Thursday Sep 17, 2020

Thursday, September 17, 2020

San Juan The

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House to Evaluate Soto’s Appointment as Comptroller

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After 6 Long Years, Commonwealth Is Back in the Market

DAILY

Star

The Risks of the Prescribing Cascade

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Another Kickback Scheme?

PDP Candidates Refer NPP Contractor to Justice, Say He Earned Over $1.2 Million from House in 4 Years

Firm Owner Allegedly Gave Thousands to NPP Campaigns

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

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September 17, 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.

PDP candidate for mayor of San Juan proposes ‘health and productivity’ for elder citizens

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Wind: Humidity: UV Index: Sunrise: Sunset:

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

From ENE 14 mph 74% 10 of 10 6:12 AM Local Time 6:25 PM Local Time

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

Kitchen Health Legals Sports Games Horoscope Cartoons

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iven that the capital of Puerto Rico has almost 100,000 citizens who are 60 years or older, Popular Democratic Party (PDP) candidate for mayor of San Juan Rossana López León on Wednesday announced her governmental plan to provide for the elder community’s welfare.

López León said that even if 27 percent of the elder population in San Juan are “healthy, productive and the primary family supporter,” she recognizes that members of this sector live in poverty or have a functional issue that would put them at risk.

“Many are living in poverty, have some functional diversity, live alone, and more than 3,000 of them have had to assume responsibility for their grandchildren,” López León said. “These people take care of the health of these minors and their financial insecurity increases the difficulties in obtaining services, added to the fear that their children or grandchildren will drop out of school, be diverted into the world of drugs or have to leave the country.”

In order to solve the aforementioned issues, López León, who is a gerontologist, said she will develop a “New Golden Village” in the former Las Antillas Clinic.

This “village” will become a preventive services center, an elderly home that includes assisted living, long-term care and the largest geriatric medicine center in the Caribbean.

“It will include gerontology and geriatric services, a daycare center for people with first-stage Alzheimer’s,” the candidate said. “This will help in the development of elderly homes in San Juan that will become an example to the world. I envision the development of such centers on every social level.”

Likewise, the PDP senator said she will be promoting the construction of co-housing residences that she said will open up the opportunity to provide basic independence for the elder community. Meanwhile, the project could provide optimal conditions for sharing tasks and interests with other members of the community.

“As I announced before, one of the projects will be for the elder members of the LGBTQIAP+ community,” López León said.

Another of the initiatives to be implemented is one called “Expert Volunteering.” It consists of the creation of a corps of volunteers with retirees who are experts in different subjects and are willing to share their knowledge and skills with others.

López León said she will use both state and federal funds available so that San Juan’s elder citizens complete the required number of credits to receive Social Security benefits.

“We will maintain a continuous training program in the use of the computer, internet searches and management of social media networks,” she said.

“The creation of the University of the Third Age will be a program of courses at the Technological Institute of San Juan to help elder citizens gain knowledge and to promote greater productivity.”

When the Star asked the senator how she will be able to fulfill her plan for the elder community if a government from a different political party is elected in November, López León said it would be possible because “the government would not be a stumbling block” given that she has “the expertise to care for the elder community.”

Other proposals presented by candidate included providing a 24/7 telemedicine and telehealth system, the development of the San Juan Registry for the Third Age and the creation of a “Caretaker School” to give elder caretakers an opportunity to enhance their skills and become more capable in their responsibilities.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

PDP House candidates refer NPP contractor to Justice Dept. for alleged payback scheme

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

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opular Democratic Party (PDP) at-large candidate for the House of Representatives Yaramary Torres Reyes, joined by PDP House district candidates Noemí Andújar and Roberto Zayas, on Wednesday referred New Progressive Party (NPP) contractor Oriol Campos Hernández to the Department of Justice (DJ) for alleged kickback schemes since the current four-year term began.

At the entrance of DJ headquarters on Jesús T. Piñeiro Avenue, Torres Reyes told press members that Campos Hernández, who is currently NPP Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González Colón’s campaign treasurer, created a for-profit corporation called OC Strategic Advisors LLC on Dec. 3, 2016 at 9:01 p.m. that has obtained $1,262,397.50 through 46 contracts for both consulting and contracting services since January 2017; meanwhile, according to documents provided by Torres Reyes, Campos Hernández has donated up to $15,850 from February 2017 until December 2019 to NPP legislators, including House Speaker Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Nuñez.

“Once this person obtained his contracts, donations likewise were given to different representatives, in this case, Yashira Lebrón, Ángel Peña, even [House] Speaker Carlos ‘Johnny’ Méndez, [Antonio] ‘Tony’ Soto, Urayoán Hernández, and a very interesting name, María Milagros Charbonier, that, as you all know, faces a federal court case for yet another kickback scheme,” Torres Reyes said.

Documents also show that other donations from Campos Hernández were made

to NPP Reps. Félix Lasalle Toro, Jacqueline Rodríguez Hernández, Johnathan Alemán Arce and the Friends of Gabriel Rodríguez Aguiló Committee.

“We believe that the time is now for the Puerto Rican people to comprehend that the Legislative Assembly is there to protect their welfare and lives, and not for close friends to get rich from the government’s coffers and to move particular legislators’ election campaigns forward,” Torres Reyes said.

The House candidate said the island justice system must intervene and fully investigate Campos Hernández’s relationship with the NPP. She called on the House speaker to explain “ad nauseam” each contract awarded to prove if the services were provided as she deemed it “impossible that one person would be capable of advising regularly, or correctly, from seven to 12 politicians simultaneously.”

“People deserve to know on what the …

House spends their resources. I think it’s an atrocity that a person registers a corporation … in December [2016] and that in a fouryear period, he would obtain more than $1.2 million, and there aren’t any explanations. It can’t be like that,” Torres Reyes said. “This is an extended open invitation that we will keep following to both Carlos ‘Johnny’ Méndez and Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González to explain who this person is, why this person had access to so many contracts and, most of all, where the proof is of his performance and work for the Puerto Rican people.”

Meanwhile, when asked by the Star for her thoughts on a recent bill that Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced submitted to the sixth special session that began yesterday, which proposes tackling contracts awarded for political benefits

at the beginning of a new administration or amid an emergency, Torres Reyes said she agreed with the governor’s determination that it is time to stop schemes like the ones both she and her colleagues have called out.

“I believe that contractors should be registered with lead time as Puerto Ricans should know both their capability and expertise [in regard] to serving the country and so that it doesn’t look like this,” she said. “This is cronyism, this is what Puerto Ricans want to stop.”

Out of the $15,850 that Campos Hernán-

dez donated to NPP legislators, $5,400 went to Méndez Nuñez. Meanwhile, four consulting services contracts with OC Strategic Advisors that add up to $146,400 remain in force until Dec. 31. According to the island State Department’s Registry of Corporations and Entities, OC Strategic Advisors is located in the municipality of Toa Baja and still remains active as a limited liability company with the objective of offering “strategies, consulting and counseling on public policy topics, in addition to any other allowed legitimate purpose.”

House to hold public hearings on comptroller appointment

By THE STAR STAFF

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peaker of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Núñez said Wednesday that he will consider the appointment of Osvaldo Soto García as commonwealth comptroller in a public hearing as part of the confirmation process.

In an interview with the press, Méndez Núñez said he wants to listen to the nominee so Soto García can “convince” him as to why he should be confirmed in the lower chamber.

According to statements the House speaker reportedly made as soon as he learned of Soto García’s appointment, the appointee does not have the votes for confirmation.

Méndez Núñez said that during the public hearings process he will seek an opinion from the Certified Public

Accountants Association of Puerto Rico.

For his part, the president of the Senate, Thomas Rivera Schatz, reported that the upper House will attend the appointment of the nominee for Comptroller of Puerto Rico as soon as the House of Representatives concludes its analysis.

“Each senator and senator will evaluate the merits and circumstances of this man… We will not attend the appointment until the House of Representatives attends it and we will await that process. If it is confirmed in the House, we will attend it in the Senate. … There have been comrades of the Party who have made legitimate and valid expressions and they must be evaluated very carefully, ”said Rivera Schatz in his opening turn of the Sixth Special Session.

According to media outlets, the House public hearing process is expected to begin Monday.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

5

Commonwealth returns to the markets after 6 years, seeks to refinance bonds, produce debt service savings

By THE STAR STAFF

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uerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF by its Spanish initials) Executive Director Omar Marrero Díaz announced Wednesday that AAFAF, the Housing Financing Authority (HFA) and the Public Housing Administration (PHA) will seek to refinance the outstanding HFA bonds with the goal of generating debt service savings.

It will mark the return of Puerto Rico to the markets after at least six years. The estimated $248 million bond issue is expected to be priced the week of Sept. 28.

“In our role as financial advisor to the Government of Puerto Rico and its instrumentalities, we have determined that it is in the best interest of HFA, PHA, and the People of Puerto Rico to take advantage of current market conditions and seek opportunities for reductions in the debt service of the existing public debt,” Marrero Díaz, who also serves as the chief financial of-

AAFAF Executive Director Omar Marrero ficer of the Puerto Rico government, said in a statement.

Currently, HFA has some $300 million in outstanding bonds issued under the Capital Fund Program of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), maturing between 2020 and 2027.

HFA originally issued the bonds in 2003

and 2008, the proceeds of which were lent to the PHA and, in accordance with the purposes of the federal program, were used to pay the costs of improvements and modernization of public residential projects throughout the island. The principal of and interest on the HFA bonds are payable solely from annual federal appropriations of the U.S. Congress to fund public residential modernization and improvement projects.

The HFA bonds do not constitute a debt, obligation or pledge of the full faith and credit of the commonwealth or any of its instrumentalities or political subdivisions.

The proposed refunding would be achieved through the issuance of new bonds under HUD’s Capital Fund Program. The issuance of the new bonds has been approved by the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico and HUD. In addition, Standard & Poor’s has assigned a AA- credit rating to the proposed refunding bonds. The final size, timing and structure of the anticipated transaction are

subject to market conditions and other factors. PHA is responsible for the development and operation of the public housing units and receives grants and subsidies from HUD. PHA’s goal is to improve the quality of life in public housing units, promote community activity and the integral development of Puerto Ricans who live in such housing projects by means of a highly efficient administration.

According to the statement, it is important to note that even though the source of repayment of the new refunding bonds consists of HUD appropriations, any debt service savings realized as part of the transaction will result in additional funds being made available to PHA to fund its mission and objectives. Likewise, HFA provides financing options for lowor moderate-income families and other services to create and preserve affordable housing on the island, which contributes to the socioeconomic development of Puerto Rico, the statement says.

Judge Swain reserves her decision on PREPA-LUMA deal

By THE STAR STAFF

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.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain on Wednesday postponed making a decision on a Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) request that seeks to give preferred status to the payments the power utility must make to LUMA Energy, the operator of its transmission and distribution system.

Per a contract signed about two months ago, PREPA must pay LUMA a fixed annual compensation that will start at $70 million the first year and go up each year. PREPA could end up paying up to $125 million a year if LUMA meets certain goals.

Opponents of the administrative expense priority claim, such as PREPA’s workers, retirees and fuel line lenders, said giving payment priority to LUMA Energy will hurt the claims of pensioners and other unsecured creditors.

The LUMA Energy contract is being challenged in the commonwealth Appeals Court because one of the individuals who approved

the contract, Edison Avilés, also heads the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau, which is the energy industry’s regulator on the island.

Abid Qureshi, a lawyer for Cobra Energy, insisted that the court must respect the principle that similarly situated creditors be treated the same. Unlike Cobra, which helped repair the energy grid after the 2017 hurricane season destroyed it, LUMA Energy has not performed any work.

Carmen Conde, the legal counsel for Whitefish, said that after Hurricane Maria the Montana-based firm fixed some 200 miles of power lines and energized hospitals but has not been paid for its service.

Swain, meanwhile, authorized PREPA to reject 27 non-operational renewable energy projects after companies opposing the petition withdrew their objections. PREPA said the projects had not progressed to an advanced stage of development and have become a burden to the utility.

Swain also denied a request from the Unsecured Creditors Committee (UCC) to lift

the bankruptcy stay on challenges to general obligation (GO) bonds’ priority in the payment of debt, arguing that it would hurt efforts to reach a debt settlement for the commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Swain said during an omnibus hearing that the COVID-19 pandemic, hurricanes, the nomination of new Financial Oversight and Management Board members to replace two that left the board recently, elections and a the prospect of a new governing administration coming into office in January in Puerto Rico could delay the plan of adjustment, but that continuing the stay for at least six months should not create a burden.

The UCC, through its lawyer, Luc Despins, said it was not seeking to modify the stay, only that it be allowed to move forward with an objection to claims that GO bonds have payment priority because they are guaranteed by the island Constitution’s full faith and credit.

The UCC said the oversight board had no intention of moving forward with the commonwealth debt settlement because 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. GO bondholders said their $18 billion in claims must be paid before other unsecured debt.

The UCC says that would leave unsecured creditors with as little as 3 percent left to pay its claims.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Payroll Protection Program incentives now available to eligible island businesses

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced announced Wednesday that economic incentives through the federal Payroll Protection Program (PPP) are now available to Puerto Rico’s hardhit private sector.

The PPP incentives are offered under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act’s Strategic Disbursement Plan.

“Today [Wednesday], after a strict application process that seeks to ensure the proper distribution of funds, we are pleased to announce the approval of the disbursement of the first $350 million of the private sector Payroll Protection Program,” the governor said. “We are aware of the challenges that private employers have faced in the wake of this global pandemic. For this reason, we have worked hard to start the disbursement process and cover the expenses related to this emergency.”

The program has $350 million to provide emergency assistance through a grant to private employers with 500 or fewer employees who have continued to pay their payroll during the COVID-19 emergency despite the interruption of their operations.

It is available to private employers in the con-

struction, commerce, manufacturing, transportation and hospitality industries, among others, as well as to those who offer professional, educational and health services.

Island Treasury Secretary Francisco Parés Alicea said the PPP will benefit some 30,000 employers, who have already been identified.

“The Treasury Department issued Internal Revenue Memo 20-38 outlining the steps and the procedure for requesting financial assistance under the program through the SURI platform,” he said.

Parés Alicea said the employers that will benefit are those with, among other characteristics, an annual income of $10 million or less.

“These [businesses] must also have been operating since March 15, 2020, have their Merchant Registration up to date and show evidence of having incurred or [that they] will incur extraordinary expenses, as a result of COVID-19,” he added.

The Treasury Department memo is available on the website www.hacienda.pr.gov, publications section, Parés Alicea said.

Coordination of the new aid is being carried out in conjunction with the commonwealth Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF by its Spanish initials).

“This aid seeks to alleviate the economic burden

that the pandemic has represented for those businesses in the private sector that have continued to pay their employees despite having their operations interrupted,” AAFAF Executive Director Omar Marrero Díaz said. “We keep working constantly to provide alternatives for economic relief to all sectors.”

Marrero Díaz noted that the guidelines for applying for financial aid under the PPP are available on AAFAF’s official website (aafaf.pr.gov).

To date, the Puerto Rico government has disbursed over $993 million in federal funds through the CARES Act Strategic Disbursement Plan.

No charge for crossing the Teodoro Moscoso Bridge (southbound) this weekend. Here’s why

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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utopistas Metropolitanas de Puerto Rico (Metropistas) announced Wednesday the final closure of bridge No. 2088 over the Martín Peña Channel (el Caño Martín Peña in Spanish), on the José de Diego Highway, at kilometer 1.4, at the exit of the Minillas Tunnel toward Bayamón, from 10 p.m. Friday until around 5 a.m. Monday.

During the closure, repairs will be made to the beams at the end of the bridge, as announced two weeks ago. The work requires lifting parts of the structure for repairs that include demolition and concrete pouring, Metropistas announced in a written statement.

With the aim of minimizing the impact on traffic, Metropistas y Autopistas de Puerto Rico — the concessionaire that operates the Teodoro Moscoso Bridge — is continuing to make the bridge available as a north-south alternate route (from Carolina to Río Piedras/Caguas). As has been the case during previous closures, the Moscoso bridge will be free of charge in that direction for drivers during the period in which bridge 2088 over the Martín Peña Channel is closed.

Drivers heading from Carolina to Río Piedras or Caguas will be able to cross the Teodoro Moscoso Bridge, free of charge, from 10 p.m. on Friday until 5 a.m. Monday. In a south-north direction (Río Piedras to Carolina), the bridge will operate normally and drivers traveling in that direction must pay the corresponding toll, since the throughway will not be affected by the closure of the bridge over the Caño Martín Peña.

Drivers heading toward Guaynabo and/or Bayamón, meanwhile, will have the possibility of using Kennedy Avenue as an alternative route.

The repair of the 2088 bridge resumed as of May 11, after work in the construction sector was restored by executive order. The bridge over the Martín Peña Channel, at the exit of the Minillas tunnel, is one of the busiest points in all of Puerto Rico, with average

traffic of more than 100,000 vehicles per day.

The rehabilitation work is being carried out only on the bridge that goes in the direction of San Juan toward Bayamón, with an investment of $10 million for the entire project, which is part of the Metropistas bridge rehabilitation program. For more information on scheduled jobs and future traffic alterations, including alternate lanes, motorists can visit www.metropistas.com.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

7

Biden, in first Florida trip as nominee, aims to shore up Latino support

By MARK LEIBOVICH and KATIE GLUECK

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oe Biden on Tuesday made his first trip to Florida as the Democratic presidential nominee, facing a tight race in the state and a challenge consolidating support among its Latino voters that he moved to address as he campaigned along the increasingly Democratic I-4 corridor.

Against a backdrop of polls that showed Biden both cutting into traditional Republican constituencies and sometimes underperforming Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing with Latino voters in Florida, he sought to engage a broad range of voters with stops in Tampa and then in Kissimmee, where he attended a Hispanic Heritage Month event.

His campaign also unveiled a plan focused on supporting Puerto Rico. The rollout came as Biden has faced urgent calls to shore up his standing with Puerto Rican voters in Florida, a critical constituency, and he described the plan at the heritage event onTuesday night near Orlando, in a region with a significant Puerto Rican population. He said he believed that statehood “would be the most effective means of ensuring that residents of Puerto Rico are treated equally, with equal representation at a federal level.”

“But the people of Puerto Rico must decide, and the United States federal government must respect and act on that decision,” Biden went on.

The plan also called for accelerated access to reconstruction funding, investments in Puerto Rican infrastructure after devastating hurricanes, expanded health care and nutrition assistance, and efforts to “reduce its unsustainable debt burden,” among other proposals.

Throughout his remarks, Biden toggled between celebrating Hispanic Americans and the diversity of the nation, and lashing President Donald Trump’s messaging and policies toward Puerto Rico, casting that approach as callous toward U.S. citizens.

“Donald Trump doesn’t seem to grasp, doesn’t seem to grasp, that the people of Puerto Rico are American citizens already,” Biden said. Jabbing at the president’s actions after Hurricane Mariain 2017, he continued, “I’m not going to throw paper towels at people whose lives have just been devastated by a hurricane.”

The event’s participants included actress Eva Longoria and singers Ricky Martin and later Luis Fonsi, who, as they spoke from behind socially distanced podiums, urged viewers to vote.

In a nod to Fonsi’s song “Despacito,” Biden played a few strains of the hit — apparently from his phone — and bobbed briefly to the beat before launching into his remarks.

“Donald Trump has done nothing but assault the dignity of Hispanic families over and over and over and over again,” Biden said. “It’s wrong. That’s not who we are.”

Earlier, in Tampa, Biden made a concerted appeal to veterans and other Americans with ties to the military, as he denounced Trump over a report in The Atlantic that said Trump had referred to American soldiers killed in combat as “losers” and “suckers.” The president denies the report.

“Nowhere are his faults more glaring and more offensive, to me at least, than when it comes to his denigration of our

Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, boards a plane in New Castle, Del., en route to campaign events in Florida, on Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020. service members, veterans, wounded warriors,” Biden said.

His remarks came as a new poll from Monmouth University found that Trump maintained only a small edge over Biden with voters from military and veteran households in Florida — typically a staunchly Republican constituency. The poll also found Biden ahead of Trump by 58% to 32% among Latino voters, though other surveys have suggested a much narrower race, to the alarm of some Democrats.

“The Hispanic community, Latino community, holds in the palm of their hand the destiny of this country,” Biden said Tuesday night in Kissimmee. “You may not want to hear it, but it’s true. It’s true. You can decide the direction of this country.”

At another point, he said plainly, “I’m asking for your vote.”

Earlier Tuesday, competing clusters of Trump and Biden supporters stood outside the Tampa event, near the entrance to Hillsborough Community College, where Biden spoke. Each candidate’s groups included supporters wearing “Latinos for Trump” clothing or holding “Latinos for Biden” signs, underscoring the importance of the constituency in this diverse and fiercely contested battleground.

While Trump’s contingent outnumbered Biden’s by about two to one, supporters of the former vice president managed to assemble a loud, honking caravan — about a dozen cars strong — that included a sound truck blaring an assortment of “Viva Biden” messages.

Mercedes Figueruell, a Cuban-American Trump supporter, was not swayed.

“Listen, he’s a jerk and says things that I don’t like and don’t approve of,” she said of the president whom she plans to support.

But she expressed concern that more Democrats seemed to have grown accepting of socialism.

Supporters on both sides are quick to point out that “Latino voters” are hardly a monolithic group.

On Tuesday, there was a wide variance in political views across age, class, geography and country of origin. Four people interviewed said that they were former Republicans and that Trump had scared them out of the party, largely over immigration policies that they described as cruel. Likewise, two supporters of Trump said they used to be Democrats, but now liked the incumbent — mainly because of what one called his “no-nonsense” approach to immigration.

“For most Latino voters, health care and the economy are more important than immigration,” said Marco Delgado of Tampa, who voted twice for George W. Bush and plans to support Biden. He also mentioned Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis as a big factor in considering how to vote.

“You ask him about COVID-19 and he gives you an answer about the stock market,” Delgado said. “To me that says all you need to know, no matter where you come from.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

In denying minimizing threat of virus, Trump again downplays pandemic

President Donald Trump and George Stephanopoulos, before the start of an ABC News Town Hall event at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020. President Trump denied on Tuesday that he downplayed the threat of the coronavirus that has taken more than 195,000 lives in the United States, directly contradicting his own recorded words in which he admitted doing exactly that.

By PETER BAKER

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resident Donald Trump denied Tuesday that he downplayed the threat of the coronavirus that has taken more than 195,000 lives in the United States, directly contradicting his own recorded words in which he admitted doing exactly that. And then he proceeded to downplay the pandemic even further.

Appearing at a town hall-style event in Philadelphia, Trump presented a view of the pandemic radically at odds with the view of public health officials, insisting again that the virus would disappear on its own and contending that “we’re rounding the corner” of the crisis. He cast doubt on the value of wearing masks, citing the wisdom of restaurant waiters over the counsel of his own medical advisers.

“I feel that we’ve done a tremendous job, actually,” Trump said, defending his handling of the pandemic during the event broadcast on ABC News. “It’s something that I don’t think has been recognized like it should.”

But the president disputed himself by claiming that he did not publicly diminish the severity of the virus. “I didn’t downplay it,”

he told the host, George Stephanopoulos. “I actually in many ways up-played it in action.”

In March, however, he told journalist Bob Woodward exactly the opposite, admitting in private that the virus was “deadly stuff” even as he was telling the public that it was akin to the average flu. “I wanted to always play it down,” he told Woodward in a recorded conversation that was made public in recent days. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Trump did so again during the ABC forum, repeating his assertion that the virus would just vanish even without a vaccine.

“It is going to disappear. It’s going to disappear, I still say it,” he said. “You’ll develop herd — like a herd mentality. It’s going to be — it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen. That will all happen.”

Herd immunity (not mentality) depends on enough people getting sick that a broad immunity is developed against the virus but experts said it would result in many more deaths. By one estimate, 200 million Americans would have to get infected and recover to halt the epidemic. Nonetheless, the president predicted that the pandemic was already nearing an end. “I really believe we’re rounding the corner and I believe that

strongly,” he said.

Trump’s views were strikingly out of sync with those of public health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease specialist, who has warned that the pandemic remains a serious threat to Americans and that life may not get back to a semblance of normal until late 2021.

Andrew Bates, a spokesman for former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential challenger, said during the broadcast of the ABC forum Tuesday night that Trump was profoundly out of touch.

“We need a president who lives not just in our country, but on our planet,” he wrote on Twitter.

The president’s 90-minute appearance was one of the few instances during this campaign season when he has faced voters who were not already his committed supporters and a rare open-ended encounter on a network other than on his favorite Fox News. From the start of the event in the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, he seemed defensive about his handling of the coronavirus and sought to change the subject to more comfortable terrain.

Some of the undecided voters in the hall, who were kept far apart in the interest of social distancing, challenged him on his positions not just on the virus but also on health care more generally as well as on racial injustice, immigration and aid to those who have lost jobs during the pandemic.

Even as he appeared sensitive about criticism, Trump seemed intent on not pushing back against the voters who questioned him in the same abrasive way he does with journalists and politicians who challenge him. When a woman objected to his interruptions and asked him to let her finish her question, he deferentially fell silent.

But he made clear there was only so far he was willing to go. Trump rebuffed a man who voted for him last time and asked him to be more unifying. “Sometimes you don’t have time to be totally, as you would say, presidential,” the president said.

Asked about the shootings or deaths of Black Americans at the hands of the police, Trump called them “tragic” but he then quickly shifted gears to defend law enforcement officers, praising them as “phenomenal” and arguing that they should not be restrained the way critics are advocating.

“You have to allow the police to do

their job,” he said. “I agree with you, those events are terrible. But we have to allow the police to do their job. Otherwise crime is going to soar.” He added, “We have to give the police the respect that they deserve, and we have to give them their mojo.”

But some of the most intense exchanges centered on the pandemic that has now killed close to twice as many Americans as the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan combined, shuttered many businesses, put millions out of work, kept tens of millions of schoolchildren home this fall and devastated families across the country. With just seven weeks until the Nov. 3 election, the virus is one of Trump’s biggest political vulnerabilities, with just 35% of Americans approving of his handling of it in a poll released this week by ABC and Ipsos.

One man at the Tuesday night forum, who described himself as “conservative, prolife and diabetic” and said he cast a ballot for Trump four years ago, pressed the president about his decision to reopen American society last spring before the outbreak was under control, leading to a resurgence of infections and deaths in the months that followed.

“I thought you were doing a good job with the pandemic response until about May 1,” the voter told Trump. “Then you took your foot off the gas pedal. Why did you throw vulnerable people like me under the bus?”

“Well, we really didn’t,” the president replied, pointing to efforts by the administration to provide medical equipment like ventilators and develop treatments and a vaccine. “We’re starting to get very good marks.”

The president disparaged the value of masks in stopping the spread of the virus even though public health officials have called it crucial. “A lot of people don’t want to wear masks,” said Trump, who himself almost never wears one in public. “There are a lot of people who think that masks are not good.”

“Who are these people?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“I’ll tell you who those people are — waiters,” he said. “They come over and they serve you, and they have a mask. And I saw it the other day where they were serving me, and they’re playing with the mask — I’m not blaming them — I’m just saying what happens. They’re playing with the mask, so the mask is over, and they’re touching it, and then they’re touching the plate. That can’t be good.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

9

Justice Department opens criminal inquiry into John Bolton’s book

By KATIE BENNER

T

he Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton unlawfully disclosed classified information in a memoir this summer, an inquiry that the department began after it failed to stop the book’s publication, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The department has convened a grand jury, which issued a subpoena for communications records from Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Bolton’s memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.” The Javelin Agency, which represents Bolton, also received a subpoena, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry is a significant escalation of the turmoil over the publication of the book, whose highly unflattering account of Bolton’s 17 months in the White House prompted Trump to attack him and call for his prosecution even as the Justice Department sued earlier to try to stop its release.

The disclosures about the criminal investigation into Bolton’s memoir also come amid a flurry of other new books by onetime Trump advisers, former law enforcement officials, journalists and others that are critical of Trump and reveal harsh new details about his 2016 campaign and his first term as he seeks reelection.

After a judge rejected the department’s allegations that Bolton moved forward with publication without final notice that a review to scrub out classified information was complete, the director of national intelligence referred the matter last month to the Justice Department, two of the people said.

John Demers, the head of the department’s national security division, then opened the criminal investigation.

Bolton denied that he published classified information. “Ambassador Bolton emphatically rejects any claim that he acted improperly, let alone criminally, in connection with the publication of his book, and he will cooperate fully, as he has throughout, with any official inquiry into his conduct,” his lawyer Charles J. Cooper said in a statement.

Representatives for the Justice Department, the Office of the Director of Na-

tional Intelligence and the National Security Council declined to comment, as did Simon & Schuster. Javelin did not return calls and emails for comment.

Bolton’s account of his time working for Trump and his efforts to get the book published set off a furor. He confirmed elements of the Ukraine scheme that prompted impeachment, wrote that the president was willing to intervene in criminal investigations to curry favor with foreign dictators and said he sought China’s help in winning reelection.

Cooper has accused the administration of slow-walking the review process to keep Bolton from revealing embarrassing information about Trump. Administration officials have said they uncovered legitimate instances of unauthorized disclosures of classified information.

Trump has made clear that he wants his former aide prosecuted. He has said on Twitter that Bolton “broke the law” and “should be in jail, money seized, for disseminating, for profit, highly Classified information.” He has also called Bolton “a dope,” “incompetent” and the book “a compilation of lies and made up stories, all intended to make me look bad.”

Bolton, the ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, left the White House a year ago and signed a deal last fall with Simon & Schuster to write a memoir of his time there.

Bolton had submitted a copy of his manuscript in December to the National Security Council’s top official for prepublication review, Ellen J. Knight. When Bolton became national security adviser, he had signed a standard nondisclosure agreement that bound any book he might eventually write to a mandatory review to ensure that it contained no classified information.

Such an agreement is routine for national security officials as a condition of gaining a security clearance and access to classified information.

Knight told Bolton in April that he had satisfied her requests for edits to the manuscript, according to court documents. But when asked when he could expect a letter confirming that the review was complete, Knight gave no clear answer.

Eventually, Bolton told Simon & Schuster to publish the book based on Knight’s

April statement that she was finished.

But without notifying Bolton, the White House had initiated another review in May, overseen by Michael Ellis, a political appointee who had never conducted a prepublication review. Ellis said in an affidavit that he found multiple instances of classified information in the manuscript.

The government also suggested to the court that since 2017, Ellis had had “original classification authority,” a designation that would allow him to make decisions to classify material. But the administration later recanted, saying in a filing that Ellis did not receive that authority until June, after he had reviewed the book.

Weeks before the book was to go on sale, the National Security Council told Bolton in June that his manuscript still contained classified information and would need further edits. Cooper declared that the Trump administration was trying to suppress the book and its critical portrayal of the president and said it was already printed, bound and shipped to booksellers nationwide.

The administration escalated the battle, suing Bolton that month to stop distribution. Department lawyers accused Bolton

of giving Simon & Schuster permission to publish his book before he had official signoff that the review was complete and insisted that the book still contained classified information whose disclosure could damage American interests.

Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency, said in an affidavit that he had “identified classified information” in the portion of the manuscript that he had read.

Nakasone did not detail the passages but warned that “compromise of this information” could cause the government to lose an unspecified source of electronic intelligence and “cause irreparable damage” to its ability to gather such intelligence.

But the lawsuit was filed only a week before Bolton’s memoir was set to go on sale and as detailed accounts of it appeared in the news media. The judge in the case, Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia, determined that it was too late to keep the book from readers.

“With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done,” he wrote in rejecting the Justice Department’s argument.

John Bolton, then President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, walks to an news interview outside the White House on July 31, 2019. The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into whether Bolton unlawfully disclosed classified information when he published a memoir in 2020, a case that the department opened after it failed to stop the book’s publication, according to three people familiar with the matter.

10

Thursday, September 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Party selfies and hazmat suits: How New York’s worst campus outbreak unfolded

By AMANDA ROSA

they were dismayed that SUNY Oneonta did not require students to have negative virus tests before they arrived. Nor did the university test students once they came to campus. The university also did not closely prevent gatherings in off-campus housing.

The fallout has been swift.

Next semester, all SUNY schools will be required to develop testing plans, and surveillance testing is now mandatory on every campus, according to the system chancellor, Jim Malatras.

SUNY is also conducting a review on “what went right and what went wrong” at Oneonta, the chancellor said, adding that “clearly, things went wrong.”

Malatras, who officially became chancellor Aug. 31, said he was unsure why SUNY did not mandate every campus to require negative tests before classes began.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for the school said the decision to not test asymptomatic students was based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.

“We asked students to quarantine for seven days and 14 days if they were traveling from a hot state or out of the country,” the statement said.

This summer, colleges in New York were tasked with creating reopening plans that aligned with the state Department of Health’s standards.

While SUNY’s 64 schools also were given protocols to follow, they had the option to make their plans more strict. Some required

negative test results. Others, like Oneonta, did not. Throughout the system, no two plans were t was the middle of the night when a man in exactly alike, especially when it came to testing. a hazmat suit led a first-year student from her Outbreaks in universities around the coudormitory at State University of New York at ntry have shown that perhaps no perfect plan Oneonta to a van as she cried quietly, a scary exists. But most experts have agreed that testing experience later shared on social media. She should be an important aspect of reopening had tested positive for the coronavirus. campuses.

Later that week, a photo appeared on Colleges benefit from both requiring nesocial media of a dozen infected students pargative tests before allowing students on campus tying in an isolation dorm and posing for a selfie, and following up with regular testing when posdrawing the ire of students, parents and officials. sible, said Anita Cicero, deputy director at the Those incidents seemed to highlight how Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

SUNY Oneonta in upstate New York had se“Every case you catch is helpful,” she said. riously mishandled the pandemic, resulting in Fred Kowal, president of United Universithe worst outbreak of any college in New York ty Professions, which represents SUNY workers, state, with more than 670 cases, totaling about said his union had pushed for comprehensive 10% of the campus student population. testing since June.

In terms of the percentage of students inOn July 2, Oneonta announced that SUNY fected, it is one of the most notable outbreaks on and state officials had approved Oneonta’s fall a campus anywhere in the country. reopening plan; most classes would be online, As a result, officials had to cancel in-perand in-person instruction would end by Thankson classes for the fall and send students home. sgiving. Students would be required to wear Universities across the country have famasks on campus, and social distancing would ced daunting challenges in trying to resume be enforced by “policies and procedures,” acin-person instruction. But the disarray at SUNY cording to the plan.

Oneonta has left university officials scrambling Health screening questionnaires, in which to explain why they did not put in place a strict students fill out a form saying they were virusmonitoring system to prevent the virus from gaifree, were required in lieu of test results, and ning a foothold. The oversight of the broader students were encouraged to quarantine before State University of New York system has also classes began. been called into question.

But a spokeswoman for SUNY denied that Students, parents and staff members said state officials had approved the plan.

The first two positive cases were announced Aug. 25. Malatras said those two cases didn’t overly concern him. After all, it was only the second day of classes.

Little to no restrictions kept students from leaving the campus. Though officials blame the outbreak on large gatherings, students like Juliet Pinkney, 20, a sophomore, said she was able to meet with a small group of friends at an off-campus apartment with no problem.

These types of smaller gatherings were common, students said. Haley Dimonda, a freshman who filmed the man in a hazmat suit, said students should have been more careful because they were not tested beforehand.

“The university should’ve definitely had testing before we even came on campus in the first place,” she said.

By Aug. 27, 13 students tested positive, prompting the chancellor to order SUNY Upstate Medical University to assist in mandatory Cooper Levine, a sophomore resident assistant, at the State University of New “pool testing” — where a number of saliva samYork at Oneonta on Sept. 15, 2020. More than 670 students, about 10 percent of ples are grouped together in a “pool” and tested the campus student population, became infected with the coronavirus, forcing the as one — for all students. If the pool’s results campus to be shut down. return positive, that means at least one student

I

was infected.

Out of the 29 preliminary pools of Oneonta students, 19 returned positive, Malatras said, meaning anywhere from 19 to 90 students from those pools were infected.

“SUNY Upstate Medical said they’ve never seen anything like that,” he said.

The virus’s spread was unwavering. Within days, 29 more positive cases were found, and the school suspended five students for having organized parties. Soon after, 105 students — or about 3% of the people who were on campus or using campus facilities by then — had tested positive.

On Aug. 30, Malatras announced that the school would cancel in-person activities for two weeks. That same day, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the state was sending a virus-control team to keep the outbreak from spreading to the city of Oneonta.

“At that point, I saw enough,” the chancellor said.

The state’s efforts did little to stop what had already begun. Some students, including some resident assistants, left when the twoweek lockdown was announced, while those who stayed behind tried to manage the stress.

While in between classes Sept. 3, Cooper Levine, a sophomore resident assistant, got a text from a fellow RA who told him he had just tested positive.

After his third class of that day, Levine checked his email and found an ominous announcement: Only three days into the temporary lockdown, Oneonta was nearing 400 cases, and the campus would close.

The chancellor had pulled the plug, sending students home and canceling all in-person classes for the semester.

Pinkney, who had taken a pool test that had come back negative during the second week of classes, was urged by her father, who has colon cancer, to get tested again. She took a rapid test in town Sept. 4, which came back positive.

She was placed in the school’s isolation dorm for 10 days, where she remained until Sunday.

Pinkney’s father, Daryl, said he hasn’t heard anything from the college about the outbreak and closure. He said he’s extremely at-risk after having surgery to treat his cancer about two weeks ago. The family was scrambling to find housing for Juliet Pinkney, who is now staying in a regular dorm room until she tests negative.

“It’s a ripple effect. All this stuff affects people’s lives,” Daryl Pinkney said. “I want to protect my daughter, but I want to protect myself.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

11

Europe’s economic revival is imperiled, raising the specter of a grinding downturn

By PETER GOODMAN and LIZ ALDERMAN

E

urope was supposedly done with political histrionics. In the face of the pandemic, a continent not known for common purpose had put aside long-festering national suspicions to forge a collective economic rescue, raising hopes that a sustainable recovery was underway.

But the European revival appears to be already flagging and in part because of worries that traditional political concerns may disrupt economic imperatives.

The European Central Bank — which won confidence with vows to do whatever it took to stabilize the economy and support lending — has been hesitant to reprise such talk, sowing doubts about the future availability of credit.

National governments that have spent with abandon to subsidize wages and limit layoffs are wrapping up those efforts, presaging a surge of joblessness.

And in the midst of the worst public health emergency in a century, twinned with the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, the British government has opted to unleash a fresh crisis: It has sharply escalated fears that it may follow through with years of bellicose threats to abandon Europe without a deal governing future commercial relations across the English Channel.

A chaotic Brexit would almost certainly worsen Britain’s already terrible economic downturn while also assailing major European trading partners like the Netherlands, France and Spain.

Collectively, these developments have crystallized fresh worries that Europe could find itself mired in bleak economic circumstances for many months, especially as the virus regains strength, yielding an alarming increase of cases in Spain, France and Britain.

“It’s hard to imagine a recovery that’s going to be strong and sustained given the current situation,” said Ángel Talavera, lead eurozone economist at Oxford Economics in London. “There’s not a lot of engines of growth.”

A new Oxford Economics tracking model shows that commercial life in the 19 nations that share the euro currency bounced back sharply in July and much of August, before activity slowed again in recent weeks.

But as COVID cases have increased in recent weeks, consumers and businesses have altered their own behavior, even where governments have loosened restrictions. People have scrapped holidays, limited their exposure to shopping areas and opted to economize in the face of threats to businesses and jobs.

The results reinforce what has become a truism of the pandemic: The fundamental threat to economic livelihood is the virus itself. The lockdowns have simply intensified the effect.

“It’s hard to anticipate that consumers are going to be driving much of a recovery without the health situation under control,” Talavera said.

That was the backdrop as the ECB convened last week amid deepening worries about flagging growth, which raised the prospect of deflation — falling prices, which discourage investment and choke off future growth. Exporters were troubled by increases in the value of the euro, which makes European goods more expensive on world markets.

Some analysts hoped to hear reassuring words of action from the bank’s president, Christine Lagarde.

London’s Canary Wharf, a home for many financial firms. Britain is facing the possibility of withdrawing from the European Union without a trade agreement.

In the first phase of the pandemic, she unleashed an overwhelming surge of money into the economy, banishing fears of a shortage of credit. In mid-March, the bank promised to spend up to 750 billion euros ($892 billion) to purchase government and corporate bonds. By June, the central bank had nearly doubled that target.

Along the way, Lagarde won plaudits for assuaging the darkest imaginations of a marketplace grappling with an unfamiliar emergency.

Lagarde reportedly played a behind-the-scenes role in bringing to fruition a landmark development in the history of the European Union — an agreement to forge a $750 billion-euro rescue fund, with much of the money raised through the sale of bonds backed collectively by member nations.

In previous emergencies, northern European countries — especially Germany, the Netherlands and Finland — had opposed putting their taxpayer money on the line to cover the shortfalls of their southern European brethren while indulging crude stereotypes about the supposedly profligate ways of the Mediterranean.

Such episodes had revealed Europe to be a union in name only — a reality that tended to enhance trouble, prompting investors to demand higher rates of return for loans to Spain, Portugal and Italy, lifting borrowing rates for those countries.

But the passage of the coronabond proposal — which was championed by France and Germany — cemented the sense that the pandemic had brought about a maturation of the bloc.

“The rich countries have shown they are willing to put their credibility on the line to support the others,” said Christian Odendahl, the Berlin-based chief economist at the Center for European Reform. “That will stabilize expectations about the European economy going forward.”

But he was struck by Lagarde’s reticence in pledging further action last week.

“I would have expected her to be a bit more aggressive, and say, ‘OK, if this continues, we will need to do more,’ ” Odendahl said.

Instead, her silence generated the impression that the European Central Bank — as ever, balanced between the fiscally con-

servative inclinations of the north and the debt-saturated nations of the south — was prioritizing the protection of consensus over decisive action.

The greatest cause for concern centers on what has not changed in Europe: Both the euro and the broader European Union are governed by strict rules limiting the allowable size of budget deficits.

Those rules have been suspended, permitting member nations to borrow aggressively to finance their job protection programs. But the strictures will return eventually, forcing spending cuts. Already, member nations are debating how long they can extend the relief.

Companies are resorting to layoffs.

Joblessness rose within the eurozone to 7.9% in July, marking its fourth straight month of increases, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.

“Unemployment is exploding and probably will be exploding everywhere between now and the end of 2020,” said Amandine Crespy, a political scientist at the Institute for European Studies at the Free University of Brussels. “All the lights are red.”

France typifies the concern. As the country tumbled into a deep recession early this year, President Emmanuel Macron delivered a massive 600 billion-euro ($711 billion) package of spending measures to stimulate a recovery.

An economic plunge that had been forecast to reach 10.3% this year has been moderated to 8.7%, the Banque de France said Monday.

But some economists, who say more support is needed, worry that a new 100 billion-euro “turnaround plan” announced last week by Macron’s government will fall far short of generating a revival.

The program largely focuses on longer-term investments over the next decade in green industries like electric car batteries and hydrogen power. It comes as Green Party candidates are sweeping into power in major French cities, prompting Macron’s government to shift toward more ecological policies.

About a third of the money would subsidize corporate tax cuts to stimulate long-term investment. The government is betting that if it can instill confidence that a brighter future is unfolding, French savers will invest in forward-looking industries and generate jobs.

Economists affirm the logic but fret that the benefits could take too long to emerge.

“The ambition is there,” Charlotte de Montpellier, an economist at ING Bank, said in a note to clients. “But the realization could turn out to be more complicated than expected.”

As if none of this were enough, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain — his popularity plummeting following his government’s tragic mishandling of the first phase of the pandemic — has taken this as the moment to embrace rogue tactics in negotiating a trade deal with the European Union.

Given that Britain sends nearly half of its exports to the European bloc, an unruly Brexit would almost certainly exacerbate the perilous straits gripping the nation’s economy, which contracted by more than 20% between April and June. Europe stands to be hurt, too.

“It comes at a bad time,” Odendahl said. “Neither for Britain nor for the EU do you necessarily need disruption to your trade relationship while trying to keep your economy afloat during a pandemic.”

12

Thursday, September 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

House report condemns Boeing and FAA in 737 Max disasters

A congressional report released on Wednesday followed an 18-month investigation of two Boeing 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people.

By NIRAJ CHOKSHI

T

he two fatal crashes that killed 346 people aboard Boeing’s 737 Max and led to the worldwide grounding of the plane were the “horrific culmination” of engineering flaws, mismanagement and a severe lack of federal oversight, the Democratic majority on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee said in a report Wednesday.

The report, which condemns both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration for safety failures, concludes an 18-month investigation based on interviews with two dozen Boeing and agency employees and an estimated 600,000 pages of records. Over more than 200 pages, the Democrats argue that Boeing emphasized profits over safety and that the

agency granted the company too much sway over its own oversight.

“This is a tragedy that never should have happened,” Rep. Peter A. DeFazio of Oregon, the committee chairman, said. “It could have been prevented, and we’re going to take steps in our legislation to see that it never happens again.”

Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican, said that while change was needed, congressional action should be based on nonpartisan recommendations, “not a partisan investigative report.”

The report was issued as the FAA appeared close to lifting its grounding order for the Max after test flights this summer. FAA clearance could lead aviation authorities elsewhere to follow suit and allow the plane to fly again as soon as this winter.

The congressional report identified five broad problems with the plane’s design, construction and certification.

First, the race to compete with the new Airbus A320neo led Boeing to make production goals and cost-cutting a higher priority than safety, the Democrats argued. Second, the company made deadly assumptions about software known as MCAS, which was blamed for sending the planes into nosedives. Third, Boeing withheld critical information from the FAA. Fourth, the agency’s practice of delegating oversight authority to Boeing employees left it in the dark. And finally, the Democrats accused FAA management of siding with Boeing and dismissing its own experts.

“These issues must be addressed by both Boeing and the FAA in order to correct poor certification practices that have emerged, reassess key assumptions that affect safety and enhance transparency to enable more effective oversight,” the committee said.

The findings are largely in line with an abundance of information uncovered by federal investigators, news reporters and the committee’s preliminary findings after the crashes in Indonesia in October 2018 and Ethiopia in March 2019.

Those crashes were caused in part by the MCAS system aboard the Max. Because the engines on the Max are larger and placed higher than on its predecessor, they could cause the jet’s nose to push upward in some circumstances. MCAS was designed to push the nose back down. In both crashes, the software was activated by faulty sensors, sending the planes toward the ground as the pilots struggled to pull them back up.

The deaths could have been avoided, however, if not for a series of safety lapses at Boeing and the FAA, the Democrats argued.

Internal communications show that Boeing dismissed or failed to adequately address concerns raised by employees relating to MCAS and its reliance on a single external sensor, the committee found. It also accused Boeing of intentionally misleading FAA representatives, echoing a July report from the Transportation Department’s inspector general.

That report found that Boeing had failed to share critical information with regulators about important changes to MCAS; had been slow to share a formal safety risk assessment with the agency; and had chosen to portray the software as a modification to an existing system rather than a new one, in part to ease the certification process.

The Democrats on the committee also accused Boeing of putting a priority on profits by strongly opposing a requirement that pilots receive simulator training to fly the plane.

Under a 2011 contract with Southwest Airlines, for example, Boeing promised to discount each of the 200 planes in the airline’s order by $1 million if the FAA ended up requiring simulator training for pilots moving from an earlier version of the aircraft, the 737NG, to the Max. “That drove a whole lot of really bad decisions internally in Boeing, and the FAA did not pick up on these things,” DeFazio said.

In a statement, Boeing said it had learned lessons from the crashes and had started to act on the recommendations of experts and government authorities.

“Boeing cooperated fully and extensively with the committee’s inquiry since it began in early 2019,” the company said in a statement. “We have been hard at work strengthening our safety culture and rebuilding trust with our customers, regulators and the flying public.”

The revised Max design has received extensive review, Boeing said, arguing that once the plane is ready to fly again, “it will be one of the most thoroughly scrutinized aircraft in history.”

The FAA said in a statement that it would work with the committee to carry out any recommended changes and was already making some of its own.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

13 Stocks

S&P 500, Dow extend gains following Fed statement

T

he Dow and S&P 500 added to gains on Wednesday after the U.S. Federal Reserve delivered a policy statement that bolstered expectations it will keep interest rates near zero for a prolonged period.

The Dow rose more than 1% and the Nasdaq turned positive after the the Fed kept rates near zero and promised to keep them near there until inflation is on track to “moderately exceed” the U.S. central bank’s 2% inflation target “for some time.”

The central bank’s two-day meeting is its first under a newly adopted framework that promises to shoot for inflation above 2% to make up for periods where it runs below that target.

“We’ve come a long way from (President Donald) Trump saying the Fed is ‘loco’ for raising rates. The Fed is clearly now offering unbridled support for markets and the economy,” said David Carter, chief investment officer at Lenox Wealth Advisors in New York.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 291.63 points, or 1.04%, to 28,287.23, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 21.08 points, or 0.62%, to 3,422.28 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 20.80 points, or 0.19%, to 11,211.12.

The S&P 500 and Dow were modestly higher before the statement, while the Nasdaq was lower.

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.

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14

Thursday, September 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Even as cases rise, Europe is learning to live with the Coronavirus

Checking temperatures outside a cinema in Málaga, Spain, on Aug. 30, 2020. New infections have soared in recent weeks in the country.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

I

n the early days of the pandemic, President Emmanuel Macron exhorted the French to wage “war” against the coronavirus. Today, his message is to “learn how to live with the virus.”

From full-fledged conflict to cold war containment, France and much of the rest of Europe have opted for coexistence as infections keep rising, summer recedes into a riskfilled autumn and the possibility of a second wave haunts the continent.

Having abandoned hopes of eradicating the virus or developing a vaccine within weeks, Europeans have largely gone back to work and school, leading lives as normally as possible amid an enduring pandemic that has already killed nearly 215,000 in Europe.

The approach contrasts sharply to the United States, where restrictions to protect against the virus have been politically divisive and where many regions have pushed ahead with reopening schools, shops and restaurants without having baseline protocols in place. The result has been nearly as many deaths as in Europe, although among a far smaller population.

Europeans, for the most part, are putting to use the hard-won lessons from the

pandemic’s initial phase: the need to wear masks and practice social distancing, the importance of testing and tracing, the critical advantages of reacting nimbly and locally.

All of those measures, tightened or loosened as needed, are intended to prevent the kind of national lockdowns that paralyzed the continent and crippled economies early this year.

“It’s not possible to stop the virus,” said Emmanuel André, a leading virologist in Belgium and former spokesman for the government’s COVID-19 task force. “It’s about maintaining equilibrium. And we only have a few tools available to do that.”

He added, “People are tired. They don’t want to go to war anymore.”

Martial language has given way to more measured assurances.

“We are in a living-with-the-virus phase,” said Roberto Speranza, the health minister of Italy, the first country in Europe to impose a national lockdown. In an interview with La Stampa newspaper, Speranza said that though a “zero infection rate does not exist,” Italy was now far better equipped to handle a surge in infections.

“There is not going to be another lockdown,” Speranza said.

Still, risks remain.

New infections have soared in recent weeks, especially in France and in Spain.

France recorded more than 10,000 cases on a single day last week. The jump is not surprising since the overall number of tests being performed — now about 1 million a week — has increased steadily and is now more than 10 times what it was in the spring.

The death rate of about 30 people a day is a small fraction of what it was at its peak when hundreds and sometimes more than 1,000 died every day in France. That is because those infected now tend to be younger and health officials have learned how to treat COVID-19 better, said William Dab, an epidemiologist and a French former national health director.

“The virus is still circulating freely, we’re controlling poorly the chain of infections, and inevitably high-risk people — the elderly, the obese, the diabetic — will end up being affected,” Dab said.

In Germany, too, young people are overrepresented among the rising cases of infections.

While German health authorities are testing over 1 million people a week, a debate has started over the relevance of infection rates in providing a snapshot of the pandemic.

At the beginning of September, only 5% of confirmed cases had to go to the hospital for treatment, according to data from the country’s health authority. During the height of the pandemic in April, as many as 22% of those infected ended up in hospital care.

Hendrik Streeck, head of virology at a research hospital in the German city of Bonn, cautioned that the pandemic should not be judged merely by infection numbers, but instead by deaths and hospitalizations.

“We’ve have reached a phase where the number of infections alone is no longer as meaningful,” Streeck said.

Much of Europe was unprepared for the arrival of the coronavirus, lacking masks, test kits and other basic equipment. Even nations that came out better than others, like Germany, registered far greater death tolls than Asian countries that were much closer to the source of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, but that reacted more quickly.

National lockdowns helped get the pandemic under control across Europe.

But infection rates began rising again over the summer after countries opened up and

people, especially the young, resumed socializing, often without adhering to socialdistancing guidelines.

Even as infections have been rising, Europeans have returned to work and to school this month, creating more opportunity for the virus to spread.

Instead of applying national lockdowns with little regard to regional differences, authorities — even in a highly centralized nation like France — have begun responding more rapidly to local hot spots with specific measures.

On Monday, for example, Bordeaux officials announced that, faced with a surge in infections, they would limit private gatherings to 10 people, restrict visits to retirement homes and forbid standing at bars.

In Germany, while the new school year has started with mandatory physical classes around the country, the authorities have warned that traditional events, like carnival or Christmas markets, may have to be curtailed or even canceled. Soccer games in the Bundesliga will continue to be played without fans until at least the end of October.

In Britain, where mask wearing is not especially widespread or strictly enforced, the authorities have tightened the rules on family gatherings in Birmingham, where infections have been rising. In Belgium, people are restricted to limiting their social activity to a bubble of six people.

In Italy, the government has sealed off villages, hospitals or even migrant shelters to contain emerging clusters. Antonio Miglietta, an epidemiologist who conducted contact tracing in a quarantined building in Rome in June, said that months of battling the virus had helped officials extinguish outbreaks before they got out of control, the way they did in northern Italy this year.

“We got better at it,” he said.

At the height of the epidemic, most people in France were extremely critical of the government’s handling of the epidemic.

But polls show that a majority now believe that the government will handle a possible second wave better than the first one.

Jérôme Carrière, a police officer who was visiting Paris from his home in Metz, in northern France, said it was a good sign that most people were now wearing masks.

“In the beginning, like all French people, we were shocked and worried,” Carrière, 55, said, adding that two older family friends had died of COVID-19. “And then, we adjusted and went back to our normal lives.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

15

As second wave of virus builds, U.K. enters new testing crisis

By BENJAMIN MUELLER

W

ith Britons fretting last week that a new six-person limit on gatherings would effectively cancel Christmas, Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled what he called Operation Moonshot, an audacious plan to test 10 million people every day for the coronavirus and restore life to normal by winter.

But by Tuesday, the reality of earthbound life in a pandemic reasserted itself: Before a second wave of the virus had even crested, unprocessed samples overwhelmed Britain’s labs and people waited in desperation for tests while the reopening of the country’s schools and businesses hung in the balance.

The country cannot meet the current demand, yet the prime minister plans, within a few months, to conduct more than 40 times as much testing as it does now.

“We are sleepwalking into a second surge of the pandemic without really having learned the lessons from the first,” said Dr. Rinesh Parmar, an anesthesiologist and the chairman of The Doctors’ Association UK, an advocacy and professional group. “We are set for a perfect storm of problems heading into the winter.”

Britain has suffered more coronavirus-related deaths — 57,528, according to official records compiled from death certificates — than any other nation in Europe. But as new cases receded over the summer, Johnson’s government created incentives for people to dine out, urged them to return to their offices and dithered over whether to require face masks before mandating them in mid-July for enclosed spaces.

Crucially, experts said, the government also failed to prepare the country’s labs for an inevitable spike in demand for tests as schools reopened in September and cases of everyday coughs and colds surged along with the coronavirus.

Confirmed new cases in Britain, which had fallen below 600 a day in early July, have reached about 3,000 a day.

The testing program is now so saturated that it has started sending overflow samples to labs in Italy and Germany. At one point Monday, people in England’s 10 riskiest coronavirus hot spots — including areas of Manchester, the second largest city — were unable to book tests. Some people were told they would have to travel 200 miles to get tested.

The program recently reached a backlog of 185,000 swabs, The Sunday Times of London reported this weekend.

And after urging people in July to get tested regardless of any symptoms, the Conservative government is reported to be drawing up plans to restrict access to testing in an attempt to deal with what officials described as “frivolous demands.”

Britain’s opposition Labour Party seized on the difficulties, barraging Matt Hancock, Britain’s secretary of state for health, at an appearance in the House of Commons on Tuesday.

“The secretary of state is losing control of this virus,” Jonathan Ashworth, Labour’s lead lawmaker on health issues, said of Hancock. “He needs to fix testing now.”

Hancock acknowledged “operational challenges” in the testing system that he said could take weeks to resolve, even as he pinned most of the blame on people seeking tests who did not have symptoms of the coronavirus.

Johnson has walked away time and again during his political

career from the smoldering ruins of failed moonshots. His rosy attitude did not fade when the coronavirus landed in Britain this year, despite the pandemic continually proving him wrong.

In mid-March, he promised to “turn the tide” on the virus within 12 weeks. His government at first downplayed the need for virus testing on a massive scale, defying the experts, and instead invested in untried antibody tests — which, as it turned out, didn’t work.

After Johnson’s government reversed course on viral testing and pledged to test 100,000 people a day by May 1, that goal placed such a huge strain on public laboratories that they were left scrabbling for the supplies they needed to meet the demand. It took almost four months more, until late August, to push the figure above 200,000 tests in a day.

In July, he floated a “more significant return to normality”

by Christmas. His pledge to build a “world-beating” contact tracing program remains unfinished; many contact tracers spent the early days of their employment watching Netflix.

Still, defying the warnings of a key government adviser, Johnson set out his new target last week for a high-speed diagnostic program that by early 2021 could test 10 million Britons a day, or every person in the country once a week.

Documents obtained by The BMJ, a medical journal, mentioned a price tag of 100 billion pounds ($129 billion) and acknowledged that the technology to process so many tests so quickly did not exist.

Beyond the uptick in demand, some officials have also

suggested that shortages of staff and reagents, the chemical ingredients used in tests, may be contributing to the crisis.

The shortages have rippled through schools, where students returned to classes at the beginning of the month, highlighting the dangers of sending children back to classrooms without a strong testing program in place.

Teachers said that start-of-term headaches and sniffles began to spread almost immediately, but there was little way of knowing if they were a sign of something worse.

The shortage of tests is not just a problem in the schools.

Because they cannot get tested for the virus in time, some patients have had to cancel scheduled operations at the last minute, doctors said.

Even general practitioners — the usual refuge for families dealing with colds and flus — have not been immune from testing difficulties. While hospital doctors have better access to testing, general practitioners generally have to book swabs the same way their patients do.

In a survey conducted by The Doctors’ Association UK on Saturday, doctors described being asked to wait days and travel hundreds of miles for tests.

“That leaves an already stretched health service even more stretched,” Parmar said. “It’s a real affront to the 600 health care workers we’ve lost if we don’t learn the lessons of how to do this better, how to look after our health care workers and prevent the spread of the virus and enable testing so people can actually isolate.”

N.H.S. workers collecting samples at a coronavirus testing site in London on Tuesday. Laboratories are being overwhelmed with samples following the opening of schools.

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Thursday, September 17, 2020

Germany says it will take in refugees, easing burden on Greece

By MELISSA EDDY

G

ermany agreed Tuesday to take in more than 1,500 refugees now living in Greece, in a challenge to other wealthy European countries that have been reluctant to help Greece resettle thousands of people left homeless after blazes last week destroyed Europe’s largest refugee camp.

The decision followed intense debate within Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, with some officials arguing that Berlin should wait to take action until there is a joint European Union response to the crisis in Greece. They feared that a unilateral move by Germany, while showing solidarity with Greece, could create the politically unpopular impression that the country had reopened its borders, as it did in 2015, when it accepted more than one million people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The German government will allow 1,553 people from 408 families who have already been recognized as refugees by Greece to settle in Germany, Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s spokesman, said on Tuesday. Germany had already agreed to take in around 1,200 other asylum-seekers who have been housed in Greece — about 200 unaccompanied minors, and 243 children requiring medical treatment, along with their families.

“In total, Germany will take in about 2,750 people from the Greek islands,” Seibert said in a statement, after the chancellor and her ministers reached agreement on the move.

Merkel’s willingness to take the political risk speaks to her confidence as she heads into what she has repeatedly said will be her final year in office, and at a time when her popularity has surged over what is widely viewed as her effective handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Germany’s move could increase pressure on other wealthy members of the European Union to act, and appeared to be an implicit rebuke over their failure to ease the strain on Greece, a member of the bloc.

The migrants who have been packed into overcrowded camps on Greek islands come from dozens of countries, but

A refugee family carrying their belongings after leaving the Moria camp in Lesbos, Greece on Sept. 12, 2020. Thousands of people were left homeless after a fire destroyed Europe’s largest refugee camp.

the largest number are from Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who has dramatically hardened Greek policy toward undocumented migrants, welcomed the move, but warned that it should “in no way be seen as rewarding those who attempt to enter the country illegally,” according to a member of government who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the statement was not

Far-right police officers suspended in Germany after sharing Hitler pictures

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

T

wenty-nine German police officers have been suspended from duty on suspicion of sharing images of Adolf Hitler and violent neo-Nazi propaganda in at least five online chat groups, German authorities said Wednesday, the latest in a series of cases of far-right infiltration in Germany’s police and military.

Herbert Reul, interior minister of the western state of North-Rhine Westphalia, where the chats were discovered, called the discovery a “disgrace.”

Speaking at a news conference Wednesday, Reul described the images that were shared among officers as “farright extremist propaganda” of the “ugliest, most despicable, neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant” kind.

Police raided the homes of 14 of the 29 suspended officers, most of whom stand accused of actively sharing content that included, among other things, a fictional image of a refugee in a gas chamber.

Some of the chats have existed for years, and at least one dates back to the early days of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of migrants to Germany in 2015, officials said.

officially issued by the prime minster’s office.

“Rather,” the statement said, “it brings back to the European debate the issue of the relocation of refugees and of providing relief for countries of first entry ahead of the proposals of the European Commission for a common agreement for migration and asylum to be presented next week.”

Seibert said the German government remained “committed to a more far-reaching European solution with other welcoming member states.” Should an agreement be reached, he said, Germany “would also participate to an appropriate extent in accordance with the size of our country.”

Under an EU agreement, Greece keeps migrants in refugee camps until their applications for asylum are processed — it can take more than a year — rather than let them pass through to the wealthier northern countries that most of them hope to reach.

Last week, blazes destroyed the largest of those camps, Moria, on the island of Lesbos, leaving about 12,000 people, including 4,000 children, stranded without shelter or sanitation.

Charles Michel, president of the European Council, visited Lesbos on Tuesday in what he called an expression of solidarity with the migrants as well as the local Greeks and humanitarian workers who have been supporting them. He called on all the bloc’s members to be more committed to helping to solve the problem.

“All European countries must mobilize their support for countries such as Greece that are on the front lines of the migration crisis,” Michel said. “There is no miracle solution when it comes to migration. We need coherent measures based on the values that bring us together.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

17

As U.N. turns 75, the celebration is muted by calamity and conflict

By RICK GLADSTONE

W

orldwide contagion, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and a warming planet — not to mention rising hunger, growing legions of refugees, xenophobic bombast from strongmen leaders and a new cold war between the United States and China.

The United Nations is about to celebrate its birth in 1945 from the ruins of World War II, although “celebrate” might seem an odd choice of word amid the long list of current global woes and the organization’s own challenges.

So the marking of the anniversary will be muted, and not only because world leaders will be unable to gather in person to raise a glass — the pandemic has reduced the General Assembly beginning this week to virtual meetings. As the world body turns 75, it also faces profound questions about its own effectiveness and even its relevance.

“The U.N. is weaker than it should be,” said Mary Robinson, a former U.N. high commissioner for human rights and the first woman to become president of Ireland.

When the United Nations was founded by the Allied victors, the goal was to avert another descent into another global apocalypse. And for all its shortcomings, the organization that Eleanor Roosevelt called “our greatest hope for future peace” has at least helped achieve that.

As he looked ahead toward convening this year’s General Assembly, Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized the long view. The values embedded in the U.N. Charter, he said, have prevented “the scourge of a Third World War many had feared.”

Still, the organization is struggling like perhaps never before.

While it is the leading provider of humanitarian aid, and U.N. peacekeepers operate in more than dozen unstable areas, the United Nations has been unable to bring an end to the protracted wars in Syria, Yemen or Libya. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nearly as old as the United Nations itself.

U.N. statistics show that the number of people forcibly displaced worldwide has doubled over the past decade to 80 million. The number suffering acute hunger is expected to nearly double by year’s end to more than a quarter billion, with the first famines of the coronavirus era lurking at the world’s doorstep.

Guterres’ entreaty for a global cease-fire to help combat the coronavirus has gone largely unheeded. His plea for contributions to a $10 billion emergency coronavirus response plan to help the neediest had, as of last week, been met with commitments totaling just a quarter of the goal. That response “barely justifies the descrip-

tion of ‘tepid,’ ” said Mark Lowcock, the top U.N. relief official.

The United Nations, which has grown from 50 members 75 years ago to 193 members and a global staff of 44,000, was intended at its inception to provide a forum in which countries large and small believed they had a meaningful voice.

But its basic structure gives little real power to the main body, the General Assembly, and the most to the World War II victors — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — with each wielding a veto on the 15-seat Security Council as permanent members. The council is empowered to impose economic sanctions and is the only U.N. entity permitted to deploy military force.

No permanent member seems willing to alter the power structure. The outcome is chronic Security Council deadlocks on many issues, often pitting the United States against not only China and Russia but also against U.S. allies.

It is not only on questions of war and cease-fires where the United Nations is struggling for results.

The Sustainable Development Goals, 17 U.N. objectives aimed at eliminating inequities that include poverty, gender bias and illiteracy by 2030, are imperiled. Barbara Adams, chairwoman of the Global Policy Forum, a U.N. monitoring group, told a conference in July that the objectives were “seriously off track” even before the pandemic, according to PassBlue, a news site that covers the United Nations.

U.N. veterans say multilateralism — solving problems together, a tenet of the organization’s charter — increasingly collides with principles in the same charter emphasizing national sovereignty and nonintervention in a country’s internal affairs.

The result is often delays of aid or denial of U.N. access to humanitarian crises, whether in delivering supplies to displaced Syrians, investigating evidence of Rohingya massacres in Myanmar or helping sick children in Venezuela.

Carrie Booth Walling, a political-science professor at Albion College and an expert on U.N. humanitarian interventions, said the turning inward of many countries afflicted by the virus might bode badly for the United Nations and the diplomacy it embodies.

“What is really frightening at this moment,” Walling said, is “the state of multilateralism in general, and whether the world’s governments and people will see the value of multilateral cooperation.”

The ascendance of autocratic-minded leaders has presented further challenges.

President Donald Trump has been a frequent U.N. critic, rejecting notions of global governance and complaining about what he sees as wasteful

spending on a budget that totals roughly $9.5 billion annually, including $6.5 billion for peacekeeping operations.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has called the U.N.’s Human Rights Council a “communist meeting place.” Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has railed against U.N. policy protecting refugees. President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has expressed fury over a U.N. human rights inquiry into his war on drugs.

Under Trump’s “America First” approach, the United States intends to withdraw from the World Health Organization, with Trump criticizing its coronavirus response and calling it a mouthpiece for China. Trump also has abandoned or slashed support for U.N. agencies, including the U.N. Population Fund, the Human Rights Council and the agency that aids Palestinians classified as refugees.

While the United States has been lashing out, China has maneuvered to assert more control at the United Nations, taking leadership positions in agencies that include the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the International Telecommunications Union and the Human Rights Council.

A May 2019 study, “People’s Republic of the United Nations,” by the Center for New American Security, a bipartisan research group, suggested China’s U.N. actions were part of its effort to redefine how such institutions are run, shifting away from Western concepts of democracy and human rights.

China’s U.N. reach extended deeper this

year when Chinese candidates were chosen, over U.S. opposition, to lead the Food and Agriculture Organization, to join a panel that chooses investigators for the Human Rights Council, and to become a judge on a U.N.-affiliated tribunal that adjudicates Law of the Sea disputes.

President Xi Jinping of China has exhorted subordinates “to take an active part in leading the reform of the global governance system.”

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Kelly Craft, has insisted she is confronting the Chinese — telling a Fox News interviewer last month, for example, that she raises human rights issues in China “at every opportunity we have in the Security Council.”

Still, current and former U.N. officials say Trump’s isolationist behavior has hurt U.S. influence at the United Nations, even as the United States remains vital as the host country and biggest single contributor. They see an emboldened China asserting itself in contested areas of the South China Sea, suppressing dissent in Hong Kong, interning 1 million Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, and lending aggressively to the needy countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

“If the United States pulls its cards out of the game, that leaves more scope for China,” said Edward Mortimer, who was the chief speechwriter for former Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “Now China is behaving in an incredibly heavy-handed and provocative way, and has a lot of countries worried.”

President Donald Trump meets with representatives from United Nations Security Council member countries at the White House on Dec. 5, 2019. The United Nations, created in the wake of one world war, was aimed at preventing another, but a celebration of its accomplishments has been overshadowed by a pandemic and rising world tensions.

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Thursday, September 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Which party represents the racial future?

By ROSS DOUTHAT

D

onald Trump’s coalition in 2016 was an archaism, a throwback — the last gasp of a fading white America, a last dance with the voting blocs that once delivered Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan their landslides, a resentment-soaked attempt to maintain the power that white Christians once took for granted even as its demographic basis slips away. The Democratic Party’s coalition, on the other hand, looks like the American future — a Californian kaleidoscope of diversity, a multiethnic majority that only voter suppression and the rural bias of the Senate can keep at bay.

This analysis is liberal cliche, but it has become cliche because it fit the trends of 2016 so well. Trump’s coalition really was made up of the old, white and religious to an unusual degree; his racial and identitarian appeals were balder than almost any Republican predecessor’s; and his party’s current share of power does depend on the structure of the Senate and the Electoral College rather than majority support.

It seems increasingly possible, though, that Trump will lose the 2020 election with a somewhat different coalition than the one he won with four years ago. Last week in a Fox News poll (whose relative closeness inspired heartburn in my Twitter feed), Joe Biden led Trump 51% to 46%, meaning that the president earned about the same prospective vote share as he won in 2016. But in the poll, Biden led by 9 points among seniors, a group Trump won by 9 points last time. Meanwhile, Trump reached 41% with Hispanics, which would be the highest share

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for any Republican nominee in decades.

Both of the Fox demographic numbers are likely outliers, but a more modest version of the Hispanics-for-Trump trend shows up in a lot of polling. Win or lose, the whiteness of Trump’s Republican coalition is likely to decrease and the racial polarization of the electorate to modestly diminish.

This development, if it comes, will be a provisional indicator, not proof of any certain future — any more than the composition of Trump’s 2016 coalition proved anything definite about the world to come. But in a year defined by left-wing racial-justice activism, unexpected Republican strength with a nonwhite voting bloc would hint at the risks for progressives in their own kind of archaism, their own politics of nostalgia.

If the essence of Trumpian nostalgia is a view that the United States can be governed as the conservative white-Christian country it hasn’t been for years, the essence of liberal nostalgia is the idea that the politics of racial redress in 2020 can simply pick up where the racial politics of 1965 left off — as though the racial divisions in 21st-century America looked like the color line of 50 or 60 years ago.

This idea, implicit or explicit, is woven through the anti-racist arguments elevated since the killing of George Floyd. The centering of slavery’s arrival in America as an alternative to 1776, the depiction of “whiteness” as not just a useful concept but the central category of American experience, the evocations of Reconstruction as a model for the 2020s, the capitalization of “Black” (and in some cases “White” as well) and the collapse of all nonwhite experience into a shared story of racist oppression: In all these ways and more the liberal narrative increasingly assumes a bifurcated America, with four centuries of white privilege on one side and the history of slavery and segregation as the defining minority experience on the other. And the crucial political question, then, becomes whether enough white people can be persuaded to cross this color line and join what Adam Serwer, in an Atlantic essay, calls the first potential “anti-racist majority in American history.”

But much of this bifurcation belongs to the past, no less than Trump’s white-Christian pastoralism. Specifically, it belongs to the country that existed at the time of the civil rights movement: a country with low in-migration rates and long-standing restrictions on non-European immigration, a country that had just passed through a 40-year project to assimilate Central and Eastern European immigrants while imposing segregation and exclusion for citizens of African descent, a country of two colors where 88% of the population was categorized as white.

That is not the America that exists today. Not just the scale but the sheer diversity of post-1968 immigration has made our racial categories more complex, and in the process substantially changed what it means to have a debate about whiteness or racial redress or desegregation. And a liberalism that tries to collapse these complexities back into a binary is likely to end up with an agenda as anachronistic as Make America Great Again and a coalition no less vulnerable than the Republicans to the effects of demographic change.

Some of those vulnerabilities can be distilled into pointed questions. What does a program of school desegregation look like in a country where white kids are a downward-trending minority in

the public school system? Can an anti-racist liberalism maintain a system of affirmative action that obviously discriminates against the country’s fastest-growing minority group, Asian Americans, in order to achieve its goals of ethnic balance? Can unwieldy academic categories — “Latinx” for a diverse Spanish-speaking population that evinces little interest in the term, “BIPOC” for everyone from Native Americans to Pakistani immigrants to the millions of children of interracial marriages — create durable political identities that subsume wildly divergent ethnic experiences? What happens to the votes of American Jews in a political left that increasingly regards them as a privileged cohort rather than as an oppressed one?

And finally, is it really possible to sustain an anti-racist political coalition whose most important white participants, the members of the intelligentsia and professional classes, are the institutional and often lineal heirs of the pre-1960s white Protestant establishment? By any reasonable measure, this inheritance means that the white liberals most invested in anti-racism have more white privilege themselves than the heirs of rural fundamentalists and immigrant Catholics who currently vote for Trump. Political coalitions need an out-group, an antagonist, but what happens when the coalition’s internal logic makes one of its inmost in-groups an enemy as well?

The theoreticians of anti-racism have answers to these questions, but many of those answers promise to save their theories rather than their political project. If an anti-racist coalition loses power because too many Hispanics or Asian Americans abandon it, that will just prove the power of whiteness to co-opt, suborn and seduce. Likewise, if the current progressive coalition sustains itself by limiting the demands of anti-racism to symbolic rituals of white self-abnegation, with material reparation perpetually postponed, then that will just show the resilience of privileged “nice white liberal” racism.

But it’s also possible that if liberalism’s hope of a pan-ethnic majority falls apart, then the sweeping theories of whiteness will themselves bear an important share of blame — because their reductionist approach to a variegated social landscape makes unexpected reactions like a Hispanic drift toward Trump more likely.

Alternatively, some of the most immediate and reasonable demands of anti-racism — from reformed police departments to shorter voting lines — can probably be achieved with a racial politics that’s more transactional and incremental, and therefore more durable, than the sweeping rhetoric of Reconstruction and reparation and white privilege. (As, indeed, a limited form of criminal justice reform was achieved even under Donald Trump.)

This was the original promise of the Biden candidacy: a continuation of the incrementalism of the Obama era, which disappointed many activists and intellectuals but still has plenty of minority support.

This summer’s ideological revolution within liberalism has made such incrementalism seem like cowardice rather than prudence. But I still suspect that the pan-ethnic political majority of 2030 or 2040 will belong to the party — right or left — that figures out how to approach racial issues as a normal and even slightly boring kind of politics, shorn of nostalgia and utopianism, and sensitive to both the demands of racial justice and the ever-increasing racial complexity of America as it actually exists.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

19

Catalogan como irresponsable intención del PNP de crear agencia con nombramientos “atornillados” Por THE STAR

E

l senador del Partido Popular Democrático (PPD), Aníbal José Torres y el candidato a representante por acumulación por el PPD, Gabriel López Arrieta criticaron el miércoles, la supuesta creación de una nueva agencia gubernamental por parte del gobierno del Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP).

Alegaron que el monto de salario propuesto para el director ejecutivo y el director ejecutivo asociado es mayor a un cuarto de millón de dólares.

“Estos nuevos puestos se suman a otros cientos que pretenden atornillar en las diferentes agencias. El gobierno del PNP pretende que la Oficina Central de Recuperación, Reconstrucción y Resiliencia de Puerto Rico (“COR3”) se perpetúe por 10 años, con un director y un subdirector nombrados por este gobierno, quienes devengarán más de un cuarto de millón de dólares, con la responsabilidad de la administración de todos los programas de subvenciones federales relacionados con emergencias y

desastres. La entidad aprobará cualquier política o regulación relacionada con la recuperación”, denunció Torres en comunicación escrita.

“Las políticas serán aplicables a todas las entidades gubernamentales, corporaciones públicas y municipios que forman parte de la recuperación. Aquí queda demostrado cuáles son las prioridades trastocadas de un Gobierno caracterizado por la insensibilidad, la incapacidad, la incompetencia e imprudencia al proponer la creación de una nueva agencia”, añadió.

Por su parte, López Arrieta criticó: “El COR3 es una entidad creada mediante Orden Ejecutiva y nadie en Puerto Rico muestra satisfacción con su desempeño.

Ni los alcaldes, ni entidades no gubernamentales. El país es testigo de la lentitud y la burocracia en los procesos de reconstrucción y recuperación del país.

Todavía los alcaldes y los ciudadanos viven los estragos causados por el paso de los huracanes Irma y María. Atender esas necesidades debe ser la prioridad del gobierno y no el atornillar empleados”.

Torres resaltó: “Esta legislación bajo ninguna circunstancia debió haberse presentado e incluido como parte de la Sesión Extraordinaria. Es una propuesta inaceptable y una falta de respeto al pueblo de Puerto Rico, que de facto plantea muchísimas reservas sobre algunos nombramientos presentados con

el interés de atornillar posiciones en el gobierno”. Ambos portavoces destacaron que la creación de esta agencia se suma a los atornillados en la Ofician del Contralor, el Negociado de Telecomunicaciones de PR, la Junta de Subastas de la Administración de Servicios Generales, entre otras.”

Pierluisi afirma que nominado para ser Contralor no tiene las calificaciones para el puesto Por THE STAR

E

l candidato a la gobernación por el Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP) , Pedro Pierluisi, rechazó este miércoles la nominación del secretario de Asuntos Públicos y Política Pública de La Fortaleza, Osvaldo Soto García, como Contralor de Puerto Rico.

“Puerto Rico está pasando por momentos históricos y necesitamos las personas correctas para toda posición en nuestro gobierno, y la Contraloría es una posición clave. Como Gobernador yo siempre me voy a asegurar de nombrar al más cualificado para cada puesto y a base de la información que tengo, el nominado no reúne las cualidades necesarias para la

posición”, dijo Pierluisi en declaraciones escritas.

“Como dije ayer (martes), no cuestiono las buenas intenciones de la gobernadora (Wanda Vázquez Garced) o del nominado y reitero que el puesto de Contralor requiere unas cualificaciones específicas, incluyendo experiencia probada en materia contable y de fiscalización”, añadió Pierluisi.

“La gobernadora tiene la potestad de hacer sus nombramientos y nuestra Asamblea Legislativa tiene que proveer su consejo y consentimiento. Yo respeto los procesos y confío en que la Cámara y el Senado harán una evaluación justa y exhaustiva como corresponde”, concluyó el candidato a la gobernación por el PNP.

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Thursday, September 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Angel Deradoorian channels cosmic energy (and Ozzy Osbourne)

By JENN PELLY

A

ngel Deradoorian needed my birth information.

Speaking over FaceTime from her plant-filled home in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles, the amiable 34-year-old musician was giving me an abbreviated version of the Vedic astrology readings she has offered since studying this form of astronomical inquiry in 2018. Occasional glimpses of her forearm revealed a tattoo depicting the phases of the moon.

“You’ve got a pretty good-looking chart. Not too much hell being raised,” she said dryly, parsing the celestial facts on her computer screen indicating that since 2016 I have been undergoing a period of deep transformation.

“You can make a lot of change when you let go for a little while.”

Having once quit a high-profile band — art-pop ensemble Dirty Projectors, in which she was a bassist and vocalist from 2006 until late 2011 — to embark on her own musical journey, Deradoorian seems well suited to advise on matters of risk and growth. She has since become a compelling presence in independent music: capable of channeling mystical knowledge into her neo-psychedelic solo records, released under her last name, as well as transforming into Ozzy Osbourne for her role in Black Sabbath Cover Band Rehearsal, an indie-rock tribute act that also features Nick Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

“It’s a different form of meditative music,” she said of singing as a metal god.

To talk about self-actualization is one thing, but Deradoorian’s work embodies it, especially in the earthy tones, churning drones and motorik grooves that comprise her second solo record, “Find the Sun,” due Friday. The result sounds like Can with an acid-folk singer probing deep spiritual themes.

“I’ve always been a big questioner of life,” she said.

“What I’m interested in is becoming self-aware.”

In the years since her first solo album, “The Expanding Flower Planet,” in 2015, Deradoorian had been largely nomadic and often alone. While the constant movement helped her embrace a more “loose and undefined” approach to songwriting, she has been open about her struggles with finances and self-worth — the realities of life for a working musician.

“I didn’t have a band, I didn’t have a partner, I didn’t have a label for part of that time, and I didn’t have any money,” she said. “I did move into solitude, away from people, very far away.”

Deradoorian was at a Vipassana retreat last summer — in complete silence for 10 days — when she was gripped by realizations about her then-in-process record. One was that its aesthetic should be raw and spontaneous, akin to real life. Another was that she should ask her friend Samer Ghadry, a sound healer and jazz drummer, to play on it.

The musician Angel Deradoorian in Los Angeles, Sept.

11, 2020. Deradoorian quit Dirty Projectors and searched for her own voice and a new musical family — she found them among the collaborators on her latest album of neo-psychedelic rock and in a metal cover band.

Ghadry’s longtime collaborator Dave Harrington, whom he met while studying at Brown, joined them.

“I wanted to go into the studio with musicians who know how to improvise,” Deradoorian said. “There’s an element of error or sloppiness, but it was reflective of this desire to not control things too much, and to let the environment be intertwined in the recording.” She hoped for her singing, too, to be “less flashy” and more vulnerable. The nine-minute jam “The Illuminator” features congas, bells and Deradoorian playing the flute and intoning “The power of intensity/The power of radiance/The power of delight!”

“I can write a pop song,” she said, “but I like music that can flow and change, with a root to return to.”

Deradoorian grew up in Sacramento, California, the daughter of artists; her father is a painter and saxophonist, and her mother is a visual artist and wire sculptor. After leaving high school early, at 16, to tour with a handful of indie bands, she moved to Brooklyn, New York, where, in

her earliest months, she was a member of no less than six projects. At one point, she played alongside Jack Antonoff as a multi-instrumentalist in his band Steel Train.

She joined Dirty Projectors when she was 20. She had met its singer and guitarist, Amber Coffman, in Sacramento, and after they crossed paths in Brooklyn, Coffman invited her into the band — led by Dave Longstreth — as they prepared to introduce the virtuosic art-rock harmonies of “Bitte Orca” to the world in 2009. Coffman and Deradoorian’s voices were crucial components of its sound; they’re pictured on the cover.

In an interview, Longstreth called Deradoorian “a hugely defining part” of her era of Dirty Projectors. “She’s an epic personality,” he said. “You get her sense of humor, but also her sense of concentration and her seriousness.”

Dirty Projectors’ marathon practices could last 12 hours, and Deradoorian said she has held on to the discipline of those years.

“I had to learn to sing with more conviction,” she said. “I started to understand how versatile the voice can be.”

After Deradoorian left the band, she moved to Baltimore, worked odd jobs and played in Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, a side project started by Animal Collective member Dave Portner. She slowly wrote her own songs, throwing many of them away.

“Coming out of bands where I was in a position of support, and also being a woman, I did not feel like I deserved to focus on myself and my own desires,” she said of this challenging creative period. “I was so used to being there for other people. It took me a long time to really be OK with doing that.”

But Deradoorian says she is doing her most meaningful work now. Amid the lyrical images of singing bowls and infinite skies on “Find the Sun,” she narrates her breakthrough on “Corsican Shores”: “Wanted bad just to be somebody/Didn’t see that I was somebody/Now I know that I am.”

And for all of the existential questing at the heart of her songs, the pure joy of Black Sabbath Cover Band Rehearsal has offered her spiritual sustenance, too. There are even echoes of its heavy, blown-out guitars in the self-possessed sound of “Find the Sun.” “That is a perfect band,” Deradoorian said. “It has been a great lesson that I didn’t know I needed.”

She also attributed her perseverance to an ongoing dialogue around art within her strong community of musicians — like drummer Greg Fox and guitarist Ben Greenberg, whom she collaborated with last year performing Terry Riley’s minimalist classic, “A Rainbow in Curved Air” — and friends like drone metal musician Stephen O’Malley.

“I feel like I finally found my closest musical family,” she said. “That is the reason I can keep doing this.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

21

Let’s see: Outdoor theater is welcome, but sightlines are vital

By LAURA COLLINS-HUGHES

T

he nearest audience member to me on the August evening I saw the socially distanced “Godspell” revival in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, was a dog lying cozily on a blanket next to its human, who sat in a chair.

My own seat was at least 15 feet from them, outside the tent where the actors were acting and the rest of the spectators spectating. Happy as I was to be seeing a show in person at all, I probably wouldn’t have minded the isolation if I hadn’t had such an obstructed view.

I am a sightline fiend, but I wasn’t just being persnickety.

Even after I was allowed to switch at intermission to an empty seat at the back, actors did whole solos I couldn’t see, what with the tent poles and the lighting truss and the low-mounted speakers in the way. Looking around, I realized there seemed to be lots of partial views. Which is not great when tickets aren’t cheap, even if that’s unavoidable with seating capacity severely limited by the state.

I know, I know: It’s horribly poor form to say anything negative about that Berkshire Theatre Group production, a muchchronicled Actors’ Equity test case for coronavirus-safe stage practices that has valiantly navigated a shifting labyrinth of public health rules merely to exist.

And I realize that figuring out the geometry of the seat maps — where to put parties of assorted sizes, each far from the stage and one another — must be an enormous headache even without sightlines taken into consideration.

But still.

I felt the kind of alarm that seizes critics when they see an art form they love careening in the wrong direction — meeting necessary safety regulations in a way that hinders design, placing unintended obstacles between the actors and the audience.

(Which, actually, a critic might not notice from press seats, which are likely to be among the best in the house. I went as a civilian.)

My worry wasn’t about that single show, anyway. I was worried because outdoor spaces are pretty much what theater has until indoor performance is safe again. Making them work for the audience while following the rules is tricky, and crucial to get right — because even people lockdown-starved for theater will only indulge a show so far.

Not to be alarmist, but it seemed to me like a design emergency.

“It absolutely is,” set designer Rachel Hauck agreed when I got her on the phone from Pittsburgh, where she was putting her minimalist touch on a drive-in concert staging of Jill Sobule and Liza Birkenmeier’s “F*ck 7th Grade” at City Theatre.

I wanted to talk with accomplished designers to help me think through the challenges that shows all over the country are facing. (None of the designers, by the way, had seen the “Godspell” revival. All were clear that they meant no disparagement of anyone’s work.)

Like every other stage professional who had a full-throttle career before the pandemic brought the industry to a screeching halt, Hauck — who won a Tony Award for “Hadestown” just last year — has been adjusting to the scarcity of now.

“I am of course quietly relieved to hear,” she said, meaning from me, “yeah, the design elements do matter.”

Responding to the space When drag artist Jeffery Roberson learned that he would be performing poolside on an ad hoc stage in Provincetown, Massa-

The Berkshire Theater Group’s socially distanced production of “Godspell” in Pittsfield, Mass., Aug. 7, 2020. It might seem churlish to criticize productions improvising through a pandemic, but for audiences taking the chance, design makes a difference. chusetts, this summer, he responded by ordering all new costumes for his solo cabaret show, including an elaborate swimsuit so he could exit by way of the pool.

Set designer Mimi Lien, a Tony winner for the immersive Broadway production of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” — a show she had previously designed in a lavishly decorated tent off-Broadway — said it’s vital to assess the forces operating in a given space and proceed accordingly.

“Try not to replicate a normal theater in some other space,” she said. “Right now what we should all be doing is just responding as best we can to what’s in front of us. So if you’re in a garden, take advantage of the garden.”

One of the most delightful pieces of design I encountered this summer was, in fact, in a garden: Normandy Sherwood’s “Beast Visit,” by the company the Drunkard’s Wife, in Brooklyn, New York. But it wasn’t only the way it harnessed the environment.

As we entered, each person was asked to choose a bright yellow or hot pink hoop skirt from a rack and put it on, then stand in one of the individual circles around the edges of the space.

Designed by Sherwood, the skirts were charming to look at and fun to wear, swaying pleasingly when we moved. They also pulled off the neat feat of visually uniting us while keeping us physically separate.

At Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey, the simple business of painting 8-foot circles on the lawn and placing them 6 feet apart was a comfortable approximation of a normal summer experience. And who doesn’t want a little extra space when they’re watching a show from the grass?

I watched another show from a field on Cape Cod: a drivein circus — yes, I know that’s peculiar — where I was instructed to park my diminutive rented VW Golf behind a hulking SUV with

its hatch up. I declined.

And I spent an hour lugging my laptop through GreenWood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, to listen to Gelsey Bell’s “Cairns,” a beautiful sound walk with a nagging design flaw. It uses a digital host, Bandcamp, that makes it hard for anyone to download the recording to an iPhone — right at the outset, a roadblock between the art and a chunk of the prospective audience.

Hope in an odd time In theater’s weird, sometimes flailing semi-limbo, creative minds are confronted with such a panoply of restrictions that there is a danger of compromising too much, as Obie-winning set designer Arnulfo Maldonado told me.

“A lot of plays could be done with actors, minimal props,” he said. “It’s just a matter of at what point does it start doing a disservice to the audience to really strip it away?”

He is right about that — though Hauck, in Pittsburgh, decided that her own best option with limited resources was simply to light a steel mill as the backdrop, “shape the space visually and make it functional for the band.”

“It still takes a really savvy design eye to make the most out of what you’ve got here,” Hauck said, “but it’s a huge amount of also, like, ‘And that’s all we can do.’ ” There will be, I suspect, a lot of similar judgment calls as theater stumbles its way through this crisis — and I still think there is a danger that the expertise of designers will be minimized.

But you know what else? We’re also going to see productions responding to restrictions in exciting ways. Such as the Billie Holiday Theater’s superbly designed reading of “12 Angry Men … and Women: The Weight of the Wait.” Aesthetically, it made me hopeful.

They filmed it, with five cameras; it’s on YouTube through Election Day. Give it a watch. Maybe it’ll make you hopeful, too.

22

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Savor summer longer with this cherry tomato pasta Spicy and saucy cherry tomato pasta Yield: 4 servings Total time: 25 minutes Ingredients: Kosher salt and black pepper 4 tablespoons olive oil 3 tablespoons drained jarred capers 3 tablespoons tomato paste 3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced 1 to 2 teaspoons red-pepper flakes (optional) 16 ounces orecchiette or other shaped pasta 1 1/2 pounds cherry tomatoes, halved 1/2 packed cup thinly sliced fresh basil, plus small whole leaves, for garnish Fresh ricotta, shaved ricotta salata, or grated pecorino or Parmesan, for garnish (optional)

Spicy and saucy cherry tomato pasta in New York on Nov. 25, 2019. This simple recipe provides a burst of sunshine any time of year.

By ALEXA WEIBEL

S

eparated from perfection by nothing more than a pinch of salt, ripe tomatoes inspire a very particular type of summer joy. In the last few weeks of the season, many of us consume them ravenously, as if storing sunshine for the cold months ahead.

You’ll still find plenty at their peak right now, but even when the best of the summer tomatoes are gone, cherry tomatoes can be counted on year-round to provide more texture than canned tomatoes and more taste than larger varieties.

“The big thing about cherries is that they pack more flavor than their larger brethren,” said Harry J. Klee, who studies tomato fruit development at the University of Florida. “Think of a larger tomato as the same amount of flavor with a lot more water.”

This spicy and saucy tomato pasta leans upon that diminutive fruit for an easy weeknight meal that delivers bright flavor with minimal effort. The sauce starts with just two fresh ingredients — cherry toma-

toes and basil — and is finished with tomato paste and salty capers for a robust punch.

Tomato paste fortifies the fruit’s flavor, the same way a combination of fresh lemon juice and zest might intensify the flavors of a citrus dessert. The technique here is simple: While your pasta water boils, heat some olive oil, squeeze in some tomato paste, and cook until it darkens from brick red to a plummy shade of red wine. This effectively caramelizes the paste, exaggerating the tomato’s natural sweetness.

Sweat some garlic and red-pepper flakes — or Aleppo pepper, chiles de árbol, gochujang or any other spicy condiment you have on hand — then simmer with cherry tomatoes and a splash of pasta water, and your pasta sauce is ready in 20 minutes.

Toss in your cooked pasta — orecchiette will cup everything nicely, but any shaped pasta will suffice — and some torn basil, top with crispy fried capers and a dollop of ricotta, and you’ve got a quick pasta dish that will taste like summer no matter what season it is.

Preparation: 1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat.

2. In a large nonstick skillet, heat 2 tablespoons oil over medium-high. Pat the capers dry, then add them to the skillet and cook, stirring frequently, until crisp, 3 to 4 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the capers to a paper towel-lined plate.

3. Add the tomato paste to the skillet and cook over medium-high, stirring frequently, until tomato paste darkens in color and deepens in flavor, about 2 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium, add the remaining 2 tablespoons oil, the garlic and red-pepper flakes, if using, and cook, stirring frequently, until garlic is softened and fragrant, about 2 minutes.

4. Add the pasta to the boiling water and reduce heat to medium. Cook according to package instructions until al dente.

5. While the pasta cooks, add the cherry tomatoes to the skillet, season with salt and pepper and cook over medium-high, stirring, 5 minutes. Add 2/3 cup pasta cooking water from the pot and cook, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes start to fall apart and the liquid becomes saucy, about 10 minutes.

6. Drain the pasta, and transfer it to the skillet with the sauce to combine. (If your skillet is too full to accommodate the pasta, you can transfer the cooked pasta back to the pot, then add the sauce to combine.) Stir in half the basil and season to taste with salt and pepper.

7. Divide among plates or bowls and top with capers and remaining basil, plus cheese and whole basil leaves. Serve immediately.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

23

The risks of the prescribing cascade

By JANE E. BRODY

T

he medical mistakes that befell the 87-year-old mother of a North Carolina pharmacist should not happen to anyone, and my hope is that this column will keep you and your loved ones from experiencing similar, all-too-common mishaps.

As the pharmacist, Kim H. DeRhodes of Charlotte, North Carolina, recalled, it all began when her mother went to the emergency room two weeks after a fall because she had lingering pain in her back and buttocks. Told she had sciatica, the elderly woman was prescribed prednisone and a muscle relaxant. Three days later, she became delirious, returned to the ER, was admitted to the hospital, and was discharged two days later when her drug-induced delirium resolved.

A few weeks later, stomach pain prompted a third trip to the ER and a prescription for an antibiotic and proton-pump inhibitor. Within a month, she developed severe diarrhea lasting several days. Back to the ER, and this time she was given a prescription for dicyclomine to relieve intestinal spasms, which triggered another bout of delirium and three more days in the hospital. She was discharged after lab tests and imaging studies revealed nothing abnormal.

“Review of my mother’s case highlights separate but associated problems: likely misdiagnosis and inappropriate prescribing of medications,” DeRhodes wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine. “Diagnostic errors led to the use of prescription drugs that were not indicated and caused my mother further harm.

The muscle relaxer and prednisone led to her first incidence of delirium. Prednisone likely led to the gastrointestinal issues, and the antibiotic likely led to the diarrhea, which led to the prescribing of dicyclomine, which led to the second incidence of delirium.”

The doctors who wrote the woman’s prescriptions apparently never consulted the Beers Criteria, a list created by the American Geriatrics Society of drugs often unsafe for the elderly.

In short, DeRhodes’ mother was a victim of two medical problems that are too often overlooked by examining doctors and unrecognized by families. The first is giving an 87-year-old medications known to be unsafe for the elderly; the second is a costly and often frightening medically induced condition called “a prescribing cascade” that starts with druginduced side effects which are then viewed as a new ailment and treated with yet another drug or drugs that can cause still other side effects.

I’d like to think that none of this would have happened if instead of going to the ER the older woman had seen her primary care doctor. But experts told me that no matter where patients are treated, they are not immune to getting caught in a prescribing cascade. The problem also can happen to people who self-treat with over-the-counter or herbal remedies. Nor is it limited to the elderly; young people can also become victims of a prescribing cascade, DeRhodes said.

“Doctors are often taught to think of everything as a new problem,” said Dr. Timothy Anderson, internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “They have to start thinking about whether the patient is on medication and whether the

A medically induced condition called “a prescribing cascade” starts with drug-induced side effects that are often viewed as a new ailment and treated with yet another drug or drugs that can cause still other side effects. medication is the problem.”

“Doctors are very good at prescribing but not so good at deprescribing,” DeRhodes said. “And a lot of times patients are given a prescription without first trying something else.”

A popular treatment for high blood pressure, which afflicts a huge proportion of older people, is a common precipitant of the prescribing cascade, Anderson said.

He cited a Canadian study of 41,000 older adults with hypertension who were prescribed drugs called calcium channel blockers. Within a year after treatment began, nearly 1 person in 10 was given a diuretic to treat leg swelling caused by the first drug. Many were inappropriately prescribed a loop diuretic that Anderson said can result in dehydration, kidney problems, lightheadedness and falls.

Type 2 diabetes is another common condition in which medications are often improperly prescribed to treat drug-induced side effects, said Lisa M. McCarthy, doctor of pharmacy at the University of Toronto who directed the Canadian study.

Recognizing a side effect for what it is can be hampered when the effect doesn’t happen for weeks or even months after a drug is started. While patients taking opioids for pain may readily recognize constipation as a consequence, McCarthy said that over time, patients taking metformin for diabetes can develop diarrhea and may self-treat with Lomotil, which in turn can cause dizziness and confusion.

Dr. Paula Rochon, geriatrician at Women’s College Hospital in Ontario, said patients taking a drug called a cholinesterase inhibitor to treat early dementia can develop urinary incontinence, which is then treated with another drug that can worsen the patient’s confusion.

Complicating matters is the large number of drugs some people take.

“Older adults frequently take many medications, with two-fifths taking five or more,” Anderson wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine. In cases of polypharmacy, as this is called, it can be hard to determine which, if any, of the drugs a person is taking is the cause of the current symptom.

Rochon emphasized that a prescribing cascade can happen to anybody. She said, “Everyone needs to consider the possibility every time a drug is prescribed.”

Before accepting a prescription, she recommended that patients or their caregivers should ask the doctor a series of questions, starting with “Am I experiencing a symptom that could be a side effect of a drug I’m taking?” Follow-up questions should include: Is this new drug being used to treat a side effect?

Is there a safer drug available than the one I’m taking?

Could I take a lower dose of the prescribed drug?

Most important, Rochon said, patients should ask “Do I need to take this drug at all?”

24 ochocientos trece (4,813), inscripción quinta (Sta). La propieESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE dad que garantiza dicho pagaré: PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE URBANA : Solar marcado con PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA el número diez (10) del Bloque SUPERIOR DE CAROLINA. “A” en fa Urbanización Villas de JOSE ALBERTO LOPEZ Loíza, sita en el Barrio CanóvaCOLON su esposa ANA nas de Loíza, Puerto Rico, con área de cuatrocientos veintiLUZ LOZADA SÁNCHEZ un dós punto treinta y seis (422.36) t/c/c ANNIE LOZADA metros cuadrados. En lindes SÁNCHEZ por el NORTE, veintitrés punto Parte Demandante Vs. cero cinco (23.05) metros, con el solar número nueve (9), por el DORAL MORTGAGE CORPORATION ahora SUR, en dieciocho punto sesenta y dos (28.62) metros y cuatro BANCO POPULAR DE punto noventa y seis (4.96) mePUERTO RICO; JOHN tros, con la calle doce (12), por DOE y RICHARD ROE el ESTE, en catorce punto nocomo posibles tenedores venta y uno (14.91) metros, con la calle dos (2), y por el OESTE, desconocidos en veinte punto cuarenta y seis Parte Demandada (20.46) metros, con el solar núCIVIL NUM. CA2020CV01841. mero once (11 ), Enclava casa.

SOBRE: CANCELACION DE Inscrita al folio uno (1) del tomo PAGARE EXTRAVIADO. EMochenta y ocho (88) de CanóPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICvanas, finca número cuatro mil TOS. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE ochocientos trece {4,813). ReAMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE gistro de la Propiedad de CaroliLOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIna Sección Tercera (III). SE LES BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO APERCIBE que, de no hacer RICO. SS. sus alegaciones responsivas a A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD la demanda dentro del término ROE COMO posibles aquí dispuesto, se les anotará la tenedores desconocidos rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, POR LA PRESENTE se les em- concediéndose el remedio soliplaza y requiere para que con- citado en la Demanda, sin más teste la demanda dentro de los citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi treinta (30) días siguientes a la firma y sello del Tribunal en Capublicación de este Edicto. Us- rolina, Puerto Rico, a 4 de septed deberá radicar su alegación tiembre de 2020. Lcda. Marilyn responsiva a través del Sistema Aponte Rodriguez, Secretaria Unificado de Manejo y Adminis- Regional. Myriam I Figueroa tración de Casos (SUMAC), al Pastrana, Sec Auxiliar. cual puede acceder utilizando la LEGAL NOTICE siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/su- ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE mac/, salvo que se presente por PUERTO RICO EN EL TRIBUderecho propio, en cuyo caso NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA deberá radicar el original de su SALA DE CAGUAS.

LEGAL NOTICE

contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de fa parte demandante, Lcda. Marjaliisa Colón Villanueva, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-843-4168. Se alega en dicho procedimiento que se extravió pagaré, según resulta de la escritura número ciento cuarenta y cinco (145) otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día trece (13) de febrero de mil novecientos noventa y nueve 91999), ante la notario Teresita Navarro García, se constituyó hipoteca en garantía de pagaré, a favor de Doral Mortgage Corporation ahora Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, o a su orden, por la suma de cincuenta y ocho mil dólares ($58,000.00), con intereses al siete punto setenta y cinco por ciento (7.75%) anual con vencimiento el primero de marzo dedos mil catorce (2014), y cuya obligación hipotecaria fue anotada fue anotada mediante la inscripción al folio noventa y uno (91) del tomo cuatrocientos cuatro (404) de Canóvanas, finca número cinco cuatro mil

@

MARILYN RAMOS

Parte Demandante Vs

LOUIS JOSEPH GAGNE

Parte Demandada Civil Núm.: CG2020RF00468.

Sala: 501. Sobre: Sobre: DIVORCIO — RUPTURA IRREPARABLE. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EEUU EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. S.S.

A: LOUIS JOSEPH GAGNE Inmate No. 83875-054 Tallahatchi County Correctional Facility C11105; 19351 US Hwy 49 North Tutwiler, MS 38963-5249

Por la presente se le notifica que la parte Demandante ha presentado ante este tribunal una Demanda de Divorcio por Ruptura Irreparable. Representa a la parte Demandante la abogada cuyo nombre y dirección se consigna a continuación: Lcda. Beatriz Cay Vázquez RUA 18,234 P.O. Box 1809,

Caguas, Puerto Rico 00726-1809 Tel. (787) 731-0526 Email: beatrizcayvazquez@gmail.com Se le apercibe que si no compareciere usted a presentar alegación sobre dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del edicto, podrá dictarse Sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado en la Demanda. Por el presente Edicto se le emplaza y requiere para que conteste la Demanda radicando el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal Superior de Puerto Rico, Sala de Caguas y notificándole con copia de dicha contestación a la abogada de la parte demandante. POR ORDEN DEL TRIBUNAL, expido el presente Edicto en Caguas, Puerto Rico hoy día 4 de septiembre de 2020. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, Secretaria General. Por: KANIA QUINTERO PEREIRA, SECRETARI AUXILIAR.

LEGAL NOTICE COMMONWEAL TH OF MASSACHUSETTS. BRISTOL, SS. SUPERIOR COURT. DOCKET NO. 2073CV00015

COMMONWEALTH v.

ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS ($100,000.00)

MA; and (2) Toe San Juan Daily Star of Caguas, Puerto Rico once a week for three consecutive weeks, the last publication to be at least 20 days before said return date of OCTOBER 14, 2020. By the Court, ( YESSAYAN, . J.) Lucia R. Butler, Assistant Clerk - Magistrate.

Dated: AUGUST 20, 2020

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

Reverse Mortgage Solutions, Inc. DEMANDANTE VS.

Sucesión de Félix Navarro Pérez, t/c/c Félix Navarro compuesta por María Navarro Pérez, Gregoria Navarro Pérez, Genoveva Navarro Pérez, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos de nombres desconocidos, Centro de Recaudaciones Municipales; y a los Estados Unidos de América

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: FA2020CV00007.

SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero y EjeORDER OF NOTICE BY PUBLI- cución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria. EMPLAZAMIENTO CATION POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNITo: All interested DOS DE AMERICA EL PREpersons who own or may SIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS have an interest in the UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE defendant monies seized ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

by the Massachusetts State Police on June 4, 2019, in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

GREETINGS: WHEREAS a civil action has been filed against the defendant monies in our Superior Court by and through Thomas M. Quinn, III, District Attomey for the Bristol District, and counsel for the Plaintiff, Michael G. Scott, Assistant District Attomey, 218 South Main Street, Fall River MA 02721. WE COMMAND YOU if you intend to intervene and assert a claim to the defendant monies, that on or before OCTOBER 14 • 2020 or within such further time as the law allows you do cause your written pleadings to be filed in the Of:fice ofthe Clerk of Court at New Bedford in the County of Bristol, in said Commonwealth.

Hereof fail not, at your peril, as otherwise said suit may be adjudged and orders entered in your absence. It appearing to this Court that no personal service of the Complaint has been made on all potential interested parties, it is ORDERED that notice of this suit be given by publishing this Order ofNotice in (1) Toe Herald News ofFall River

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

Thursday, September 17, 2020

A: Gregoria Navarro Pérez, Genoveva Navarro Pérez, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos de nombres desconocidos de la Sucesión de Félix Navarro Pérez, t/c/c Félix Navarro

POR LA PRESENTE, se les emplaza y se les notifica que se ha presentado en la Secretaria de este Tribunal la Demanda del caso del epígrafe solicitando la ejecución de hipoteca y el cobro de dinero relacionado al pagaré suscrito a favor de Urban Financial Group, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $130,500.00, con intereses computados sobre la misma desde su fecha hasta su total y completo pago a razón de la tasa de interés de 5.560% anual, la cual será ajustada mensualmente, obligándose además al pago de costas, gastos y desembolsos del litigio, más honorarios de abogados en una suma de $13,050.00, equivalente al 10% de la suma principal original. Este pagaré fue suscrito bajo el affidávit número 864 ante el notario Fernando E. Doval Santiago.

(787) 743-3346

Lo anterior surge de la hipoteca constituida mediante la escritura número 105 otorgada el 29 de mayo de 2010, ante el mismo notario público, inscrita al folio 136 del tomo 492 de Fajardo, del Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección de Fajardo. La Hipoteca Revertida grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar radicado en la Urbanización Extensión Fajardo Gardens, situada en el Barrio Quebrada Fajardo del término municipal de Fajardo, con el numero trece de la Manzana “JJ” con cabida de trecientos quince metros cuadrados con doce centimetros. En lindes por el NORTE, con el Solar catorce, distancia de veinticuatro metros; por el SUR, con el Solar doce, distancia de veinticuatro metros; por el ESTE, con los solares siete y ocho, distancia de trece metros y trece centimetros y por el OESTE, con la Calle veinticuatro distancia de trece metros y trece centimetros. Contiene una casa de concreto. Finca número 7,045, inscrita al folio 230 del tomo 198 de Fajardo. Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección de Fajardo. Se apercibe y advierte a ustedes como personas desconocidas, que deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal. De no contestar la demanda radicando el original de la contestación ante la secretaria del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Fajardo, y notificar copia de la contestación de esta a la parte demandante por conducto de su abogada, GLS LEGAL SERVICES, LLC, Atención: Lcda. Genevieve López Stipes, Dirección: P.O. Box 367308, San Juan, P.R. 009367308, Teléfono: 787-758-6550, dentro de los próximos 60 días a partir de la publicación de este emplazamiento por edicto, que será publicado una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general en la isla de Puerto Rico, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia, concediendo el remedio solicitando en la Demanda sin más citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal hoy1 de julio de 2020. Wanda I Segui, Secretaria.

Solutions, Inc.

DEMANDANTE VS.

Sucesión de Félix Navarro Pérez, t/c/c Félix Navarro compuesta por María Navarro Pérez, Gregoria Navarro Pérez, Genoveva Navarro Pérez, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal como posibles herederos de nombres desconocidos, Centro de Recaudaciones Municipales; y a los Estados Unidos de América

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: FA2020CV00007.

SOBRE: Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la Vía Ordinaria. MANDAMIENTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. Por Cuanto: Se ha dictado en el presente caso la siguiente Orden: ORDEN. Examinada la demanda radicada por la parte demandante, la solicitud de interpelación contenida en la misma y examinados los autos del caso, el Tribunal le imparte su aprobación y en su virtud acepta la Demanda en el caso de epígrafe, así como la interpelación judicial de la parte demandante a los herederos del codemandado conforme dispone el Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 2787. Se Ordena a los herederos del causante a saber, María Navarro Pérez, Gregoria Navarro Pérez, Genoveva Navarro Pérez, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal, herederos de nombres desconocidos a que, dentro del término legal de 30 días contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia del causante Félix Navarro Pérez, t/c/c Félix Navarro. Se le Apercibe a los herederos antes mencionados: (a) Que de no expresarse dentro del termino de 30 días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia la misma se tendrá por aceptada a beneficio de inventario (b) Que luego del transcurso del termino de 30 dias contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden. Se Ordena a la parte demandante a que, en vista de que la sucesión del causante Félix Navarro Pérez, t/c/c Félix Navarro incluyen como herederos a María Navarro Pérez, Gregoria Navarro Pérez, Genoveva Navarro Pérez, Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal, como poLEGAL NOTICE sibles herederos desconocidos, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE proceda a notificar la presente PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE Orden mediante un edicto a PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA esos efectos una sola vez en DE FAJARDO. un periódico de circulación diaria general de la Isla de Puerto Reverse Mortgage

The San Juan Daily Star Rico. DADA en Fajardo, Puerto Rico, hoy día 16 de junio de 2020. Hon. Jaime Jose Benero Garcia, JUEZ. Por Cuanto: Se le advierte a que dentro del término legal de 30 días contados a partir de la fecha de notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia del causante Félix Navarro Pérez, t/c/c Félix Navarro. Por Orden del Honorable Juez de Primera Instancia de este Tribunal, expido el presente Mandamiento, bajo mí firma y sello oficial, en Fajardo, Puerto Rico hoy día 1 de julio de 2020. Wanda I Segui, Sec General.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Y SUN WEST MORTGAGE CO, INC.COMO AGENTE DE SERVICIO Demandante v.

to Rico, el 11 de septiembre de 2020. F/LAURA l. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario(a). MARILYN COLON CARRASQUILLO, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

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

Reverse Mortgage Funding, LLC Demandante v.

Sucesión Olga Elisa Villamil Cruz, t/c/c Olga Villamil Cruz, t/c/c Olga E. Villamil Cruz , compuesta por Fulano de Tal y Sutano de Tal nombres de herederos posibles como desconocidos , Centro de Recaudaciones Municipales; y a los Estados Unidos de América.

Demandado(a) Civil: Núm. HU2019CV00780.

Sobre: Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por al vía Ordinaria. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

LYDIA RONDA MUSSENDEN; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA A: Fulano de Tal y Sutano Demandado{a) de Tal como posibles Civil: BY2020CV00190. SALA: 506. Sobre: COBRO DE DINE- heredereos de nombres RO y EJECUCION DE HIPOTE- desconocidos de la Sucn.

CA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENde Olga Elisa Villamil TENCIA POR EDICTO. Cruz t/c/c Olga E. Villamil A: LYDIA RONDA Crruz: A SU DIRECCION MUSSENDEN CONOCIDA: URB VILLA URB. VISTA BELLA ORIENTE, A-32 CALLE 25-H CALLE RENO A, HUMACAO, PUERTO BAYAMON,P.R. 00956 RICO, 00791 (Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que 11 de septiembre de 2020 , este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se. publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación.

Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copiad e esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 11 de septiembre de 2020. En BAYAMON , Puer-

(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 13 de agosto 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 13 de agosto de 2020. En HUMACAO,

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Puerto Rico , el 13 de agosto Juana Díaz. de 2020. DOMINGA GOMEZ BANCO POPULAR DE FUSTER, Secretario(a). f/ MIPUERTO RICO CHELLE GUEVARA DE LEON, Demandante v.

Sec Auxiliar.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante v.

MIGDALIA ALICEA NEGRÓN, RAFAEL RUIZ TORRES Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Demandado{a) Civil: JD2019CV00550. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO - ORDINARIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

JESÚS E. LÓPEZ DEL POZO, MARTA VENTOSA Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL A: Rafael Ruiz Torres DE GANANCIALES y la Sociedad Legal de COMPUESTA POR Gananciales compuesta AMBOS por éste y Migdalia Alicea Demandado{a) Negrón Civil: PO2019CV03767. SALA: HC 4 Box 22052 Juana 605. Sobre: COBRO DE DINEDíaz PR 00795-9618 P/C RO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. Lcda. Gina H. Ferrer A: JESÚS E. LÓPEZ DEL Medina - lawoffices.

POZO, MARTA VENTOSA ginaferrermedina@gmail.

Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL com para ser publicada DE GANANCIALES por edicto (Nombre de las partes a las que se COMPUESTA POR le notifican la sentencia por edicto) AMBOS, PARA SER EL SECRETARIO(A) que susNOTIFICADO POR cribe le notifica a usted que 11 EDICTO P/C: LCDA. GINA de septiembre de 2020 , este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, H FERRER MEDINA Sentencia Parcial o Resolución PO BOX 2342, en este caso, que ha sido debiMAYAGÜEZ, PUERTO damente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted RICO, 00681-2342 (Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que 4 de septiembre de 2020 , este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se. publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación.

Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copiad e esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 11 de septiembre de 2020. En PONCE , Puerto Rico, el 11 de septiembre de 2020. LUZ MAYRA CARABALLO GARCIA, Secretario(a). f/ MARICELL ORTIZ MUÑIZ, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

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. Copiad e esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 11 de septiembre de 2020. En PONCE , Puerto Rico, el 11 de septiembre de 2020. LUZ MAYRA CARABALLO GARCIA , Secretario(a). f/ DORIS A. RODRÍGUEZ COLÓN, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

Demandante v.

Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de

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

JAMES W. TURNER CONSTRUCTION, LTD CRA SITE LAWN & LAND DEVELOPMENT, INC. H/N/C CRA SITE LAWN & LAND DEVELOPMENT,

LLC; CHRISTIAN SOTO, JOSÉ BECERRA , JEFFREY IRVIN T/C/C JEFFREY IRVING

Demandado(a) Civil Núm. SJ2020CV00073.

SALA 903. Sobre: ACCIÓN CIVIL. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: CRA SITE LAWN & LAND DEVELOPMENT, INC. H/N/C CRA SITE LAWN & LAND DEVELOPMENT, LLC; CHRISTIAN SOTO; JOSÉ BECERRA; JEFFREY IRVIN (TAMBIÉN CONOCIDO COMO JEFFREY IRVING)

GEORGINA FELICIANO COMPUESTA POR LESLIE E. MALDONADO FELICIANO Y ALEXIS MALDONADO FELICIANO; JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIÓN DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NÚM: SJ2020CV02050.

SALA: 604. SOBRE: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA (Nombre de las partes a las que se EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EE.UU. ESTADO LIBRE ASOEL SECRETARIO(A) que sus- CIADO DE P.R. SS. cribe le notifica a usted que el A: JOHN ROE Y 28 de agosto de 2020, este JANE ROE COMO Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, POSIBLES MIEMBROS Sentencia Parcial o Resolución DESCONOCIDOS DE en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada LA SUCESIÓN DE en autos donde podrá usted EDWIN MALDONADO enterarse detalladamente de los RODRÍGUEZ T/C/ C términos de la misma. Esta noEDWIN MALDONADO; tificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulaJOHN DOE Y ción general en la Isla de PuerJANE DOE COMO to Rico, dentro de los 10 días POSIBLES MIEMBROS siguientes a su notificación. Y, DESCONOCIDOS DE siendo o representando usted SUCESIÓN GEORGINA una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la FELICIANO LOPEZ T/C/C Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o GEORGINA FELICIANO Resolución, de la cual puede es- Quedan emplazados y notifitablecerse recurso de revisión o cados de que en este Tribunal apelación dentro del término de se ha radicado una demanda 30 días contados a partir de la de ejecución de hipoteca en publicación por edicto de esta su contra. Se le notifica que notificación, dirijo a usted esta deberá presentar su alegación notificación que se considerará responsiva a través del Sistema hecha en la fecha de la publica- Unificado de Manejo y Adminisción de este edicto. Copia de tración de Casos (SUMAC), al esta notificación ha sido archi- cual puede acceder utilizando vada en los autos de este caso, la siguiente dirección electrónicon fecha de 2 de septiembre ca: https://unired.ramajudicial. de 2020. En San Juan, Puer- pr, salvo que se represente por to Rico, el 2 de septiembre de derecho propio, en cuyo caso 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ deberá presentar su alegación COLLADO, Secretaria. F/MIL- responsiva en la Secretaría DRED J. FRANCO REVEN- del Tribunal Superior de PuerTOS, Sec Auxiliar. to Rico, Sala de San Juan y enviando copia a la parte demandante: LCDA. FRANCES ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE L. ASENCIO-GUIDO, TRADE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE CENTRE SOUTH, SUITE 700, PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA 100 WEST CYPRESS CREEK SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN. ROAD, FORT LAUDERDAREVERSE MORTGAGE LE, FL 33309, TELEPHONE: (954) 343 6273, CORREO FUNDING, LLC ELECTRÓNICO: FRANCES. DEMANDANTE VS. ASENCIO©GMLAW.COM. Se SUCESIÓN EDWIN le apercibe y notilica que si no MALDONADO contesta la demanda radicada en su contra dentro del término RODRÍGUEZ T/C/C EDWIN MALDONADO de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, se le COMPUESTA POR anotará la rebeldía y se dictará LESLIE E. MALDONADO sentencia concediendo el remeFELICIANO Y ALEXIS dio solicitado en la demanda, sin más citárseles, ni oírseles . ExX. MALDONADO FELICIANO; JOHN ROE pedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, 26 de agosto de 2020.

Y JANE ROE COMO GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COPOSIBLES HEREDEROS LLADO, Secretaria. LUZ ENID FERNANDEZ Del Valle, Sec DESCONOCIDOS; SUCESIÓN GEORGINA Serv a Sala.

LEGAL NOTICE

FELICIANO LÓPEZ T/C/C

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‘Very unhealthy’ air quality forces MLB to reschedule games

By BENJAMIN HOOFMAN

A

compressed schedule forced by the coronavirus pandemic has led Major League Baseball to find creative solutions to get a 60-game season completed by October.

That determination took a turn toward dangerous Monday when the Oakland Athletics and the Seattle Mariners played a doubleheader despite wildfires on the West Coast sending smoke pouring into Seattle, lowering the air quality to “very unhealthy” ratings by some measures.

With conditions only getting worse Tuesday, two games between the Mariners and San Francisco Giants were postponed and moved to San Francisco’s Oracle Park instead. The Mariners were still to be the home team in the games,

which were rescheduled for Wednesday and today.

The wildfires, which have caused enormous damage, along with plenty of dystopian images from California, Oregon and Washington, have brought Air Quality Index (AQI) into the public vernacular. At the start of the first game in Seattle on Monday, the AQI was 220, according to AirNow, and the website reported that the number reached 240 during game play — anything over 200 carries increased health risks for anyone outdoors, with strenuous activity heavily discouraged.

Multiple A’s players expressed a concern at being asked to play despite the low air quality on Monday.

“I’m a healthy 22-year-old,” said Jesús Luzardo, Oakland’s starting pitcher

in the first game of the doubleheader.

“I shouldn’t be gasping for air or missing oxygen. I’ll leave it at that.”

Oakland manager Bob Melvin said in a postgame video conference that his team had not been consulted about whether the games should proceed, and that he had been under the impression that games would not be played with an AQI in excess of 200. While AirNow had the AQI in excess of 200 throughout both games, at least one other website, IQAir, did not record an AQI higher than 198 in Seattle on Monday.

Addressing Monday’s games, Pat Courtney, a spokesman for MLB, said the league had monitored the situation all day with medical experts — and was in contact with both clubs — while consulting with multiple air quality experts in

making the determination about whether or not to play.

On Tuesday, with AirNow reporting an AQI of 241 at 4 p.m. Eastern time, the conditions were determined to be too dangerous to risk.

Oakland and Seattle split the doubleheader on Monday, with the Mariners winning the first game, 6-5, and the A’s taking the second, 9-0.

Seattle center fielder Kyle Lewis, who robbed Ramón Laureano of a potential grand slam in the first inning of the second game, talked afterward about the strange scene.

“I think it was OK breathing, but we definitely noticed it,” Lewis told reporters. “The sky was all foggy and smoky; it definitely wasn’t a normal situation, definitely a little weird.’”

Big Ten will play football in 2020, reversing decision

By ALAN BLINDER

T

he Big Ten Conference said Wednesday that it will try to play football as soon as the weekend of Oct. 23 and 24, stepping back from its leadership’s decision just more than a month ago not to compete this fall because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The move by chancellors and presidents representing the Big Ten’s 14 universities will quell some of the pressure — from prominent coaches, parents, players, fans and even President Donald Trump — faced by the first Power Five league to drop plans for football in 2020. But it is also likely to provoke new outrage from those who will believe the league is prioritizing profits, entertainment and a measure of public relations peace over health and safety.

In a statement Wednesday morning, the league said players, coaches, trainers and others who are on playing and practice fields would undergo daily testing for the virus and that any player who tested positive would be barred from games for at least 21 days.

The conference also said that a team would stop practice and compe-

tition for at least a week if it recorded a positivity rate of at least 5 percent.

Leagues that have returned to play, like the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big 12, have so far found it tricky to navigate the epidemiological perils of the pandemic. A handful of games have been postponed, some teams have held out players because of positive tests or contact tracing, and stadiums are operating with fewer spectators in the stands or none at all.

Now the Big Ten is poised to try to join them, potentially salvaging the seasons of some of the most renowned and lucrative names in college sports, including Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio State, Penn State and Wisconsin.

It was only Aug. 11 that the league, which had already moved to a conference-only schedule, said it would not compete until at least 2021. In an interview that day, Kevin Warren, the Big Ten commissioner, said there was “too much uncertainty, too much risk” to proceed with athletics this year.

“You have to listen to your medical experts,” Warren said then. “There’s a lot of emotion involved with this, but when you look at the health and well

being of our student-athletes, I feel very confident that we made the right decision.”

Later, with the league under a barrage of public dissent from within its ranks and fans across the Midwest, Warren released an open letter that declared the decision would “not be revisited.”

That did not stop the league’s critics from trying to overturn the decision anyway. Parents of players protested outside the league’s offices near Chicago; some players pursued litigation; and Ryan Day, Ohio State’s coach, issued a pointed statement last week that said “the communication from the Big Ten following the decision has been disappointing and often unclear.”

He added, “However, we still have an opportunity to give our young men what they have worked so hard for: a chance to safely compete for a national championship this fall.”

Even with some of its football programs pausing workouts because of outbreaks, Big Ten officials convened over the weekend as speculation intensified that the league would ease its posture.

By then, the season’s fate had even

become a subject of the presidential campaign. Trump, facing attacks from his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, who accused him of mishandling the pandemic and upending Big Ten football, called Warren on Sept. 1 to urge the league to play and to offer federal aid.

On Wednesday morning, Trump called the announcement “great news” and declared on Twitter that it was “my great honor to have helped!!!” (It was not immediately clear whether the Big Ten accepted any of the president’s offers of assistance.)

All the while, teams, which were permitted to hold limited practices, kept preparing for the possibility of a season. Teams, coaches reasoned, needed to remain ready regardless of when games were allowed — and especially if they were scheduled quickly.

“We don’t know when it’s going to be,” Tom Allen, Indiana’s coach, said in an interview late last month. “That’s what keeps you on your toes.”

The Big Ten’s announcement Wednesday applied only to football. It said plans for other fall sports, as well as winter sports like basketball and wrestling, would be announced “shortly.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

27

The Liberty had a plan this season. Then it all fell apart.

By MATT ELLENTUCK

T

he New York Liberty’s 2-20 record was the worst in the WNBA and the worst in franchise history. But this year wasn’t supposed to be easy for Walt Hopkins, the first-year coach, or his team, which had seven rookies and just one player older than 27 after an offseason trade sent Tina Charles, the franchise cornerstone for six years, to Washington.

The 2020 Liberty never had title aspirations. Several key players opted out because of concerns about the coronavirus, including last year’s No. 2 overall pick, Asia Durr, who said she had COVID-19 in June. But it was the early-season injury to Sabrina Ionescu, the team’s No. 1 draft pick in April, that posed the biggest problem.

Just three games into her debut season, Ionescu sustained an ankle sprain so severe that she left the bubble and never returned. How would the Liberty go on without not only their best player, but the point guard on whom the team’s offense was centered?

“We had to really sit down as a staff and talk about the long-term repercussions of the choices we made post-Sabrina injury, because we had two options,” Hopkins said. “We could change everything for this season and try to salvage a seven or an eight seed or whatever, and win a few more games.”

Or? “Or, we had the choice to say, ‘You know what, we’re going to stick with this because it’s never been about this year.’”

With so many pieces missing, the team began a rebuild that general manager Jonathan Kolb compared to summer league, as the Liberty had just three players with four or more years of experience. The mission was clear: Give as many minutes as possible to young prospects.

“The goal this year was to learn,” Hopkins said. “It was to learn the people that we have. Who makes sense in the long term, on- and off-court? Who makes sense, system-wise? Who needs to get better at what? It was going to be a year of reflection, a year of growth, from the very beginning.”

The Liberty players were thrown into the fire of a brand of basketball rooted in analytics. The focus offensively was on 3-point shooting and getting to the freethrow line. Defensively, it was on chasing opponents away from the arc, and forcing long, contested 2-point shots.

That process was hard on its own but was made more difficult by a condensed season in a “bubble” at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., which provided limited practice time and had teams playing games nearly every other day.

By sticking to the original plan, there were nights the Liberty were hard to watch. In a loss to the Atlanta Dream on Sept. 3, the Liberty scored just 56 points and were 6 of 35 on 3-point attempts.

They also lost to the Seattle Storm by 41 points. Without Ionescu and some of their best career 3-point shooters, including Marine Johannes (37.9 percent) and Rebecca Allen (38.6 percent), the Liberty were the worst team from 3-point range (27.7 percent) and the field overall (37.2 percent).

But the focus was on building player chemistry and a team identity. Even if the team missed shots, Hopkins and Kolb prided their group on taking the correct ones and making the right decisions.

Of all 12 teams, the Liberty finished with the second-most 3-point attempts (602) and highest 3-point attempt rate (37 percent of their shots were from distance). They were one of the better teams at preventing 3-point attempts, and, of all four lottery teams, locked down the best defensive rating. Per Synergy Sports, the Liberty also generated the most unguarded shot attempts of any team (286), although they made them at a league-worst 29.4 percent.

Consistency was a problem, but when Liberty players were on, they were on. Kiah Stokes, a 6-foot-3, fifth-year veteran, had attempted just three 3-pointers, and made none, before this year.

Fast-forward to the next-to-last game of the season, in which she made five of eight attempts from distance.

“Basically my whole career in New York it’s been Tina Charles’ team, so that’s the only thing I knew,” Stokes said.

“So I was a little nervous coming into the

Sabrina Ionescu severely sprained her ankle in the third game of the season, sending Liberty Coach Walt Hopkins, center, in search of a new plan. season, but I think Walt has done a great job with the system. He’s really put a lot of confidence in me — ‘Just shoot it.’

He’s like: ‘If you miss it, so what? Everybody misses a shot.’”

In a shortened 22-game season in which eight of the 12 teams made the playoffs, almost every team was in the running until the final days. Even through an eight-game losing streak to close the season, the Liberty stuck to their strategy.

Hopkins recalled a game against the Indiana Fever in which Teaira McCowan, a 6-7 center, scored on all six shot attempts in the opening half. He figured he would be criticized for not making an adjustment to double-team her in the second half, but Hopkins’ defense calls for double-teaming as little as possible; he doesn’t want his team to get into rotations that would allow open 3-point looks. So instead, he called for more physicality and for players to not allow easy touches around the rim. The Liberty lost, but McCowan got only one shot attempt in the second half.

“We weren’t talking about playoffs at the end of the season,” Hopkins said.

“Not because I didn’t think we could make it. I very much thought we could make it, but more so because it was never the goal.”

Steadily developing players, especially rookies, was a crucial component of the Liberty’s season. In the process, they found a few standouts.

“Look how far Jocelyn Willoughby has come,” Hopkins said. “Look at her jump shot. Look at how her 3-point shot, when she got here in the preseason, everything was front rim and flat.

Her rotation was crazy. And now she’s shooting over 40 percent from 3.”

He added: “She’s learning how to make better decisions. Her defense is getting better. She’s fouling less.”

Next season, the Liberty expect to have Ionescu and Durr, and they also have the best odds to receive the No. 1 pick in the 2021 draft. The roster should improve as the 2020 opt-outs and new free agents join Hopkins’ system. Then, the pressure is on to prove that the experience gained through this season’s struggles wasn’t in vain.

28

Thursday, September 17, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Tiger Woods reflects on his US Open history that pre-dates his competition

By BILL PENNINGTON

I

t has been 20 years since Tiger Woods won his first U.S. Open by 15 strokes, which remains the largest margin of victory in the event. Two years later, golf’s leaders sought a new populism embodied

by Woods, who learned the game on a municipal golf course. For the first time, America’s golf championship was contested at a public-owned facility, Bethpage Black in a New York state park. Woods won again.

It has been 12 years since Woods last won the U.S. Open, in 2008, although that year he needed a 19-hole playoff to defeat Rocco Mediate, a 45-yearold with a creaky back.

Let’s pause a second to note the irony as Woods, with a back that has been surgically repaired four times, enters his 22nd U.S. Open this week as he awaits his 45th birthday in December.

There’s a lot of golf history in Woods’ previous appearances at the event, something he did not dismiss when meeting with reporters Tuesday at Winged Foot Golf Club, where the championship begins today. The memories, good and bad, flashed through the decades. And yet, the most amusing, and telling, Tiger-related reminiscence came from the defending U.S. Open champion, Gary Woodland, who recently appeared at an outing with Woods.

Woods was wearing his green jacket commemorating his 2019 Masters victory. Woodland brought the trophy that goes with a U.S. Open victory.

“I had the trophy with me and was giving him a hard time that his name was only on there twice,” Woodland said Tuesday.

Woods did not see the humor.

“It’s three times,” he corrected in a millisecond.

It has been a tough year for Woods, and not just because even his friends, like Woodland, sometimes fail to remember the finer details of his greatness. His ailing back, almost miraculously stable and supple during his mesmerizing 2019 Masters victory, has been an intractable hindrance in the worst of times and an unpredictable wild card in the best of times — or a combination of both.

At the Memorial Tournament in July, with his back feeling fluid, Woods shot a one-under-par 71 in the first round. The next day, he winced and limped to a four-over-par 76 when sudden back stiffness made a full swing impossible. Afterward, an unruffled Woods did not seem surprised — or perturbed.

“So you never know exactly what you’re going to have each day?” I asked him.

He smiled and replied: “It’s going to happen more times than not.”

Woods has played six times this year (not counting the charity exhibition match with Phil Mickelson, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning) and his best finish

Thursday, Woods will be paired with Dustin Johnson, who was 2 years old when Woods played his first Open. was a tie for ninth in late January. In the six months since that result, the best he has done is tie for 37th, with four finishes outside the top 50.

At tournaments, Woods’ disposition, which could run the gamut in his prime, is now almost always measured and cooperative. On Tuesday, he did not break form when asked to summarize his season. He sounded like a golfer of any stripe after a spate of poor play: He missed putts, made some swing mistakes and put the ball in the wrong spots.

“I’ve compounded mistakes,” he said.

As one of the few golfers in the vast field who participated in the last U.S. Open held at Winged Foot, in 2006, Woods was asked what advice he could give his colleagues as they try to tackle a golf course renowned for its fearsome challenge. There wasn’t too much he could say since he missed the cut that year, the first time he had done so at a major championship.

But there was another piece to his 2006 U.S. Open story.

About a month after he tied for third at the 2006 Masters and failed to win the tournament for the fourth time, his father, Earl Woods, died. Woods did not play again until that year’s next major, at Winged Foot in June.

“Yeah, when I didn’t win the Masters that year, that was really tough to take because that was the

last event my dad was ever going to watch me play,” Woods said Tuesday.

Looking ahead to that year’s U.S. Open, Woods said: “Frankly, when I got ready for this event, I didn’t really put in the time. I didn’t really put in the practice.” He was not prepared to play, but added: “After that, I probably did some pretty good grieving.”

A month later, he won the British Open and six more times that year, including the 2006 PGA Championship.

In the chill of Tuesday morning, Woods played a practice round with a 22-year-old amateur, John Augenstein, who was not alive when Woods first played in the U.S. Open. The third member of the group was Justin Thomas, 27, who grew up idolizing Woods, even if he was only 2 years old when Tiger struck his first shot in a U.S. Open.

Today, Thomas and Woods will be paired in the first round. It will nonetheless be a first for Woods.

Never before has Woods played a round in the U.S. Open without a massive gallery following him.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, spectators have been barred from this year’s championship.

But looking ahead to today, Thomas, the world’s third-ranked golfer, said he would recognize a bit of history when he sees it.

“I’ll know that’s the fewest amount of people he’s played in front of since he was about 4,” Thomas said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 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)

News of an engagement, marriage or birth will be cause for a family celebration. Communications are harmonious. Words will flow easily and being able to share your true feelings feels liberating. Take this opportunity to catch up on business and personal correspondence. Accept the chance to work on a creative project.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

You will do anything possible to help someone you love find happiness and success.

It means a lot to you to be able to support your family and friends. Everyday routines are starting to bore you and you’re in need of something different. Booking a holiday will give you something to look forward to.

You need to find an outlet for your restless energy. You can’t thrive in an environment where there is no challenge. Studying a subject that intrigues you will give you an attractive glow. Embarking on an advanced course of study will be a welcome change of pace. A private matter will need your attention before the day is through.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

A positive outlook will bring improvements into your personal life and career. You have good intuition and you can trust your instincts when making decisions that have longterm consequences. You will feel good about what you are doing because ultimately, you are progressing your main aims. As an added bonus, a partner will offer their full support.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Taking good care of your health is essential.

Give some thought to your lifestyle and relationships. Walking away from a toxic situation will ease your stress. Taking regular exercise and avoiding sugar, fat and alcohol will pay dividends. You’re planning for a major event in your life and because of its significance you want to look and feel your best.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

The San Juan Daily Star

Thursday, September 17, 2020

There’s something you’ve been keeping to yourself even though it would have helped to discuss this matter. It will come as some surprise to discover other people already know about it. You can’t feel guilty as this isn’t anything you have done but it will cause problems when a friend hears their secret has been exposed.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

A partner or close friend is acting like they are hiding something from you. Their secretive behaviour is making you suspicious. If they won’t tell you what’s going on, you may have to make some discreet enquiries elsewhere.

You would rather know the truth than have this hanging over you. People who know them well should be the first ones to approach.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

You’re feeling restless and rebellious and this will make it hard for you to work as part of a team. You aren’t in the mood to let anyone tell you what to do. You have your ways and methods and these may conflict with someone you are meant to work with. Demand that you work in the background on your own.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

You want to buy something special and luxurious but can you really afford it? Credit cards could be making things too easy. If you really want this item, save up for it. Rather than borrow, start putting some money aside each month. Soon you’ll have enough to treat yourself without feeling guilty about it.

You’re determined to show you are up to a challenging assignment. You’re serious about everything you take on and there’s no need to prove to others what you can do. They already know. For this reason stop being so hard on yourself. Delegate some chores to make your job easier.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

It doesn’t seem to matter where you are or what you might be doing, something will seem to happen that makes things awkward.

You’re trying hard to please people but there is always someone who has something to complain about. You’ll never be able to please everyone so at least do something for yourself.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Responsibilities to a team effort are increasing.

This will cause you to have to reduce commitments elsewhere but you won’t mind this slight inconvenience. Some sacrifices are worth it if it helps a team effort progress. A partner’s resourceful use of money will save you a lot of future frustration. You will be happy to leave them to make important financial decisions.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Thursday, September 17, 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

Thursday, September 17, 2020

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