Wednesday Sep 16, 2020

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

San Juan The

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DAILY

On the Eve of NY Fashion Week, What’s Next?

Star

P22

Rough Path for Appointed Comptroller

Governor Defends Designation of La Fortaleza Public Affairs Chief; Senate and House to Evaluate

Also, Vázquez Presents 25 Bills to Be Assessed in 6th Extraordinary Session P4

PDP Mayors: Recovery from Hurricane Maria ‘has practically stopped’

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NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

Ex-SEC Head Liza García Under PFEI Investigation

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24 EDITORIAL Jueves, 3 de septiembre de 2020 Wednesday,SEMANA, SeptemberINC 16,• 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

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September 16, 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.

PREPA, UCC disputes in spotlight at commonwealth bankruptcy hearing

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he monthly bankruptcy omnibus hearing to start today in U.S. District Court will focus on two disputes related to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and an Unsecured Creditors Committee (UCC) petition to lift the stay on objections to the constitutional payment priority granted to holders of commonwealth general obligation (GO) bonds.

U.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain is slated to hear PREPA’s request for the court’s permission to reject 27 non-operational and/or above-market power purchase and operating agreements for renewable energy projects. PREPA says the projects have not advanced to a stage of development and are too costly for the utility and the rate payers. Developers of some of the projects, such as Tradewinds, are slated to speak against the petition.

The judge also is slated to hear PREPA’s request seeking to give debt priority to the payments that will be made to LUMA Energy to manage PREPA’s transmission and distribution system.

As part of the contract, PREPA will pay LUMA a fixed annual compensation that will start at $70 million the first year, increasing to $90 million the second year, and to $100 million the third year. In the fourth year and for the remainder of the 15-year agreement, the annual payment to the operator will be $105 million, an amount that could go up to $125 million if LUMA Energy achieves certain performance metrics.

Opponents of the request said the administrative

expense priority for LUMA Energy will prioritize millions of dollars worth of payments to LUMA Energy over the claims of PREPA’s pensioners, employees, and other unsecured creditors. PREPA has $9 billion in bonded debt.

Swain will also hear a dispute related to GO bonds.

Holders of GO bonds have argued that their $18 billion in claims must be paid before other unsecured prepetition claims and that a plan of adjustment cannot be confirmed unless their bonds are paid first. The UCC says the federal Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act contains too many provisions that go against the constitutional debt priority payment and that the distribution of payments as proposed would be unfair.

The court in March imposed a stay on all objections against the GO bonds, including the unsecured creditors’ objection to the payment priority for GOs as it wanted to have a final plan of adjustment for the commonwealth debt.

The UCC, however, argues that the premise of the stay order, namely the settlement of certain GO-Public Buildings Authority issues through the plan of adjustment, has evaporated due to the global pandemic.

The new economic reality post-COVID-19 is that the commonwealth cannot afford to distribute nearly $14 billion in value to holders of GO bonds as contemplated under the proposed plan of adjustment on the basis of a dubious constitutional provision that uses the commonwealth’s full faith and credit to back the bonds, the UCC said.

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Wednesday, September 16, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Governor calls 6th special session to ‘fight corruption’

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

G

ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced summoned the Legislative Assembly on Tuesday for a sixth special session that begins today and in which 25 bills that address health, education, safety, transparency issues will be taken up, along with other matters that remained unattended in earlier sessions.

One of the administrative bills is intended to “fight one of the most terrible situations that Puerto Rico has confronted, corruption.” The measure proposes that all professional service or consulting contracts from governmental entities should indicate under oath if there are natural or legal persons who would be part of or have a direct interest in, including affiliates or subsidiaries, the gains or benefits resulting from the contract by reason of any verbal or written agreement for subcontracting, intermediation, shared profits, gains of success by hiring, lobbying or a similar nature.

Meanwhile, the governor submitted for the Legislative Assembly’s evaluation an amendment proposal for the Contract Registration Law that requires every person who awards a contract to any government or municipal entity should be obliged to enroll and present a subcontract copy to the Office of the Comptroller and its relevant agency.

“As former Justice secretary, governor, and other experiences through public service, we believed that there were some

measures that must be submitted through this assembly to try tackle corruption in the government system. I want to promote through my measures that, in future governments, whoever enters the government should serve and not be served,” Vázquez said.

“Enterprises that were created at the beginning of a new government or in the middle of an emergency to acquire contracts with the government as part of the narrative we have listened to every four years, these businesses would get juicy contracts that resulted in benefits for people close to this new administration.”

The governor also submitted House Bill (HB) 403, which would authorize a “virtual driver’s license” that could be processed directly from the Driver Services Center (CESCO by its Spanish acronym) mobile app and give the digital document legal power. The governor said the bill’s objective is to “make citizens’ lives easier and … so that they won’t have to go to a CESCO each time they have a problem.”

Meanwhile, another bill that the governor submitted for the special session was HB 2036, which intends to amend the Puerto Rico Vehicle and Traffic Law by expanding the terms for requesting both analog and digital driving license renewals before the expiration date and extending the life of the license from six to eight years. Vázquez said the bill is “a step toward advancement and a benefit toward all citizens.”

Another bill, HB 2581, proposes to amend the Puerto Rico Department of Public Safety Law to establish as criminal conduct not complying with the use of face mask coverings amid a pandemic or epidemic as it is a breach against an executive

order enacted by the governor. When the Star asked why such a bill is necessary, given that the standing executive order states that violators could be fined $5,000 and spend up to six months in jail, Vázquez responded that “as … the executive order reaches its deadline, we know that COVID-19 and any other public health emergency could happen at any moment, and not necessarily spur an executive order.

“That’s why the law establishes that when a public emergency is declared, any citizen who doesn’t use it [a face mask covering] is committing a crime,” the governor said.

During the press conference, Vázquez also appointed Laa Fortaleza Public Affairs Secretary Osvaldo Soto García as commonwealth comptroller. The appointment now goes to the island House of Representatives and Senate for confirmation.

Governor defends appointment of Public Affairs chief as comptroller

By THE STAR STAFF

G

ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced on Tuesday defended the appointment of La Fortaleza Public Affairs and Public Policy Secretary Osvaldo Soto García as commonwealth comptroller, insisting that it was not a political appointment and that he has the qualifications needed for the job.

“I have to clarify that this appointment has nothing to do with politics. I told the Puerto Rican people that I am not a traditional politician. And since I’m not a traditional politician, I don’t make those decisions either,” Vázquez told reporters at a news conference in La Fortaleza. “I did it by evaluating the merits, what the law establishes as the requirements [to appoint] a comptroller of Puerto Rico, the experience, the career in public service that Mr. Osvaldo Soto García has.”

The governor noted that Soto García -- who is not a certified public accountant -- has a bachelor’s degree in business sciences and marketing from the University of Phoenix in Puerto Rico, and graduated from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Puerto Rico Law School.

Prior to occupying the position of Public Affairs secretary at La Fortaleza since January, he was the secretary of public affairs for the island Senate. Soto García has also served as a federal funds consultant for various regional consortia and municipalities, in charge of the implementation and formulation of public policies and federal laws.

In addition, both in public service and in the private sector, Soto García has highlighted his administrative management skills,

having been in charge of projects with budgets of more than $4 million and more than 60 employees. He has also implemented measures that have resulted in over $35 million in federal funds, with excellent performance results in the execution and management of federal and state funds, according to La Fortaleza.

The Commonwealth Comptroller’s Office, however, is the office in charge of auditing the operations of agencies to detect fraud and ensure public funds are used adequately. The governor noted that the Comptroller’s Office has comptrollers who do an excellent job and are not certified public accountants.

The Certified Public Accountants (CPA) Association issued a statement asking the governor to appoint a CPA to the job as has been done in the past.

“Since 1978, with the exception of a two-year intermission,

the comptroller’s position has been occupied by a certified public accountant because his academic experience, professional education, experience and qualifications are ideal if not necessary for the job,” the Association said.

Soto García said the job does not call for a person to have a background as a certified public accountant.

“As the governor has said, I have experience managing state and public funds. … The work will speak for itself,” he said.

Asked about why she did not evaluate a person with more traditional experience for the post, Vázquez said Soto García’s work will be backed up by an auditor.

“In evaluating officials I am very careful,” she said. And it does not mean that they have not been taken into consideration.

When we talk about auditors, we are talking about people who are the complement of each agency. And in the case of Osvaldo Soto, all the auditors who are there [in the Comptroller’s Office] are the complement for that office to provide agile, efficient and transparent service to the Puerto Rican people.”

The governor noted that she sought the advice of the legislative leaders who will evaluate the appointment in the extraordinary session she convened for today.

Rep. Gabriel Rodríguez Aguilo objected to the nominee and instead supported current Treasury Secretary Francisco Parés for the job. The governor said she would rather have Parés remain as Treasury secretary.

“I must tell you, the Treasury secretary has all my respect and is an excellent and extraordinary civil servant,” Vázquez said. I therefore rather have him remain as Treasury secretary.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

5

Ex-SEC chairwoman under PFEI investigation

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

F

ormer State Elections Commission (SEC) Chairwoman Liza García Vélez will be investigated by a special independent prosecutor, after the Special Independent Prosecutor Panel (PFEI by its Spanish initials) accepted a recommendation to that effect by the Puerto Rico Department of Justice.

The resolution issued by former judges Nydia Cotto Vives, Rubén Vélez Torres and Ygrí Rivera Sánchez establishes for the record that the report sent by the Justice Department contains evidence to demonstrate that the allegations against the former official could be the subject of criminal charges.

The preliminary investigation report submitted by the Justice Department is signed by Assistant Prosecutor

Wanda Meléndez Santos and Phoebe Isales, director of the department’s Public Integrity Division.

Zulma Fúster Troche was appointed as special independent prosecutor in the case, and Manuel Núñez Corrada was appointed as delegated prosecutor.

The PFEI establishes in its resolution that the genesis of the matter revolves around the hiring of a private company to carry out tasks that were supposedly established as part of the functions of SEC employees.

It is also argues that payments were made for other services provided that allegedly did not have a “public purpose,” a requirement indispensable for the granting of funds.

To this is added another series of situations regarding the retroactive payment for services rendered, without the mediation of the legally established procedure that would make it possible for such payments to be made correctly, according to the PFEI’s resolution. This, in

turn, led to other administrative actions, resulting in a deviation from established procedure, with its possible criminal consequences.

Mayors: Post-Hurricane Maria recovery ’has practically stopped’

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

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hrough an “X-ray” of the island’s municipalities, members of the Puerto Rico Mayors Association (PRMA) said Tuesday that recovery after almost three years since the passing of Hurricane Maria “has practically stopped.”

PRMA First Vice President and Villalba Mayor Luis Javier Hernández said municipalities have confronted three years of great challenges, and the association’s obligation was to inform the island about the real situation that towns are going through.

The PRMA groups mayors from the Popular Democratic Party.

“Without a doubt, the role of the municipalities was crucial during the first weeks and months [after the hurricane], opening roads, distributing food and medicines, and assisting families,” Hernández said during a press conference. “After all this, many millions in federal funds have been announced, but the truth is that they are not arriving.”

Meanwhile, Salinas Mayor Karilyn Bonilla, who was formerly an executive director of the State Agency for Emergency Management and Disaster

Administration State Agency -- now called the Emergency Management and Disaster Administration Bureau -- said the biggest stumbling block that towns have faced is the federal government’s mistrust toward the central government.

“Today we have an estimate of 25,000 families living under plastic tarps and around 70,000 homes that are in poor condition. The biggest problem is that we are in September, the peak month of the hurricane season, and Puerto Rico is more vulnerable than before,” Bonilla said. “For example, in Salinas, the Repair, Reconstruction or Relocation [R3] Program of [the island Department of] Housing has only two houses under reconstruction, out of the 300 that are on the list.”

Meanwhile, the Villalba mayor pointed out that, in the case of the Fed-

eral Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), millions of dollars in federal funds were announced by the agency “that are required to be, but have not been transferred.”

“Before, 50 percent of the funds were disbursed in advance, but now it is not that way,” Hernández said. “For example, inVillalba, there is $31 million [allocated] in compulsory projects, yet only $3 million has been disbursed.”

Guayanilla Mayor Nelson Torres Yordán said it was important to insist that municipalities should be in charge of managing the aforementioned recovery funds for two “very important reasons.”

“First, municipalities have experience managing this sort of funding, with positive results on federal grounds,” Torres Yordán said. “Second of all, we are more efficient in its execution.”

Torres Yordán said his municipality, in less than a year, has requested funding for the demolition of structures damaged by the earthquakes that shook southern Puerto Rico at the beginning of the year.

However, by next Monday, only 36 properties out of 800 that were evaluated will be about to begin demolition.

The mayor added that he visited Guayanilla’s Piedras Blancas community this past Monday, where, he said, three families still live under plastic tarps that were provided by “the failed project Tu Hogar Renace from the Department of Housing.”

PRMA’s official position is that the Emergency Management and Disaster Administration Bureau (NMEAD by its Spanish initials) must be “free and separated from the Department of Public Safety’s umbrella,” and the mayors called on Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced to proceed to order such a separation.

“It is a request made even by the organization of former directors of that agency, and it is even a recommendation from FEMA,” Bonilla said. “It was a mistake from the beginning. Poor emergency management has cost lives, and in the same way that the Forensic Sciences Bureau was released, it must also be done with the NMEAD.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

FEMA says all Hurricane Maria funds to be disbursed next year

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

A

ll funds allocated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for relief from Hurricane Maria will be disbursed next year, FEMA’s permanent coordinator announced on Tuesday.

The announcement by José Baquero came after a controversy was stirred over the failure to disburse more than half of the allocated funds nearly three years after Hurricane Maria hit the island.

“It has moved by leaps and bounds in the last year.

I don’t know if you are aware of the large amount of money that was allocated to Puerto Rico; it is more than what was allocated to Louisiana after Katrina and New York after Sandy combined,” Baquero said in response to questions from the press. “When you compare the [sequence] of those responses in Puerto Rico, well, more progress has been made in Puerto Rico.” “[The point] is not to sit down and be fanatical about that, it is to improve, keep pushing and looking

for ways to be efficient,” he added, assuring that the key is communication between the executive branch of the commonwealth government, the island’s municipalities, Puerto Rico’s Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resilience, and FEMA. Baquero said the total funds assigned to the island stand at around $48 billion, of which $17 billion have been disbursed.

“They are already obligated to specific projects and that is a great advance, over 3,000 or so projects in the municipalities,” he said. “The goal is that 70 percent will be required by December and 100 percent will be required by next year.”

Baquero’s statements came after a meeting with Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced on the monitoring of recovery projects following the passage of hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017.

“This coming weekend is Maria’s third anniversary,” Baquero said. “Basically it is to give you an update on where we are, what is being done, what is being worked on and what the work plans we have for the next six months are.”

Arecibo Mayor to issue $1,000 grants to flood victims

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

A

recibo Mayor Carlos Molina Rodríguez announced Tuesday that he will grant $1,000 to families who are victims of the floods that submerged parts of the municipality on Sunday and Monday, while the Puerto Rico government manages assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“We recognize that many families suffered considerable losses during this unexpected event. We believe that it is necessary to act quickly, so before Arecibo is declared a disaster area, we will be granting economic assistance through the municipality’s own funds,” Molina Rodríguez said in a written statement.

The mayor said the bill, which will award $1,000 to homes damaged by the floods, was approved by the municipal legislature less than 48 hours after the emergency

with the expectation of giving relief to at least about 300 families throughout the municipality, as part of an initial mitigation effort while other types of aid are made available to citizens.

Molina Rodríguez said that throughout the affected communities today, after an evaluation of the damage was carried out Monday by municipal personnel, “the municipality will be calling the affected families to coordinate aid.”

The mayor urged interested non-profit organizations to join the relief efforts for affected families, who in many cases suffered the total loss of their assets.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

7

What happened during Trump’s visit?

By JILL COWAN and ADAM NAGOURNEY

I

n California alone, more than 16,000 firefighters continued to battle blazes that have already killed at least two dozen people, torn through mountain towns still reeling from past fires, and destroyed thousands of homes and businesses.

On Monday, President Donald Trump met with Gov. Gavin Newsom and a group of California officials in McClellan Park outside Sacramento. The California officials wore masks. The president did not.

“It’ll start getting cooler,” Trump said. “You just watch.”

Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, told Trump that he hoped the weather would, indeed, cool.

“I wish science agreed with you,” Crowfoot said.

“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump responded.

Climate change is not a matter of debate among scientists, and while Newsom has acknowledged the state could better manage the state’s forests after a century of a damaging policy of total fire suppression, he has been vocal about the role of climate change in making wildfires increasingly destructive and dangerous.

He has called federal officials’ denial of climate change “BS” and exhorted anyone who doesn’t believe in it to come to California.

On Monday, though, the governor and members of his administration were polite.

“I think there’s an area of at least commonality on vegetation, forest management,” Newsom told Trump. “But please respect — and I know you do — the difference of opinion out here as it relates to this fundamental issue on the issue of climate change.”

The visit was, for better or worse, a political display. So I asked my colleague Adam Nagourney, who has covered politics for decades, to add some context to the interaction: Q: So there were obviously some underlying political considerations at play Monday. What were they for the president and the governor?

A: Let’s take Newsom first. He is the governor of the state that has been at the vanguard of the resistance to President Trump from his first day in office. Newsom is well aware of how unpopular Trump is, but also how distressed many Californians are with Trump’s denial of climate change and needed to convey that sentiment in their meeting. He had two big complications.

The first was this: California, reeling from the fires and the economic devastation of the coronavirus, needs the help of the federal government and the president in getting millions of dollars in federal aid.

Trump has threatened repeatedly to cut off funding

Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Trump during a briefing at Sacramento McClellan Airport on Monday. to the state and said it was at fault for the devastating wildfires. I asked Jerry Brown, who was Newsom’s predecessor and one of Trump’s biggest critics on the environment, whether he would tell the president of his criticism if he were still governor and greeting the president on his visit to California.

Brown said yes — but taking note of the billions of dollars California needs, said he’d probably wait a few days.

So we saw Newsom noting their difference on climate change and suggesting he respected the fact that there was a difference of opinion. It will be interesting to see how that’s going to play in the next few days.

Q: And the second complication?

A: Newsom was clearly mindful not to say something that could show up in a Trump campaign commercial or promotional video — which happened the last time the two men met and Newsom was effusive in his thanks of the president, remarks the president highlighted in a video at the Republican convention.

On one hand, it might have seemed that Newsom had been played a bit by the president — but on the other, this is a state in crisis, and it needs the help from Washington.

Q: What about Trump?

A: Well, let’s allow off the bat that Mr. Trump came

here in the role of a president comforting a part of his country in distress, which is one of the things that presidents do. But this is a visit with definite political benefit to him. He is of course never going to win California, but appearing concerned and sympathetic could help him with moderate women suburban voters who have moved away from him and is one of the reasons he is struggling in polls. And the fact is that television images of presidents tending to national crises are almost always good in politics, especially during election seasons.

Q: Do you think climate change will become a bigger factor in the presidential election? It hasn’t been much of a focus so far.

That’s a terrific question, and the answer is — don’t hate me for this — time will tell. Joe Biden has been talking about the environment, pledging if elected to, for example, to reverse Trump’s decision to withdraw from the international Paris climate accord. Biden has a much more affirmative legislative history on the environment. But in this era of pandemic and social unrest there has not been an abundance of interest in this issue by voters and thus by the candidates. It certainly seems possible that these fires might change that at least a bit.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

As wildfires rage, leaders plead for ‘all the help we can get’

Firefighters battle the Bobcat Fire in Arcadia, Calif. on Monday.

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

T

he wildfires raging on the West Coast became an all but inescapable crisis around the country Tuesday, with at least 27 people dead in three states, fires and evacuations starting in Idaho, milky smoke clouding the skies over Michigan, and haze reaching as far as New York City.

In the states where the fires are burning worst — with more than 5 million acres charred so far in Oregon, California and Washington state — authorities were trying to adapt to a disaster with no clear end in sight, under conditions deeply exacerbated climate change.

The Bay Area, under a choking blanket of smoke for four weeks, set another record for consecutive warnings about hazardous air. The Oregon State Police established a mobile morgue as teams searched incinerated

buildings for survivors and the dead.

Alaska Airlines suspended flights out of Portland, Oregon, and Spokane, Washington, citing “thick smoke and haze.” And Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon requested a presidential disaster declaration, saying late Monday, “to fight fires of this scale, we need all the help we can get.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California met with President Donald Trump on Monday in McClellan Park, near Sacramento, thanking him for federal help and agreeing that forest management could be better — while also noting that only 3% of land in California is under state control, compared to 57% under federal control. The governors of all three states stressed that climate change had made fires more dangerous, drying forests with rising heat and priming them to burn, science that Monday the president denied.

“The rules of fighting wildfires

are changing because our climate is changing,” Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington wrote in an open letter Monday.

“There is no fire suppression plan on this planet that does anyone any good if it doesn’t even acknowledge the role of climate change.”

Addressing Trump directly, he wrote, “I hope you had an enlightening trip to the West Coast, where your refusal to address climate change — and your active steps to allow even more carbon pollution — will accelerate devastating wildfires like you are seeing today.”

Firefighters continued trying to contain the dozens of fires Tuesday morning. In California, the August Complex fire, which has burned more than 750,000 acres northwest of Sacramento, was contained to about 30%, and the Creek Fire northeast of Fresno, which has burned more than 200,000 acres, was contained about 16%.

In Oregon, tens of thousands of people were still under evacuation orders, and the Beachie Creek fire, east of Salem, grew to burn almost 200,000 acres.

Lakefront cottages are reduced to ash in a California community.

The North Complex Fire tore through the tiny California mountain community of Lake Madrone last week, reducing the pine-fringed shore, which was speckled with cottages and frequented by bears and otters, to bare black timbers and ash.

The community had spent years clearing fire breaks and removing forest debris to protect it from wildfire. But roaring winds, high temperatures and a fire storm that raced almost 20 miles in a few days smashed its defenses late last week and destroyed about half of the 130 houses.

“We hoped we had done enough,” said Scott Owen, a resident who lived by the lake. “After watching that fire I don’t think you can do enough. This fire moved like no one had seen before.”

On Monday evening, Sheriff Kory Honea of Butte County announced one additional victim of the fire, which has killed at least 15 people. He said that family members of some of those who died told deputies that the individuals had packed their bags and planned to evacuate but changed their minds based on false information that the fire was 50% contained.

Owen’s whole neighborhood burned to the ground in the blaze. One neighbor barely escaped, he said, and sheltered from the flames in a creek. On Monday the neighbors were still trying to account for everyone, hoping that authorities would not have to search the debris with cadaver dogs.

Though the flames have moved north, the residents of Lake Madrone have not been able to return yet. Owen, who has owned a house on the lake for decades, said he was not sure he would rebuild.

“I just think things have changed and we’re going to have more fires,” he said. “This is a record year — who knows where it goes from here.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

9

As Trump again rejects science, Biden calls him a ‘climate arsonist’

By PETER BAKER, LISA FRIEDMAN and THOMAS KAPLAN

W

ith wildfires raging across the West, climate change took center stage in the race for the White House on Monday as former Vice President Joe Biden called President Donald Trump a “climate arsonist” while the president said that “I don’t think science knows” what is actually happening.

A day of dueling appearances laid out the stark differences between the two candidates, an incumbent president who has long scorned climate change as a hoax and rolled back environmental regulations and a challenger who has called for an aggressive campaign to curb the greenhouse gases blamed for increasingly extreme weather.

Trump flew to California after weeks of public silence about the flames that have forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, wiped out communities and forests, burned millions of acres, shrouded the region in smoke and left at least 27 people dead. But even when confronted by California’s governor and other state officials, the president insisted on attributing the crisis solely to poor forest management, not climate change.

Biden, for his part, assailed Trump’s record on the climate, asserting that the president’s inaction and denial had fed destruction, citing not just the current emergency on the West Coast but flooding in the Midwest and hurricanes along the Gulf Coast. In an outdoor speech at a museum in Wilmington, Delaware, the Democratic presidential nominee sought to paint a second Trump term as a danger to the nation’s suburbs, flipping an attack on him by the president.

“If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires?” Biden asked. “How many suburban neighborhoods will have been flooded out? How many suburbs will have been blown away in superstorms? If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?”

The politicking came as firefighting teams across the West Coast battled shifting winds and drier weather Monday, sparking additional fire fronts that threatened to make new kindling out of forests and cover more of the country with hazardous smoke and falling ash. By Monday afternoon, haze had spread

across much of the U.S. and could be seen over New York and Washington.

Heavy smoke kept some firefighting aircraft grounded as fire pushed into new areas, prompting fresh evacuations in Idaho, Oregon and California.

In Oregon, with a confirmed death toll of 10 along with 22 others missing, Gov. Kate Brown said the state was getting firefighting support from as far as North Dakota and Michigan. She expressed gratitude for the national assistance, saying the state could use all the help it could get. “Without question, our state has been pushed to its limits,” Brown said.

Doug Grafe, the chief of fire protection at the Oregon Department of Forestry, said crews had made progress containing fires. But he said rains anticipated to fall Monday were not materializing and winds threatened to exacerbate fire conditions in some areas. Grafe said the rains that may now come Wednesday or Thursday could also include lightning, raising the danger of new fires.

Trump, who had come under intense criticism for barely addressing the crisis before, interrupted a western campaign swing to make a two-hour visit to an airport in McClellan Park outside Sacramento, where Air Force One descended through a smoky haze. Not far away, one of the biggest fires, now largely contained, recently burned more than 363,000 acres.

As soon as the president disembarked from the plane at Sacramento McClellan Airport, where the stench of smoke filled the air, he did not wait for his scheduled briefing to tell reporters that the cause of the conflagration was poor forest management, not climate change.

“When trees fall down after a short period of time, they become very dry — really like a matchstick,” Trump said. “And they can explode. Also leaves. When you have dried leaves on the ground, it’s just fuel for the fires.”

At his subsequent briefing, however, Gov. Gavin Newsom and his top environmental adviser pushed the president to acknowledge the role of climate change. Newsom, a Democrat, made a point of doing so exceedingly politely, reaffirming his working relationship with the president, thanking him for federal help and agreeing that forest management needed to be improved.

But Newsom noted that only 3% of land in California is under state control while 57% is federal forest land, meaning under

A tropical storm doesn’t stop the weekly get-together of Cubans for Biden supporters near Tropical Park in Miami on Saturday, Sept. 12, 2020. Signs depicting President Donald Trump with President Vladimir Putin of Russia read “Friend of socialism” and “Friend of communism.” the president’s management as governed by federal law.

“As you suggest, the working relationship I value,” Newsom said. But he said climate change clearly was a factor. “Something’s happening to the plumbing of the world, and we come from a perspective, humbly, where we submit the science is in and observed evidence is self-evident that climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this.”

He went on: “And so I think there’s an area of at least commonality on vegetation, forest management. But please respect — and I know you do — the difference of opinion out here as it relates to this fundamental issue on the issue of climate change.”

Trump did not argue the point. “Absolutely,” he said, and then turned the floor over to another briefer.

But Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources, pressed Trump more bluntly. “If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians,” he told the president.

This time, Trump rejected the premise.

“It’ll start getting cooler,” he insisted. “You just watch.”

“I wish science agreed with you,”

Crowfoot replied.

“Well, I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump retorted, maintaining a tense grin.

Experts say climate change, the management of public lands and decisions over where to site housing all contribute to wildfires. Trump has exclusively blamed poor forest management and last year issued an executive order directing agencies to cut down more trees, arguing that expanding timber harvesting would reduce forest fires.

Biden, on the other hand, has proposed spending $2 trillion over four years to escalate the use of clean energy and ultimately phase out the burning of oil, gas and coal. He has pledged to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, build 1.5 million new energy-efficient homes and eliminate carbon pollution from the power sector by 2035.

In his speech at the Delaware Museum of Natural History, Biden accused Trump of making the country more vulnerable by denying climate change. He also made a case for treating the reduction of fossil fuel emissions as a nonpartisan issue that could create manufacturing jobs while preserving the planet.

“We have to act as a nation,” Biden said. “It shouldn’t be so bad that millions of Americans live in the shadow of an orange sky, and they’re left asking: ‘Is doomsday here?’”

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Trump health aide pushes bizarre conspiracies and warns of armed revolt

Michael Caputo, then a Republican strategist and now the assistant secretary of health for public affairs, at a campaign event for Republican congressional candidate Michael Grimm in New York on May 19, 2018.

By SHARON LAFRANIERE

T

he top communications official at the powerful Cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus made outlandish and false accusations Sunday that career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.

Michael R. Caputo, assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Donald Trump, even if that opposition bolsters the COVID-19 death toll.

Caputo, who has faced intense criticism for leading efforts to warp CDC weekly bulletins to fit Trump’s pandemic narrative, suggested that he personally could be in danger from opponents of the administration.

“If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get,” he urged his followers.

He went further, saying his physical health was in question, and his “mental health has definitely failed.”

“I don’t like being alone in Washington,” Caputo said, describing “shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.” He also said the mounting number of COVID-19 deaths was taking a toll on him, telling his viewers, “You are not waking up every morning and talking about dead Americans.” The United States has lost more than 194,200 people to the virus.

Caputo urged people to attend Trump rallies, but only with masks.

To a certain extent, Caputo’s comments in a video he hosted live on his personal Facebook page were simply an amplified version of remarks that the president himself has made. Both men have singled out government scientists and health officials as disloyal, suggested that the election will not be fairly decided, and insinuated that left-wing groups are secretly plotting to incite violence across the United States.

But Caputo’s attacks were more direct, and they came from one of the officials most responsible for shaping communications around the coronavirus.

CDC scientists “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops” to plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next,” Caputo

said. “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.”

A longtime Trump loyalist with no background in health care, Caputo, 58, was appointed by the White House to his post in April, at a time when the president’s aides suspected the health secretary, Alex Azar, of protecting his public image instead of Trump’s. Caputo coordinates the messaging of an 80,000-employee department that is at the center of the pandemic response, overseeing the Food and Drug Administration, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.

“Mr. Caputo is a critical, integral part of the president’s coronavirus response, leading on public messaging as Americans need public health information to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement.

Caputo’s Facebook comments were another sign of the administration’s deep antipathy and suspicion for its own scientific experts across the bureaucracy and the growing political pressure on those experts to toe a political line favorable to Trump.

Last weekend, first Politico, then The New York Times and other news media organizations published accounts of how Caputo and a top aide had routinely worked to revise, delay or even scuttle the core health bulletins of the CDC to paint the administration’s pandemic response in a more positive light. The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports had previously been so thoroughly shielded from political interference that political appointees only saw them just before they were published.

Caputo’s 26-minute broadside on Facebook against scientists, the news media and Democrats was also another example of a senior administration official stoking public anxiety about the election and conspiracy theories about the “deep state” — the label Trump often attaches to the federal civil service bureaucracy.

Caputo predicted that the president would win reelection in November, but that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, would refuse to concede,

leading to violence.

“And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”

There were no obvious signs from administration officials Monday that Caputo’s job was in danger. On the contrary, Trump again added his voice to the administration’s science denialism. As the president visited California to show solidarity with the fire-ravaged West, he challenged the established science of climate change, declaring, “It will start getting cooler.” He added: “Just watch. I don’t think science knows, actually.”

Caputo has 5,000 Facebook friends, and his video was viewed more than 850 times. He has now shut down his account.

Overall, his tone was deeply ominous: He warned, again without evidence, that “there are hit squads being trained all over this country” to mount armed opposition to a second term for Trump. “You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Caputo added.

In a statement Monday, Caputo told The Times: “Since joining the administration, my family and I have been continually threatened” and harassed by people who have later been prosecuted.

“This weighs heavily on us, and we deeply appreciate the friendship and support of President Trump as we address these matters and keep our children safe.”

He insisted on Facebook that he would weather the controversies, saying, “I’m not going anywhere.” And he boasted of the importance of his role, stating that the president had personally put him in charge of a $250 million public service advertising campaign intended to help the United States return to normal.

The Department of Health and Human Services is trying to use that campaign to attract more minority volunteers for clinical trials of potential COVID-19 vaccines and to ask people who have recovered to donate their blood plasma to help other infected patients. Department officials have complained that congressional Democrats are obstructing the effort.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

11

How U.S. companies are getting speedy Coronavirus tests for employees

By NOAM SCHEIBER

A

s businesses try to recover from the pandemic’s economic blow while ensuring the safety of workers and customers, many have complained of two obstacles: access to coronavirus testing for their employees and long delays in receiving results.

But some have found a reliable workaround. Through a growing number of intermediaries, they can generally obtain test results in one to three days, often by circumventing large national labs like Quest and LabCorp that have experienced backlogs and relying on unused capacity at smaller labs instead.

The intermediaries occupied various corners of the health care galaxy before the pandemic, like offering treatment on behalf of insurance companies or providing employee access to human resources data. Now they are addressing what Rajaie Batniji, an executive at one of the companies, calls “a supplychain optimization failure.”

“The bottleneck in the crudest terms is: Are you routing tests to processing labs that can process it immediately?” said Batniji, a physician and co-founder of Collective Health, which administers health plans for employers and created a separate testing and screening product during the pandemic. “That ends up being what slows us down.”

Daniel Castillo, chief medical officer of Matrix Medical Network, which is among the companies connecting businesses with laboratories, said the solution often meant turning to labs located where the spread of the virus was relatively contained.

“In some places there are spikes and perhaps testing issues; in other parts of the country there are not,” said Castillo, whose company works with health insurers to treat chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension. “We might send a test across the country — fly it to Maryland from Arizona.”

While there is not limitless capacity for employers to test workers, Batniji, Castillo and others in the industry said significantly more could do so. Even Quest and LabCorp have said their average turnaround times have dropped significantly in recent weeks.

A program intended to catch infections before they result in outbreaks typically requires testing a substantial portion of people in a shared space once a week, if not more frequently, whether or not they have symptoms. Mike Boots, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said that such testing could be enormously beneficial but that it must be combined with other measures, like distancing and contact tracing, to be effective.

For PCR tests — which detect the virus’s genetic material and are the gold standard of accuracy — the process typically costs around $100 per test per person. Even less sensitive tests, which experts increasingly recommend as a screening tool, can add up, and most currently require special equipment and a health professional to administer them.

As a result, decisions about testing often reveal less about availability than about the economics of a business and the value it places on driving down workplace transmission.

Businesses for which an outbreak among employees

Chris Drewno, a sales representative at Cameron Manufacturing in upstate New York, administering a coronavirus test. The company tests workers who travel to customers’ sites. would be extremely costly — possibly curtailing or halting operations — are generally the most likely to seek out tests.

“If there is a significant probability of a shutdown, it’s a no-brainer — you’re going to do everything you can privately to stop it,” said Jonathan Kolstad, an economist at Berkeley who has written about efficient means of mass testing and has set up a company to help promote it. “But in some cases, you don’t get a shutdown.”

In those cases, Kolstad and other economists said, employers are unlikely to carry out testing until it is cheaper and faster.

Cameron Manufacturing in upstate New York is putting a premium on employee testing. The company, which makes conveyor belts and other equipment for food and dairy processors, only briefly shut down because of the pandemic, but many customers delayed sales visits and installation work, wary of admitting outsiders.

“It’s affecting us revenue-wise,” Matthew Sharpe, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview in August. “We haven’t had major contracts canceled, but they’ve been pushed out into next year.”

So that month, Sharpe began regular PCR testing for members of his sales and engineering teams, who typically travel to customers’ work sites. Workers are also tested before and after they travel to a “hot” state for work, which could otherwise require isolating themselves for several days upon returning. Sharpe said Cameron employees received test results through a website within 36 hours and could use the information to establish their health status to customers.

Other employers have begun regular testing of asymptomatic workers for similar reasons.

Some, like meat processors Tyson Foods and JBS, have done so after outbreaks forced them to shut down facilities temporarily, and in the face of pressure from the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Representatives of both companies said they had begun testing to help protect workers.

But the flip side of this calculus, some economists said, is that employers who believe they can continue to operate even if a number of workers become infected will often forgo the expense of testing.

Zack Cooper, an economist at Yale’s School of Public Health, who contributed to a recent Rockefeller Foundation report on a national testing plan, said many businesses faced a key consideration: “If an employee gets sick, will they be able to bring someone else in to do their job?”

Some automakers, for example, have relied on an increase in temporary workers to deal with absences related to COVID-19, though they assert that the practice is unrelated to their decision to forgo wide-scale testing.

While the United Automobile Workers union has demanded such testing for months, several automakers have said it is not yet practical.

James R. Cain, a General Motors spokesman, said by email that until there was an accurate test that could deliver results very quickly, without the need for a lab, “mass testing will have limited if any value in helping GM prevent disease from getting into the workplace.” Cain added that the company was continuing to explore testing strategies but that its safety protocols, which include protective equipment and distancing, had been effective so far.

Kolstad of Berkeley and other economists say genuine uncertainty about the value of testing workers without symptoms — including about how often testing must occur and how quickly the results must be obtained to be useful — may lead employers to forgo testing.

The federal government has largely avoided providing employers with guidance on asymptomatic testing — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says such testing of workers “may be useful to detect COVID-19 early and stop transmission quickly” — which has created additional reluctance. The agency recently stopped recommending testing for people without symptoms in its guidelines for the general public, drawing criticism from experts.

Some employers may also worry that knowledge of infections they discover through testing could expose them to lawsuits from workers or customers if they continue operating.

Many experts argue that more widespread testing by employers will ultimately hinge less on capacity than on cost. They recommend greater use of tests that are less sensitive but faster and cheaper than PCR tests, but those tests have experienced regulatory hurdles and other bottlenecks.

“If it was easy as taking a temperature,” said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, “then no doubt every employer and every office you went into would be testing people all the time.”

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Coming this fall: Return of the video game console wars

By KELLEN BROWNING

E

ven before the coronavirus forced the world indoors and glued millions of people to their screens, 2020 was shaping up to be a huge year for gaming.

Microsoft is set to release a new Xbox in November, and Sony is expected to introduce the next iteration of its PlayStation this holiday season. Both are big draws for video gamers eager to fire up the newest version of Halo or Spider-Man as they wait out the pandemic.

And as the ninth generation of consoles approaches, the cancellation of in-person events has created a surge of interest in gaming and is likely to juice their sales — even as their availability is expected to be limited by supply chain problems caused by the pandemic.

Roughly every seven years, companies release a fresh series of consoles with technological improvements — in this case, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X. Although they aren’t expected to be drastic departures from previous versions, there’s still plenty of hype for the holiday releases.

Gaming has become one of the biggest global entertainment industries, with 2.7 billion people projected

to play a game this year, according to the gaming market researcher Newzoo. Growth has accelerated during the pandemic, and gamers worldwide are expected to spend nearly $160 billion this year.

“This launch is a massive moment,” said David Gibson, the chief investment officer at Astris Advisory, a financial advisory firm in Tokyo. “It is the largest and most important nextgeneration console launch ever.”

But Gibson said temporary factory shutdowns caused by the virus in several Asian countries, coupled with an increased worldwide demand for similar hardware components because of the rise in remote work, would most likely lead to a scarcity of Xboxes and PlayStations come November.

“It’s going to be really hard to find them,” he said.

The rectangular, black Xbox Series X will be released Nov. 10 for $499, Microsoft announced last week after months of speculation. The company also said it would release a miniature budget version, the Series S, for $299.

Sony has yet to announce a date or price for the PlayStation 5, a more curved, futuristic-looking white device, but said it, too, would release an alternative version.

A gaming competition in Anaheim, Calif., in February. The pandemic is only intensifying anticipation for Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X.

Both consoles will have faster loading times for games and better graphics than their predecessors, though the Series X is anticipated to have slightly more powerful hardware.

Even with the supply limitations, Gibson expects Sony to sell about 5 million PlayStations and Microsoft 3 million Xboxes in the first five months.

Game developers do not have the same hardware limitations, though, and are likely to benefit from the high console demand, he said.

Jacob Throop, a streamer for the professional e-sports organization Team SoloMid, said he played on consoles from both companies, as well as on Nintendo’s 3-year-old Switch, and would buy both new devices. He said most of his fans seemed to favor the new Xbox.

“I think the Xbox will be better,” said Throop, better known to his 1 million Twitch followers as ChocoTaco.

“On paper, the specs are better, so it looks like it will be a more powerful machine.”

Many analysts, though, expect Sony to continue its historical sales advantage in large part because of the perception that the PlayStation offers superior games. And in August, the producers of Halo Infinite, the newest version of Xbox’s flagship game series, announced that the pandemic had delayed its release until 2021, rather than release it with the Series X. “Having Halo at our launch would have been tremendous,” said Cindy Walker, an Xbox spokeswoman. But “we are not reliant on massive exclusive titles to drive console adoption. Our players will have thousands of games from four generations of Xbox available to play on launch day.”

Sony, which declined to comment on its coming release, has produced the three best-selling individual home consoles — the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 4 and original 1994 PlayStation — and is focusing on the strength of its exclusive games and brand recognition while promoting the PlayStation 5.

But Microsoft is signaling for the first time that it wants an end to the decades-long console war, or at least a truce.

Microsoft is putting a priority on

flexibility and betting that the future of gaming will be mobile, with gamers spread across consoles, computers and even phones while on the go.

The release of the Series X is still a big moment for the company, but Microsoft is also highlighting the success of Xbox Game Pass — think a Netflix library for games — and a new feature, xCloud, which will allow users to play Xbox games on Android phones for $15 per month, starting Tuesday.

“Sony is focused on convincing gamers they need to get a PlayStation 5,” said Matthew Ball, the managing partner at Epyllion Industries, which operates a venture capital fund.

Rival companies are also sensing an opportunity to break into the growing market, and are experimenting with cloud gaming, a new technology that theoretically allows players to download and run games on any device using the strength of the internet — or cloud. The nascent feature could devalue expensive consoles, especially at 5G internet speeds.

Google Stadia, a $10-a-month cloud service that lets subscribers play games across devices, arrived in November but has struggled with bugs and graphics problems. Amazon has been said to be working on its own cloud gaming service, Project Tempo.

Microsoft’s response to these incursions is xCloud.

“We’re committed to bringing more games to more gamers around the world, and cloud gaming is a longterm investment for Microsoft and critical to making this commitment real,” Walker said.

Sony’s cloud service, PlayStation Now, was introduced in 2014 and lets subscribers play some PlayStation games on computers, but users haven’t been enamored with the feature, especially before Sony slashed the monthly charge in half to $10 last year.

Analysts said Sony’s more traditional thinking as the PlayStation 5’s arrival approached could pay off in the short term.

“Sony has tremendous strength following the eighth generation of consoles and will thrive in the ninth, but it is still applying the old playbook,” Ball said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

13 Stocks

Wall Street climbs ahead of Apple event

T

ech stocks pushed Wall Street higher on Tuesday led by Apple shares ahead of a launch event by the company, while investors hoped the Federal Reserve would continue with its dovish stance as the central bank’s two-day meeting got underway.

Apple Inc’s AAPL.O 1.8% rise was the biggest boost to the S&P 500 and Nasdaq in the run-up to a broadcast event, where the company is expected to unveil updates to products such as the Apple watch and iPads. The event begins at 1 p.m. ET (1700 GMT). “(Apple is) always trying to introduce something that is game changing (and) Wall Street is looking to the Apple event and expecting something favorable to come out of it,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA in New York.

The tech index .SPLRCT jumped 1.5%, extending its recovery from a brutal sell-off earlier this month that had halted a Wall Street rally.

“The correction has probably run its course and markets are now back to focusing on some of the positives,” said John Praveen, portfolio manager at QMA. “Some positive news on the vaccine front and economic data suggest this global recovery after the COVID recession is on track, and the markets are supported by a very friendly Fed.” In its first policy meeting since Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced a more accommodative stance on inflation, the central bank could switch its Treasury purchases toward more long-dated debt to keep long-term yields low, some strategists said.

Expectations from the Fed have increased amid a stalemate in talks for fiscal relief and economic reports suggesting an uneven recovery from the coronavirus-induced recession.

Data on Tuesday showed U.S. factory output increased strongly in August. Separately, U.S. import prices increased more than expected for the same month, supporting the view that inflation pressures were building up.

Earlier in the day data showed China’s industrial output accelerated the most in eight months in August. At 12:28 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI was up 125.51 points, or 0.45%, at 28,118.84, the S&P 500 .SPX was up 31.57 points, or 0.93%, at 3,415.11. The Nasdaq Composite .IXIC was up 168.22 points, or 1.52%, at 11,224.87.

Citigroup Inc C.N dropped 3.7% following a report that federal regulators were preparing to reprimand the U.S. lender for failing to improve its risk-management systems.

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14

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

The Arctic is shifting to a new climate because of global warming

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

T

he effects of global warming in the Arctic are so severe that the region is shifting to a different climate, one characterized less by ice and snow and more by open water and rain, scientists said Monday.

Already, they said, sea ice in the Arctic has declined so much that even an extremely cold year would not result in as much ice as was typical decades ago. Two other characteristics of the region’s climate, seasonal air temperatures and the number of days of rain instead of snow, are shifting in the same way, the researchers said.

The Arctic is among the parts of the world most influenced by climate change, with sharply rising temperatures, thawing permafrost and other effects in addition to shrinking sea ice. The study, by Laura Landrum and Marika M. Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, is an effort to put what is occurring in the region in context.

“Everybody knows the Arctic is changing,” said Landrum, a climate scientist and the lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“We really wanted to quantify if this is a new climate.”

In other words, she said, “has the Arctic changed so much and so fast that the new climate cannot be predicted from the recent past?”

Using years of observational data from the region and computer models, the researchers found that sea ice is already in a new climate, in effect: The extent of ice in recent years is consistently less than what would be expected in even the worst year for ice in the mid-20th century.

Arctic sea ice has declined by about 12% per decade since satellite measurements began in the late 1970s, and the 13 lowest sea-ice years have all occurred since 2007. This year is expected to be a record or near-record low for ice extent, which will be determined by the end of this month as the summer melt period ends.

For fall and winter air temperatures and rain versus snow days, the simulations found that the transition to a new climate is occurring more slowly, with the shift expected to be complete by the middle of the century.

Overall, Landrum said, “We are beginning to get to the point where we can no longer know what to expect.”

Jennifer Kay, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado who was not involved in the research, said the new study builds on previous ones that had looked at fewer climate elements.

“It’s nice to see all those variables discussed,” Kay said. And determining the timing of the various shifts is an interesting contribution.

But scientists have known for a long time that fundamental changes were occurring in the region. “We

A photo provided by Steffen Graupner and MOSAiC of the Polarstern, a German icebreaker taking part in a large multidisciplinary polar research expedition, in the Arctic Ocean in August. The effects of global warming in the Arctic are so severe that the region is shifting to a different climate, one characterized less by ice and snow and more by open water and rain, scientists said Monday, Sept. 14, 2020. know what used to be,” Kay said. “We call it the ‘new Arctic’ because it’s not the same.”

Landrum said that Arctic communities are already suffering from the changes. Eroding coastlines are forcing some Alaska Native villages to consider relocating. Other changes are affecting the food supply. Warmer storms that bring rain on existing snow, for example, can lead to starvation of the animals Indigenous groups rely on.

“Arctic climate change is not in the future for them,” she said. “It’s now.”

Landrum said the climate models used in the study simulated the future in a world where planet-warming emissions of greenhouse gases remained high. That provides some fodder for optimism, she said.

“We still have an opportunity to change how rapidly the Arctic evolves,” she said, “if we end up changing our emissions.”

“You can’t just give up. If you work hard and make some changes there’s a possibility you’d have some dramatic effects.”

Another study released Monday suggested that two Antarctic glaciers that have long been of concern to scientists over their potential to contribute to sea level

rise may be in worse shape than previously thought.

The Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers are rivers of ice, slowly moving from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the continent’s interior to the ocean, where it melts and adds to sea level rise. In recent decades the two glaciers’ movement has accelerated, leading to more ice loss from the interior, largely because of melting by warm water underneath the glaciers.

Even with the acceleration, however, complete melting of this part of the West Antarctic sheet could take centuries.

The new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed satellite imagery and found cracks and other signs of stress damage to the glaciers’ ice shelves, the leading edges that float on the water.

This evidence of damage, the paper’s authors wrote, is the first sign of structural weakening of the ice shelves, a process that can end in the shelves’ disintegration and even faster glacial flow of ice to the ocean. The authors said that incorporating these damage processes into models of ice-sheet dynamics is critical for more accurate assessments of potential sea-level rise.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

15

Gates offers grim global health report, and some optimism

By DONALD G. McNEIL JR.

O

n Monday, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released the fourth of its annual Goalkeeper reports, which track the slow but steady progress the world has made toward more than a dozen health-related goals set forth by the United Nations in 2015.

This year’s was unrelentingly grim. The coronavirus pandemic has scorched away years of work: More families are in dire poverty, malnutrition is increasing, far fewer children are getting immunized.

The assessment comes as the United States, stung harder by the virus than any other country, is retreating from the global health stage and seems focused primarily on saving itself. Could it ever return to its role as the world’s leader in both competence and generosity? In an interview with The New York Times, Gates devoted a half-hour to explaining why he was optimistic that it would.

“It’s my disposition,” he said. “Plus, I’ve got to call these people up and make the pitch to them that this really makes sense — and I totally, totally believe it makes sense.”

By “these people,” he was referring to leading figures in the White House and Congress, whom he has personally lobbied to do “this”: namely, add an extra $4 billion to the fiscal stimulus package now under debate in Congress so that poor countries can get COVID-19 vaccines.

Ultimately his goal is far more ambitious: to double American foreign aid from less than 0.25% of gross domestic product to 0.5% or more. He sees the pandemic as an opportunity to do that.

“As they say,” he added cheerily, “the U.S. government — after it’s tried every other thing — does the right thing.”

As he did in Silicon Valley while battling competitors and antitrust regulators, Gates can calculate his chances of success with a ruthless logic.

That has rarely been as true as it is now, as a once-ina-century pandemic devastates the impoverished countries where he focuses his giving.

The damage has been wrought less by the virus — so far it has killed much smaller percentages of the populations of Asia and Africa than of the Americas and Western Europe — than by the economic effect, which has been far greater in countries where people and governments “have no spare reserves to draw on,” Gates said.

The collapse of tourism, declines in remittances from relatives working abroad, the shutdown of ports, mines and oil wells, school closings and new stresses on fragile health care systems have all created enormous suffering.

Not since 1870 have so many countries been in recession at once, according to the Goalkeeper report. Between 1990 and 2020, the percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty, which is now defined as living on less than $2 a day, shrank to less than 7% from 37%.

In just the past few months, 37 million people have fallen back below the line, the report estimated.

“The longer the pandemic lasts, the worse its eco-

nomic scars will be,” it added.

The percentage of the world’s children who received all the vaccines recommended by the World Health Organization rose last year to a record high of 84%. That figure has now dropped to 70% — back where it was 25 years ago. Deaths from malaria, malnutrition, childbirth complications and diseases like measles and diphtheria have begun to increase.

Nonetheless, Gates was optimistic that the lost ground would be recovered “in two to three years.” The pipelines of money from tourism, remittances, World Bank loans and other sources would begin flowing again as soon as the whole world was vaccinated, ending the pandemic; he expected that to be accomplished by sometime in 2022.

Until then, however, there will be a period of intense pain and even greater inequity between rich countries and poor ones.

One of the starkest conclusions in the foundation’s report is that nearly twice as many deaths could be prevented if COVID-19 vaccines were distributed to all countries based on their populations rather than to the 50 richest countries first.

That will not happen soon, Gates conceded. The Trump administration has publicly refused to join the international collaborative agreement known as Covax, under which the World Health Organization; GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations have joined forces to make sure both

rich and poor countries receive new coronavirus vaccines simultaneously.

Instead, Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s unilateral effort to fast-track vaccine development, has paid out $11 billion to six vaccine companies in return for ensuring that at least 100 million doses from each company, and options for millions more, are exclusively earmarked for the United States.

Although that position “looks selfish,” Gates said, he did not feel it was unjustified. Realistically, he said, “You’re not going to succeed in getting the U.S. to treat itself as just a random 5% of the world’s population.” American taxpayers, he noted, have paid two-thirds of the costs of the clinical trials and of manufacturing doses even before the trials end.

Absent that money, the only available vaccines would be those from Russia or China, which Gates considered untested and potentially weak. “You can’t call up Johnson & Johnson or AstraZeneca and say, ‘Hey, here’s a chance to lose $500 million.”

If just three of the several vaccines that the United States is backing succeed, he said, the country would have more doses than it could use, and the rest could be shared with the world.

Also, Gates said he expected that by early next year, regardless of who wins the presidential election, the United States would come around to paying much of the estimated $4 billion needed to get vaccines to all the world’s poor.

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, wants to add $4 billion to the fiscal stimulus package under debate in Congress so that poor countries can get Covid-19 vaccines.

16

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Boris Johnson pushes to backtrack on EU deal, despite party revolt

The Houses of Parliament in London on April 6, 2020. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s move to rewrite a treaty that settled Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit status has raised fears that trade negotiations with the European Union could be impaired.

By MARK LANDLER

P

rime Minister Boris Johnson survived a rebellion among lawmakers from his Conservative Party on Monday as the Parliament advanced Brexit legislation even after the government admitted that it would violate international law.

The vote, 340-263, came after a fierce debate in the House of Commons that demonstrated that Britain, despite having cast off from the European Union eight months ago, has yet to put the furies of Brexit behind it.

It is only the first step for the legislation, which would nullify parts of a landmark agreement that Johnson struck with the European Union last fall. That deal paved the way for Britain to leave the bloc after 44 years.

Johnson, with an 80-seat majority, was never likely to lose this first vote. But the divisive debate sets in motion a politically perilous period for the prime minister, both with his own party and with the European Union. European officials have warned that the legislation would torpedo talks for a post-Brexit trade deal.

With further legislative hurdles to come, analysts said the danger was less a quick defeat than a gradual leaching away of support that could leave Johnson weakened at a time when his government

is battling a resurgence of the coronavirus and the effects of a lockdown-ravaged economy.

“If you put together concerns about the government’s handling of the virus, with concerns about the economy, and concerns about the effects on individual liberties of the lockdown, Boris Johnson is making a lot of people unhappy,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London.

Britain also faces other international repercussions, not least with the United States, where congressional Democrats have warned Johnson that his move could scuttle a trans-Atlantic trade deal because it undermines the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

Johnson’s aggressive move to rewrite provisions of the treaty relating to Northern Ireland has drawn a torrent of criticism from prominent Conservative figures, including former Prime Minister David Cameron, who said Monday he had “misgivings” about the government’s proposal.

“Passing an act of Parliament and then going on to break an international treaty obligation is the very, very last thing you should contemplate,” Cameron told reporters, becoming the latest of five former prime ministers — three of them Conservatives — to speak out

against Johnson’s plan.

The government also lost the support of two former Cabinet members — Sajid Javid, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer until Johnson forced him out in February, and Geoffrey Cox, a former attorney general.

Cox said he would vote against the law because it would do “unconscionable” harm to Britain’s global standing. His defection was particularly noteworthy because Cox favored Brexit and was the government’s top legal adviser when Johnson negotiated the withdrawal agreement.

In the heat of the debate, Ed Miliband, a former leader of the Labour Party, reminded Johnson that he had signed, promoted and ran his election campaign on the agreement he was now proposing to rewrite.

“What incompetence! What failure of governance!” Miliband bellowed, as Johnson shook his head in disgust. “And how dare he try and blame everyone else.”

Despite the boldface names lining up to oppose the law, there was no sign that Johnson planned to back down. He told Parliament the legislation was an “insurance policy” against a European Union that might interpret the withdrawal agreement in a way that could break up the United Kingdom.

Threatening to rip up an agreement with the European Union plays well with the hard-line Brexiteers in his party. And there are still 3 1/2 months before the Dec. 31 deadline for a trade deal with Brussels, which means Johnson could always compromise later.

Johnson pursued a similar strategy of brinkmanship this time last year, threatening to leave the European Union without a withdrawal agreement, which prompted a similar, if more widespread, mutiny in his party.

The prime minister expelled 21 rebels for defying the government, including Conservative grandees like Kenneth Clarke, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Nicholas Soames, a grandson of Winston Churchill.

Johnson kept threatening a nodeal Brexit until October, when he met with Leo Varadkar, then the prime minister of Ireland, and suddenly cut a deal on the treatment of Northern Ireland that opened the door to a broader

agreement with Brussels.

It is that deal that Johnson now proposes to renege on, if Britain is unable to agree to long-term trade arrangements with the European Union. The government says the legislation is intended to provide a “safety net” for businesses in Northern Ireland, which send and receive goods from the rest of the United Kingdom.

Few analysts expected more than a small band of Conservative lawmakers to abstain or vote against the government Monday. But more may vote for an amendment — to be introduced next week by a Conservative member, Bob Neill — that would block the government from using the provisions of the bill that would break the law by nullifying the so-called Northern Ireland protocol, without Parliament’s approval.

Even that rebellion seems likely to fall short, however, given the size of Johnson’s majority and the reluctance of Conservative lawmakers to fall out with a prime minister who delivered a landslide victory less than a year ago.

After passing in the House of Commons, the legislation now goes to the House of Lords, where Michael Howard, who sits in that chamber and who is a former head of the Conservative Party, predicted it would run into a buzz saw of opposition. Still, the Lords rarely thwart bills that have passed the lower house.

For all the fireworks, some analysts still said they believed Johnson would ultimately come to terms with Brussels.

The prime minister’s threats to break off talks, breach international law or accept a no-deal Brexit are all intended, they said, to prepare the ground for a compromise.

“This is a signal to his Brexit ultras that he is playing hardball with the European Union, which will make it easier when he eventually has to make concessions to cut a deal,” Bale said.

The risk for Johnson, analysts said, is that he could miscalculate the reaction from the European Union, which has so far been measured, or that his government no longer has the bandwidth to conclude a trade deal — a scenario that is not implausible given its growing urgency of the virus.

“It is perfectly possible to slide into war,” Bale said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

17

Navalny says he is breathing on his own in a message from his hospital bed

By KATRIN BENNHOLD and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

A

lexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who is recovering in Berlin after being poisoned, posted a photograph Tuesday showing him in the hospital, looking gaunt but very much alive, and telling followers that he was breathing on his own.

“Hello, it’s Navalny,” he said in an Instagram post with a picture of himself sitting up in a hospital bed surrounded by his wife and other relatives. “I can still do almost nothing, but yesterday I could breathe the entire day by myself.”

The message came hours after a senior German security official told The New York Times that Navalny was awake, alert and had told German prosecutors that he was refusing to cooperate with a Russian inquiry into his case. He also vowed, according to the official, to return to Russia as soon as possible to continue his work.

Navalny’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, confirmed Tuesday that Navalny planned to return to Russia.

“It’s strange to me that anyone could think otherwise,” Yarmysh said on Twitter. “No other options are being considered.”

Asked whether Navalny would be permitted to return to Russia, the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that “any Russian citizen” was allowed to leave and enter the country at will.

Navalny’s return to health, as well as to social media, has the potential to reenergize Russia’s opposition after nearly a month of uncertainty since Navalny first fell ill Aug. 20.

Navalny and his allies made mod-

est gains in regional elections in Russia over the weekend, costing the ruling party its majority on the City Council in Novosibirsk, a Siberian industrial hub that is Russia’s third-largest city.

Moscow, which has declined to cooperate with German and European requests to shed light on the poisoning, has instead been pressing Berlin to share its findings and hospital reports about Navalny’s health.

Russia recently made an official request for mutual assistance in the case. The German government, acting according to protocol, instructed the Berlin prosecutor’s office to consult with Navalny. But Navalny declined Monday to authorize the sharing of his files with Russian authorities.

Leonid Volkov, Navalny’s chief of staff, who is in Berlin, said Tuesday that Navalny would not be cooperating with a Russian investigation. He said that Navalny’s team was talking to German officials about the government’s response to Russia and that they welcomed the clarity with which German and other European officials had condemned the poisoning.

“The EU has taken a strong, a harsh position,” Volkov said. “They are using unusual wording in this case, which is a good sign that they might be prepared to go a step further.”

German officials now say they have almost no doubt that the Russian state was behind the poisoning of Navalny.

The German government said Monday that laboratories in France and Sweden had confirmed that the substance used to poison Navalny was a form of the nerve agent Novichok. The results match Berlin’s own findings and

provide additional confidence of state involvement, as Western intelligence agencies have assessed that only the Russian government was likely to have access to such a weapon.

German officials and others have said that any use of the nerve agent would violate the Chemical Weapons Convention, to which Russia is a signatory.

But even as patience with President Vladimir Putin is running thin,

Berlin is struggling to determine how exactly to respond. Some have suggested canceling the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a nearly completed, $11 billion project to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany.

So far, however, the German government, its European allies and the United States have not taken any action other than raising the prospect of imposing additional sanctions on Russia.

Alexei A. Navalny shared a photograph on Instagram on Tuesday showing him in a Berlin hospital, surrounded by family members.

18

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Trump’s perverse campaign strategy

By JAMELLE BOUIE

O

n Sunday, Michael Caputo, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, warned of left-wing insurrectionists and “sedition” within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during a video he hosted live on his Facebook page. After predicting victory for President Donald Trump in the upcoming election, Caputo warned that Joe Biden wouldn’t concede. “And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”

Ordinarily, in a presidential election year, the main story of American politics is the election — its twists and turns, its ups and downs. This year, that story is hard to convey. Part of the reason for this is that the race itself is unremarkable, despite everything else that’s happening around it. Biden is ahead, most voters have made up their minds, and Trump has a narrow path to reelection, with few opportunities to recover lost ground.

The larger, more important factor is that Trump isn’t actually running for reelection — or at least, not running in the traditional manner. He has a campaign,

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A supporter waiting for President Trump to speak at a rally on Sunday in Henderson, Nev. yes, but it is not a campaign to win votes or persuade the public outside of a few, select slivers of the electorate. Instead, it’s a campaign to hold on to power by any means necessary, using every tool available to him as president of the United States. Caputo, in that sense, is only taking cues from his boss.

Of course, Trump would like to obtain a proper victory. But it’s clear he’s not counting on it. That is why the most visible aspect of Trump’s campaign for continued power is his attack on the election itself.

If he doesn’t win, he says again and again, then the outcome isn’t legitimate. He said it last month, during a trip to Wisconsin: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that. It’s the only way we’re going to lose this election, so we have to be very careful.”

He said it again Saturday, to cheering supporters at a nearly mask-less rally in Nevada. “I am going to start by saying that the Democrats are trying to rig this election because it’s the only way they are going to win.”

Along with this warning comes Trump’s call for supporters to act as “poll watchers” to prevent imaginary fraud at voting locations. “Watch it,” he said last week during a rally in North Carolina. “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.” He added that after they vote, his supporters should “make sure it counts” because the “only way” Democrats can win is by “doing very bad things.”

There’s also the president’s rhetoric toward his political opponents. Asked on Fox News about “riots” if he wins reelection, Trump said he would “put them down very quickly,” before adding:

“Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send in, and we do it, very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to we’d do that and put it down within minutes.”

Later in the interview, Trump commented on the Sept. 3 killing of Michael Forest Reinoehl by U.S. marshals. Reinoehl was suspected of shooting a member of far-right group Patriot Prayer during a protest in Portland, Oregon, on Aug. 29. Trump, who swore to uphold the Constitution when he was inaugurated, claimed to have essentially called for an extrajudicial killing: “Now we sent in the U.S. marshals for the killer, the man that killed the young man in the street. Two and a half days went by, and I put out ‘when are you going to go get him.’ And the U.S. marshals went in to get him. There was a shootout. This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. marshalls killed him. And I’ll tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”

Instead of making a conventional appeal to voters to give him another term in office, Trump is issuing a threat, of sorts: I cannot lose. If I do lose, the election was stolen. Anyone protesting my effort to hold onto power is an insurrectionist. And sometimes, “there has to be retribution.”

You can dismiss Trump’s statements as mere ranting and raving, but remember: This is a president who makes policy with his ranting and raving. And his allies, both in and out of government, have gotten the message. Asked in an interview with Alex Jones, the far-right conspiracy theorist, what Trump should do against Democrats who “think they can steal” the election, Roger Stone — a close confidant of the president whose 40-month prison sentence for witness tampering and lying to Congress was commuted by Trump earlier this year — said that “the ballots in Nevada on election night should be seized by federal marshals and taken from the state” because “they are completely corrupted.” He also urged the president to declare “martial law” and invoke the Insurrection Act to arrest political opponents.

It is a little tempting to treat all of this as a distraction from the traditional campaign, from the polls and events and advertisements and general political spectacle. For Trump, however, this is the campaign, and it is laying the groundwork for chaos and violence should the outcome show the slightest ambiguity (and even if it doesn’t). In a half-functioning country, all of the president’s rhetoric on this score would be grounds for removal from office.

But we don’t live in a half-functioning country — we live in the United States of America.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

19

Más de 300 agentes están en cuarentena a causa del COVID-19 Por THE STAR

E

l comisionado del Negociado de la Policía de Puerto Rico (NPPR), Henry Escalera Rivera, ofreció este martes datos actualizados sobre el COVID-19 en los cuarteles y personal de esa agencia.

Al momento, se encuentran cerrados dos cuarteles y/o unidad de trabajo

como medida preventiva. Estos son el cuartel 107 y la Oficina de Regulación de Armas, ambos en Arecibo, se informó en declaraciones escritas.

Se encuentran aislados como medida de prevención 334 agentes y oficiales. Al momento, 114 agentes han reportado resultados positivos al COVID-19, según las pruebas ordenadas y certificadas por la doctora María Del

Carmen Calderón.

Las querellas en los sectores que cubre el cuartel de Arecibo se estarán investigando por el cuartel 207 de Sabana Hoyos.

Por otro lado, los casos citados en la oficina de Regulación de Armas serán referidos a la oficina de Registro de Armas del área de Utuado, honrando el día y hora de su citación.

Radican resolución bipartita para respaldar los resultados del plebiscito Por THE STAR

E

l congresista Darren Soto (FL-09) y la comisionada residente Jenniffer González Colón, presentaron el martes, una resolución bipartita de la Cámara de Representantes que busca respaldar los resultados del plebiscito de Puerto Rico y exhortó al Congreso y al presidente a tomar acción en el 2021 ante los resultados de dicha consulta.

“Cuando llegue noviembre, Puerto Rico tendrá una nueva oportunidad de dar un paso hacia adelante para atender su situación de estatus. En el primer día del Mes de la Herencia Hispana, la introducción de nuestra resolución se trata de respetar la democracia y la voluntad del pueblo de Puerto Rico. Si los puertorriqueños votan por la estadidad, ¡debemos tomar medidas para admitir el estado 51 de nuestra Unión!”, dijo el representante Soto en comunicación escrita.

Sostuvo que el plebiscito, programado para el 3 de noviembre, permitirá al pueblo de Puerto Rico la oportunidad de votar por la estadidad o la independencia.

El plebiscito se llevará a cabo el mismo día de las elecciones generales en la Isla, para asegurar que la participación sea máxima. Estos cambios son críticos ya que corrigen preocupaciones sobre plebiscitos pasados.

“Los 3.2 millones de ciudadanos estadounidenses que residen en Puerto Rico merecen igualdad, incluido el derecho a votar por su presidente y miembros del Congreso, así como un trato igualitario en los programas federales. Ahora, más que nunca, debemos seguir

luchando y ser una voz para todos los puertorriqueños.

Haremos todo lo posible para asegurarnos de que el Congreso otorgue a Puerto Rico la estadidad si los votantes eligen esta opción de estatus en el próximo plebiscito. Agradezco a mi colega, el congresista Darren Soto, por ser un firme partidario del pueblo de Puerto Rico y por presentar esta resolución para alcanzar nuestro máximo potencial: la igualdad con los 50 estados”, dijo González Colón.

Mencionó que Puerto Rico fue azotado por los huracanes Irma y María, y por terremotos recientes, agobiado por una recesión de más de una década, sufrió drásticos recortes por la Junta de Supervisión Fiscal de PROMESA y ahora está en medio de una pandemia por el COVID-19. A la luz de estos desafíos, el Congreso debe respetar la elección de los estadounidenses en Puerto Rico para determinar su forma de gobierno, incluida la elección de ser un estado y tener dos senadores y cuatro representantes que los defiendan en Washington.

Añadió que, si los votantes eligen la estadidad, Puerto Rico sería el primer estado de mayoría hispana admitido en la Unión, seguido por nuevo México con un poco más del 49 por ciento de residentes hispanos.

“Esto expandiría enormemente el poder político hispano en la capital de la nación”, acotó.

La resolución está coauspiciado por los representantes Jenniffer González-Colón (PR-R), Alcee L. Hastings (FL-20), Val Demings (FL-10), Charlie Crist (FL-13), Ted Deutch (FL- 22), José Serrano (NY-15), Brian Fitz-

patrick (PA-01), Don Young (AK-R), Donna E. Shalala (FL-27), Stephanie Murphy (FL-7), Lois Frankel (FL- 21), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-23), Debbie MucarselPowell (FL-26), Al Lawson (FL-05), Frederica Wilson (FL-22), Kathy Castor (FL-14), la delegada Amata Radewagen (AS) .

20

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Over headphones and in a truck, the Philharmonic stays alive

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

A

steep set of stairs off a sidewalk plaza at Central Park West and 106th Street leads up to the Great Hill, an expansive patch of grass surrounded by thick woods and winding paths. I live nearby and go there often, especially during these largely homebound days. In truth, only in Manhattan could such a modest hill pass for “great.” Yet those 77 steps offer a dramatic entrance to a secluded space.

That drama was richly enhanced Friday, when I climbed while listening to “Soundwalk,” an audio experience created by composer Ellen Reid, with recorded music by members of the New York Philharmonic, the Young People’s Chorus of New York City and the jazz group Poole and the Gang. Available through a free app, “Soundwalk” has been tailored to all 840 acres of Central Park. As you walk, various musical “cells,” as Reid calls them, are triggered by your location. So each walk results in a different piece.

On Friday, as soon as I started up the steps, mellow sustained strings blended into a bed of wistful, tremulous chords, which swelled and subsided in volume and intensity. Suddenly a horn flourish burst forth, just animated enough to grab my attention, though not aggressive. A mournful trumpet and elusive flute joined in, suggesting the bucolic, wistful side of Copland, though with flintier harmonies.

Some elements of Reid’s music ended up feeling intriguingly counterintuitive. As I came to a patch of flowers in some woods, I was surprised to hear a scratchy violin and bursts of nervous repeated notes for woodwinds and percussion. At Lasker Pool, which was covered with algae and bustling with birds, a slow three-note horn motif began, a moment evocative of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold.”

And so it continued as I walked through the North Woods area I know well.

Coming to a cliff overlooking the Harlem Meer, passages of shimmering sonorities were flecked with delicate harp runs and fidgety woodwinds. Rounding the north tip of the road, the music reached a moment of climactic yet playful exuberance — a mix of surging Romantic crescendos and eerily angelic choral drones — until a jazz combo crept in.

Cellist Patrick Jee of the New York Philharmonic plays at Tucker Park — the orchestra’s Bandwagon pick-up behind him — in New York, Sept. 11, 2020. With indoor performances still far-off, the New York Philhamonic has organized a “Soundwalk” in Central Park and outdoor pop-up concerts.

Reid, whose opera “Prism” won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2019, describes herself as a composer and sound artist; “Soundwalk” is clearly more about atmosphere than about structure. Yet it has coherence, character and recurring motifs.

That impression was reinforced later in the day, when I entered Strawberry Fields, off 72nd Street, and heard that three-note “Rheingold”-esque passage again, wafting over familiar-sounding string chords. When I started to move on, some jumpy brass riffs and pleading choral cries of “ah” grew intense, as if the music was affronted that I was daring to leave.

At the Bethesda Fountain, there was

another counterintuitive episode, with weighty Bruckner-like sonorities and winding melodic strands. Naturally, the balmy weather brought competition from people making music outside my headphones, including a duo of drums and electric guitar and a man with beefy voice singing (you guessed it) “New York, New York.”

John Cage would say such mingling between the inside and outside of the app was an integral part of “Soundwalk.” I bet Reid would agree. After all, she folded several surprise Easter eggs into the work: As I neared the Beethoven statue on the Mall, a recording of his “Pastoral” Symphony began.

With the pandemic more or less preventing live indoor performances, this is a moment suited to outdoor sound walks.

Another in New York, “Cairns,” written and narrated by Gelsey Bell, with music by Bell and Joseph White, takes listeners on a peaceable journey through Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

But, undeterred, the Philharmonic has also created the Bandwagon, a pickup truck traveling through the city for short outdoor concerts every weekend through Oct. 18. Early Friday evening, after finishing “Soundwalk,” I took in the program at Richard Tucker Square on Broadway, near Lincoln Center. Violinists Qianqian Li and Na Sun, violist Katherine Greene and cellist Patrick Jee joined countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who conceived the series and performed with the string quartet while standing in the bed of the truck.

Each week the Philharmonic announces the names of the players and the programs for the weekend, but not the times and locations, to avoid attracting crowds that would make social distancing difficult.

But as the musicians and crew parked the truck and began unloading music stands and sound equipment in Tucker Square, the activity drew a curious, very surprised and ultimately delighted crowd of 50 or so.

Costanzo, who triumphed in the title role of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten” at the Metropolitan Opera last fall, which now feels long ago, was in fine voice and made an affable host. Of the six works, three were by composers of color, including one young American. First came a spirited movement from 18th-century composer Joseph Boulogne’s String Quartet No. 1. In Daniel Bernard Roumain’s “Klap Ur Handz,” a stirring section of his Quartet No. 5 (“Rosa Parks”), the musicians alternately played and clapped, with the audience joining in.

Costanzo gave an earnest account of “Somewhere” from “West Side Story.” He told the audience that, given it was the anniversary of Sept. 11, Dido’s anguished lament from Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” seemed fitting. He sang it exquisitely. Ending with the Gershwins’ “I Got Rhythm” proved poignant at a time when we are all enduring deprivations. “I got rhythm, I got music, I got my man,” Costanzo sang. “Who could ask for anything more?”

That’s actually a lot to have.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

21

Listeners found Beverly Glenn-Copeland. It was time.

By GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN

W

hen Beverly Glenn-Copeland was 64, he entrusted Elizabeth Paddon, whom he would soon marry, with a sobering prediction: His records would finally be noticed after he died.

For Glenn-Copeland, making music had been both a lifelong pursuit and a lifeline, the unifying thread through six tumultuous decades as a Black transgender man. He grew up in Philadelphia watching his father play classical piano and learning spirituals his mother remembered from her Georgia childhood. As a college student in Montreal, Glenn-Copeland studied lieder and the oboe, then opera in New York.

At the start of the 1970s, he made two albums of yearning folk-rock, his formal training manifest in an ascendant vibrato and audacious arrangements. Despite a manager who worked with Dylan and signed the Doors, a substantive career never materialized. As the ’80s began, music became a private pursuit for Glenn-Copeland, who issued tranquil electronic hymns on tiny batches of self-made cassettes, if at all.

“When I was younger, I was looking at the goal — you get signed, you get heard,” Glenn-Copeland, 76, said recently by phone from New Brunswick, Canada. “I didn’t want fame, but I wanted to share my music with the world.”

“By the time I was in my later 30s, I was no longer looking at that goal,” he continued. “I just knew this is what I was supposed to do, all I knew how to do.”

But only a few years after Glenn-Copeland announced his fatalistic resignation, the world seemed ready to listen. His folk-rock LPs emerged as collectors’ items, auctioning for thousands of dollars. A record enthusiast from Japan asked if he had leftover copies of “Keyboard Fantasies,” the luminous New Age tape he’d made with an Atari computer and a drum machine and released in 1986 in an edition of about 500.

The requests intensified. Taste-making producers like Four Tet and Caribou name-checked the singer, while a half-dozen labels vied for the rights to his work. Still very much alive and writing new music, Glenn-Copeland returned to the stage for the first time in more than a decade, playing prestigious festivals in the Netherlands and lavish halls in London, a resurrection that even prompted a 2019 documentary.

“He accomplishes the ultimate creative tightrope walk — there is so much shape-shifting, but everything sounds like the same person,” said Jenn Wasner, the founder of the bands Wye Oak and Flock of Dimes. She compared Glenn-Copeland to Arthur Russell, whose own polymathic music gained popularity only after his 1992 death. “A thread of very specific emotional resonance unites everything he’s done.”

This month, Glenn-Copeland will release “Transmissions,” a life-spanning mixtape that moves from the mournful torch songs of his youth to joyously soulful odes to survival.

There are dances and dirges, reimagined gospel standards and radiant organ jams. But mostly, there are songs for pressing on, anthems for keeping the faith in yourself. During “River Dreams,” the album’s centerpiece and Glenn-Copeland’s first new song in 16 years, he chants wordlessly and reassuringly over gossamer synthesizers and an upright bass’ ostinato strut.

Glenn-Copeland grew up in Greenbelt Knoll, Philadelphia’s pioneering integrated community. But he felt burdened as a Black child there, a representative of “an entire race

whenever I went out the door,” he remembered. At the age of 3, he began to realize he identified as a boy — standing in front of mirrors alongside preening friends, he flexed muscles that barely existed.

Still, for 50 years, Glenn-Copeland (who augmented his surname after college to honor a favorite composer, Aaron Copland, and has gone by “Glenn” with friends for nearly two decades) lived as a woman in dogged pursuit of something else. At 8, he began going to neighborhood churches alone; around 10, his mother began taking him to Quaker meetings. As his fledgling career cratered in the mid-70s, he found Buddhism after experiments with a dozen Eastern philosophies. He bounced between Canadian provinces, navigated the Eastern Seaboard

by RV and delivered pizzas while living with his mother in Phoenix.

In 1995, while reading the mid-70s memoir of a transgender activist on a Cape Cod, Massachusetts, beach, GlennCopeland felt as if he were watching a supercut of his life. He now had the language for his feelings, and he soon began his transition. “I have always been such a roamer,” he said. “But this wasn’t difficult at all. It was so freeing.”

The journey had come with immense costs. His relationship with his mother had been tenuous for decades, though she emerged as his champion before dying in his arms in 2006. As a student at McGill University, Glenn-Copeland’s romance with a woman appalled university officials, who ostracized him until he fled campus.

Glenn-Copeland has been married four times, first after college to a man who remains a friend. (“That lasted 15-anda-half minutes,” he said, chuckling. “What were we thinking?”)

During the next three decades, he wed two women, each relationship another anguishing experience of trying to fix someone

else before reckoning with himself.

“A lot of us fall in love with love because we don’t want to be alone. Part of myself was not whole,” he said. “After my last relationship, I finally accepted that I was OK with being alone for the rest of my life.”

In 2007, though, Paddon walked into the wedding of mutual friends. For decades, their social circles had overlapped, and she became his sporadic confidant during the ’90s, just before he began his transition. At one point, Paddon said, she had prayed for a new partner and saw him that very night in a dream.

“When I saw her that day, I tilted out like a sail, as if seeing her for the first time,” Glenn-Copeland said, struggling to catch his breath from laughter. “Of all the things I had needed to learn about myself, I had learned enough to be in a relationship where I could learn the rest — and be happy.”

In the decade since their marriage, Glenn-Copeland has become more vulnerable, relaxing once-ironclad emotional barriers. He’s also become an intense collaborator to Elizabeth, a poet, singer and actor. They have launched a theater school, set one another’s words to sound and created an ambitious musical history of Canada’s Maritime Provinces for the stage.

This summer alongside the sea, a new song arrived to Glenn-Copeland via what he calls the “Universal Broadcasting System,” a kind of mystic link between his subconscious and the energy around him. Captured during “the sunset glow” of his later years, the four verses chronicle his failures and successes, blessings and burdens.

Each verse ends with a simple declaration about singing, a reminder that it’s the force that has always sustained him. “The melody is very simple, but it’s arresting — to me, at least. The only other person who has heard it is my wife,” he said. “She thinks it’s quite beautiful.”

Beverly Glenn-Copeland, at his home in Grande-Digue, Canada, Sept. 8, 2020. The 76-year-old Black transgender man, whose previously unheralded work became sought-out later in his life, is relea

FASHION The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, March 4, 2020 Wednesday, September 16, 2020 20 22

The TheSan SanJuan JuanDaily DailyStar Star

On the eve of New York Fashion Week, what’s next?

An undated photo provided to The New York Times shows, clockwise from top left: Vanessa Friedman talking about the future of fashion in the wake of the coronavirus, with Gwyneth Paltrow, Tory Burch, Antoine Arnault, and Virgil Abloh.

By VANESSA FRIEDMAN

L

ast season, the rising tide of COVID-19 lapped at fashion’s heels as the style set moved from city to city, show to show. In New York, Chinese designers, stuck at home, missed their collection bow; as Milan began, one Italian had died of the virus. By the end of that week, Armani had decided to hold a show with no audience. In Paris, parties were canceled, masks handed out and ushers stood tall with big vats of hand sanitizer. Then, just after everyone scattered for home, the pandemic began.

This season everything has changed. Most of the shows will be digital. Some big names are sitting the whole thing out. Others are doing their own thing, on their own schedule. There’s angst in the air. But fashion is not over. It is simply in flux, grappling with big questions about old systems that for years seemed irreplaceable.

To explore what that could mean, The Times gathered four people in the thick of it all: Tory Burch, of the namesake brand; Virgil Abloh, of Off-White and Louis Vuitton menswear; Gwyneth Paltrow, of Goop; and Antoine Arnault, of LVMH (the largest luxury group in the world).

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Q: I’ve got to ask: Given all the absentees this season, what is the point of a show any more?

Virgil: Recently we did a menswear show in Shanghai that borrowed from film and theatrical experience to give a positive message. Instead of a traditional runway show that can be very serious, with models with serious gazes on their face, walking down the runway being hangers for clothing, what I did was make it almost like a Thanksgiving Day parade. The models were street-cast, just walking down the streets as if they were conversing with friends, bestowing a

feeling that we’re not generally awarded in this time. Underneath the practicality of clothes, my studio has an ambition that the world can be a better place.

Tory: Strangely, before the pandemic, I decided not to show this season. We were opening a store on Mercer Street, and I thought it would be really interesting to go back to where we were when we first launched this company with a store event that lasted the day, and we had everyone stop by.

I’m thinking a lot about where I’ve been, and also about the product — simplicity, quality and then showing in a more personal way.

Antoine: For smaller brands, it makes sense to skip a season or two. It’s definitely expensive. And when you realize the price it costs, then once you don’t do it, you’re actually quite relieved. For brands that have the means to produce shows, it’s fantastic to have this creative world live. And it is not only a personal decision. There’s a whole economy around these shows. That should not be underestimated.

Gwyneth: When we started doing G Label on Goop, I did feel the fashion system was a bit hard to access — possibly a little antiquated in terms of the schedule. And I really responded to the streetwear cadence of drops, the buy now, wear now, building up some excitement and pent-up demand around a collection. During the pandemic, we’ve gotten super-scrappy. We’ve slashed every marketing budget, and we have been able to make an impact. When a business is under a bit of pressure, you’re having to get closest to that creative spirit. It’s the upside of social media, which doesn’t always have much of an upside.

Q: Do you think this marks a tipping point in fashion?

Antoine: A lot is going to be decided after the next couple of rounds of shows. Showing is definitely not essential. However, you sometimes need to show what

you’re actually creating.

Tory: I think that every company is different. A lot of the schedule was driven by wholesale, and we’re 85% direct to consumer.

Virgil: We’re looking at a watershed moment for the next generation to really take their seat. We know the names of Karl Lagerfeld, Margiela, Yves Saint Laurent — how they revolutionized the industry by switching from couture to ready-to-wear. In my generation, we brought streetwear into the fold, and now we see its effect on the luxury market. I think this is a moment where we can redefine what fashion means.

Gwyneth: There will probably be a separation between the brands that are really well-funded and use those shows as an amazing marketing moment and theater, and smaller brands like mine, which will continue to focus on creating a connection with product through a cultural moment. And I think it’s good. It forces all brands, big and small, to get more creative about how to reach the customer.

Q: Do trends still exist?

Virgil: With social media, I would say that trends are very much alive.

Gwyneth: I have a 16-year-old girl in my house. So yes, trends are very much alive. Though I tend to buy more classic trend-free pieces because I’ve had a few dodgy moments, I think, in my past.

Tory: Haven’t we all! I also love the idea of things that are forever. And I think people are looking at that as well — things they can invest in. I go back to people wanting special things. I really stand by that.

Q: So what does that mean for the glut-of-stuff problem?

Tory: One of the things people don’t talk about enough is overproducing. We are really careful with that — and getting better. When I think about sustainability, I think it’s a given that we all need to make this a top priority. It’s a bit herculean, what we have to do as an industry. But we have to do it. The customer is totally focused on what a brand stands for — particularly younger customers. They deeply care about what brands are doing to make the world a better place.

Virgil: In the last LV collection I debuted the idea of collapsing all my seasons into one. I think it’s important to remove the idea that just because it’s last season, it’s devalued.

Tory: Women are thinking differently about the way they shop. I don’t think they’re thinking, “I want to wear something and not wear it again.” I don’t think it’s modern.

So from a season standpoint, we also are looking at it differently. It’s more about deliveries and wearing things when you want to wear them. Ten years ago, people would change their spring closet to their fall closet. That’s obsolete.

Antoine: But there’s also a market reality that we have to understand. I’m not sure if we decide to have only one season for all our brands. That would really change the business.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

23

How flu shots can help in the fight against COVID

By JANE E. BRODY

W

hile we anxiously await the development and approval of a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19, there’s another health-sparing and lifesaving vaccine already available to nearly everyone over the age of 6 months.

Yes, that’s the flu vaccine, offered as an annual event that not nearly enough people partake in. The excuses are numerous, ranging from “I never get the flu” to “I had the vaccine once and still got the flu.”

The latter excuse is especially telling, reflecting a widespread misunderstanding of the nature and effectiveness of influenza vaccines that could carry over to any of the novel coronavirus vaccines that may reach the U.S. market.

In general, flu vaccines are on average 50% effective in preventing infection by the main strains of influenza virus expected to be circulating in the country in the coming flu season, usually November or December to April or May. Flu vaccines are administered annually for two main reasons: 1) flu viruses mutate readily and the mix of viral strains varies from year to year, and 2) even if the viruses don’t change significantly, immunity against them gradually wanes and may be all but gone by the next flu season.

Be prepared, folks. A COVID-19 vaccine may be no different. “If a vaccine was developed that is 50% effective in preventing COVID, it would still be licensed,” Michael Osterholm, infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Of course, we’d like a higher degree of effectiveness, but as with the flu vaccine, 50% protection is better than zero. A COVID vaccine probably won’t be nearly as effective as the childhood vaccines we’re familiar with,” Osterholm said.

Thus, even after being immunized against COVID-19, we may still have to practice social distancing, wear masks in public, wash our hands often and limit indoor gatherings until and unless this too-often lethal virus “disappears,” as President Donald Trump once predicted it would. On the plus side, these protective measures against COVID should also help to limit the spread of influenza.

Indoors or out, masks can reduce the airborne transmission of both viral diseases, which spread when an infected person coughs, sneezes, talks or sings.

Since we already know that the antibodies people develop following a coronavirus infection seem to wane with time, there’s a good chance that any COVID vaccine will need to be administered repeatedly, perhaps annually, to provide adequate protection. Unlike the flu, COVID-19 has shown no evidence of having a season. Whether the weather is hot, cold, dry or wet, this coronavirus is highly infectious. But like the flu, it spreads readily from person to person and can be transmitted even before those infected know they are contagious. It can also be transmitted by those who are infected and don’t become noticeably ill.

Experts are currently most worried about a likely

confluence this winter of a flu epidemic and a still-raging COVID-19 pandemic, which could easily overwhelm the medical care system and create anew a shortage of hospital beds and personal protective equipment. Pneumonia is a not-uncommon complication of the flu that could add to the burden of hospitalizations needed for people with a life-threatening coronavirus infection.

The experts are also concerned about people who develop the flu and, thinking it could be COVID, seek medical care and a test that could inadvertently expose them to this dreaded virus as well as cause a shortage of tests. Both ailments can produce similar symptoms: fever, cough, shortness of breath and fatigue that can be extreme.

Another worrisome possibility is that people who get the flu might be even more susceptible to contracting the coronavirus and to developing severe disease.

Even discounting an increased risk of COVID-19, the complications of flu can be serious. They include bacterial pneumonia, ear infections, sinus infections and a worsening of chronic medical conditions like asthma, diabetes and congestive heart failure. Others at increased risk of serious flu-related complications include people 65 and older, pregnant women and children younger than 5.

So who should be getting a flu shot? Not children younger than 6 months or people with certain medical conditions that may include those with a history of Guillain-Barré syndrome or a prior severe allergic reaction to flu vaccine. However, according to the Centers for Disease

Control and Prevention, most people with an egg allergy can safely get a flu shot. The vaccine contains inactivated virus so it is safe for those who should not be immunized with a live virus vaccine. But it’s best not to get a flu shot when you are not feeling well.

Some forms of flu vaccine are approved only for use in adults. For example, the recombinant influenza vaccine Flublok Quadrivalent, which does not use viruses grown in eggs, is suitable for those 18 years and older.

For people 65 and older, a three-component inactivated vaccine called Fluzone High-Dose is available and covered by Medicare. It is especially recommended for people living in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. It contains four times the level of antigen needed to provoke an immune response than is found in standarddose flu vaccines. According to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the high-dose vaccine was 24.2% more effective in preventing flu in older adults than the standard-dose vaccine. Another study, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, found that the use of the high-dose vaccine reduced the risk of respiratory-related hospitalization among nursing home residents.

In general, October is the ideal time to get a flu shot to help provide protection that lasts throughout the coming season, since the effects may wane with time.

Given the pandemic, September might work better this year, but as my doctor told me, the best time to get it is when you can.

24

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Roanoke’s ‘lost colony’ was never lost, new book says

Researchers at a dig site on Hatteras Island. Experts said it was difficult to know for sure how colonists’ artifacts got there.

By ALAN YUHAS

I

n 1590, John White, the would-be governor of a colony meant to be one of England’s first outposts in North America, discovered that more than 100 settlers weren’t on the small island where he left them.

More than 400 years later, the question of what happened to those settlers, who landed on Roanoke Island, off the coast of modern North Carolina, has grown into a piece of American mythology, inspiring plays, novels, documentaries and a tourism industry in the Outer Banks.

Stories have taken root that the colonists, who left no clear trace aside from the word “Croatoan” carved on a tree, survived somewhere on the mainland, died in conflict with Native Americans or met some other end.

A new book about the Roanoke colonists, “The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island,” published in June and citing 10 years of excavations at nearby Hatteras Island, aims to put the mystery to bed. The book’s author, Scott Dawson, a researcher from Hatteras, argues

that the Native people who lived there took in the English settlers and that historical records and artifacts can end the debate.

“Basically, the historical evidence says that’s where they went,” said Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol, in England, who worked with Dawson. Horton acknowledged that there was no “smoking gun” but said that with everything in context, “it’s not rocket science.”

Historians and archaeologists not involved in the recent research on Hatteras were more skeptical, saying that the evidence was inconclusive and that they wanted to see peer-reviewed work.

They also said the argument was not new. The idea that the Croatoans, as the Native people on Hatteras were called, adopted at least some of the settlers has long been considered plausible.

“Sure, it’s possible — why wouldn’t it be?” said Malinda Maynor Lowery, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “People don’t get lost. They get murdered; they get stolen; they get taken in. They live and die as members

of other communities.”

Maynor Lowery presented a similar possibility in her 2018 book on the history of the Lumbee people, the descendants of dozens of tribes in a wide region including eastern North Carolina. Despite violence by the English against Croatoan villagers, she wrote, the settlers probably took refuge with them.

“The Indians of Roanoke, Croatoan, Secotan and other villages had no reason to make enemies of the colonists,” she wrote. “Instead, they probably made them kin.”

The English landed into a complicated fray of conflict and shifting alliances, said Lauren McMillan, a professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

“They’re all interfighting, and these different groups are trying to use the English against one another,” she said. “The Croatoans perhaps saw the English as a powerful ally and sources of valuable new things.”

Maynor Lowery, who is Lumbee, added that the “lost colony” story is itself based on the incorrect premise “that Native people also disappeared, which we didn’t.”

The story, she said, was like “a monument that has to come down,” adding that “it’s harder to dismantle an origin story than a statue.”

Dawson, a founder of the Croatoan Archaeological Society, a local research group, said he hoped his book would dismantle some of that story.

“I was trying to get the Croatoans’ history back from the depths of mythology,” he said. “They played a huge role in American history, took these people in, and in school you’re taught that no one knows what Croatoan means.”

He also wanted to counter the mystique around the settlers, which has ballooned over the centuries in popular culture. They were made the heroes of 19th-century romances; Confederate sympathizers tied them in with themes of the “lost cause”; and a nationalistic, outdoor musical has drawn more than 4 million people, including Franklin D.

Roosevelt, since 1937.

Before those works, the colonists had been historical footnotes, said Charles Ewen, an archaeologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. It is not clear how much their contemporaries even wondered what happened to them, he said, given how common failure, death and disappearances were in European ventures across the Atlantic.

“It’s no big mystery until you start to get a historical type of writing in the 1800s,” he said.

Ewen, who is also working on a book about the colony, said there were so many stories about it in part because there was so little evidence about what happened to the colonists. The settlers could have been killed by Native people or by England’s rival, Spain, or faced famine, a hurricane or shipwreck.

They could have moved into the mainland, allying with Native groups there, or moved in with the Croatoan people on Hatteras.

“I’m not saying it’s not true,” Ewen said of the last theory. “I’m just saying I’m very skeptical.”

James Horn, a historian and member of the First Colony Foundation, a research nonprofit, said that most historians over the past 50 years had considered Hatteras a destination for the settlers. But he said it was unlikely that all of the colonists ended up there.

Horn and an archaeologist with the First Colony Foundation, Nicholas M. Luccketti, believe they have evidence that some of the settlers moved about 50 miles inland to a place they call Site X. Luccketti said the colonists could have split up, with some on Hatteras, others at Site X and another group somewhere else.

Although there have been no excavations at Site X since 2018, Horn said he expected the search for evidence to continue.

“It’s a 400-year-old mystery that revolves around all sorts of mysteries within it,” he said. “It’s too tempting for many people.”

The San Juan Daily Star CIVIL NÚM. SJ2020CV04542 (503). SOBRE: CANCELAESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO CIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- DO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE SALA DE BAYAMON. DE LOS EE.UU., EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. COOPERATIVA DE SS. EDICTO. AHORRO Y CREDITO

LEGAL NOTICE

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDIC- CIA SALA DE CAGUAS. TO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE ORIENTAL BANK DE LOS EE.UU. DE AMERICA Demandante V. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIAADMINISTRACIÓN DO DE PUERTO RICO SS.

DE ASUNTOS DE A: ROSA LIZ SÁNCHEZ VETERANOS; JOHN DOE MALDONADO, SU & RICHARD ROE A: HOUSING LOS HERMANOS ESPOSO FULANO DE TAL Demandados INVESTMENT Demandante Vs. Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL CIVIL NÚM. CG2020CV01553.

CORPORATION ANGEL MANUEL DE GANANCIALES SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE MIRANDA TORRES, ET AL 552 Miramar Ave. Miramar, PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. EMCOMPUESTA POR Demandados Santurce, PR 00907.

PLAZAMIENTO POR EDICAMBOS CASO NÚM: TB2019CV00704.

SALÓN NÚM. SOBRE: EJEC. DE HIPOTECA Y COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: LUIS MIRANDA ORELLANO, VANESSA MIRANDA ORELLANO; Herederos Desconocidos A,B,C o sea laparte demandada de epígrafe arriba mencionada.

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.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. EXTIENDO BAJO MI FIRMA y el Sello del Tribunal, hoy 31 de agosto de 2020.

LCDA. LAURA I. . SANTA SÁNCHEZ, Secretaria Regional.

Sandra I Cruz Vazquez, Sec Servicios a Sala.

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

JUAN RAMÓN VILA LÓPEZ Demandante V.

HOUSING INVESTMENT CORPORATION; JOHN DOE & RICHARD ROE Demandados

@

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.ramaiudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Representa a la parte demandante el Lcdo.

Javier Montalvo Cintrón, Delgado & Fernández, LLC, PO Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station, San Juan, Puerto Rico00910-1750. Tel. [787] 274-1414. DADA en San Juan, Puerto Rico, a 4 de septiembre de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, SECRETARIA REGIONAL Marlyn Ann Espinosa Rivera, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal.

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

AMERICAS LEADING FINANCE LLC Demandante, V.

ROSA LIZ SÁNCHEZ MALDONADO, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Quedan emplazados y notificados que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cobro de dinero y ejecución de gravamen mobiliario (reposesión de vehículo) por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que los demandados, ROSA LIZ SÁNCHEZ MALDONADO, SU ESPOSO FULANO DE TAL Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS, le adeudan solidariamente al Americas Leading Finance, LLC, la suma de principal de $10,647.96, más los intereses que continúen acumulando, las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado según pactados. Además, solicitamos de este Honorable Tribunal que autorice la reposesión y/o embargo del Vehículo. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que, si no comparecen a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarles ni oírles. El abogado de la parte demandante es el Lcdo.

Gerardo M. Ortiz Torres, cuya dirección fisica 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 y su correo electrónico es: gerardobellverlaw.com.

Expedido bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, en San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy día 4 de septiembre de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria. Marilyn Ann Espinosa Rivera, Sec Servicios a Sala.

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: SJ2020CV01929 (503). SOBRE: COBRO DE LEGAL NOTICE DINERO POR LA VA ORDIESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO NARIA Y EJECUCIÓN DE DE PUERTO RICO TRIBuNAL GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REGENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIPOSESIÓN DE VEHÍCULO).

BUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTAN-

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

TO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, personas desconocidas que se designan con estos nombres ficticios, que puedan ser tenedor o tenedores, o puedan tener algún interés en el pagaré hipotecario a que se hace referencia más adelante en 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 el 8 de diciembre de 1980, se otorgó un pagaré a favor de Administración de Asuntos de Veteranos, o a su orden, por la suma de $25,900.00 de principal, con intereses al 12% anual, con vencedero el 1 de diciembre de 2010, ante el Notario Eva Irizarry De Toledo. En garantía del pagaré antes descrito se otorgó la escritura de hipoteca número 59, en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 8 de diciembre de 1980, ante el Notario Eva Irizarry De Toledo, inscrito al folio 26 del tomo 1065 de Caguas, finca 13003, inscripción 9, Registro de la Propiedad de Caguas, Sección I. El inmueble gravado mediante la hipoteca antes descrita es la finca número 13003 inscrita al folio 26 del tomo 1065 de Caguas, Registro de la propiedad de Caguas, Sección I. La obligación evidenciada por el pagaré antes descrito fue saldada en su totalidad. Dicho gravamen no ha podido ser cancelado por haberse extraviado el original del pagaré. El original del pagaré antes descrito no ha podido ser localizado, a pesar de las gestiones realizadas.

Administración de Asuntos de Veteranos es el acreedor que consta en el Registro de la Propiedad. El último tenedor conocido del pagaré antes descrito fue Oriental Bank. 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, excluyendo el dia del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá pre-

(787) 743-3346

25 sentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría de! tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

LCDO. JAVIER MONTALVO C1NTRÓN RUA NÚM. 17682 DELGADO & FERNÁNDEZ, LLC PO Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 009 10-1750, Tel. (787) 274-1414 ¡Fax (787) 764-8241 E-mail: jmontalvo@ delgadofernandez.com Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 21 de agosto de 2020. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, Secretaria.

Eneida Arroyo Velez, SubSecretaria.

de $163,225.00, el interés pactado del 3.5% anual. Cobro de dinero y ejecución de hipoteca en virtud de la escritura numero nueve (9) de Segregación, Liberación, Venta e Hipoteca otorgada el 22 de mayo de 2017 ante le Notaria Caren Awilda Ruiz Pérez, por la suma principal de $235,319.00 más el interés pactado del 4.5% anual. Por la presente se le emplaza y requiere para que notifique a la Lcdo. Orlando Joshua Nazario Morales, 203 calle Geranio Parcelas Maginas Sabana Grande, Puerto Rico, teléfono (787) 234-8143, email: lcdo.ojnazario@gmail. com, abogado de la parte demandante, con copia de vuestra contestación a la Demanda radicada en este caso contra ustedes, dentro de un término de treinta (30) días contados a partir de la publicación de este Edicto. Usted debe presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del LEGAL NOTICE tribunal.

Por la presente se ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO le apercibe que de no compaDE PUERTO RICO TRIBUrecer a formular alegaciones NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA dentro de treinta (30) días conSALA DE MAYAGÜEZ. tados a partir de la fecha de la Pablo Vázquez Solivan, publicación de este Edicto, se Noemí Torres Rodríguez le anotará la rebeldía y se dicy la Sociedad Legal de tará sentencia de acuerdo con Gananciales Compuesta lo solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Expepor ellos dido bajo mi firma y sello del Demandantes VS. Tribunal, hoy 4 de septiembre Luis Miguel Belén Zapata, de 2020. LCDA. NORMA G SANTANA IRIZARRY, Sec ReCarmen M. Belén y gional. F/Raiselle Jorge Martila Sociedad Legal de nez, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

Gananciales Compuesta por ellos

Demandados CIVIL NÚM.: MZ2020CV00596.

SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero Ordinario y Ejecución de Hipoteca.

EDICTO. EN LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: luis miguel belén zapata, carmen m. belén y la sociedad legal de gananciales compuesta por ellos.

Por la presente se les notifica que se ha radicado una Demanda donde se solicita el cobro de dinero y ejecución de hipoteca en virtud de la escritura de Compraventa e Hipoteca número treinta y seis (36) otorgada el 30 de julio del año 2016 ante el Notario José Ayala Pratts, por la suma principal

LEGAL NOTICE Condado de Wake de Carolina del Norte. En la Sala del Tribunal Superior del Tribunal General de Justicia Archivos No. 20 SP 421 y 20 SP 422 AVISO DE SERVICIO DE PROCESO POR PUBLICACIÓN

A: MANUEL RAMON ROMERO-BRITO,

Demandado.

Tenga en cuenta que se ha presentado un alegato en busca de reparación en su contra en la acción antes mencionada. La naturaleza del amparo que se solicita es para la legitimación de dos menores: Elmer Valentin Reyes, nacido el 28 de diciembre de 2016, y Ruby Valentin Reyes, nacida el 26 de marzo de 2015. Debe presentar la defensa de dicho alegato a más tardar el 26 de octubre, 2020, siendo dicha fecha al menos cuarenta (40) días a partir de

la primera publicación de este Aviso, y en caso de que usted no lo haga, el peticionario solicitará al tribunal la reparación solicitada.

Este, el día 16 de septiembre de 2020.

Yvonne Armendáriz, Esq. Oficina Legal Armendáriz, PLLC 1140 Kildaire Farm Road Suite 206-4 Cary, NC 27511 Teléfono: (919) 656-1524 Email: yvonne@armendarizlaw.com

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

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

NICOLMARIE FONSECA SOTO

Demandado(a) Civil Núm. BY2019CV04063.

Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA (VÍA ORDINARIA). NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: NICOLMARIE FONSECA SOTO

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 16 de marzo de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 11 de septiembre de 2020. En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico, el 11 de septiembre de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria. F/ MILITZA MERCADO RIVERA, Sec Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE CAGUAS.

ANDRÉS CASIANO COLLAZO Demandante V.

ANA MARIA COLLAZO LÓPEZ, DAMARIS CRUZ COLLAZO, LYDIA LÓPEZ, INDIVIDUOS X, Y, Z

Demandadas Caso Civil Núm:.

CD2020CV00165. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO INCUMPLIMIENTO DE CONTRATO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: ANA MARIA COLLAZO LOPEZ, DAMARIS CRUZ COLLAZO e INDIVIDUOS X, Y Z

Queda emplazado y notificado de que en este Tribunal ANDRES CASIANO COLLAZO ha radicado una demanda en su contra sobre : COBRO DE DINERO, INCUMPLIMIENTO DE CONTRATOS. Se le notifica que comparezca ante el Tribunal dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto y exponer lo que a sus derechos convenga, en el presente caso. Se le notifica que deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), a la cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https: //unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal Superior de Puerto Rico, en Caguas y enviando copia a la parte demandante: Lcda. Mariely Rivera Rivera Urb. El Verde Calle Venus Lote 1- B, Caguas, Puerto Rico 00725. Tel: (787) 936-2214, marieIyriveralaw@ gmail.com, abogada de la parte demandante. Se le apercibe y notifica que, si no contesta la demanda radicada en su contra dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, se le anotará rebeldía en su contra y se dictara sentencia en su contra, conforme se solicita en la Demanda, sin más citarle, ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy dia 11 de septiembre de 2020. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, Secretaria, Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Caguas. Yamaira M. Rios Carrasco, Sec Auxiliar.

26

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Steven Cohen agrees to buy the Mets, again

By DAVID WALDSTEIN

F

rustrated New York Mets fans have for years pined for a new owner to swoop in and buy their team, someone to save it from what they felt was decades of mismanagement and mediocrity.

Those fans can finally rejoice. Steven Cohen is buying the team, and this time it appears to be for real.

Cohen, a billionaire hedge fund mogul from Long Island, has agreed to purchase the Mets from Saul Katz and Fred Wilpon, the team announced Monday. The deal gives Cohen a 95 percent stake in the team, with a total valuation of about $2.4 billion, according to two people with direct knowledge of the deal who requested anonymity because the figure had not been made public. Katz and Wilpon will retain 5 percent of the team.

Cohen will become only the fourth controlling owner of the cherished baseball club that was formed in 1962 to help ease the loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, both of which relocated after the 1957 season.

“I am excited to have reached an agreement with the Wilpon and Katz families to purchase the New York Mets,” Cohen said, according to the Mets’ statement.

This is Cohen’s second effort to buy the team in less than a year. He reached an agreement with the current owners late last year, but it fell apart in January over who would control the team during a five-year interim period after the sale.

Then came the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic fallout, which cast a cloud over the immediate future of Major League Baseball’s finances without fans in stadiums. As a result, the Mets’ asking price fell, and the idea of a temporary power-sharing agreement was dropped, too.

According to one of the people with knowledge of the deal, the sale does not include SNY, the profitable regional sports network. SNY was started, and is still primarily owned, by Sterling Equities, the real estate and finance company started by Wilpon and Katz, who is Wilpon’s brother-in-law.

Once Cohen takes full control, the transfer of power could be followed by significant changes in the baseball department. The team’s general manager, Brodie Van Wagenen, was hired before the 2019 season, and manager Luis Rojas has been in his role since January.

Cohen, whose wife and father-in-law are devoted supporters of the team, currently holds an 8 percent stake in the Mets.

But the current ownership group will most likely stay in control at least through the end of this season. The sale still requires the approval of 23 of the other 29 owners in Major League Baseball, some of whom may be alarmed by Cohen’s vast resources and his ability to single-handedly outspend them and raise player salaries in general. A vote could come at the

next owners meeting in November, which would give Wilpon and Katz one more chance to win a World Series this year — though the Mets are not currently in position for a playoff spot.

Cohen’s history in the business world may also invite scrutiny. His previous fund, SAC Capital Partners, was subject to a series of insider trading investigations beginning after 2009. Cohen was never charged with wrongdoing, but his firm ultimately paid nearly $2 billion in fines, and he agreed not to manage outside money for two years. His new fund, Point72 Asset Management, has been accused of hostility to women.

But the increased valuation of the Mets through the sale would also most likely increase the value of other teams, too, making the bid attractive to other owners. Additionally, the fact that MLB had already approved Cohen as a minority owner and has been aware for months that the Wilpons and Katz were in negotiations with him to buy the team seems to improve the odds of the deal being completed.

When word of Cohen’s plan to buy the Mets broke last year, many fans could not hide their glee at a potential new direction for a team that has long underachieved — especially considering its large home market and fan base.

The Mets have reached the playoffs just three times since 2000, and the team itself reportedly loses tens of millions of dollars per year. People familiar with the inner workings of the Mets hierarchy say that members of the Katz and Wilpon family have been eager to sell the team before control passed to Jeff Wilpon, the chief operating officer and the son of Fred Wilpon, the 83-year-old patriarch who first bought his way into the team with a 5 percent stake in 1980.

Fred Wilpon gained ownership of half of the team in 1986, and then assumed full control when he bought Nelson Doubleday’s half in 2002 for $135 million — a figure that was reached by halving the team’s value of roughly $400 million and subtracting debt.

All told, the Wilpon family has been part of the primary ownership group of the Mets for more than half of the club’s 59-season history.

It was a bumpy tenure, to be sure. There were successes, like when the Mets reached the World Series in 2000 and 2015. They also designed and built Citi Field, one of the gleaming examples of a new breed of elegant baseball stadiums, with financial assistance from the public sector, as the value of the franchise increased roughly sixfold.

But they never won the World Series with the Wilpons in charge, with their most recent title coming in 1986, months before Fred Wilpon officially took control of half the team. In the 18 years since the family gained full ownership, the Mets only reached the postseason three times and seemed to be in a perpetual state of rebuilding, often with limited financial resources.

At times the Mets were among the biggest spenders in baseball, but at other points fans complained

Steven Cohen in 2016. they were financially constrained, spending like a smaller market team operating in the nation’s most populous city. That infuriated many loyal fans, whose historical sense of inferiority to the crosstown Yankees was exacerbated by the limited resources of their own club — especially in the wake of the Bernard Madoff financial scandal.

Katz and the Wilpons had invested heavily with Madoff’s firm for years, even running some of the team’s finances and investments through it. But after Madoff was arrested in 2008 for orchestrating a Ponzi scheme with investors’ money, the family and the team lost millions. The losses threatened the WilponKatz ownership of the team, forcing them to seek loans from Major League Baseball and take on new minority investors, including Cohen and Anthony Scaramucci, the financier who briefly served as communications director for the White House in 2017.

When family members insisted on selling the team in recent years, Cohen made for a natural buyer. Even after talks broke down several months ago, some people within baseball believed that the Mets would eventually turn back to Cohen, who has deeper pockets than virtually anyone else who was known to have expressed interest in the team.

The Mets had also entertained offers from other parties this summer, including a group that featured the celebrity couple Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez, and another group led by Josh Harris and David Blitzer, the co-owners of the NHL’s New Jersey Devils and the Philadelphia 76ers of the NBA. But the prospect of the Mets being owned by Cohen, a massively wealthy financier, is what piqued the interest of so many fans, who have long clamored for the Wilpons to sell the team to someone who can flex financial muscles befitting the largest media and sports market in the country. Finally, it appears, they have gotten their wish.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

27

Diana Taurasi is still living up to her ‘White Mamba’ nickname

By GINA MIZELL

E

ven as Diana Taurasi arrived at the arena, she was hesitant about the wardrobe change.

But when she slipped on a No. 8 Phoenix Mercury jersey with the name “Bryant” on the back, she knew there was only one way to pay tribute to Kobe Bryant on his birthday.

“Anything that he did in life, he just never quit,” Taurasi said.

Taurasi scored a season-high 34 points that night, Aug. 23, lifting the Mercury to a key 1-point victory against Washington.

All season, Taurasi has been living up to the “White Mamba” nickname Bryant gave her years ago, a remarkable feat given she is 38 and coming off major back surgery that sidelined her for nearly all of the 2019 season.

Taurasi’s regular-season numbers — 18.7 points, 4.2 rebounds, 4.5 assists per game — were on par with her recent healthy seasons and worthy of all-WNBA consideration. She compiled them for a Phoenix team that had won seven of its past nine games in the regular season, despite abruptly losing All-Star center Brittney Griner, who left the bubble last month for personal reasons, and guard Bria Hartley, who was putting up career-best numbers before a season-ending knee injury on Aug. 28.

Taurasi is reminding everybody that when they see her, they are still watching a legend in real time.

“Every time I see my life without basketball, I get a little scared, and I try to put a little more into it,” said Taurasi, who is the WNBA’s leading career scorer. “I try to savor all these moments. Even being here in Bradenton, with less-than-ideal conditions, and I’m still finding the beauty in the struggle of being here and playing basketball.”

The WNBA is playing this season inside a so-called bubble at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. Its shortened 22-game regular-season schedule ended Sunday, with Taurasi’s Mercury earning the fifth playoff seed. Phoenix was slated for a first-round single-elimination game against the Washington Mystics on Tuesday night.

The day after the Mercury’s 2019 season ended, the always-candid Taurasi expressed frustration about never feeling fully healthy after her May back surgery.

She leaned on her family and close circle of friends, including her wife, Penny Taylor; UConn coach Geno Auriemma; and Sue Bird, her friend and a fellow WNBA star. They helped her navigate doubts about rehabilitation and the uncertainty about whether the 2020 WNBA season would even happen.

“I’ve had some really good people just kind of keeping me sane,” Taurasi said.

The Mercury overhauled their roster after a disappointing 2019 season. They added Skylar Diggins-Smith to replace DeWanna Bonner, who left for the Connecticut Sun, as the third member of Phoenix’s “Big 3.” The Mercury believed that they had a championship contender if Taurasi was healthy.

Still, Mercury coach Sandy Brondello acknowledged that initially she was not sure how much Taurasi could play during the unusual season, with games almost every other day.

After all, it now takes Taurasi about two hours of preparation, with assistance from the medical and strength and conditioning staffs, just to get on the court for practices and games. She said her treatment involved cupping therapy, needles and a “scraping” technique, which can relieve muscle tension but also creates minor bruising.

“If you would see my body, it’d look like I got beat up in an alley,” Taurasi said.

Taurasi views that routine as a new competitive challenge, a satisfying way to get mentally charged to step on the court.

She is also relishing her team’s overall resilience while, at times, having only seven players available because of injuries and other absences.

“It just confirmed everything that I thought about her,” said Diggins-Smith, a four-time All-Star. “She has a work ethic.

She’s competitive. She’s a great leader, and she’s a winner. So it’s cool being able to play alongside of her. She definitely challenges me and pushes me.”

Yet when Taurasi felt a pop in the side of her body during an Aug. 8 game against Seattle, her first reaction was: Not this again.

She had a strained oblique, which was not serious but still left her bedridden for a couple of days. She watched a lot of ESPN and Bravo on television, and browsed home listings because she is “kind of addicted to real estate.”

Diana Taurasi tied her career high with eight 3-pointers during a game this season.

Since recovering, Taurasi has keyed the Mercury’s run to the postseason.

She buried a career-high-tying eight 3-pointers in a Sept. 3 win against Indiana to clinch a playoff berth, and hit seven shots from behind the arc in two other games. She pulled down 12 rebounds in an Aug. 30 win against Minnesota. She dished out seven assists three times during the last two weeks of the regular season.

Brondello praised Taurasi’s leadership after Griner left the bubble on Aug. 22, which was a turning point for the Mercury.

Taurasi has averaged 21.2 points over those nine games, playing a free-flowing style that allows her to use the additional space to attack the basket, shoot from deep and create for others.

Taurasi said that production uptick came out of necessity.

“We’re each in a corner where we have to do it,” Taurasi said. “You can’t say, ‘Oh, well, this person will do it.’ No, because we don’t really have that many bodies at this point. You have to get it done, or we won’t win.

“I think everyone’s taking that pretty

serious, and I have, too.”

About four weeks ago, a photograph popped up on Taurasi’s cellphone: The NBA All-Star Damian Lillard was wearing a white T-shirt featuring a purple goat with a No. 3 on the chest as he walked into Game 1 of the Portland Trail Blazers’ first-round playoff series against the Los Angeles Lakers. When that shirt honoring Taurasi went on sale about two weeks later, the website struggled to handle the influx of traffic before selling out its inventory within hours.

(Taurasi is widely revered as the GOAT — greatest of all time — in women’s basketball.)

Taurasi does not even have the shirt yet, because she had no idea it was being designed behind the scenes. But the enthusiastic response makes her feel validated in the basketball world.

“I never played for that type of fame,” Taurasi said. “I never played for the money.

I literally played for the love of the game.

I played because I love to compete. I love being on the court.”

Though Taurasi recognizes she is in the twilight of her career, she mused that she has “done all right” in her 2020 return. She said, though, that “this was a big season individually for me, to see if I could play at the level that I want to play at” after her back injury.

She said she has learned how to stay in shape while not playing overseas during the WNBA offseason. She hopes to play next year in the Olympics, which is “motivation in itself” to keep going. Whether the 2021 WNBA season is also played in a bubble will be among the factors she will weigh while deciding her future.

Taylor, Taurasi’s wife, stepped away from her role as an assistant on the Mercury coaching staff to focus on parenting the couple’s 2-year-old son, Leo. Taurasi said keeping in touch primarily through FaceTime calls while in Florida “has been tough.”

But Taurasi pushes on, fueled by her own competitive nature — and Bryant’s.

Monday’s practice was the latest example. As the Mercury walked through a defensive drill before Tuesday’s playoff game, guard Shey Peddy made a comment to Taurasi and, “all of a sudden, I wanted to kick her ass.”

“In little moments like that, his spirit conjures up in me,” Taurasi said.

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

A relieved Tour de France has the finish in sight

By ELIAN PELTIER

T

he Tour de France embarked on its final week Tuesday, with more than 500 miles of racing left and only 40 seconds separating the leader from his closest pursuer.

The field had already covered 15 stages, racked up nearly 1,650 miles and lost 20 cyclists, none of them to the coronavirus, despite early concerns that the race could trigger new waves of infections in a country that has seen a surge of cases in recent weeks. On Tuesday, the Tour announced that 785 more tests — conducted Sunday and Monday on riders, staff members of the 22 teams and race officials — all had come back negative.

It has not exactly been business as usual, however. Fans of the Tour have been scarcer on the sides of the road, and selfies and autographs are forbidden. Riders put on masks as soon as they cross the finish line and operate in a restricted environment, although that has not been foolproof: Last week, Christian Prudhomme, the race’s director, tested positive for the coronavirus, along with a few team staff members.

But for the most part, the stringent protocols put in place to keep the 2020 edition safe appear to be working. And in the absence of virus drama, much of the attention has been directed toward those excelling — or struggling — on their bikes.

Slovenia’s Primoz Roglic of Team Jumbo-Visma is leading the race, but his good friend and countryman Tadej Pogacar of Team Emirates is only 40 seconds behind after winning a mountain stage Sunday.

Germany’s Lennard Kamna won Tuesday’s 16th stage, well ahead of the leaders, who — protected by their teammates — kept close watch on one another from the relative safety of the front of the main pack.

With six stages left before the race’s arrival on the Champs-Élysées on Sunday, Roglic and Pogacar will take their fight for the yellow jersey into the French Alps this week, including on a much-anticipated stage today with a harrowing mountain climb to the finish near the ski resort town of Méribel that has never appeared on the Tour’s route.

“It’s unprecedented,” Prudhomme said about the Col de la Loze.

Slovenia’s Primoz Roglic of Jumbo-Visma, left, has worn the leader’s yellow jersey for the last week.

Many expect the fate of this year’s Tour to be sealed there.

Pogacar said this week that his strategy would be to try to close the gap on Roglic in the mountains and then try to take the yellow jersey in a time trial Saturday. He finished ahead of Roglic at the Slovenian time trial championships earlier this year, beat him in a sprint to the line Sunday and then tried — and failed — to do it again Tuesday.

“The perfect scenario would be to take it on the evening of the final time trial, but we live in a real world,” Pogacar said. “If there’s a chance to take it, I will try.”

Until Sunday, last year’s winner, Egan Bernal, was third behind Roglic and Pogacar. But the Colombian star lost ground and fell to 13th overall, leaving his chances of repeating as the Tour champion — or of even climbing onto the awards podium in Paris on Sunday — nearly nonexistent.

“There are riders that are stronger than

me, and we need to accept it,” Bernal told journalists Sunday. “I had no power. I haven’t had the legs.”

Still, Bernal, the first Colombian (and the first South American) to win the Tour, said he would give his best out of respect for the race. On Sunday, he posted a picture of himself wincing in pain on his Twitter account. “Long live to the Tour,” he wrote in French.

The Tour de France was initially scheduled for July but delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Organizers have tried to maintain this year’s edition by keeping the racers in a so-called bubble, with every rider required to wear face masks before and after each stage, and staff members ordered to do the same even as they ride together in the cars that accompany the peloton.

Team doctors have had to complete daily health checklists for every rider and

staff member so they can be isolated if any symptoms of possible infection appear.

Prudhomme, the race director, was allowed to return Tuesday only after self-isolating and testing negative.

Besides Bernal’s collapse Sunday, another surprise this year has been the poor performance of French riders, several of whom were favorites for the yellow jersey or the podium. Through 16 stages, there isn’t a single Frenchman in the top 10.

One French favorite, Romain Barnet, dropped out after sustaining a concussion in a crash. Another, Thibault Pinot, crashed on the first day and never seemed to regain his stride. He lost all hope of winning when he was left behind in Stage 8, losing more than 25 minutes in a single day, and said his only goal now was to finish the race.

“The Tour is not over,” he said after dropping out of contention last week. “I never thought about quitting.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 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)

Life is looking good. You’re about to enjoy an upswing in both your domestic life and professional world. Plans linked with your career will get the green light and this will have a positive effect on your family relationships. You have a lot to feel happy about and your cheerful spirit lights up the lives of those around you.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

You intend to keep to your word. You’re doing your best to fulfil all the promises you have made and all obligations you take on now.

You are accepting more responsibilities but no one has forced you into this. You’re doing it through choice and changes this will bring should add to your sense of security and satisfaction.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

If there are misunderstandings yet to be resolved, don’t leave them hanging in the air.

Friends and colleagues will respect you more if you make a move to make amends. You won’t be the only one to benefit from happier relationships. There will be joint rewards through reaching a new understanding.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

You’re hoping to get started on a project that was put on hold. This is something you’ve never given up hope on and you knew when the time was right, you’d be able to do something about it. You’re ready to broach the subject with someone in power. You’ve found the right person to team up with.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Art and music bring a special kind of pleasure. Expressing your creative side will transport your mind to places outside your usual realm of experiences. Joining a spiritual organisation will put you in touch with people who share your beliefs. Sharing views in an online chatroom will be enlightening.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

It is not like you to feel sorry for yourself.

Getting a change of scenery will help you see your life from a more positive perspective. Joining a local group or society would give you a chance to work on a project that is close to your heart. Taking steps to increase your outside commitments will bring greater contentment.

Honest talks will encourage harmony in your community. Someone will ask you to take charge of a group effort. Your popularity is high and people will come to you for advice on a variety of issues. There are great events being planned and plenty of chances to swap gossip with friends and neighbours.

You will be given a chance to take on more responsibility. This opportunity is appealing but if it means working longer hours, you may have to talk to other members of your family.

Whether you have to arrange childcare or help for an elderly relative you can only take on extra work if this does not clash with commitments at home.

Leo

Aquarius

(July 24-Aug 23)

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

Channel your abundance of energy where you are most likely to see constructive results. You need to feel you are doing something useful.

Redecorate your living space or volunteer to help beautify your community. Plant a garden.

Working on a fundraiser will be a lot of fun.

Draw on your social network for donations.

You will have a few good laughs with your family while trying to work out how a new appliance works. It would have been easier but less amusing if someone had read the instructions first. Whatever you are doing it will be through choice. That’s why you will make the most of any opportunity to develop a talent.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Working towards a mutual goal will bring you most satisfaction. You enjoy your own company but you’ve spent enough time by yourself recently. Get together with others and you will produce impressive results. Even so, it shouldn’t be all about work. Arrange some time for play and for joining in the fascinating conversations around you.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

You don’t want to be the centre of attention but this is where your creative skills will put you. You’re finding some great ways to put your imagination to good use. People are impressed by the results. If you’re shopping online it will be to buy items to brighten your surroundings.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

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