka, while rallying for social justice, wins US Open title

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

N

aomi Osaka had just come back to secure her second U.S. Open singles title. She had tapped rackets with Victoria Azarenka, thanked the chair umpire and consulted with a WTA Tour media official about the commitments to come.

Only then did she take a moment for herself, returning to the blue court where she became a star in 2018 and gingerly dropping to its surface, lying on her back, hands folded and eyes blinking as she gazed up through the open roof — all alone — for nearly 20 seconds.

“I was thinking about all the times I’ve watched the great players sort of collapse onto the ground and look up into the sky,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see what they saw.”

Osaka, still just 22, is undoubtedly a great player already, and there was much for her to savor on many levels over the last three weeks. Much to ponder, as well, as she took on not only some of the toughest tennis players in the world but some of the thorniest social issues, as well.

She handled the pressure on both fronts and returned to the fore in women’s tennis with Saturday’s gritty 1-6, 6-3, 6-3 victory.

She wore seven masks with different names for each of her matches to honor Black victims of violence. She said it motivated her — “I wanted more people to say more names” — and she walked on court Saturday with a mask bearing the name of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy shot and killed in Cleveland by a white police officer in 2014.

“The point is to make people start talking,” Osaka said at the award ceremony.

Osaka — with her talent and increasingly confident voice — seems to have that effect.

Her time at the top has been short but impactful, and Saturday’s victory came in radically different conditions than did her first title run in New York in 2018.

In that final, she defeated Serena Williams in a tumultuous straight-set match that turned ugly when Williams clashed in Arthur Ashe Stadium with chair umpire Carlos Ramos, who called three code-of-conduct violations against Williams.

The crowd, unclear on the rules and upset at the treatment of Williams, booed during

Naomi Osaka defeated Victoria Azarenka in the United States Open final in three sets to earn her third Grand Slam tournament victory. the awards ceremony, leaving Osaka in tears shortly after her first Grand Slam singles title.

But Ashe Stadium was nearly empty Saturday, as it has been throughout this unusual U.S. Open where fans were not permitted because of the coronavirus pandemic.

What little crowd there was in attendance never became a factor, and though Osaka started very slowly against Azarenka, she gradually found her range and became the first player in 26 years to win a U.S. women’s singles final after losing the first set.

The last player to manage it was Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, who rallied to defeat Steffi Graf in 1994.

Osaka, 22, who represents Japan and is based in the U.S., is 3-0 in Grand Slam singles finals. With her huge serve, powerful groundstrokes and improved fitness, she appeared ready to take command of the women’s game when she won the 2018 U.S. Open and 2019 Australian Open and became No. 1.

But she surprisingly split with her coach Sascha Bajin shortly after that victory in Australia and struggled to recapture the same sparkling form.

Last year, as she defended her U.S. Open title, Osaka was beaten in the fourth round

by Belinda Bencic. At the Australian Open in January, she played an error-filled match and was upset in the third round by Coco Gauff, then 15, an American whom Osaka

had beaten in straightforward fashion at the 2019 U.S. Open.

Osaka was in evident disarray, but then came the five-month tour hiatus because of the pandemic. Osaka, the biracial daughter of a Haitian father and Japanese mother, became deeply involved in the social justice movement, attending a rally in Minneapolis and speaking out on social networks and elsewhere. She also worked intently on her game and her fitness in her new base in Los Angeles with new coach Wim Fissette, a Belgian who has helped Azarenka and many other leading players win big titles.

“The quarantine definitely gave me a chance to think about a lot of things, what I want to accomplish, what I want people to remember me by,” Osaka said. “I think it definitely helped me out.”

When she returned to the tour for a twotournament doubleheader in New York, with the players in a controlled environment, she continued her activism. She initially declined to play her semifinal match in the Western & Southern Open the week before the U.S. Open, in solidarity with athletes in professional basketball, baseball and soccer who were protesting systemic racism and police violence.

Tour officials responded by canceling the entire day of play, and Osaka went on to reach the final, withdrawing with a left hamstring injury before facing Azarenka.

The hamstring was still strapped Saturday as she came back to beat Azarenka in the final.

Azarenka lost to Williams in classic U.S. Open finals in 2012 and 2013 but rallied to defeat the 38-year-old Williams in a ferociously contested semifinal Thursday and started just as convincingly Saturday.

Azarenka, 31, from Belarus, was unseeded and had not won a tour match in nearly a year before arriving in New York, but she is hardly a tennis outsider. She was No. 1 for 51 weeks in 2012 and 2013 and won two Australian Open singles titles before Williams reasserted herself at the top of the women’s game and Azarenka dropped back.

She had injuries, painful breakups with boyfriends and coaches and, most traumatically, a lengthy and bitter custody dispute over her now 3-year-old son, Leo, who stayed with Azarenka and her mother and team

at a private home she rented near the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center for the tournament.

She would have been the first mother to become a Grand Slam singles champion since Kim Clijsters won the Australian Open in 2011. As Azarenka dominated the opening set, hitting nearly every first serve in play and controlling the rallies, it appeared she might win in a hurry. Osaka threw her racket at one stage in frustration as her unforced errors piled up.

“I just thought it would be very embarrassing to lose this in under an hour,” Osaka said, explaining that she told herself to “stop having a really bad attitude.”

Her mood and game improved dramatically as the final progressed, while Azarenka failed to sustain her level of play. After losing the second set and falling behind 1-4 in the third, Azarenka made one more surge, battling through a five-deuce game to hold serve and then breaking Osaka’s serve in the next game to close the gap to 3-4.

But at 30-15 on Azarenka’s serve in the next game, the match turned for good as Azarenka started hitting shots that failed to penetrate. Osaka won a high-velocity rally to get a break point and then converted it as Azarenka lined up a forehand, went for an inside-out winner and missed just wide. By such tiny margins are Grand Slam titles lost and won.

Osaka then closed out the victory by holding serve as Azarenka’s last shot, a backhand, struck the net to end a 13-shot rally.

Osaka tapped rackets with Azarenka at the net — another sign of these changed times — and then lay on her back.

“I always see everyone sort of collapse after match point, but I always think you may injure yourself, so I wanted to do it safely,” she explained.

That seemed fitting at a tournament where staying safe was the priority, as players were tested for the virus regularly and restricted to their lodging and the tournament site.

“It’s not easy times in the world right now,” Azarenka said, holding back tears in her post-match speech in the near-empty stadium. “So I’m very grateful for the opportunity to play in front of millions of people watching on TV, unfortunately not here.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

27

Young core carries the Celtics past the Raptors. But there’s more work to do.

By SOPAN DEB

T

he last time Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart were in a Game 7, they were up-and-coming youngsters on a 2018 Boston Celtics team that was full of potential going up against LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Tatum even famously dunked on James in the fourth quarter of a losing effort — a small taste of his growth to come.

On Friday night against the Toronto Raptors, Tatum, Brown and Smart solidified that they are no longer up-and-coming. The trio combined for 66 points as the Celtics eliminated the reigning NBA champions, 92-87, to return to the Eastern Conference finals for the third time in four years.

In a neck-and-neck series, all three players made crucial plays down the stretch. Brown had a momentum-shifting dunk. Tatum saved the game with an offensive rebound in the final minute.

And Smart’s chase-down block — also in the final minute — surely will be in Celtics highlight reels for years to come.

“I’m first team all-defense for a reason,” Smart said after the game.

Is it possible to be young in age and old in experience? Tatum is 22. Brown is 23. Smart is 26. But they have now played seven playoff series together, not including the playoff games that Smart and Brown had before Tatum entered the league. Friday was the third Game 7 for the trio and the fourth for Brown and Smart.

“We have three 30-year-olds,” coach Brad Stevens said, referring to Kemba Walker, Brad Wanamaker and Gordon Hayward. “We’re like basically a college team with a couple of guys.”

The young core looked poised down the stretch. They made just enough shots, grabbed just enough rebounds and stretched their arms just high enough to keep the Raptors from scoring when they needed to. For Toronto, Kyle Lowry and Pascal Siakam looked out of sorts

Jayson Tatum is one of several young players on the Celtics who have collectively tallied a lot of playoff experience.

— especially when Lowry threw the ball into the backcourt for a turnover with about five minutes left. Siakam, who played poorly most of the series, finished with 13 points on 12 shots, while Lowry scored 16 points on 15 shots.

Even so, it took every bit of the Celtics talent to hold off the resilient Raptors.

This was not a team keen on giving up its crown easily.

With 0.5 seconds left in Game 3 and Toronto down 2 points, the Raptors hit a 3-pointer to get back into the series. In Game 6, the Celtics led late in the fourth quarter, overtime and double overtime, yet Toronto still won. And in Game 7, even when the Celtics were up 10 points with less than five minutes left, the Raptors came back to within 2 in the final minute. It wasn’t even that surprising.

That’s the kind of team Toronto was: You just assume it will come back.

“Both teams were really tired,” Ste-

vens said. “Both teams laid it all out there. This has been a grueling series.”

And therein lies the cruelty of professional basketball: You live by the bounce and die by the bounce. Last year in a conference semifinal Game 7, the Raptors won by virtue of a fortuitous shot that rimmed in at the last second, beating the Philadelphia 76ers and effectively pushing the Sixers to drastically change their team. On Friday, when the Raptors needed one more bounce, the plays went the other way.

“We had more to give,” Lowry told reporters. “But, you know, unfortunately, we’re not getting any more now.”

Toronto’s win last year followed by Friday’s elimination laid bare how rare championship runs are — and why it is imperative for the Celtics to take advantage of this opportunity. The league’s dynamics can shift on a dime, a result of player empowerment in free agency and

unexpected trade requests.

If you are a glass-half-full type, then you are probably feeling bullish about the Celtics’ chances against the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference finals, which begin Tuesday. After all, the Raptors were significantly better than Miami during the regular season. And Hayward is expected to return against Miami.

We should definitely be hardened,” Stevens said. “We should definitely have a lot more in our toolbox to go back to, but we also have to get ready for a different, more unique team in Miami.”

And Walker — barring an injury — is a better player than he showed against Toronto, against whom he averaged 17 points and six assists on 42 percent shooting.

“These guys saved me all night,” Walker said, referring to his teammates.

But Boston fans are never the glasshalf-full types (rather, they often ask, is there anything in the glass?). In that respect, the Celtics are still a work in progress.

For the first time since the late-2000s era of Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce, the Celtics will be favored in the Eastern Conference finals.

Boston finished ahead of Miami in the regular season, beat opponents by more points and had a better offense and defense. Boston won two of the three games they played against one another and probably has the best player on the floor in Tatum.

The Celtics have been here before.

But now fans expect them to win, unlike in 2018, when Kyrie Irving and Hayward were injured, and James was the opponent. Or in 2017, when the Celtics made an unexpected run to the conference finals and lost Isaiah Thomas to injuries and to James once again in the series.

Brown and Smart were on that 2017 team.

If the Celtics do not reach the finals, there might not be another opportunity as more teams drastically retool and the league shifts again.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

Gene Budig, last president of the American League, dies at 81

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

G

ene Budig, the soft-spoken former chancellor of the University of Kansas who in 1994 became the final president of baseball’s American League, died Tuesday at his home in Charleston, S.C. He was 81.

His wife, Gretchen Budig, said the cause was complications of fatty liver disease.

Budig (pronounced BYOO-dig) did not expect to be the last to hold his position (nor did Leonard Coleman Jr., his National League counterpart). The job, which included supervising umpires, disciplining players and owners, and arranging schedules, was created in 1901 when Ban Johnson founded the American League and became its first president.

But in 1999, five years after his appointment, Major League Baseball owners voted to eliminate the league presidents and fold their functions under Commissioner Bud Selig. That left Budig and Coleman jobless.

Budig, a Yankees fan since childhood, was disappointed. “He loved that job — it was his dream job,” his daughter Kathryn Budig said in an email.

Budig championed diversity and hired Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League, as his special assistant in 1995.

“Larry Doby is a historic figure, a treasure who deserves to be remembered,” Budig told The New York Times shortly after naming him to the position.

“This appointment will call attention to his contributions. He will provide unique insights.”

Budig also took his disciplinary duties seriously. In 1998, he imposed a five-game suspension on Mike Stanton, a relief pitcher for the Yankees, for hitting Eric Davis of the Baltimore Orioles with a pitch. George Steinbrenner, the Yankees owner, responded angrily.

“I’m not sure what Dr. Budig’s experience is,” said Steinbrenner, who had clashed several times with Budig but later became friendly with him, “but I’m not sure when the last time he wore a jockstrap was.”

Budig, who was known for his reserve, did not reciprocate with thunder.

Gene Budig, right, the president of the American League, at the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park in Boston with the former Red Sox center fielder Dominic DiMaggio.

Instead, he asked someone at the athletic department at Kansas to send him the largest jockstrap the department had, which he autographed and shipped to Steinbrenner.

“Gene always fought his adversaries with a subtle wit,” Coleman said in an interview.

Gene Arthur Budig was born on May 25, 1939, in Lincoln, Neb., and raised in McCook, in the western part of the state. His birth parents gave him up to an orphanage and he was adopted by Arthur Budig, an auto mechanic, and Angela (Schaff) Budig, a nurse who worked at the hospital where Gene was born.

When he was 12, Gene sent a letter to Bill Veeck, the maverick owner of the St. Louis Browns, asking to try out for the team after learning that Veeck had once sent the 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel to pinch hit as a gag.

“He said, ‘I’m pretty good at second base. Can I come for a tryout?’”

Gretchen Budig said in an interview.

“Bill wrote back and said, ‘Sure, when you get out of high school.’”

Gene never tried out for Veeck, with whom he later became friends. But he played for his high school team and at the University of Texas, Austin, during his only semester there. He graduated from the University of Nebraska,

Lincoln, in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and remained there to earn a master’s in English and a doctorate in education.

After holding various jobs at the university, including assistant vice chancellor and assistant vice president, Budig left for Illinois State University in 1972 as a vice president, dean and professor of educational administration. He was named president the next year.

In 1977 he was hired as president of West Virginia University. He left four years later when he was appointed chancellor at Kansas, where he remained until 1994.

While there, he oversaw the construction of several buildings and helped secure an $18 million state grant to rebuild Hoch Auditorium, which had burned down in 1991 and was renamed Budig Hall in 1997.

He also approved the hiring of two high-profile men’s basketball coaches: Larry Brown in 1983 and Roy Williams in 1988.

By 1994, Budig had become known in baseball circles as a member of the board of the Kansas City Royals. He was chosen that year to replace Bobby Brown, a former Yankees infielder, as American League president. He followed another academic in baseball’s hierarchy, A. Bartlett Giamatti, who had left the presi-

dency of Yale to become the National League president in 1986 and was named baseball commissioner three years later.

After the league presidencies were eliminated in 1999, Budig worked briefly as an adviser to Selig; taught a course, “The Business of Sport and the Public Trust,” at Princeton University; and served on the advisory board of the Pinstripe Bowl, a postseason college football game played at Yankee Stadium.

In 2007, after moving to South Carolina, he acquired a large minority stake in the Charleston RiverDogs, a low-level minor league affiliate of the Yankees.

In addition to his wife, Gretchen (Van Bloom) Budig, whom he married in 1963, and daughter Kathryn, Budig is survived by another daughter, Mary Frances Budig; a son, Christopher; a sister, Mary Ann Myers; a brother, Richard; and five grandchildren.

When Budig left Kansas to run the American League, there were some doubts about his decision. The Kansas City Star criticized him for leaving serious work to manage athletes. And on his third day as league president, Steinbrenner told him that he was overqualified.

“I heard that quite often,” Budig told Yankees Magazine in 2020. “It was like a lot of people thought I was wasting my life. And, God, far from it.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 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)

A senior colleague will be in touch regarding an ongoing project or assignment. They are hoping you will have some information they need to move this matter forward. You will feel flattered that they have chosen you to confide in. A personal skill will come in useful at work and will add some variety to your usual routines.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

A youngster or older relative will stand out as lacking in consideration for everyone else.

Before you start criticising, try to get to the bottom of their behaviour. You might discover they aren’t feeling well and doing their best to hide it. When someone needs your loving support, you will be there for them.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Arrangements are changed and this will be to your advantage. A meeting will leave you slightly bemused when someone you have always looked up to will prove they aren’t quite all you imagined them to be. An offer will be swiftly taken. Friends will be surprised at your spontaneity when normally you would ask to think about it.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

There will be moments when you wonder whether anything is going to go right for you.

You’re tempted to go back to bed and sleep the day away. Persevere. You’re a fighter and you can overcome the problems you are faced with today. Meet challenges head on. Results will be positive if you’re willing to keep trying.

You find it hard to put emotions into words.

Beware of overindulgence in any form. You’re starting to take a more sensible approach towards health matters. Make it your intention to make self-indulgence a thing of the past.

A colleague will admit they were getting tired of having to cover for you while you were having fun. You hadn’t realised how resentful they had become.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

(June 22-July 23)

After a busy start to the day your world will suddenly seem to go very quiet. Take advantage of the peace and spend a few hours relaxing and recharging your batteries. A brilliant idea will come to you while you are driving, gardening or walking. This could be the seed of a prosperous future project.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Someone in the family is spending money as if it grows on trees. This concerns you. If by rights they should be left to handle their finances in whichever way they so desire, you may have to be diplomatic in your attempt to get them to see the error of their ways. Sometimes people have to be left to learn from their own mistakes.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

When you do a friend or neighbour a favour it would be good to see some appreciation.

You could always ask if they are grateful but it would be far more satisfying for others to show their gratitude without any prompting and at least then you would know it is sincere.

If you feel your efforts aren’t appreciated think twice before doing anything more for them.

If you don’t start to wind down, you will become increasingly tired. You may not have realised how much you have been pushing yourself recently. Pause, relax and recharge your batteries. Luxuriate in a scented bath.

Spend some time in nature and use this time to revisit your goals for the future.

You seem to be proving everything everyone thinks about you wrong. When you are usually the one who prefers familiarity to the unknown and routine to the unpredictable, today you’re coming up with inspirational ideas to break out of a rut and to encourage others towards new goals.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You’re upset with someone in the family but you don’t want to prolong an argument. A youngster’s behaviour has not been acceptable but you want to keep life harmonious which means they will be getting off lightly on this occasion at least. Keeping your thoughts to yourself is the best way to keep the peace.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

You are a sensitive as well as sensible person and many people find it easy to talk to you. Someone may want to discuss a delicate issue. This is a good time to make career plans or to look into ways to expand your knowledge. You have many achievements no matter how small, to be grateful for. Build on these.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Monday, September 14, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 14, 2020

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