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September 18-20, 2020

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How to Keep the Muse, Arts and Teaching Alive During a Pandemic

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Photo By Amnesty International

FEMA Coordinator: ‘Don’t Focus on the Negative’

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Three Years After Hurricane Maria, Hundreds of Houses Have Not Been Fully Rebuilt or Repaired; Meanwhile, Gov’t Insists Glass Is Half Full P4

Not Happy with Inspection Governor: ‘DOJ Refusal Rules, Gaming Machine of Funds for Plebiscite Not Going to Stop Us’ Owners, Operators Sue

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The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

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September 18- 20, 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.

PR to go forward with status plebiscite despite DOJ’s refusal to release funds

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By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

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ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen on Thursday informing them that Puerto Rico plans to move forward with the status plebiscite in elections Nov. 3 despite the refusal of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to approve an allocation of $2.5 million for that purpose.

“In the letter, the Governor addresses the misconceptions, oversights, and misguided reasoning of DOJ regarding the island’s upcoming plebiscite,” said a press release from the governor’s office. “The communication further states that even though the appropriated federal funding is not required by law, the $2.5 million obligation could help procedurally with this plebiscite after Puerto Rico’s State Elections Commission failed to complete its functions efficiently in the 2020 primaries.”

This year’s plebiscite comes after the 2017 objection by DOJ to Puerto Rico’s initially proposed ballot for that year’s plebiscite that included the “statehood” and “free association/ independence status” options, arguing that Puerto Rico needed to add the “current territorial status” option.

Island officials complied with this request and included the “colonial” territorial status option on the ballot; however, DOJ still failed to obligate funds for the 2017 plebiscite.

Additionally, the letter to the DOJ states that “the people of Puerto Rico and not the federal government should determine the preference among options,” pointing out that in its refusal to obligate funds for the planned 2020 plebiscite the DOJ is ignoring that Puerto Rico’s elected officials selected the language for it.

“This premise violates the directives of [U.S. House Report] 116-101 that states clearly ‘that the current territorial/Commonwealth status should be excluded from any future plebiscite, since it fails to address key inequities,’” the press release notes.

In the DOJ’s July 29 letter, the agency included outdated language from previous congressional legislation that disregards current directives that Puerto Rico’s plebiscite language remained unchanged, the press release said.

“We are disappointed with DOJ’s determination to not obligate the $2.5 million allocated by Congress for the people of our island to freely and democratically exercise their right to vote and finally resolve Puerto Rico’s colonial-territorial status,” Vázquez said in the press release. “I am concerned with DOJ’s explanation and the tone of the communication that seem to be

skew in favor of the current territorial status, despite a clear mandate from Congress to disregard this option in future plebiscites and the policy of the U.S. to remain neutral in this topic.”

The governor added that “DOJ’s decision will not deter our will and determination to end this unfair political status that further perpetuates inequalities and the unjust treatment of the U.S. citizens of Puerto Rico.”

“Today, I say to the DOJ that Puerto Rico will move forward with the November 3 plebiscite,” she said.

“While we do not require the federal funds or DOJ’s blessing to proceed with the free will of the people of Puerto Rico, I urge you to continue working with our Government to obligate the $2.5 million that will guarantee the fair and transparent election process that all Puerto Ricans deserve.”

Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration (PRFAA) Executive Director Jennifer M. Storipan added that the “language of the letter from DOJ is an example of the misconceptions some in the U.S. mainland have about Puerto Rico’s political status.”

“During my tenure as Executive Director of PRFAA, I have learned a great deal about the intricacies of the island and how, in some cases, complex situations are not always given the necessary consideration by the federal government,” Storipan said in the press release. “In its letter, DOJ failed to acknowledge that regardless of whether a U.S. territory is incorporated or unincorporated, and irrespective of a plebiscite being binding, non-binding, or even held at all, the only requirement for a U.S. territory to become a state is for Congress to vote.”

Vázquez noted that “[i]n our nation, we hold democracy as a sacred right.”

“That right should not be denied to the people of Puerto Rico,” the governor said. “We must safeguard the integrity of the elections and in order to do so, we urge the proper and swift disbursement of the $2.5 million in funds appropriated by Congress for the 2020 general election plebiscite.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

Governor declares 3-year disaster recovery after post-Hurricane Maria has been 'significant'

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

W

ith thousands of Puerto Rico’s families still living under blue tarps, others still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt and island mayors pointing out stumbling blocks in their towns’ recovery three years after Hurricane Maria, Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced declared on Thursday that disaster recovery has been “significant” as approval for disaster recovery projects has gone up by 300 percent.

During a roundtable held by the governor in the Experimental Room at the Santurce Fine Arts Center, Vázquez said that even though there’s much work left to do, the island government, in one year, has “sped up, obligated and disbursed” more disaster recovery funds than were disbursed after both hurricanes Harvey and Katrina in the United States, something she also deemed ‘’significant.”

“It has been the longest federal response amid a disaster in the history of the United States,” the governor said. “You all saw in the images more than 1,315 electrical generators installed, over $1.5 billion from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Individual and Family Assistance Program, where almost 900,000 surviving

families [received assistance for] housing repairs, rent and other related expenses.”

“Since January 2020, there has been a general obligation for around 389 projects approved,” Vázquez said. “When we entered, there were fewer than 100 projects approved per month. Up to today [Thursday], 4,598 projects and over $7.2 billion have been obligated. That’s our reality.”

During the hourlong presentation, the governor said that around $1.2 billion have been allocated to municipalities and mayors have access to it. She said “the training is being given, and it is in the hands of the municipalities to request the training.”

However, the governor added, “of the

first funding” of $1.2 billion, “only 19 mayors have requested [the training].”

“It is important that all mayors if they have a need, give us the opportunity to help them,” she said.

“In the first agreement of $8.2 billion, they were approved on October 14, 2018; that money was unavailable because there was no communication,” Vázquez said.

“Once we arrived [in office] In August 2019, we started seeing an open space to communicate with the federal government, especially with HUD [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], that we were going to work correctly and it helped us sign an August 2019 agreement in February 2020.”

Meanwhile, island Housing Secretary Luis Fernández Trinchet said there are 17 ongoing programs funded with $1.223 billion in Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) Program funds. Nonetheless, he said, many municipalities have not used the federal funds or participated in the programs.

“If municipalities have the perception that I will give them the money for simply telling me that they will build a 15-housingunit building or simply by sending me a letter, the CDBG-DR program doesn’t work that way. There are a number of requirements,” Fernández Trinchet said. “Housing

does not intervene in the decisions of the municipalities. But the program is there. The doors are open. We have been proactive, we have held summits to explain this to mayors.

Housing staff go to their municipalities.”

Meanwhile, FEMA Federal Coordinating Officer for Puerto Rico Alex Amparo said the public should not “not focus on the negative” of the slow disaster recovery amid the hurricane that hit Puerto Ricans on Sept. 20, 2017, but rather should “look at the positive [side], what is happening and what we are doing together.”

Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resilience Executive Director Ottmar Chávez said the U.S. Congress designated $49.9 billion for the recovery of Puerto Rico, of which some $25 billion have been obligated -- in other words, destined for a particular purpose. Of that latter sum, some $16.6 billion have been disbursed, he said.

According to the island Housing Department’s Repair, Reconstruction or Relocation Program (R3) Construction Status, there are 367 houses inpre-construction, 421 under construction, and 103 have been completed.

On July 2, as the Star reported, the government finally announced the construction of the first home damaged

by Hurricane Maria under R3.

Acevedo Vilá: González Colón must break ‘silence’ on possible funding loss

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

P

opular Democratic Party (PDP) candidate for resident commissioner Aníbal Acevedo Vilá called on Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González Colón on Thursday to respond to reports from La Fortaleza officials who confirm that the two-term member of Congress knew, as far back as July, that the Puerto Rico government could lose more than $1.1 billion in federal funding.

Likewise, the PDP leader demanded that the candidate for governor for the New Progressive Party (NPP), Pedro Pierluisi, state plainly on Thursday, the day of the gubernatorial candidates’ debate, if he had knowledge or was informed by his running mate, González Colón, that there was a serious threat of the loss of federal funds.

In a report by José Delgado for El Nuevo Día, two sources from the administration of Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced said the resident commissioner had been informed since July that the government would stop using a large portion of the $2.9 billion allocated to the island this federal fiscal year (which ends Sept. 30) under the Medicaid program.

“The first responsibility of a resident commissioner is to make sure congressional appropriations get to the people without delay and without excuses. It is inconceivable that

Jenniffer González knew about this unforgivable negligence and did absolutely nothing,” Acevedo Vilá said in a radio interview. “There are 1.4 million Puerto Ricans, participants in the Medicaid program, who today are in danger of ceasing to receive medical services due to the irresponsibility of the NPP government. This is a case of government malpractice.”

The former governor added in the interview that as he sees it, a code of silence exists between Vázquez and González Colón regarding the issue.

“Here there is a shared responsibility between Jenniffer and Wanda Vázquez for this scandal, without a doubt,” Acevedo Vilá said. “From La Fortaleza they pointed out to González the probability that these funds would be lost; it is already public knowledge, and now neither of the two has expressed themselves on this delicate issue. They think that keeping silence avoids the issue, but it is the opposite.”

The candidate for resident commissioner added that he will be sending letters to the congressional leadership requesting that the term of use of the funds be extended and pointing out that “the PDP, once it wins the elections, will submit an action plan to release the federal funds withheld, either because of the mismanagement of funds or the negligence of the NPP government in dragging its feet when it comes to effectively disbursing congressional appropriations.”

“She [González Colón] maintained that she continues to

communicate with members of Congress about the interest in bringing back the large-scale pharmaceutical industry, in order to create new jobs,” Acevedo Vilá said. “We continue to work toward that purpose and we expect affirmative action in that direction soon. While some stand out for their inaction, others work every day to create jobs and straighten out the chaos of this government.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

5

Gaming machine owners, operators sue over inspection rules

By THE STAR STAFF

M

ore than a dozen owners and operators of electronic gaming machines sued in U.S. District Court this week to challenge the constitutionality of gaming regulations because they do not impose limits on inspections of gaming machines.

The operators, headed by Electronic Games, said the regulations violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because the defendants, the Puerto Rico Tourism Co. and the island Gaming Commission, cannot perform warrantless inspections.

The operators said they have operated adult entertainment machines, and later, electronic gaming machines, as defined by the Puerto Rico Internal Revenue Code, for more than 10 years. Presently, they all are operators of electronic gaming machines that are regulated by the Puerto Rico Treasury Department.

On Dec. 10, 2018, the government enacted Act No. 257 to amend the island’s Internal Revenue Code. Articles 132 to 165 of the Act amended the local Games of Chance Act of 1933 and authorized the operation of electronic gambling machines outside of the island’s casinos. As a result, all of the plaintiffs in the aforementioned case have made the transition and have converted their electronic gaming machines to electronic gambling ma-

chines in order to operate under the guidelines of Act No. 257.37.

The 2018 law delegated to the Tourism Co. the regulation and licensing of the aforemenioned devices and the industry that would be created around them (manufacturing, internet connection, transportation, etc.). Subsequently, on June 29, 2019, the commonwealth government created the “Gaming Commission of the Government of Puerto Rico) through Act No. 81.39 and transferred all of the matters related to games of chance and gambling on the island from the local Tourism Co. to the newly created commission.

Notwithstanding this, the plaintiffs point out in their filing, the Puerto Rico Tourism Co. continued with the preparation of the regulations required by Act No. 257 and needed to create the new gaming industry, going so far as to hold public hearings.

On May 5 of this year, in the middle of a total lockdown declared to deal with the COVID-19 emergency, the Tourism Co. filed two regulations related to Act No. 257 before the Puerto Rico Department of State.

The two filings were Regulation No. 9174, “Reglamento para la Fiscalización Operacional e Interconexión de Máquinas de Juegos de Azar,” and Regulation No. 9175, “Reglamento para la Expedición, Manejo y Fiscalización de Maquinas de Juegos de Azar en Ruta.” Even

though the two documents were filed by the Tourism Co., the plaintiffs note that they were also signed by the executive director of the Gaming Commission, which according to Act No. 81 of 2019 is the entity that would be in charge of regulating and licensing all of the gambling machines operating on the island.

Around two months ago, all of the agents from the Games of Chance Division of the Puerto Rico Tourism Co. were permanently transferred to the Gaming Commission and they will be in charge of implementing Act No. 81, including the inspection and even the seizure of electronic devices, the plaintiffs said in their filing.

The inspection includes verifying the machines’ “identification,” and making sure

that the agency’s sticker is attached, that the game that is installed is approved in the local jurisdiction, that the machine complies with the interconnection requirements of Act No. 257, that the micro processing unit (MPU) has the required sticker and that it has a warning that “Any malfunction voids all pays and plays.”

“Nowhere in Regulation No. 9174 does it state the scope of these inspections, how businesses would be chosen for these inspections and at what what time they would take place,” the lawsuit says. “According to Section 4(3) (B), anyone in violation of this regulation can be tried and sentenced to a term of prison of up to six months, plus a fine of $5,000, while Section 4(3)(C) punishes anyone who obstructs the free inspection of any business housing these devices with a prison term of up to a year and a fine of $10,000.”

The regulations allow the defendants to seize and confiscate any machine that they deem operates in contravention of Act No. 257 and Regulation 9174, the lawsuit points out.

“Nowhere in Regulation No. 9174 is there a delimitation of at what time these inspections would take place and how long they could last and which parts of a business establishment could be searched by these agents, which clearly violates the Fourth Amendment with regard to highly regulated industries,” the suit reads.

Census Bureau seeks comments on proposed removal of filing requirement for US-PR & USVI shipments

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he United States Census Bureau is seeking public comments as the federal government considers removing the Electronic Export Information (EEI) filing requirement for shipments between the United States and Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

While the move seeks to remove the burden on interstate commerce and spur economic development, it could seriously hinder the compilation of federal statistics, the Census Bureau said.

“The Census Bureau is responsible for collecting, compiling, and publishing export trade statistics for the United States under the provisions of Title 13, United States Code (U.S.C.), Chapter 9, Section 301. For these statistics, the Census Bureau uses data from the Electronic Export Information (EEI) filings in the Automated Export System,” the bureau said. “Trade between the United States and its territories is considered domestic and therefore statistics on such trade are not tabulated as a part of the Census Bureau foreign trade statistics.”

Collecting and compiling trade statistics between the United States, Puerto Rico, and other territories is part of the Census Bureau’s monthly processing of EEI. Ultimately, the sta-

tistics are published in the FT-895 report, “U.S. Trade with Puerto Rico and U.S. Possessions.”

For many years, the Census Bureau has received requests, from both the government of Puerto Rico and members of the international trade community, to eliminate the requirement of filing EEI for shipments between the United States and Puerto Rico in the Automated Export System, the entity said in a statement.

One of the reasons for requesting removal of the filing requirement is that it seems to treat Puerto Rico like a foreign country, when in fact Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and part of the U.S. customs area.

“Arguments have also been made that the requirement imposes a burden on what should be treated as interstate commerce, discourages manufacturers in the 50 states from shipping to Puerto Rico, and impedes economic development on the island,” the Census Burau said.

“However, removal of the filing requirement could impact the quality and availability of key federal statistics. The Census Bureau is requesting information to assess potential impacts of a regulatory change in the filing requirements and to identify stakeholder priorities for data quality and availability.”

Comments must be submitted by Nov. 16 and they are to be part of the public record.

The Census Bureau says data on trade

between the United States and its territories is used by other government agencies and private organizations. For example, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) uses the data to compile the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), one of the most anticipated economic indicators and the primary measure of the nation’s economy.

The BEA also uses the data in its initiative to estimate Puerto Rico GDP statistics, which are anticipated later this year. Given the magnitude of Puerto Rico’s trade with states, estimates of Puerto Rico GDP would be significantly compromised without the trade data from the filings. The Puerto Rico Planning Board, tasked with overseeing and promoting development in Puerto Rico, uses the trade statistics to produce statistical reports for the Puerto Rican government and businesses to make sound policy and business decisions, respectively.

“Although eliminating the mandatory requirement to file EEI for shipments between the United States and Puerto Rico would remove an additional step in the shipping process, there would be other implications associated with this change,” the Census Bureau said.

“For example, the loss of data involving petroleum trade between the United States and Puerto Rico is a concern for the Department

of Energy. There is currently no other source of information or method for tracking trade flows of oil and other energy-related commodities between the United States and Puerto Rico.

The U.S. statistical system does not measure state-to-state imports and exports, only trade between states and the rest of the world.”

There is no alternative data source for collecting this information because Puerto Rico is not included in many other Census Bureau economic surveys. The Census Bureau is exploring options to include Puerto Rico in existing surveys to mitigate the significant loss of information about the economy of Puerto Rico that would result from eliminating the filing requirement. However, using other existing surveys to collect data on the economy of Puerto Rico would not result in the same data set that is currently available, the bureau noted.

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September 18-20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Local musician stands strong amid COVID-19 to keep music and arts teaching alive Inmuse Music and Arts Institute owner readapts to help children and adults keep learning new creative skills and break away from routine

governor’s most recent executive order gives permission to do so. Now, for in-person courses, students or legal guardians must request a monthly reservation at a specified day and time. This way, they will be able to attend every week for a 30-minute face-to-face music course, or a 45-minute individual visual arts course.

“The student has the class with the teacher and without other students around the area,” she said. “Once the class is over, the classroom is sanitized, we disinfect the instruments and we receive the next student.”

Meanwhile, Ríos Ramos said she is intent on continuing to find ways to maintain her enterprise, which provides jobs to 10 teachers and keeps students inspired.

“We now have to take time from our weekends, Sundays included, to keep contact with our students through calls, [and] videocalls,” she said. “We are trying to make it feel like an in-person class; our phones are always available in case they need to call us at any moment. We are available now for our students 24/7.”

Those interested in Inmuse Music and Arts Institute classes, enrollment and offerings can access the institute through its Facebook page, on its webpage inmuseinstitute. com and via phone at 787-909-4212. Inmuse is located on Luis Muñoz Rivera Avenue (near Hima Hospital) in Caguas.

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

I

t was a lively scene: younglings were able to gather to learn how to play a tune, find the right note, brush a stroke of color, draft a picture on a canvas or even learn how to stand gracefully on the tips of their toes. However, as a virus spread exponentially around the world, many had to go back home and stay safe.

To bring sound, color, lines, and movements back amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Marline Ríos Ramos, owner of Inmuse Music and Arts Institute, had to readapt the fine arts courses that her academy offers in the city of Caguas with safety measures in order to keep both students and employees safe from the coronavirus and help them find their muse again.

Ríos Ramos said that before the COVID-19 pandemic, the institute had about 200 students enrolled in courses such as music (theory, singing, instruments), visual arts, and classical ballet; however, with the COVID-19 pandemic arriving in March, even though the majority of students had been attending classes during the first weeks of the term, once the island went into lockdown only 25 percent of the enrolled students remained active taking online courses.

“Before, in our classrooms, our groups were not as big so teachers could provide individual attention within group teaching and supervise each children’s activities in each class,” Ríos Ramos said. “Now, in virtual classes, it was very difficult to have the same dynamic. We tried, but we really couldn’t fulfill anything, which is why we had to change from group classes to one-on-one virtual courses.”

Nonetheless, the professional musician told the Star, from mid-July until the end of August she was able to increase student enrollment from 25 percent to 55 percent. More than half of the students she received were completely new.

“Many people, amid the pandemic, decided to work on something new, to learn, as many are staying at their homes, and really, they are trying to find new ways to [take a] break from their routine while at home,” Ríos Ramos said. “The majority are now professional adults and college students, while before, most enrolled students were children and teenagers.”

As for classical ballet courses, Ríos Ramos said the students are able to have individual live sessions via videoconference and complementary modules to keep practicing. She said most of her ballet students consist of three- to seven-year-old girls and, due to the pandemic, their mother or guardian must participate in the session to provide guidance.

“The girls are not alone, their moms have to be part of the class, contrary to before, when the girl was by herself in the classroom along with her companions,” she said.

As of today, Ríos Ramos said that amid the COVID-19 Inmuse Music and Arts Institute provides jobs to 10 teachers pandemic Inmuse Music and Arts Institute is now offer- and keeps students inspired. Classes offerings include music ing individual classes both virtually and in person as the (theory, singing, instruments), visual arts, and classical ballet.

López León proposes fine arts school & creative/tech industries center for former Luchetti School in Condado

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

S

en. Rossana López León, the Popular Democratic Party candidate for mayor of San Juan, proposed Thursday to create a municipal school of fine arts and a center for creative and technological industries on the premises of what was formerly Madame Luchetti High School in Condado.

López León pointed out that if elected mayor, as soon as January 2021 she will officially request that the central government transfer the facilities to the Municipality of San Juan to carry out the proposal.

“As has happened with so many other closed schools in Puerto Rico, in San Juan we have a magnificent opportunity for development,” López León said in a written statement. “This school, founded in 1906 on land donated

by Luisa Monsanto, known as Madame Luchetti, should always have had a master of fine arts school, as was her intention.”

“Despite calls from the school community, the administration of [former Gov.] Ricardo Rosselló and [former Education Secretary] Julia Keleher closed it and the agency that currently owns the land, be it the Department of Education or the Department of Transportation and Public Works, has allowed the deterioration [of the property],” the candidate said. “My commitment is to reverse that and promote creative industries and job creation.”

“There are countless things we can do there. From the creation of architectural models, industrial crafts, performing, culinary and visual arts, the development of advanced software, graphic design, fashion, music and publications, among others,” López León added.

“According to data from the Census Bureau and United

Nations …, there are already 2,355 creative industries in Puerto Rico. As a candidate for mayor of San Juan, I am ready to lead this transformation of Luchetti, in alliance with the community, volunteers, private companies interested in investing, and agencies of the state and federal governments.”

In 2014, Puerto Rico formally defined the creative industries sector with Law 173, the Law to Promote Creative Industries.

“As a senator, I know that law in detail; I voted in favor of it and it is a tool with great potential,” López León said. “Some people still have the impression that the creative industries are limited to the arts and [yet] there is much more that can be done, such as the development of technology. It is a matter of having the interest, adequate planning, generating ideas and carrying them to their successful execution.”

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

Taking stock after a historic month of fire

By JILL COWAN

I

t’s been a month since the August Complex ignited amid a freakish siege of dry lightning strikes in the Mendocino National Forest.

A week ago, as a new round of blazes consumed thousands and thousands of acres, destroying more lives and more communities, the August Complex became the largest fire in modern California history.

In other words, it’s been a draining month in a year that already defied description.

I checked in with my colleague Jack Healy, who’s been covering the fires on the ground, about what it’s been like: Q: How long have you been out here covering the fires this year? Where have you been traveling?

A: I live in the foothills outside Denver, so I’ve been living with fires like so many people out here. But I first flew out to California in late August to cover the Creek Fire and the impacts around the Bay Area, Sierras and south toward Santa Cruz. I’ve been through wine country, through the fields around Salinas, through little mountain towns that burned up. Then after Labor Day, I flew into Oregon to cover the fires there and spent my time in little Cascades communities that were getting evacuated and ripped apart.

Q: Whenever I’ve covered wildfires in the past, it always felt like there was a bit of a disconnect between the block-by-block reality of the damage and the kind of large-scale devastation you see on the maps. Is that different this year? How so?

A: “The whole state is on fire” is a refrain you hear a lot. Especially this year. What feels

different is how pervasive these fires are, how their calling cards of smoke and ash and haze have just become inescapable across spans of hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles. I’m not an expert in fire behavior, but the damage I’ve seen shows a lot of the same capriciousness of wildfires — where you’re driving through singed fields and past sawed-down trees and seeing house after house that was spared, and suddenly you turn a corner and just see a landscape of loss.

Burned houses, burned barns, cars that have all but melted into the roads.

Q: What else has felt different about covering the fires this year? Have you noticed differences in the reactions of people you interview?

A: These feel like very 2020 fires. It is not just that they’ve killed more than 30 people — including multiple children — and broken apart communities and destroyed everything people have worked for their whole lives. They are compounding the pain and stress of an incredibly difficult year. They’re making it harder for people at risk of COVID-19 to stay safe when they’re driven from their homes.

They’re robbing us of the pleasures of outdoor exercise and nature. The country’s angry, paranoid polarization even seeped into how people responded to these fires when misinformation about antifa-led arsons prompted some homeowners to defy evacuation orders, set up militia-style checkpoints in their neighborhoods and really amped up feelings of suspicion and anger in some places at a time when communities are aching to come together and figure out a path forward.

It’s like JudiVollmer told me in Napa, where she was staying after her home burned: “2020 can go to hell.”

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A burned-down school bus and garage caused by the Creek Fire just east of Fresno on Tuesday.

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Precio de venta u otras ofertas que resulten en ahorros mayores preceden esta oferta.40% de descuento: Precios regulares en pinturas y tintes desde $38.49 hasta $424.95, y precios especiales desde $23.09 hasta $254.97. Oferta no aplica a compras anteriores, compras de tarjetas de regalos, Primers múlti-uso, revestimiento de borrado en seco Sketch Pad™ escaleras, equipos de atomizadores para pintar y accesorios. Otras exclusiones pueden aplicar.Consulta en la tienda para mas información. Oferta Válida en tiendas al detal operadas por Sherwin-Williams en los EEUU/Puerto Rico y el Caribe. ©2020 La Compañía Sherwin-Williams.

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September 18-20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Deal reached in New Jersey for ‘millionaires tax’ to address fiscal crisis

By TRACEY TULLY

G

ov. Phil Murphy campaigned on a vow to raise taxes on the rich in New Jersey.

It took three years and a pandemic to get

it done.

Murphy, a Democrat, joined legislative leaders to announce a budget deal Thursday that includes a higher tax rate for residents earning more than $1 million a year.

The agreement also includes a recurring $500 rebate for families with at least one child and an annual income of less than $150,000 a year for couples and $75,000 for single parents.

The move, which has been panned by Republicans and some business leaders as a risky step that could lead to an exodus of the state’s wealthiest residents, comes amid a growing national debate over whether to increase taxes on the rich to help address a widening income gap.

Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, has proposed raising taxes on people earning more than $400,000 to finance a slate of programs, including expanded day care.

In New Jersey, the so-called millionaires tax was an initiative the Democrat-led Legislature had symbolically approved for years before Murphy took office in 2018, knowing that it would never be signed into law by former Republican Gov. Chris Christie.

But Murphy, a self-avowed progressive who arrived in Trenton with few legislative allies, had been unable to win support for the idea from Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney, a political rival, or Assembly leader Craig J. Coughlin.

Until now.

Facing a fiscal crisis brought on by the urgent health

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needs of the pandemic and the monthslong shutdown of businesses, lawmakers agreed to raise the tax rate on earnings over $1 million to 10.75%, up from 8.97%.

Individuals earning more than $5 million were already taxed at the higher rate.

The deal underscores the shifting political climate and a recognition that the wealthy may need to contribute more to the state’s recovery with so many residents out of work and struggling to feed their families. More than 1.5 million residents have filed for unemployment benefits since Murphy implemented a lockdown to help stop the spread of the virus, which has led to the deaths of more than 16,000 New Jersey residents.

The agreement is also a tacit acknowledgment of Murphy’s approval ratings, which jumped to 71% in a recent poll by Monmouth University.

Coughlin and Sweeney, both Democrats, joined the governor for a 10 a.m. announcement of the deal.

“Our promise to help the middle class and those striving to join it is a promise that will be kept,” Murphy said.

In neighboring New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a fiscal moderate, has largely resisted proposals to raise billions by taxing the wealthy. Cuomo has consistently called on the federal government to bail out the state, which he says needs some $59 billion to cover two years of projected deficits for state and local governments.

Progressives in Albany have been pushing the governor to consider a variety of bills, including one to raise the tax rate on those earning more than $100 million to almost 12%.

New Jersey’s millionaires tax is expected to generate an estimated $390 million this fiscal year. The $500 rebate, a compromise put forth by Coughlin, is expected to cost about $340 million a year.

The millionaires tax is part of a nine-month, $32.4

Gov. Philip D. Murphy had been unable to win support from fellow Democratic leaders for a higher tax on the wealthy. billion spending plan that must be adopted by Oct. 1.

The proposed budget Murphy released last month also includes about $1.2 billion in spending cuts and $4 billion in new bonding debt.

The deal, first reported Wednesday by the New Jersey Globe, was immediately criticized by the state Republican Party.

“Blink and you’ll miss the next Trenton tax hike,” the state’s Republican chairman, Doug Steinhardt, said in a statement. “That’s how fast Phil Murphy and his Democrats are spending your money.”

New York City will again delay start of in-person classes for most students

By ELIZA SHAPIRO

N

ew York City public schools will no longer start in-person classes for all students Monday, officials said Thursday.

Instead, the city will phase students back into classrooms on a rolling basis, starting with the youngest children, who will report to schools next week. Students in pre-K classes and students with advanced special needs

will return Monday.

On Sept. 29, elementary schools will open, and middle and high schools will open Oct. 1.

The sudden shift comes just three days before the nation’s largest school district was set to reopen. It is the second time that Mayor Bill de Blasio has delayed the start of inperson classes, which were originally set to begin Sept. 10.

The mayor is expected to announce more details later Thursday.

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

Barr defends right to intrude in cases as he sees fit A

By KATIE BENNER

ttorney General William Barr said on Wednesday that as the nation’s top law enforcement official, he had the right to intervene in investigations and to overrule career lawyers, castigating his own department and attacking what he described as politically motivated inquiries.

Speaking at an event hosted by Hillsdale College in Michigan, Barr delivered remarks that scanned as a rebuke of career Justice Department lawyers who have questioned his level of involvement — a management style in which he has cast himself as the ultimate authority on almost every issue that the department faces, including antitrust settlements, criminal prosecutions and civil litigation.

“Because I am ultimately accountable for every decision the department makes, I have an obligation to ensure we make the correct ones,” he said.

For months, Barr has been accused of politicizing the Justice Department, particularly by interfering in legal matters that benefit President Donald Trump or his allies. In February, Barr overrode a sentencing recommendation for Trump’s longtime friend and ally Roger Stone Jr. with a more lenient one. And in May, he directed the Washington federal prosecutor’s office to withdraw the government’s case against Michael Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

“Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency,” Attorney General William P. Barr said Wednesday at an event.

Reflecting widespread concerns among rank-and-file lawyers, a former department prosecutor said in an op-ed article that the Stone and Flynn interventions would inflict “lasting damage to the institution” and that “the department again put political patronage ahead of its commitment to the rule of law.”

But in his speech Wednesday night, Barr said that it was well within his power as the attorney general to be the final arbiter in all cases before the Justice Department. While that assertion is technically true, past attorneys general have typically let the deputy attorney general run the day-to-day matters of the department and have even distanced themselves from politically fraught issues.

Barr also said that it was his job to push back on career lawyers and make important judgment calls because those prosecutors were too narrowly focused or too inexperienced to know how best to handle delicate cases.

“Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency,” he said.

While Barr did not mention the Flynn or Stone cases by name, he said that following the letter of the law and the spirit of fairness sometimes meant “investing months or years in an investigation and then concluding it without criminal charges.”

“Other times,” he said, “it will mean aggressively prosecuting a person through trial and then recommending a lenient sentence, perhaps even one with no incarceration.”

Barr also alluded to his past statements that the investigation into Russia interference in the 2016 election had been improperly initiated by career department employees who could not accept the results of the race. That assertion has been disproved by a Republican-led Senate intelligence panel and the Justice Department’s inspector general.

“I’d like to be able to say that we don’t see headhunting at the Department of Justice, but that would not be truthful,” Barr said. “It is a temptation sometimes to go after people rather than crimes.”

“Advocating for clear and defined prohibitions will sometimes mean we cannot bring charges against someone whom we believe engaged in questionable conduct,” he said. “But that is what it means to have a government of laws and not of men. We cannot let our desire to prosecute ‘bad’ people turn us into the functional equivalent of the mad emperor Caligula.”

9

10

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

Charge that Maxwell ‘groomed’ girls for Epstein is central to case about her classmates and her family. Maxwell and Epstein took her shopping and lavished her with gifts, like beauty products and new cowboy boots, according to a lawsuit Farmer filed last year.

The seemingly innocuous behavior was in fact part of a process to “groom� Farmer for sexual activity, authorities now say. Maxwell began pressuring Farmer to give Epstein a foot massage, according to the lawsuit, and the encounters esca-

By NICOLE HONG and BENJAMIN WEISER

A

nnie Farmer was 16 when she arrived at Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico in 1996 to attend a program for high school students, only to learn that she was the sole participant.

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lated — until Farmer said she eventually woke up one day to find Epstein entering her room, climbing into her bed and pressing his body against hers.

Now, with Maxwell facing allegations that she helped Epstein recruit and ultimately abuse girls as young as 14, the concept of grooming is at the heart of the criminal case against her. References to grooming appear nine times in the 18-page indictment against Maxwell.

Grooming has long been part of cases involving underage victims, but the concept has become increasingly important in the #MeToo era, as prosecutors have become more willing to file sex-crime charges in cases where people are coerced into sexual relationships without physical force. “It’s not like a legal term; you’re not going to find it in the statute,� said Anne Milgram, a former Justice Department sex-trafficking prosecutor. “Grooming is what predators do when they find a young person and try to break down the barriers that someone may have in their head to going along with the conduct.�

The psychological manipulation often begins with normal interactions, such as giving gifts or paying special attention to a child, psychologists say.

Gradually, the predator will expose the victim to sexual behaviors, like light touching, to desensitize them to sex. The process is aimed at breaking down resistance, making it less likely victims will recognize the abuse or report it. “If you can get the person to believe that they are responsible for their own behaviors, that they are complicit, then they don’t feel that they can complain,� said Chitra Raghavan, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has testified as an expert witness in federal trafficking cases.

Maxwell, who was arrested in July, has pleaded not guilty to the six-count indictment, which includes charges of conspiracy and of transporting minors to engage in criminal sexual activity. Lawyers for Maxwell did not respond to a request for comment.

She has always denied any wrongdoing in the lawsuits that have been filed against her over the past decade, which accused her of enabling Epstein’s abuse.

A spokesman for the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment.

Maxwell’s arrest came a year after Epstein, 66, was charged in July 2019 with sexually exploiting dozens of girls and women in New York City, Florida and other locations. About a month later, he hanged himself in a jail cell while awaiting trial.

Prosecutors have said Maxwell, 58, recruited teenage girls for Epstein, knowing that he was a predator who would abuse them, often during naked massages.

The indictment described three unnamed

Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S.attorney for the Southern District of New York, points to a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell during a news conference in New York announcing Maxwell’s arrest on July 2, 2020. minors who the government said were victims of Maxwell. She is accused of directly participating in the sexual abuse of two of them from 1994 to 1997.

One of the unnamed teenagers is Farmer, according to her lawyers. Farmer spoke at Maxwell’s bail hearing in July, using her real name.

The indictment charged that Maxwell gave Farmer an unsolicited massage while Farmer was topless, and also involved another unidentified victim in “group sexualized massages of Epstein.�

Prosecutors also accused Maxwell of encouraging a third girl to provide massages to Epstein in London from 1994 to 1995. Maxwell knew the massages would turn sexual, the indictment charged.

A major hurdle for prosecutors is the fact that the sexual abuse allegations against Maxwell are from more than two decades ago.

Federal laws allow prosecutors to charge sex abuse of minors at any point in the victim’s lifetime. Still, the timeline creates an opening for Maxwell’s lawyers to challenge the memories of the women who testify at trial.

Prosecutors have said they will use diary entries, flight records and business records to corroborate their testimony.

Legal experts said that evidence of grooming is sometimes used by prosecutors to rebut a defendant who argues that the sexual activity was voluntary.

In Maxwell’s case, it might also be used to attempt to show she intended to commit a crime — that is, that she knew the minors would be sexually abused.

She is charged in one count, for instance, under a statute that makes it a crime to “entice� a minor to travel across state lines to engage in illegal sexual activity. “The grooming is very important to prove intent, to prove the specific intent that she had them travel for the purpose of sex,� said Taryn Merkl, a former federal prosecutor in New York City who supervised human-trafficking cases.

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

11

Fed pledges low rates for years, and until inflation picks up

By JEANNA SMIALEK

F

ederal Reserve officials expect to leave interest rates near zero for years — through at least 2023 — as they try to coax the economy back to full strength after the pandemic-induced recession, based on their September policy statement and economic projections released Wednesday.

The Fed, in a significant update to its official policy statement, also reinforced its August pledge to tolerate slightly higher price gains to offset periods of weak inflation, underscoring that its chairman, Jerome Powell, and his colleagues plan to be extraordinarily patient as they try to cushion the economy in the months and years ahead.

The Fed’s moves are in response to two major challenges. The coronavirus pandemic continues to threaten the economy in the nearterm, leaving millions out of work, and central bank policy will be key to restoring growth and a strong labor market. A longer-run problem centers on inflation and interest rates, which have been slipping lower, threatening economic stagnation. Officials are hoping that an extended period of very cheap money will fuel demand and lift prices.

In its statement Wednesday, the policysetting Federal Open Market Committee said it expected to hold rates steady near zero until the job market reaches what it sees as full employment “and inflation has risen to 2% and is on track to moderately exceed 2% for some time.”

By scrapping their old practice of raising rates in response to a drop in unemployment and an expectation that inflation would rise — and instead requiring inflation to show up in real life as a precondition for higher rates — central bankers are committing themselves clearly to their new policy strategy and to a long period with borrowing costs near zero.

“Effectively we’re saying rates will remain highly accommodative until the economy is far along in its recovery,” Powell said at a news conference following the meeting, repeatedly calling the messaging “strong” and “powerful.”

The change was important enough to prove contentious. Two officials, Robert Kaplan from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Neel Kashkari from the Minneapolis Fed, voted against Wednesday’s decision. Kaplan favored retaining greater flexibility about future rate setting — suggesting that he did not want to intertwine interest rates so tightly with real-life inflation outcomes. Maintaining some

The Federal Reserve building in Washington on April 12, 2020. The Fed slashed interest rates to near zero in March, and it is broadly expected to leave them there for years. wiggle room would leave the Fed room to raise rates earlier.

Kashkari seemed to take the opposite tack. He believes the committee should “indicate that it expects to maintain the current target range until core inflation has reached 2% on a sustained basis,” the statement said, arguably a stronger commitment to a period of very-low rates.

Roberto Perli, an economist at Cornerstone Macro who formerly worked at the Fed, said the announcement codified a meaningful change to the Fed’s approach.

“What strikes me is how high a bar they set for raising rates,” Perli said. “The message is plenty clear: We want to maximize employment and inflation better come up, or no rate hikes here.”

The Fed slashed interest rates to near zero almost exactly six months ago, as the pandemic first swept the United States and markets tiptoed on the brink of disaster. Such low interest rates help to spur economic growth by encouraging home refinancing, business investment and other types of borrowing. While investors and economists already expected borrowing costs to remain at rock-bottom for years, the Fed’s declaration on Wednesday should buttress that outlook.

Powell tried to hammer that point home, saying that the changes “clarify our strong

commitment over a longer time horizon.”

Officials clearly expect that sustained economic support will be needed. During his news conference, Powell noted that while activity had picked up, the recovery in household spending probably reflected “substantial and timely” fiscal support, and services that involved people gathering together — like entertainment and tourism — would struggle to fully recover until the virus abated.

“Overall activity remains well below its level before the pandemic, and the path ahead remains highly uncertain,” Powell said.

Cutting the federal funds rate is not the only tool in the Fed’s arsenal — the central bank is also buying huge quantities of mortgage-backed and Treasury securities. The primary goal of those purchases has been to stabilize markets, but bond-buying can help to stimulate the economy by pushing down longer-term interest rates. It can also prod investors to move into riskier assets with higher payoffs, driving them toward corporate bonds and stocks.

Fed officials had been mulling when and how to update their asset purchase program, and said Wednesday that they would maintain purchases “at least” at their current pace to “sustain smooth market functioning and help foster accommodative financial conditions.”

Powell said that the purchases were hel-

ping to keep credit flowing in the economy.

“There are various ways and margins that we can adjust our tools going forward, and we’ll continue to monitor developments,” he said.

Even so, the Fed’s powers are limited and the central bank head once again noted that more fiscal support — the kind of direct spending that only Congress can authorize — would be needed to help the economy continue its recovery.

“My sense is that more fiscal support is likely to be needed,” he said.

Millions of people remain out of work and it is unclear how quickly — or even if — all of those workers will find re-employment.

Fed officials now expect the unemployment rate to average 7.6% over the final three months of the year, based on the median forecast, which is lower than they had previously expected but still sharply higher than the 3.5% rate that prevailed heading into the downturn.

Those projections were included in the Fed’s updated Summary of Economic Projections, a set of estimates for how the economy and interest rates will develop in coming years. It was the so-called SEP that showed interest rates on hold through 2023, based on the median forecast.

“The labor market has been recovering, but it’s a long way, a long way, from maximum employment,” Powell said, adding that the recovery will move most quickly through areas that were not directly affected by the virus.

Parts of the economy facing a direct hit — like airlines, sports stadiums and restaurants — “are going to be challenging for some time.”

“It’s millions of people,” he said, adding that it is the Fed’s job “not to forget those people.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

Backlash to TikTok-Oracle deal grows

By ANA SWANSON, DAVID McCABE and LAUREN HIRSCHI

E

ven as negotiations continued Wednesday over a proposal that would allow the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok to continue operating in the United States, a backlash was forming in Washington to the deal.

Over the weekend, TikTok had offered a proposal to the Treasury Department that aimed to address the Trump administration’s concerns that the app could give the Chinese government access to sensitive data. The proposal included bringing on Oracle, the Silicon Valley business software company, as a technology partner to TikTok. But Oracle would not own TikTok outright and the app would not transfer ownership of its valuable recommendation algorithm to Oracle.

That proposal is under review by a TikTok’s headquarters in Culver City, Calif. secretive, multiagency national security panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment interests.”

The letter was just the latest sign of in the United States, which is expected to submit its recommendation to President discontent about the Oracle-related proDonald Trump for a final decision Thursday. posal for TikTok. On Monday, Sen. Josh But while the proposal winds its way Hawley, R-Mo., said in a separate letter through the review process, some law- that the Trump administration should reject makers are increasingly up in arms about it. the proposal. He said that “perhaps, given In a letter Wednesday, Republican senators constraints imposed by Chinese law, the including Marco Rubio of Florida, Thom Ti- only feasible way to maintain Americans’ llis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of security is to effectively ban the TikTok app Texas criticized the proposal, saying that in the United States altogether.”

The congressional objections raise the any deal that left a Chinese company — in this case, TikTok’s parent company, Byte- question of whether Trump could face critiDance — in control of the code or algo- cism for the Oracle-TikTok proposal on the rithms that run the app would fail to address campaign trail. Trump, who had made positive comments about a deal Tuesday, apnational security concerns.

In their letter, the Senate Republicans peared to be aware of the growing debate.

“I’m not prepared to sign off on ansaid the prospective arrangement with Oracle raised “significant concerns,” arguing ything. I have to see the deal,” he said at that a partial sale or “trusted partnership a news conference Wednesday. “They’re deal” would be “insufficient in achieving going to be reporting to me tomorrow morthe goals of protecting Americans and U.S. ning.” He added that he was “not going to

be happy” if TikTok remained largely owned by a Chinese company.

A day earlier, when asked about his thinking on an Oracle partnership with TikTok, Trump said he would be making a decision “soon.” He added that he had “high respect” for Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder.

“He’s somebody I know,” Trump said.

“He’s been, really, a terrific guy for a long time. So we’re going to take a look.”

The backlash from lawmakers adds another twist to the drama over TikTok, which is hugely popular among teenagers and influencers and has seeped into popular culture. The app has been under scrutiny by the Trump administration for national security concerns for months, with critics saying it could provide a conduit for the Chinese government to gather data on American citizens. Chinese law requires that Chinese citizens share data with their government if asked.

Last month, Trump issued an executive order saying that TikTok essentially had to strike a deal to divest its U.S. operations

by Sept. 20 or else halt commercial transactions in the United States. That set off a race among multiple bidders, as well as various plans to restructure TikTok’s ownership and address the app’s data security. The Chinese government also weighed in with new regulations that would have allowed it to block an outright sale of TikTok. Oracle, TikTok and the Treasury De-

partment did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A White House spokesman declined to comment.

Some of the scrutiny of the OracleTikTok proposal relates to the close ties Oracle appears to have cultivated with the Trump administration. Ellison hosted a fundraiser for Trump this year, and the company’s chief executive, Safra Catz, served on the president’s transition team and has frequently visited the White House.

The actions to get the Oracle-TikTok proposal through government approval have ramped up in recent days. Some of Trump’s advisers, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, have appeared inclined to accept the kind of deal that ByteDance has offered, people familiar with their thinking have said.

But the idea has been met with skepticism by more hawkish members of the Trump administration, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been doubtful that this deal could guarantee that American data would not end up in China, people familiar with his thinking said.

On Wednesday, Catz, who has given more than $100,000 to Trump’s reelection campaign, spoke with Attorney General William Barr about the deal, said two people with knowledge of the matter, who were not authorized to speak publicly.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Much about the proposal remains fluid. ByteDance, Oracle and the government are discussing how any arrangement would protect TikTok’s user data from China and who exactly would have corporate control of the service, said the people familiar with the discussions.

To alleviate concerns, one person said, TikTok’s board in the United States would include only government-approved members, including one independent member with expertise in data security. Oracle would also be able to review the app’s source code and subsequent updates for security vulnerabilities, the person said.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who is a prominent skeptic of Chinese technology companies, said in a speech Wednesday that scrutiny of technology companies that could pose a risk “must be done honestly.”

He said that the “haphazard actions on TikTok fail that test and will only invite retaliation against American companies.”

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

13 Stocks

Stocks buckle, dollar slips as investors mull Fed action

G

lobal equity markets and gold slumped, while the dollar eased on Thursday after the Federal Reserve reminded investors of the long slog ahead for a full recovery that was reinforced by data showing persistently high claims for U.S. unemployment benefits.

U.S. Treasury yields dropped and the yield curve flattened as investors expressed disappointment that after its policy-setting meeting on Wednesday the Fed did not unveil more measures to stimulate the economy.

Wall Street’s main indexes tumbled as the technology sector and related stocks slid further, with Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc among the biggest drags on the Nasdaq.

The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell less than expected last week and applications for the prior period were revised up, suggesting the labor market recovery had shifted into low gear amid fading fiscal stimulus.

The Fed is doing all it can without appearing to be in panic mode, said Rick Meckler, a partner at Cherry Lane Investments, a family investment office in New Vernon, New Jersey.

Investors face few alternatives other than stocks so some are taking profits ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November from this year’s unexpected gains after the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, he said.

“The Fed has been the most predictable part of the U.S. government. They did exactly what they told you they were going to do, they’ve been doing exactly what they said they were going to do for now well over a year,” Meckler said.

“If there’s more stimulation to come it’s going to have to come from Congress and the president, and on that front we seem probably stymied until the election.”

Fed Chair Jerome Powell indicated a long road to “maximum employment” but some investors were disappointed by the lack of further stimulus plans even as policy-makers pledged to keep interest rates near zero for a prolonged period.

MSCI’s global benchmark for equity markets fell 0.66% to 571.19, while its emerging markets index fell 1.04%.

In Europe, the broad FTSEurofirst 300 index dropped 0.40% to 1,440.42.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.16%, the S&P 500 lost 0.51% and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.98%.

Traders were also taking in Bank of Japan and Bank of England meetings and plenty of emerging market action, but the tone was set by the events overnight at the Fed and in the trenches of the tech war.

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September 18-20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Chile’s largest indigenous group sees opportunity in a new constitution

By JOHN BARTLETT

H

unger strikes. The occupation of a municipal building. Arson attacks against trucks traveling through southern Chile.

The long-simmering conflict between the Mapuche, Chile’s largest Indigenous group, and the government over land rights and cultural recognition has escalated and spilled into violence in recent weeks, stoked by the economic pain that followed the pandemic.

The clashes were condemned by the government. But the strife amplified public support for the Mapuche’s demands and pushed their cause to the top of the political agenda just weeks before Chileans decide whether to overhaul their constitution, potentially creating the first opportunity in decades for official recognition of Chile’s Indigenous communities.

Nearly 13% of Chileans — roughly 2 million people — identified as Indigenous in the 2017 census. But Chile, unlike some of its neighbors in South America, does not acknowledge its Indigenous peoples in its constitution, said Felipe Agüero, a political scientist at the University of Chile.

“They are not recognized or even mentioned,” he said of the Mapuche.

For Gerela Ramírez Lepin, a university student from Curarrehue, a Mapuche community near Chile’s Andean border with Argentina, the journey toward drafting a new constitution that could remedy that exclusion cannot begin soon enough.

“This is a historic opportunity to make sure nobody is left behind,” she said.

“I may never get this chance again.”

The interior minister of Chile has said that the government is willing to negotiate with the Mapuche and has condemned the strife in the Araucanía, the country’s poorest region, as the actions of a violent minority.

But a growing number of Chileans are sympathetic to the Mapuche and see the conflicts of recent weeks as the latest flashpoint in a decadeslong struggle against the state over land rights, recognition of their culture and the often brutal tactics of security forces.

“The Mapuche conflict has become a pressure cooker,” said Verónica Figueroa Huencho, a visiting scholar at Harvard University who is Mapuche.

Last week, the government an-

Protesters in Santiago wave Mapuche flags on Oct. 25, 2019. Chile’s Mapuche have long demanded official recognition of their culture and of their claims to ancestral lands. nounced it had created a committee, chaired by President Sebastian Piñera, to discuss territorial conflicts and social development in the Araucanía.

Rising support for the Mapuche cause was evident during last year’s anti-government protests in Santiago, the capital, and other cities, which were harshly curbed by a militarized police force.

The Mapuche’s Wenufoye flag was ubiquitous, and protesters installed a rewe, a type of altar used in Mapuche ceremonies, in Santiago’s Plaza Italia. Plastered on walls were images of Camilo Catrillanca, a Mapuche whose death at the hands of security forces in 2018 sparked nationwide outrage.

The demonstrations, which were set off by an increase in subway fares in October, grew into a broader denunciation of Chile’s entrenched inequality and eventually paved the way for the constitutional reform process that is scheduled to start next month with a plebiscite vote.

“It was emotional,” said Ramírez Lepin, who participated in the protests. “For the first time in my life there was a palpable sense that we aren’t alone, that the subjugation of the Mapuche had gone on for too long.”

For decades, the government has tended to quash Indigenous demands in the

Araucanía with an iron fist, Mapuche leaders said, prosecuting suspected militants under a counterterrorism law that dates to the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

The truck drivers targeted in the recent arson attacks have said the government must do more to stop Mapuche assailants threatening their vehicles and livelihoods.

But Mapuche leaders say their ancestral land, known as Wallmapu and stretching from Chile’s Pacific seaboard across the Andes and over to the Argentine Atlantic coast, is being exploited by outsiders and by extractive industries while the government fails to protect it. They accuse the state of resorting to draconian means to punish the deeds of the few who have lately resorted to violence, while brushing aside the peaceful demands of the majority.

Now, as Chile prepares to vote Oct. 25 on whether to replace the constitution created 40 years ago, during the Pinochet regime, the Mapuche see an opportunity.

“Chile is a long way behind the rest of Latin America as the only place where monoculturalism is enshrined constitutionally,” Agüero said.

Activists are also pressing political leaders to create legislative quotas for Indigenous people, and the Senate is considering setting aside seats for Indigenous

people in the constitutional assembly.

After assuming the presidency for a second time in March 2018, Piñera, a Harvard-educated billionaire, announced a plan to develop the Araucanía, arguing that economic growth would bring peace and prosperity to the region.

But that vision never materialized as the government stumbled from crisis to crisis in the past year. Chile has been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic, which paralyzed much of the economy.

Amid the country’s lockdown came a hunger strike by several Mapuche prisoners, including Celestino Córdova, a spiritual leader who is serving an 18-year sentence for murder.

Córdova convened the hunger strike to decry Chile’s “monocultural” judicial system, which does not consider Indigenous beliefs. He ended the strike in midAugust, after 107 days, when the government agreed to allow him to briefly visit a site of spiritual importance once he recovers his health.

The hunger strike drew visceral reactions. Among the most striking was a confrontation in early August at a municipal building in the town of Curacautín, which Mapuche civilians were occupying in solidarity with the hunger strikers.

As police officers moved in to evict the Mapuche, a mob of local residents backed the security forces, brandishing metal bars and chanting racist taunts. Some local residents torched vehicles belonging to the Mapuche.

The scene was “soul-destroying,” said Ramírez Lepin, and a reminder of past violence and discrimination.

“I am Mapuche, not Chilean, and have been a victim of racism and discrimination all my life, but to hear those chants meant that our conflict has turned a corner,” she said.

A new constitution could go a long way toward giving the Mapuche the rights to land and the respect for their culture they have demanded for decades. But it would be only the first step toward real inclusion, Ramírez Lepin said.

“The state simply doesn’t understand what we want,” Ramírez Lepin said. “You can’t solve the conflict by throwing money at us. There’s no drive to import, export or trade — just to be happy with what you have and live in peace.”

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

15

China-backed hackers broke into 100 firms and agencies, U.S. says

By KATIE BENNER and NICOLE PERLROTH

T

tracked by cyberresearchers under the group names Advanced Persistent Threat 41, Barium, Winnti, Wicked Panda and Panda Spider, officials said.

“They compromised video game distributors to proliferate malware, which could then be used for follow-up operations,” said John Hultquist, a cybersecurity expert.

The group known initially as Wicked Spider to researchers at CrowdStrike, the California cybersecurity firm, seemed to be hacking for profit. But starting in late 2015, there was a notable shift.

The group, which had been predominantly targeting gaming companies, shifted to a long list of companies in the United States, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan that operated in agriculture, hospitality, chemicals, manufacturing and technology whose intellectual property would assist China’s official Five-Year Plan, the nation’s top-level policy blueprint.

Their techniques changed as well. In the past, the group was known to use similar malware across attacks, but that year its hackers started pursuing a more sophisticated set of supply chain attacks.

By late 2016, researchers concluded that the hackers they had known as Wicked Spider were operating at the behest of the Chinese state and changed their moniker to Wicked Panda. Panda was CrowdStrike’s moniker for hacking groups that acted on orders from the Chinese government.

As the indictments were announced Wednesday, researchers applauded the effort. “The United States government is starting to turn the tide on Chinese intrusion operations on Western companies and targets,” said Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s head of threat intelligence.

Verizon, Microsoft, Facebook and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, helped the government in its investigation.

he Justice Department said Wednesday that a group of hackers associated with China’s main intelligence service had infiltrated more than 100 companies and organizations around the world to steal intelligence, hijack their networks and extort their victims.

The U.S. government presented the allegations in a set of three indictments unsealed Wednesday that showed the scope and sophistication of China’s attempts to unlawfully advance its economy and to become the dominant global superpower through cyberattacks. The indictments also said some of the hackers had worked with Malaysian nationals to steal and launder money through the video game industry.

“The Chinese government has made a deliberate choice to allow its citizens to commit computer intrusions and attacks around the world because these actors will also help the PRC,” Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen said, referring to the People’s Republic of China in a news conference at which he announced the charges.

The acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Michael R. Sherwin, said some of the perpetrators viewed their association with China as providing “free license to hack and steal across the globe.”

The hackers — Zhang Haoran, Tan Dailin, Jiang Lizhi, Qian Chuan and Fu Qiang — targeted social media and other technology companies, universities, government agencies and nonprofits, according to the indictments.

They had such reach partly because they used a so-called supply chain attack that enabled them to break into software companies and embed malicious code in their products. Once those products were installed in other systems, the hackers could use the code that they had planted to break in. The attack described by Justice Department officials Wednesday was among the first supply chain attacks publicly revealed in a U.S. indictment of Chinese nationals.

Some of the Chinese hackers also worked with two Malaysian businessmen to use video game platforms to steal from the companies and launder illegal proceeds. The businessmen, Wong Ong Hua and Ling Yang Ching, were arrested Monday in Malaysia, The Justice Department charged five Chinese nationals with breaking into 100 firms and agencies to steal officials said.

The criminal computer activity and the hackers had been information, hijack networks and extort victims.

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16

September 18-20, 2020

Why French politicians can’t stop talking about crime

By NORIMITSU ONISHI and CONSTANT MÉHEUT

I

n the Babel Tower of French politics, everyone agrees at least on this: Crime is out of control.

The leader of the far right warned recently that France was a “security shipwreck’’ sinking into “barbarity.” A traditional conservative conjured up the ultraviolent dystopia of “A Clockwork Orange.” On the left, the presumed Green Party candidate in the next presidential contest described the insecurity as “unbearable.’’

And in the middle, President Emmanuel Macron’s ministers warned of a country “turning savage” — the “ensauvagement” of France — as they vowed to get tough on crime and combat the “separatism” of radical Muslims.

The only catch? Crime isn’t going up.

The government’s own data show that nearly all major crimes are lower than they were a decade ago or three years ago. Despite a oneyear spike, the 970 homicides recorded in 2019

were lower than the 1,051 in 2000. Overall, crime rose in the 1970s through the mid-1980s before declining and stabilizing.

But like elsewhere, and mirroring the campaign in the United States, the debate over crime tends to be a proxy — in France’s case, for debates about immigration, Islam, race, national identity and other combustible issues that have roiled the country for years.

The intensity of the current rhetoric comes after a spate of incidents over the summer — including violence on Bastille Day and the beating of a 44-year-old man after he asked a customer at a laundromat to wear a mask — that for many typified a particularly terrible year for France.

The economy is still reeling from one of Europe’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns this spring, and its traditional social fabric is being increasingly challenged by racial and ethnic minorities and by women who have protested injustices such as sexual abuse and police violence.

“Let’s put it bluntly: For France, this summer has been a murderous summer,” said Ma-

A display with the names of victims of domestic violence in Paris, Sept. 9, 2020. Statistics show a steady decline in crime in France.

rine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally and Macron’s main rival in the last presidential election, and his presumed challenger in the next one, in April 2022.

But notably, even at the height of the Yellow Vest protests two years ago, when looting and rampaging through wealthy districts of Paris had become a weekly occurrence, there was very little talk of crime as a major social issue.

The Yellow Vest movement was overwhelmingly white. This year, many of France’s largest demonstrations, which were mostly peaceful, were inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the killing of George Floyd in the United States, which forced the issue of police brutality to the front of the political agenda.

In Le Pen’s view, the current insecurity stemmed directly from the “systematic targeting of the police by the anti-police campaigns of racial activists.”

In a poster for a by-election later this month in northern France, Le Pen appears next to the local candidate with the message: “During the summer of 2020, several French people have been killed by scum stemming from immigration. Without political action, this could happen one day to those close to you, your brothers, your sisters, your children …”

More than any other French politician, Le Pen has zeroed in on the issue of crime. She and her supporters in the National Rally have tied it directly to immigration from Africa, which they fiercely oppose, and framed it as a threat to French civilization with words like “ensauvagement” and “barbarity.”

“In Rome, barbarians didn’t have the same values as the Romans,” Philippe Olivier, a close aide to Le Pen and a member of the European Parliament, said in an interview. “Romans admitted the barbarians: Rome ended up collapsing.’’

As the idea of “ensauvagement” — long a dog whistle of the far right — has been adopted even by Macron’s own ministers, Olivier described it as “an ideological victory.”

“This theme can take us to victory in the regional and departmental elections, and then in

the presidential election,” he said. “We’re on our ground. It’s a home game.”

According to a poll published last week, 70% of respondents said the use of “ensauvagement’’ was justified in describing France’s security situation. More significantly, positive assessment of Macron’s handling of crime had dropped to 27% — down from 32% last October and from 41% in April 2018.

The importance of crime among voters has put Macron in a dilemma: how to appear tough on crime without embracing the loaded language of the far right.

So far, Macron has avoided pronouncing judgment on the term. Last week, he appeared visibly annoyed when a reporter asked him about the word “ensauvagement,” replying that “actions are important.”

“You’ve done the Kama Sutra on ‘ensauvagement’ for the past 15 days,” Macron added, meaning that the media had analyzed it from every possible position.

In July, Macron, acutely aware of the electoral importance of crime as an issue, chose as his new interior minister and head of the national police a very close ally of Sarkozy, Gérald Darmanin. Darmanin, who has become the government’s face against crime, has also unapologetically defended the use of the word “ensauvagement.”

In the prelude to the 2017 presidential election, Macron portrayed himself as a progressive candidate and successfully dodged the themes of crime that pervaded the discourse of his main opponent, Marine Le Pen. But over the past year, he has been moving progressively to the right, in an effort to appeal to an electorate that has become “more conservative, more right-wing,” said Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at the University of Nice.

“He is being careful not to lose points in a presidential race that has already started,” Martigny said.

Presidential contenders across the political spectrum are jumping on the issue of crime.

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

17

Navalny was poisoned at his hotel, his team says

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

I

mmediately after Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, showed symptoms of poisoning last month, members of his team rushed to the Siberian hotel where he had been staying and grabbed anything that could possibly be used as evidence — including a water bottle that tests showed was tainted with a highly toxic nerve agent.

Even as Russia maintains that it played no role in the poisoning of Navalny, the new details — released Thursday in a post on Navalny’s Instagram account — underscore his team’s deep concerns for his well-being and their fears that he could fall victim to the kind of attacks directed at other Kremlin critics.

In a video posted on Instagram, members of Navalny’s team swiftly donned rubber gloves and scoured his room at the Xander Hotel in Tomsk, packing evidence into blue plastic bags.

The plastic water bottle, Navalny’s team and German investigators say, eventually helped German military scientists determine that the opposition leader had been poisoned with a class of chemical weapon called a Novichok, a Soviet-designed poison that Russian operatives have used in at least one previous assassination attempt.

The rush to grab evidence suggests that Navalny and his team had been prepared for the eventuality that there would be an attempt on his life. Indeed, at meetings with supporters around Russia, he was frequently asked how he remained alive, given his vicious criticism of the Kremlin and Russia’s most powerful figures.

His continued existence even fueled conspiracy theories that he was in fact a government puppet, paid to play the role of an opposition figure, while never actually seeking power himself.

On Aug. 20, those doubts were put to rest when Navalny began choking and screaming on a flight to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk.

Immediately after Navalny’s plane made an emergency landing, his aides contacted members of the team who had stayed in Tomsk to tell them what had happened, according to Navalny’s Instagram post.

“At that moment, they did the one thing that was possible,” the statement said. “They called a lawyer, went to the hotel room, which Navalny had just left, and began to identify, record and pack up everything that they found, including bottles of water from the hotel.”

When Navalny was flown from a Siberian hospital to Berlin on Aug. 22, the evidence went with him. It is unclear how Navalny’s team was able to sneak the bottle and other items out of the country without Russian officials knowing.

Russia has insisted since Navalny first fell ill that he was not poisoned and has instead offered a number of alternative theories, like he had been using cocaine or that he had low blood sugar and simply needed to eat some candy. Such statements convinced Navalny’s team that Russian authorities had no interest in conducting a real investigation.

“It was absolutely clear to us that Navalny was not lightly ill or got overheated and that a Raffaello candy would not help,” the Instagram post read. “So we decided to grab everything that might hypothetically be of use and give that to the doctors in Germany.”

An analysis by German military scientists at the Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology in Munich found traces of a nerve agent in the Novichok family in Navalny’s blood and urine, as well as on one of the bottles. Based on the German findings, Navalny’s team, according to the Instagram post, now believes that he was poisoned in that hotel room, not at the airport as they had originally suspected.

Laboratories in France and Sweden this week confirmed the German findings that Navalny had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok family.

A similar poison was used by Russian military intelligence operatives who traveled to Britain in 2018 to attack Sergei

V. Skripal, a former intelligence officer who had served prison time in Russia for spying for the British before being traded in a spy swap.

Given the substance used, German authorities and others say there is no doubt that the Russian government was behind the poisoning, a breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention to which it is a signatory.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the world’s chemical weapons watchdog, is expected to release in the coming days the results of its own analysis of biomedical samples collected from Navalny by its team of experts, the agency said in a statement Thursday.

If those results confirm the German, French and Swedish findings, the German government would move quickly to impose financial sanctions on Russia through the European Union, according to a senior German security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

“We don’t doubt our own result,” the official said.

“It’s just to give it even more political legitimacy.”

Aleksei A. Navalny, a prominent Kremlin critic, in Moscow in 2019. He and his team seemed to be bracing for an attempt on his life.

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September 18-20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

A cataclysm of hunger, disease and illiteracy

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

W

e think of COVID-19 as killing primarily the elderly around the world, but in poor countries it is more cataclysmic than that.

It is killing children through malnutrition. It is leading more people to die from tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS. It is forcing girls out of school and into child marriages. It is causing women to die in childbirth. It is setting back efforts to eradicate polio, fight malaria and reduce female genital mutilation. It is leading to lapses in vitamin A distribution that will cause more children to suffer blindness and die.

The U.N. Population Fund warns that COVID-19 may lead to an additional 13 million child marriages around the world and to some 47 million women being unable to get access to modern contraception.

In short, a pandemic of disease, illiteracy and extreme poverty is following on the heels of this coronavirus pandemic — and it is hitting children hardest.

The greatest impact of COVID-19 may be not on those whom the virus directly infects, but on those shattered by the collapse of economies and health and education systems in developing countries. Many schools and clinics are closed, medicines for AIDS and other ail-

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Buffeted by five years of devastating conflict and by the coronavirus pandemic sweeping every corner of the globe, millions of children stand on the brink of starvation in Yemen. ments are sometimes unavailable, and campaigns against malaria and genital mutilation are often suspended.

“The indirect impact of COVID-19 in the Global South will be even greater than the direct impact,” Dr. Muhammad Musa, executive director of BRAC International, an outstanding Bangladesh-based nonprofit, told me. “The direct impact, as tragic as it is, affects those infected and their families. The indirect impact has economic and social consequences for vastly more people — with jobs lost, families hungry, domestic violence up, more children leaving school, and costs over generations.”

In this sense, many of those whom COVID-19 kills never actually get the disease. Instead, they are children who die of measles because they couldn’t get vaccinated in a time of plague — up to 80 million children may miss vaccinations. Or they die of malnutrition because their fathers lost jobs as rickshaw drivers or their mothers couldn’t sell vegetables in the market.

As is often the case in economic crises, the burden falls particularly on girls. More are being married off as children so that the new husband’s family will feed them, or they are sent off to the city to work as maids in exchange for food and negligible incomes — while facing an end to education and significant risk of abuse.

“The major challenge being faced by students is hunger,” said Angeline Murimirwa, executive director for Africa of Camfed International, which supports girls’ education in developing countries. More than 60% of Camfed’s students in Malawi report suffering a lack of food.

Before this crisis, 4% of girls in Zimbabwe married by 14. That figure may now worsen.

Years ago I heard of a wrenching query from a bright and ambitious Kenyan girl: Should she drop out of school and give up her dreams, or should she accept a sexual relationship with a man who would then pay for her education — but who she feared had HIV? More girls will now face such impossible choices.

The crisis is driven by lockdowns and economic collapse, coupled with plummeting remittances from overseas. BRAC found that more than two-thirds of the people it works with in Liberia, Nepal, the Philippines and Sierra Leone said that incomes had been greatly reduced or had disappeared.

“If you’re a day laborer and you’re told you can’t leave your shack one day, the next day you’ve got no income to buy food,” noted Mark Lowcock, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief. “I would bet my house that there’s going to be an increase in poverty head count, an increase in child mortality, an increase in maternal mortality.”

Bill Gates and others are calling on Congress to include $4 billion in the next American stimulus package to help ensure that everyone worldwide can get vaccinated for the coronavirus. Don’t think of that as charity, but as an investment in global health security — and we also need emergency investments for education, polio and nutrition.

But, so far, rich countries have mostly been selfabsorbed and small-minded, not considering that a distant outbreak can again cross their own borders. A U.N. appeal for $10 billion for COVID-19 response has raised only about a quarter of that.

One of humanity’s triumphs in modern times has been a historic trend since about 1990 in which extreme poverty (defined as someone living on less than $2 a day, adjusted for inflation) has tumbled by about two thirds. Tragically, that is now reversed.

The number of people worldwide living in extreme poverty has risen by 37 million since COVID-19 hit, and it will rise another 25 million next year, according to estimates by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation.

At the turn of each year recently, I’ve written a column arguing that the previous year was the best in human history, based on such metrics as the risk that a child will die or remain illiterate. I won’t be able to write such a column this winter, or perhaps for years to come.

I asked Lowcock if COVID-19 is a setback for that era of progress, or a bookend.

“At a minimum this is going to be a significant blip,” he said. “If we’re not careful, it’s going to be worse than a blip. It could knock back for decades some of the progress that has been made.”

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

19

Panel del FEI concurre con recomendación de Justicia en caso contra alcalde de Adjuntas Por THE STAR

E

l Panel sobre el Fiscal Especial Independiente (OPFEI) acogió el jueves, la recomendación del Departamento de Justicia (DJ) de no designar un fiscal especial contra el alcalde de Adjuntas, Jaime Barlucea Maldonado, tras establecerse que no hubo actuación indebida en el usa de fondos públicos para costear un viaje estudiantil.

La querella presentada ante Justicia por la Oficina del Contralor sobre un viaje estudiantil ocurrido en el 2013, alegaba que personas que no cualificaban, se aprovecharon y disfrutaron de los beneficios del viaje.

Los hechos más sobresalientes de la Auditoría del Contralor que fueron minuciosamente investigados por Justicia fueron los siguientes: que aun-

que la hija del alcalde formó parte del viaje, ésta costeó totalmente su participación en dicho viaje, para lo cual no hubo desembolso de fondos públicos por ello; el municipio fue proactivo en requerir el reembolso de un pasaje emitido a nombre de un estudiante que finalmente no viajó, pero la agencia de Viajes, Holiday Group, se negó a reembolsar el costo sosteniendo instrucciones previas de la aerolínea.

En vista de ese análisis y de la evidencia recopilada sobre el mismo, no se encontró causa suficiente para creer que la conducta del alcalde pueda constituir delito.

“No vemos intención criminal en sus acciones y menos aún, la intención de fraude alguno de su parte”, concluye el Panel al concurrir con la determinación del Departamento de Justicia.

Representante busca designar PR- 21 en San Juan con el nombre de Roberto Clemente Por THE STAR

E

l representante, Víctor Parés Otero, informó el jueves que presentó en días pasados un proyecto de ley para designar con el nombre de Roberto Clemente Walker la carretera PR-21 que discurre desde la intersección de la avenida De Diego, hasta la intersección de la carretera PR-19, en el distrito 4 de San Juan.

Parés Otero señaló que esa carretera es la única en Puerto Rico con el número 21, por lo que recientemente presentó el Proyecto de la Cámara 2588 como una manera de destacar y honrar el legado de la leyenda Roberto Clemente, quien, además, comenzó su carrera como jugador profesional de béisbol en la liga local puertorriqueña de los Cangrejeros de Santurce.

“Con esta iniciativa buscamos dar realce al nú-

mero 21 y honrar la memoria de ese ícono del béisbol que nos sigue llenando de orgullo, como fanáticos del deporte y como puertorriqueños. Roberto Clemente es un modelo a seguir para las nuevas generaciones por su calidad humana y deportista. Por eso es importante seguir resaltando su gran trayectoria y destacar sus aportaciones, no tan solo como pelotero, sino también como un hombre de valores que dio su vida por ayudar a otros en necesidad”, expresó el representante en comunicación escrita.

Parés Otero presentó la medida como parte de la celebración del Día de Roberto Clemente establecido por Mayor League Baseball (MLB) para rendir homenaje al legado del Salón de la Fama como humanitario y jugador.

El legislador indicó que le solicitó a la gobernadora, Wanda Vázquez, que incluya el proyecto en la Sesión Extraordinaria para su aprobación. La medida

establece que luego de aprobarse la misma, la Comisión Denominadora de Estructuras y Vías Públicas de Puerto Rico, y el Departamento de Transportación y Obras Públicas, tomarán las medidas necesarias para dar cumplimiento a las disposiciones de esta Ley.

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September 18-20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Geraldine Viswanathan on karaoke and Lizzo dance breaks

By NANCY COLEMAN

G

eraldine Viswanathan’s childhood bedroom in Newcastle, Australia, is filled with memories. The actress saves every birthday card and has a soft spot for written keepsakes — where there aren’t any, she creates her own, jotting down tidbits about moments she wants to remember. “I am a very sentimental person,” Viswanathan, 25, said. “I think I’m just sort of a documentarian of life.”

So her latest role, and one of her biggest yet, makes sense: Lucy, the charismatic heroine of “The Broken Hearts Gallery,” is a serial sentimentalist herself, amassing shelves and shelves of tchotchkes from past relationships. (Viswanathan’s mementos, thankfully, don’t seem to have reached nearly the same level of Lucy’s someone-should-really-call-the-health-department stockpile.)

The romantic comedy, which opened Friday in theaters (remember those?), centers on Lucy, a gallery assistant in New York, and Nick, a strait-laced aspiring hotelier played by the “Stranger Things” star Dacre Montgomery. They collide when Lucy mistakes his car for a Lyft — here, a meet-cute; elsewhere, every young woman’s worst nightmare.

In the past couple of years, Viswanathan has already starred opposite Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney in HBO’s “Bad Education,” and Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi in “Miracle Workers” on TBS — not to mention earning breakout roles in the films “Blockers” and “Hala.” This film, written and directed by Natalie Krinsky, came at an apt time for Viswanathan, who like most 20-somethings — her

The actress Geraldine Viswanathan in Culver City, Calif., Sept. 12, 2020. The star of “Broken Hearts Gallery” can relate to her character in more ways than one — she, too, has been trying to figure out her next steps. character included — was struggling to figure out her next steps.

“It really is so overwhelming at times to be an adult and to be responsible for yourself,” she said. “I think it’s a constant thing that I’m learning and figuring out how to do.”

In a phone interview last week, Viswa-

nathan discussed the film, playing a romantic lead and her (theater royalty) co-stars. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Growing up, how did you find your way to comedy and acting?

I was a pretty serious kid, but I liked performing. I went to a performing arts school — I was the only Brown kid, and I felt very on the outside and overlooked. (Viswanathan’s father is of Indian descent, and her mother is from Switzerland.) I was always trying to get a part in the school plays and never did. But then at one point in fifth grade, I got a tiny comedic part in one of the plays — I really distinctly remember that feeling of being onstage and getting a laugh. From that point on, I was obsessed with stand-up and “SNL” and sketch comedy, and throughout my schooling years was making all my friends do sketches with me.

Q: Would you consider yourself a romcom person?

A: Definitely. When I was like 14, my first romantic comedy that I was obsessed with was “Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.” I watched that over and over again, every sleepover. I think “Bridget Jones’s Diary” is my all-time favorite — it was something about how relatable and charming she was in an un-glossy way.

Q: What first caught your eye about “Broken Hearts Gallery”?

Lucy was just such a little firecracker. I thought she was so open and her energy was really infectious, even on the page. I was like, I want to be friends with this person, slash I want to be like this person — maybe if I play this person, she’ll rub off on me in some way. She’s such a Leo. Lucy has a really big heart, and I think she wears it on her sleeve a little bit more than I do. She expresses herself so fully and unapologetically, and I think I have that, but just not to the level that she takes it.

Q: It still feels very rare to find a romcom where we get to see a woman of color falling in love. What has it been like for you to take that on?

A: While I was filming, I never felt the pressure — I don’t really see myself as different in any way until I’m reminded by others that I am. It feels a little bigger than me, but it’s the most meaningful to me when I get messages like, “I’ve never seen myself reflected on-screen like this,” or, “It’s so nice to see someone who isn’t the default be on-screen and desired by men, and to be a beautiful and radiant young woman living her best life.”

Q: Some of the most joyful scenes show Lucy with her roommates (Molly Gordon and Phillipa Soo).

A: Oh, it was just such a dream. We got so lucky with our trio, because we didn’t do a chemistry read or anything. We just instantly got along, and I think we all felt relieved, because it meant that we didn’t have to try very hard.

Natalie was like, “Great. You guys just hang out and do your thing, and I’ll capture it.” If there was ever a lull in energy on set, she would blast Lizzo and we would have a little dance break — some of it is in the movie.

Q: You and Dacre Montgomery also have really tangible chemistry in the film.

We had this natural familiarity with each other — might have something to do with both of us being Australian. I felt like our dynamic really mirrored Nick and Lucy’s. It’s kind of perfectly encapsulated in the karaoke scene — Dacre was genuinely terrified doing that scene, and I am totally the person at karaoke that makes everyone get up and sing.

Q: Is it bittersweet for you now to look at the film and see yourself and others running around New York for events and parties?

A: Watching now, I’m even more so like, wow! People! Friendship! Community! Remember? It just feels like a fantasy at this point. Even Nick and Lucy’s meet-cute, that’s not going to happen now. It does make me feel reminiscent of that time, and I think we will get back there.

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

21

Jerry Harris of ‘Cheer’ accused of sex abuse in teenagers’ lawsuit

By SARAH BAHR

J

erry Harris, a student featured in the Emmy-nominated Netflix series “Cheer,” was sued Monday by 14-year-old twin brothers in Texas who say that he solicited sex, sent them sexually explicit messages via text and social media, and asked them to send nude photos of themselves.

The lawsuit, filed in the District Court of Tarrant County in Texas, accuses Harris, who is now 21, of asking one of the boys for oral sex at a cheerleading competition and threatening “imminent physical bodily injury.”

The boys are not named in the suit because they are minors.

The suit accuses Harris of “sexual harassment, exploitation abuse and molestation” of the boys. It states they are now “limited in their ability to meaningfully interact with others due to the trauma of childhood sexual abuse.”

A representative for Harris did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

But a spokesperson for him has told People: “We categorically dispute the claims made against Jerry Harris, which are alleged to have occurred when he was a teenager. We are confident that when the investigation is completed, the true facts will be revealed.”

Harris, who was a member of the cheerleading team at Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas, and at one time coached athletes at National Cheerleaders Association camps, gained acclaim on the Netflix series for his upbeat attitude and spirited pep talks and he had endorsement deals with Cheerios and Walmart. He made a guest appearance with other cast members on the Dallas stop of Oprah Winfrey’s nationwide wellness tour

in February and held an Instagram chat with Joe Biden in June.

He “violated his role as a mentor, trainer, coach, sexually violated the Plaintiffs,” the lawsuit said, “and used his position of authority and power over the Plaintiffs.”

It also states that three organizations — the U.S. All Star Federation, Cheer Athletics and Varsity Spirit — that employed Harris or that organized or oversaw competitions he participated in as an athlete or as a coach when the behavior is alleged to have occurred, did not do enough or act quickly enough to protect the boys.

Harris befriended the boys when they were 13 and Harris was 19, USA Today first reported Monday. They met him while competing in national cheerleading competitions organized and overseen by Varsity Spirit and the All Star Federation and communicated with him in person, by phone and on social media.

According to the suit, they were “star struck” by Harris, who was nationally known as a cheer personality and coach. He asked for their phone numbers and Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat handles, and, the boys say in the lawsuit, the interactions became sexual in nature “almost immediately.” They also said that Harris asked that they send him “booty pics.”

The complaint accuses Harris of exploiting the fact that both boys were gay and says he began sending them sexually explicit messages, including photos of his genitals and videos of him masturbating, while continuing to demand that they send nude photos of themselves. At the American Cheerleaders Association Nationals competition in Fort Worth, in February 2019, the document says, Harris, who was 19, also told one of

Jerry Harris gained acclaim for his upbeat attitude and spirited pep talks on the Netflix series. A representative did not respond for a request to comment on Wednesday. the boys, who was 13, to follow him into a bathroom. There, the suit says, he asked him to perform a sexual act.

The boys’ mother discovered sexually explicit messages, photos and videos from Harris on their phones and social media accounts around February 2020, according to the complaint. She reported what she found to the three organizations named in the lawsuit, as well as the Fort Worth Police Department and the FBI, one of the boys’ lawyers, John C. Manly, said.

Harris gained acclaim for his upbeat attitude and spirited pep talks on the Netflix series and he had deals with Cheerios and

Walmart. A spokesman for General Mills, which owns Cheerios, said Wednesday that the company had suspended its relationship with Harris as soon as it learned of the allegations. He also said the company had removed all content related to Harris from its advertising.

USA Today also reported Monday that the FBI was investigating allegations that Harris asked for sex and nude photos from the boys. The FBI executed “court-authorized law enforcement activity” in Naperville, Illinois, on Monday, its Chicago Division said.

Harris owns a home there. He has not been arrested or charged with any crime.

The lawsuit seeks more than a million dollars in damages from the U.S. All Star Federation, Cheer Athletics and Varsity Spirit, citing “emotional distress” and “loss of enjoyment of life.” The lawsuit states that the boys will need medical and psychological treatment, therapy and counseling.

Sarah Klein, another lawyer for the teenagers, said in a statement that she feared there might be other people in the same situation. “We have seen too many examples of national athletic organizations such as USA Gymnastics, USA Swimming and others ignore sexual abuse” by those people who have a high profile, like Harris, she said. “I fear that there may be other victims in this case, and I urge them to follow the lead of our clients and report their abuse to law enforcement.”

Netflix declined a request for comment Wednesday.

Cheer Athletics said that Harris was strictly an athlete participant, and that his affiliation with it ended at the National Cheerleaders Association Nationals competition on March 1, 2020.

22

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

After 43 years, a noted wine sentinel stands down

By ERIC ASIMOV

J

oseph DeLissio never felt called to become a master sommelier. He didn’t post Instagram photos of himself posing with cult wines. He didn’t try to make his own wine, start an import company or initiate a podcast, all standard activities for 21stcentury sommeliers.

For 43 years, he just did his job. At least he had a great view.

Until last month, DeLissio, 65, was wine director of The River Café, the glassy, glittery barge restaurant moored on the Brooklyn waterfront. The Brooklyn Bridge soars overhead, and the majestic skyline of Lower Manhattan dazzles from across the water.

Every year thousands of diners from around the world arrived to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and business deals.

Some came simply to take in the view. Many enjoyed a few of the bottles DeLissio carefully accumulated over his many years overseeing the comprehensive wine list.

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the restaurant industry sinks into an alarming unknown, DeLissio decided this summer that he had had enough. It was time to retire.

After putting the wine program in shape for The River Café to reopen for outdoor dining in July, he turned in his keys in August.

“I was heading in this direction — 43 years is a long time, but the pandemic certainly pushed it,” he said. “Like much of the industry, I lost my health care. A horrible thing has happened, but it’s the best time for me to go.”

Joey D., as he is widely known in the wine world, was the dean of New York City sommeliers. In an industry where stability is rare, he never felt the need to find something better or different, or even to call much attention to himself.

Since he was hired in 1977, the city has risen from the depths of financial ruin to an almost arrogant prosperity. Stickfigure towers and needle-nose high-rises now lay claim to the skyline, and everybody with money is a wine collector.

From his post, DeLissio has seen New York stunned by 9/11, rocked by the 2008 financial meltdown, washed over by superstorm Sandy and closed down by the coronavirus. Until now, it has always bounced back.

He also helped set in motion the rise of American wine culture. When he joined The River Café shortly after it opened, he said, the wine list included just 12 bottles. Spirits made up 90% of bar sales. Now, wine dominates sales, and the list offers roughly 800 choices, pruned from a peak of 1,150 bottles before Sandy.

Back in the mid-1970s, few restaurants beyond fancy French places employed sommeliers. DeLissio’s title at first was beverage manager.

“The term ‘wine director’ hardly existed,” DeLissio said.

“Kevin Zraly might have been the first with that title.”

Zraly was part of the team at Windows on the World, which opened atop the north tower of the World Trade Center a year before The River Café, in 1976. It was the beginning of a revolution in American dining, paralleled by rising consumption

Joseph DeLissio, who has just retired as wine director at the River Cafe, outside the cafe in Brooklyn, Aug. 24, 2020. DeLissio, “a blue-collar kid in a white-collar job,” saw the rise of American wine culture and put together an ever-changing, worldclass list. of wine and a boom in the American wine industry.

In the 1960s and early ’70s, French wines were synonymous with fine dining. Italian restaurants offered Chianti in straw bottles. The California wine industry still produced mostly cheap jugs and fortified wines.

But, as DeLissio recalled, restaurants like Windows, The

In a photo he provided, Joseph DeLissio on the deck at the River Cafe in 1986.

River Café, The Four Seasons and Sparks Steak House were making an effort to feature California wines from emerging producers like Robert Mondavi, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, Chateau Montelena and Heitz Cellar.

DeLissio was right there in the thick of it, traveling to California to meet and taste with producers, getting to know Napa Valley titans like Mondavi, Joe Heitz and André Tchelistcheff, a legendary Napa winemaker and consultant.

“It was very unusual back then for anybody from a top New York restaurant to come to visit,” DeLissio said. “I’m 24 years old, and I’m tasting wine with André Tchelistcheff. The people running the industry were farmers, before the big corporations bought the properties and turned Napa into a miniDisney World.”

Tastes and the American wine industry changed, and so did The River Café wine list. DeLissio continued to buy high-end California wines, but as they were getting more powerful and alcoholic in the 1990s, he turned more toward European wines, building excellent selections of Burgundy and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

He fell in love with Spanish wines and developed a personal passion for Madeira, the Portuguese fortified wine, putting together an extraordinary collection of old and rare bottles.

“Madeira is almost like a conversation,” DeLissio told me in 2007. “It’s the most thoughtful wine there is.”

Of the California cult cabernets that he collected, he said: “We were the first to put those on, and maybe the first to take them off. The wine list used to be 80% California, and now maybe it’s 25%.”

He reaffirmed his assessments after Sandy, which poured seawater through the restaurant, destroying the kitchen, the electrical system and a new Steinway grand piano and gushing through the wine storage room on the dining room level, ruining a significant portion of the 10,000-bottle collection.

Some were damaged on the outside, rendering them unsellable. But they were still drinkable, which gave DeLissio a chance to taste many precious California bottles.

“Quite often, the most expensive, the most allocated, the most highly rated wines were just not worth it,” he said in 2014.

“It took Sandy to make me say, ‘Man, what was I thinking?’”

Through it all, DeLissio, lean and angular, has remained at his post, overseeing the cellar and list. As sommeliers became superstars, developing a cliquish and competitive New York culture, he preferred to keep his distance.

“Joey marches to his own tune, always,” said Daniel Johnnes, who for years was the wine director at Montrachet in Tribeca and later for the Daniel Boulud group of restaurants. “He was never dragged into the politics of it.”

For years, DeLissio has lived on Staten Island, taking the ferry to work and back. He has been divorced for 20 years and has three grown children — Krista, Joseph and Julia — and a 3-year-old grandson, Julian.

“I always considered myself a blue-collar kid in a whitecollar job,” he said. “I’m still a working-class kid.”

Although retired, he has no plans to stop working. For years, DeLissio has nursed an ambition to write screenplays. He has finished two and is working on a third.

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

23

Moderna shares the blueprint for its coronavirus vaccine trial

By DENISE GRADY and KATIE THOMAS

T

he biotech company Moderna released a 135-page document Thursday that spells out the details of how it is conducting the late-stage trial of its coronavirus vaccine, and how safety and efficacy will be determined.

The document suggests that the first analysis of the trial data may not be conducted until late December, and that there may not be enough information then to determine whether the vaccine works. Subsequent analyses, scheduled for March and May, are more likely to provide an answer.

Those timelines mesh with the cautionary estimates from many researchers, and stand in sharp contrast to President Donald Trump’s predictions that a vaccine will become widely available before the end of this year.

Scientists have been calling on vaccine-makers to share their study plans, known as protocols, so that outside experts can evaluate them. Until now, none of the nine companies that are testing vaccines in late-stage clinical trials had done so.

Moderna, AstraZeneca and Pfizer, which is collaborating with the German company BioNTech, are among the frontrunners in the global race to produce a vaccine to fight the pandemic.

AstraZeneca’s trial stopped temporarily because of serious illness in a participant. It has resumed in Britain, but not in the United States.

Pfizer said Saturday that it planned to expand its trial to 44,000 participants from 30,000, but that it still expected to have efficacy results by the end of October.

Both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech use genetic material from the virus, known as mRNA, to prompt cells in the body to make a fragment of the virus that will train the immune system to fight off an infection.

Dr. Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer, said that his firm was the first of the coronavirus vaccine-makers to release its protocol, and that pharmaceutical companies were usually reluctant to do so, for competitive reasons.

“I’m proud of doing that,” he said in an interview. “I don’t think there’s much there that we’re disclosing that hasn’t al-

ready been spoken to, but let the public be the judge of that.”

Cognizant of public wariness and skepticism about vaccines, Zaks said Moderna consulted an outside ethics expert who advised the company that the only way to win trust was to be “transparent to the point of discomfort.”

He also sought to address researchers’ complaints about the lack of disclosure.

“If what you want to do is see the protocol — here,” Zaks said.

The action might encourage other vaccine-makers to do the same, Dr. Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive, said in an interview.

Dr. Eric Topol, a clinical trial expert at Scripps Research in San Diego, gave the company “big kudos” for sharing the information, but said that he was disappointed by some of the details. For example, the company intends to include in its data people who developed relatively mild cases of COVID-19. Topol said more compelling evidence of the vaccine’s effectiveness would be produced if the company counted only moderate to severe cases.

In addition, the protocol allows for the possibility of stopping the trial early after a relatively small number of cases. Stopping early could lead to an exaggerated perception of the vaccine’s efficacy, and could also miss safety problems that could turn out to be significant later if the vaccine is given to millions and millions of people.

“Take the time, the extra weeks,” Topol said. “No shortcuts. Nobody will regret it. I’ve been doing clinical trials for decades. I don’t know if there’s ever been a more important one than this one. I’d like to see it done right and not stopped early.”

Moderna’s protocol release coincided with a call Thursday morning with investors to discuss the company’s coronavirus work, research on other vaccines and its plans to begin developing flu vaccines.

The company’s coronavirus vaccine, developed in collaboration with scientists from the National Institutes of Health, was the first to be tested in humans. The Phase 3 study now underway has enrolled more than 25,000 of its intended 30,000 volunteers, and Zaks said the enrollment should be complete in the next few weeks.

The building housing the headquarters of Moderna Therapeutics in Cambridge, Mass., on May 19, 2020. The biotech company released a 135-page document on Thursday, Sept. 17, 2020, that spells out the details of how it is conducting the late-stage trial of its coronavirus vaccine, and how safety and efficacy will be determined.

About 28% of the participants are Black, Latino or from other populations that have been particularly hard hit by the disease. A diverse enrollment has been considered essential to make sure that the findings apply to people from as many backgrounds as possible.

To determine the vaccine’s efficacy, COVID-19 cases are counted only if they occur two weeks after the second shot.

Some patients are already two weeks beyond the second shot, but Zaks said he did not know if any trial participants had contracted the disease yet.

A total of 151 cases — spread between the vaccine and placebo groups — would be enough to determine whether the vaccine is 60% effective. The Food and Drug Administration has set the bar at 50%.

But if the vaccine turns out to be highly effective, with a statistically significant difference emerging between the two groups with fewer than 151 cases, efficacy could be proved sooner, Zaks said.

The numbers will be watched by a panel of independent experts picked by the National Institutes of Health. The same group will also monitor several other trials.

Zaks and Bancel said that the first analysis would probably not take place before November. In theory, the vaccine could be found effective at that point, though the odds of demonstrating 60% effectiveness at the first analysis are not high, Zaks said.

If the data are not conclusive, the panel will look again after there have been a total of 106 cases. If there is still no answer, the next and final analysis will occur after 151 people contract COVID. How long it takes to reach any of those case counts depends on the trajectory of the pandemic and how likely participants are to be exposed to the virus.

It will probably take five months from the study start — when the first participant received the first shot — to reach 53 cases, eight months to reach 106 and 10 months to reach 151, the protocol states. Those estimates depend on certain assumptions being correct, including that in a six-month period, the incidence of COVID in the placebo group will be 0.75%.

The study began in late July, which would suggest that the first interim analysis may not occur until late December, and the final one in late May.

24 LEGAL NOTICE COMMONWEAL TH OF MASSACHUSETTS, BRISTOL, SS. SUPERIOR COURT.

COMMONWEALTH v.

ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS ($100,000.00)

DOCKET NO. 2073CV00015 ORDER OF NOTICE BY PUBLICATION

To: All interested persons who own or may have an interest in the defendant monies seized 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 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.) Jennifer L. Sullivan, Assistant Clerk - Magistrate.

Dated: AUGUST 20, 2020

ASSOCIATION OF PUERTO RICO; FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ

PARTE DEMANDADA CIVIL NÚM. SJ2020CV04444 (103). SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO POR LA VÍA JUDICIAL. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: FULANO Y MENGANO DE TAL, POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS DEL PAGARÉ

Queda usted notificado que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cancelación de pagaré extraviado por la vía judicial. El pagaré extraviado fue suscrito 13 de agosto de 1973 por Alfonso Alonso Rubiera y su esposa Bernarda Jaca Hernández t/c/c Bernarda Jaca De Alonso a favor de Bayamón Federal Savings and Loan Association of Puerto Rico por la suma de $24,000.00, intereses al 8% anual y vencimiento al 1ro de agosto de 2003, según consta de la Escritura núm.

181 autorizada por el notario Michel Rachid Piñeiro, sobre la siguiente propiedad: URBANA: Solar sito en el barrio Monacillos de la municipalidad de Río Piedras, hoy San Juan, Puerto Rico, marcado con el #22-B de la manzana MB de la Urbanización Caparra Terrace con un área superficial de 238.56 metros cuadrados más o menos, el cual colinda por el NORTE, en 9.58 metros con terrenos propiedad de Reading Corporation; por el SUR, en 9.50 metros con la calle #110-A de la urbanización, por el ESTE, en 25.00 metros con el solar #21 de la manzana MB y por el OESTE, en 25.00 con el solar #22-A de la manzana MB. Enclava una casa de concreto con techo de azotea y pisos de losas del país, de una planta, consistiendo de tres dormitorios con sus closets, sala-comedor, en LEGAL NOTICE una sola unidad, cocina con su ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO closet, balcón, cuarto de baño, DE PUERTO RICO RIBUNAL que tiene una servidumbre por DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA signo aparente, establecida por SALA SUPERIOR DE SAN la corporación constructora que divide los apartamentos en A y JUAN. MANUEL MEDINA JACA B, mediante pared medianera que continuara sirviendo a amPARTE DEMANDANTE VS. bas propiedades. La propiedad BANCO SANTANDER y la escritura de hipoteca consDE PUERTO RICO, tan inscritas al folio 206 tomo SUCESOR EN DERECHO 225 de Monacillos, Finca núm.

DE BAYAMÓN FEDERAL 8286, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección III. InsSAVINGS & LOAN

@

cripción tercera. La parte demandada deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal Se le advierte que, si no contesta la demanda, radicando el original de la contestación en este Tribunal y enviando copia de la contestación a la abogada de la parte demandante, Lcda.

Belma Alonso García, cuya dirección es: PO Box 3922, Guaynabo PR 00970-3922, Teléfonos (787) 789-1826 y (787) 708-0566, correo electrónico: oficinabelmaalonso@gmail. com, dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, excluyéndose el día de la publicación, se le anotará la rebeldía y se le dictará Sentencia en su contra, concediendo el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle.

EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y el sello del Tribunal, hoy 4de septiembre de 2020, en San Juan, Puerto Rico. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, SECRETARIA REGIONAL. IVELISSE GONZALEZ NIEVES, SUB-SECRETARIA.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUETO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE GUAYNABO.

REVERSE MORTGAGE FUNDING, LLC. Demandante vs.

SUCESION RAMONA CAMACHO GARCIA COMPUESTA POR JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES

Demandados CIVIL NUM. GB2019CV01249.

SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO E INTERPELACION. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO MIEMBROS DESÇONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN RAMONA CAMACHO GARCIA

Quedan emplazados y notifi-

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

cados de que en esté Tribunal se ha radicado una demanda de ejecución de hipoteca en su contra. Se le notifica que deberán presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración d Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: htt.ps://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del Tribunal Superior de Puerto Rico Sala de Guaynabo y enviando copia a la parte demandante: Lcda. Frances L. Asencio-Guido, Greenspoon Marder, LLP, Trade Centre South, Suite 700, 100 West Cypress Creek Road, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309, Tel: (954) 343-6273, Fax: (954) 3436982, Correo electrónico: Frances.Asencio@ gmlaw.com. Se le apercibe y notifica que si no contEsta la demanda radicada en su contra dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda, sin más citárseles, ni oírseles. Por otro lado, el Tribunal ordena la interpelación judicial a los codemandados, JOHN DOE y JANE DOE, conforme di8pone el Artículo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 2787. Se le ORDENA a los herederos de la causante RAMONA CAMACHO GARCIA, a saber: JOHN DOE y JANE DOE, a que dentro del término legal de treinta (30) días, contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien sus respectivas participaciones sobre la herencia de la causante RAMONA CAMACHO GARCIA y así comparezcan ante este Tribunal. Se le APERCIBE a los herederos antes mencionados que de no expresarse dentro de ese término de treinta (30) días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de la referida herencia, la misma se tendrá por aceptada.

También se les APRCIE a los herederos antes mencionados que luego del transcurso del término de treinta (30) días antes señalado contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presenteorden, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia del causante y, por consiguiente, responden por las cargas de dicha herencia conforme dispone el Artículo 957 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. sec. 2785. Expedido bajo mi firma, y sello del Tribunal, en Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, hoy 8 de septiembre de 2020. LCDA.LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Regional. DIAMAR T. GONZALEZ

(787) 743-3346

The San Juan Daily Star

Friday, September 18, 2020 BARRETO, Secretaría del Tribunal Conf I.

LEGAL NOTICE

Demandante v.

DELINMARI RIVERA ROSADO, JOEL ORTIZ VAZQUEZ

Estado Libre Asociado de PuerDemandado(a) to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL Civil: BY2019CV06135. SALA: DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Pri503. Sobre: COBRO DE DINEmera Instancia Sala Superior RO ORDINARIO. NOTIFICAde CAROLINA. CIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR REVERSE MORTGAGE EDICTO.

FUNDING LLC Demandante v.

SUCN ISMAEL SOTO MADURO Y OTROS

A: JOEL ORTIZ VAZQUEZ URB. FLAMBOYAN GDNS K10 CALLE 13 BAYAMON, PUERTO RICO 00959-5810

Demandado(a) (Nombre de las partes a las que se Civil: CA2019CV02745. SALA: le notifican la sentencia por edicto) 409. Sobre: EJECUCION DE EL SECRETARIO(A) que susHIPOTECA. NOTIFICACIÓN cribe le notifica a usted que DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO. 14 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020 A: JOHN DOE , este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o ReYJANE DOE COMO POSIBLES MIEMBROS solución en este caso, que ha debidamente registrada DESCONOCIDOS DE LA sido y archivada en autos donde SUCESION DE ISMAEL podrá usted enterarse detaSOTO MADURO Y lladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se SUCESION MARIA E. CALDERON T/C/C MARIA publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general ESTHER CALDERON en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro RIVERA. de los 10 días siguientes a su (Nombre de las partes a las que se notificación. Y, siendo o reprele notifican la sentencia por edicto) sentando usted una parte en EL SECRETARIO(A) que susel procedimiento sujeta a los cribe le notifica a usted que 4 términos de la Sentencia, Sende SEPTIEMBRE de 2020 , tencia Parcial o Resolución, este Tribunal ha dictado Sende la cual puede establecerse tencia, Sentencia Parcial o recurso de revisión o apelación Resolución en este caso, que dentro del término de 30 días ha sido debidamente registracontados a partir de la publicada y archivada en autos donde ción por edicto de esta notificapodrá usted enterarse detación, dirijo a usted esta notificalladamente de los términos de ción que se considerará hecha la misma. Esta notificación se en la fecha de la publicación publicará una sola vez en un de este edicto. Copiad e esta periódico de circulación general notificación ha sido archivada en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro en los autos de este caso, con de los 10 días siguientes a su fecha de 15 de SEPTIEMBRE notificación. Y, siendo o reprede 2020. En BAYAMON, Puerto sentando usted una parte en Rico, el 15 de SEPTIEMBRE el procedimiento sujeta a los de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I. términos de la Sentencia, SenSANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria. tencia Parcial o Resolución, IVETTE M. MARRERO BRAde la cual puede establecerse CERO, Secretario(a) Auxiliar. recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días LEGAL NOTICE contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notifica- Estado Libre Asociado de Puerción, dirijo a usted esta notifica- to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL ción que se considerará hecha DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Prien la fecha de la publicación mera Instancia Sala Superior de este edicto. Copiad e esta de BAYAMON. notificación ha sido archivada PR RECOVERY AND en los autos de este caso, con DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC fecha de 15 de SEPTIEMBRE Demandante v. de 2020. En CAROLINA, PuerMIGDALIA ALICEA SAEZ to Rico, el 15 de SEPTIEMBRE H/N/C SMART ZONE de 2020. LCDA. MARILYN Demandado(a) APONTE RODRIGUEZ, Secretaria. MARICRUZ APONTE Civil: BY2019CV06412. SALA: ALICEA, Secretario(a) Auxiliar. 701. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO ORDINARIO. NOTIFICALEGAL NOTICE CIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR Estado Libre Asociado de Puer- EDICTO.

cribe le notifica a usted que 15 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 15 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020. En BAYAMON, Puerto Rico, el 15 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria. F/ MARIA E. COLLAZO, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

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 16 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020. En FAJARDO, Puerto Rico, el 16 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020. WANDA I SEGUI REYES, Secretaria. RUTH E. BERMUNDEZ MALDONADO, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

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

LEGACY MORTGAGE ASSET TRUST 2019-PR1 Demandante v.

ASSOCIATESI NTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS CORPORATION Y OTROS

Demandado(a) Civil: CG2020CV01200. Sobre: CANCELACION DE PAGARE LEGAL NOTICE EXTRAVIADO. NOTIFICAEstado Libre Asociado de Puer- CIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL EDICTO. DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriA: JOHN DOE Y mera Instancia Sala Superior RICHARD ROE COMO de FAJARDO.

ENITZA MARIN RODRIGUEZ Demandante v.

NOEL GARCIA RIVERA

Demandado(a) Civil: RG2020RF00072. Sobre: DIVORCIO, RUPTURA IRREPARABLE. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: NOEL GARCIA RIVERA-FEDERAL PRISON CAMP PENSACOLA 110 RABY AVENUE PENSACOLA, FLORIDA 32509

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que 15 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 A: MIGDALIA ALICEA periódico de circulación general to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Prien la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro SAEZ H/N/C SMART mera Instancia Sala Superior de los 10 días siguientes a su ZONE de BAYAMON. (Nombre de las partes a las que se notificación. Y, siendo o reprele notifican la sentencia por edicto) sentando usted una parte en PR RECOVERY AND DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus- el procedimiento sujeta a los

POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que 15 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 16 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020. En CAGUAS, Puerto

Friday, September 18, 2020

Rico, el 16 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020. CARMENA NA PEREIRA ORTIZ, Secretaria. F/ YARITZA ROSARIO PLACERES, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

cación de este Edicto, el cual será publicado una sola vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general en Puerto Rico, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará sentencia, concediendo LEGAL NOTICE el remedio solicitado en la DeESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO manda sin más citarle ni oírle.

DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- Expedida bajo mi firma y sello NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA del Tribunal, hoy 14 de septiembre del 2020. Lcda. Marilyn SALA DE CAROLINA. Consejo de Titulares del Aponte Rodriguez, Sec RegioCondominio St. Tropez nal. Rosa M. Viera Velazquez, Sec Auxiliar Demandante vs.

Sucn. de Josefa A. Rivera Cervera, también conocida por Sucn.

Josefa A. Rivero Cervera, sucesión desconocida compuesta por Fulano de Tal y Sutana de Tal

Demandados Civil Núm. CA2020CV01555.

Sobre: Cobro de Dinero. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. S.S.

ustedes sentencia en rebeldía concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarles ni oírles. EXTENDIDO BAJO Ml FIRMA y el Sello del Tribunal, a tenor con la Orden del Tribunal, hoy día 20 de agosto de 20. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretaria Regional. MARITZA ROSARIO ROSARIO, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO LEGAL NOTICE DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- CENTRO JUDICIAL DE GUANAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA YAMA SALA SUPERIOR. SALA DE VEGA BAJA. ORIENTAL BANK

HACIENDA DEL MAR OWNERS ASSOCIATION, INC. DEMANDANTE VS.

COMO AGENTE DE SERVICIO DE THE MONEY HOUSE, INC. DEMANDANTE VS.

ROBERT JOHN LINDSAY, LA SUCESIÓN DE BERNARDITA MARIA DARIO RAMOS CRUZ GUTIERREZ, t/c/c COMPUESTA POR Bernardita Maria Lindsay BENJAMIN RAMOS; y la Sociedad Legal de FULANO Y FULANA DE Bienes Gananciales, TAL COMO HEREDEROS A: Sucesión de Josefa A. compuesta por ambos DESCONOCIDOS DE LA DEMANDADA Rivera Cervera, también SUCESION; CENTRO CIVIL NUM. : VB2019CV00948. conocida por Sucn.

DE RECAUDACION DE SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO. Josefa A. Rivero Cervera EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDIC- INGRESOS MUNICIPALES Sucesión desconocida TO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE (CRIM) compuesta por Fulano de AMÉRICA El Presidente de los DEMANDADOS Estados Unidos El Estado Libre CIVIL NUM.: GM2019CV01007. tal y Sutana de tal Condominio Saint Tropez Asociado de Puerto Rico. ss. SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA A: ROBERT JOHN 6267 Avenida Isla Verde (VÍA ORDINARIA). EMPLAZALINDSAY, BERNARDITA Apt 2-E MIENTO POR EDICTO Y MANMARIA GUTIÉRREZ, Carolina, PR 00979; DAMIENTO DE INTERPELAt/c/c Bernardita Maria CION. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE PO Box 363407 San Juan PR 00936-3407 Lindsay y Sociedad Legal AMÉRICA, El Presidente de de Bienes Gananciales, los Estados Unidos, El Estado Por la presente se le emplaza y se le notifica de la presentación compuesta por ambos Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico. de una Demanda en Cobro de Siendo ustedes la parte A la parte co-demandada: Dinero incoada por la parte deBENJAMIN RAMOS, demandada arriba mandante. Este caso fue preCOMO MIEMBRO DE mencionada, sentado a través del Sistema LA SUCESIÓN DE Se les notifica a ustedes que se Unificado de Manejo y AdmiDARIO RAMOS CRUZ, han radicado mediante el sistenistración de Casos (SUMAC). ma SUMAC una Demanda por A LA SIGUIENTES Deberá presentar su alegación la parte demandante HACIENDIRECCIONES: (a) #643 responsiva a través de la siDA DEL MAR OWNERS ASguiente dirección electrónica: CALLE SAN CIPRIAN SOCIATION, INC. solicitando https://unired.ramajudicial.pr, un Cobro de Dinero. Se les em- COMUNIDAD CORAZON salvo que se represente por plaza y se les requiere que no- GUAYAMA, PR 00784; (b) derecho propio, en cuyo caso tifiquen a GARRIGA & IvIARJNI PO BOX 5 GUAYAMA, PR deberá presentar cualquier doLA W OFFICES, C.S.P., P.O. 00785; (c) 1401 NW 87TH cumento relacionado al caso en Box 16593, San Juan, Puerla secretaria del tribunal; con WAY PEMBROKE PINES, to Rico 00908-6593, teléfono constancia de haber servido FL 33024.

(787) 275-0655, telefax (800) copia de la misma (a la) abogado (a) de la parte demandante o a esta si hubiera comparecido por derecho propio. Se le apercibe y advierte que de no contestar o alegar en contra de la Demanda, radicando el original de su contestación ante este Honorable Tribunal y notificando con copia a la abogada de la parte demandante, licenciado Juan C. Ortiz Arocho, RUA 15,352, a la dirección Urbanización Roosevelt, 315 Calle Juan B. Rodríguez, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00918, teléfonos 787-282-8120 / 787-200-7378, correo electrónico; juankortiz@ aol.com, dentro de los veinte (30) días siguientes a la publi-

481-7130, copia de su contestación a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto. Ustedes deberán presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual pueden acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se representen por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberán presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Vega Baja. Si dejaren de contestar podrá anotarse la rebeldía y dictarse contra

Por la presente se le(s) notifica que se ha radicado en la Secretaría de este Tribunal una Demanda Enmendada en Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca por la vía ordinaria en contra de La Sucesión Dario Ramos Cruz, por razón de no haber cumplido con los pagos mensuales según pactados, adeuda a la parte demandante la suma de $67,253.53 por concepto de principal, desde el 1ro de mayo de 2019, más intereses al tipo pactado de 3.3/4% anual que continúan acumulándose hasta el pago total de la obligación. Además La Sucesión de Dario Ramos Cruz adeuda a la parte demandante

los cargos por demora equivalentes a 4.00% de la suma de aquellos pagos con atrasos en exceso de 15 días calendarios de la fecha de vencimiento; los créditos accesorios y adelantos hechos en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca; y las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado equivalentes a $7,116.30.

Además La Sucesión de Dario Ramos Cruz se comprometió a pagar una suma equivalente a $7,116.30 para cubrir cualquier otro adelanto que se haga en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca y una suma equivalente a $7,116.30 para cubrir intereses en adición a los garantizados por ley y cualquiera otros adelantos que se hagan en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca número 291, otorgada en Cayey, Puerto Rico, el día 10 de junio de 2016, ante el notario Priscilla M. Santiago Acosta, de la finca número 12032, inscrita al Folio 168 del Tomo 354 de Guayama, Registro de la Propiedad de Guayama. Por razón de dicho incumplimiento, y al amparo del derecho que le confiere el Pagaré, el demandante ha declarado tales sumas vencidas, líquidas y exigibles en su totalidad. Este Tribunal ha ordenado que se le(s) cite a usted(es) por edicto que se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general. Quedan emplazados y notificados de que en este Tribunal se ha radicado una demanda enmendada en su contra. Se les ordena a que dentro del término de treinta (30) días, a partir de la notificación de la presente Orden, acepten o repudien la participación que les corresponda en la herencia de Dario Ramos Cruz.

Los co-demandados miembros de la Sucesión de Dario Ramos Cruz se incluyen en la demanda enmendada ya que como herederos responden por las cargas de la herencia según lo dispuesto en Nuestro Ordenamiento Jurídico. Se les apercibe y notifica que, de no expresarse dentro de ese término de 30 días en torno a su aceptación o repudiación de herencia, la herencia se tendrá por aceptada. También se les apercibe que luego del transcurso del termino de 30 días antes señalado contados a partir de la fecha de la notificación de la presente Orden, se presumirá que han aceptado la herencia del causante y, por consiguiente, responden por las cargas de dicha herencia conforme el Articulo 959 del Código Civil, 31 L.P.R.A. 2785.

Se ordena a la parte demandante a que, en vista de que la sucesión de Dario Ramos Cruz, se incluye a los herederos y herederos desconocidos de Dario Ramos Cruz denominados Fulano y Fulana De Tal, proceda a notificar la presente Orden mediante publicación de un edicto a esos efectos una sola vez en un periódico de circula-

ción diaria general de la Isla de Puerto Rico. Se le(s) emplaza y requiere que dentro de los sesenta (60) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto excluyendo el día de la publicación de este edicto conteste(n) la demanda radicando el original de la contestación en este Tribunal y enviando copia de la Contestación de la Demanda a las oficinas de CARDONA & MALDONADO LAW OFFICES, P.S.C. ATENCIÓN al Lcdo.

Duncan Maldonado Ejarque, P.O. Box 366221, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00936-6221; Tel (787) 622-7000, Fax (787) 6257001, Abogado de la Parte Demandante. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https:// unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Se le(s) advierte que si dejare(n) de contestar la Demanda en el período de tiempo antes mencionado, podrá dictarse contra usted(es) Sentencia en Rebeldía, concediéndose el remedio solicitado sin más citarle(s) ni oirle(s). EXPEDIDO bajo mi firma y con el Sello del Tribunal. DADA hoy 15 de septiembre de 2020, en Guayama, Puerto Rico. MARISOL ROSADO RODRIGUEZ, Secretaria Regional I.

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

MTGLQ INVESTORS, L.P. Parte Demandante Vs.

AUTORIDAD PARA EL FINANCIAMIENTO DE LA VIVIENDA DE PUERTO RICO (AFI); JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, Como posibles tenedores desconocidos

Parte Demandada CIVIL NÚM: SG2020CV00278.

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

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE COMO posibles tenedores desconocidos

POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto. Usted deberá radicar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al

25

cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/ sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, Lcda.

Marjaliisa Colón Villanueva, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-8434168. En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cancelación de pagare extraviado. Se alega en dicho procedimiento que se extravió un pagaré a favor de La Autoridad para el Financiamiento de la Vivienda de Puerto Rico, por la suma de treinta y tres mil setecientos dólares ($33,700.00), con intereses al seis punto cincuenta por ciento (6.50%} anual, vencedero el primero (1ro} de enero de dos mil treinta y cinco (2035), según consta de la escritura número ciento cuatro (104), otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día veintiuno (21) de diciembre de dos mil cuatro (2004), se constituyó hipoteca en garantía de pagaré suscrito ante el notario público Jean Paul Vissepo Garriga y cuya obligación hipotecaria se encuentra inscrita al folio veinticinco (25) del tomo ochocientos setenta (870) de Cabo Rojo, finca número trece mil ciento veintiuno (13,121), inscripción tercera (3ra}. Que grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación: RÚSTICA: Parcela marcada con el número cuatrocientos cuarenta y nueve (439) en el plano de parcelación de la comunidad rural Elizabeth del Barrio Miradero del término municipal de Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de trescientos cuarenta y un punto. veintiuno (341.21) metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, con la parcela número cuatrocientos treinta y ocho (438) de la comunidad, por el SUR, con la parcela número cuatrocientos cuarenta (440) de la comunidad, por el ESTE, con la parcela número cuatrocientos treinta y dos (432), y por el OESTE, con la calle número cuatro (4) de la comunidad.

Inscrita al folio veinticinco (25) del tomo ochocientos setenta (870) de Cabo Rojo, finca número trece mil ciento veintiuno (13,121). Registro de la Propiedad de San Germán. SE LES APERCIBE que, de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aquí dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, a 3 de septiembre de 2020. LIC NORMA SANTANA IRIZARRY, Sec Regional. MARIA AVILES BONILLA, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

RELIGIOUS

CLASSIFIEDS

The San Juan Daily Star

Thanksgiving Novena to St. Jude .

O Holy St. Jude!

Apostle and Martyr, great in virtue and rich in miracles, near kinsman of Jesus Christ, Faithful intercessor for all who invoke your special patron in time of need; to you I have recourse from the depth of my heart and humbly beg to, whom God has given such great power, to come to my assistance; Help me now in my urgent need and grant my earnest petition. I promise to make your name known and cause you to be invoked. Say three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys and Glorias.

Publication must be promised. St. Jude pray for us and all who invoke your aid.

Amen.

This Novena has never been known to fail. I have had my request granted Publication promised.

Let Us Pray

.

O GOD, Who in Them infinite tenderness hast vouchsafed to regard the prayer of Thy servant, Blessed Rita, and dost grant to her supplication that which is impossible to human foresight, skill and efforts, in reward of her compassionate love and firm reliance on Thy promise, have pity on our adversity and succor us in our calamities, that the unbeliever may know Thou art the recompense of the humble, the defense of the helpless, and the strength of those who trusts in Thee, through Jesus Christ.

Our Lord.

Amen.

26

September 18-20, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘We’re back to being the Bronx Bombers’: Yankees burst out of a slump

By JAMES WAGNER

I

t felt like the sky was falling on the New York Yankees just over a week ago.

They had dropped their fifth straight game Sept.

8 to fall to 21-21, the first time since the strike-shortened 1995 season they were .500 or worse in September.

They were clinging to the eighth and final spot in the American League playoffs. Their hitting and pitching was sputtering. General Manager Brian Cashman made a rare address to the entire team. Standouts Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge and Gio Urshela were still recovering from injuries.

Luke Voit, the Yankees’ blunt first baseman, summed up the team’s frustrations at the time better than anyone: “I feel like teams aren’t really scared of us right now, and it’s kind of a sad thing because we’re the New York Yankees.”

So much has changed in a week.

After Tuesday’s 20-6 thrashing of the Toronto Blue Jays — New York’s sixth straight win — the Yankees leapfrogged their division rival and grabbed the AL’s fifth seed. Their pitching and hitting have stabilized, aided by the recent returns of Gleyber Torres, Urshela and Stanton from the injured list. Judge, too, was back with the team Wednesday.

Perhaps the Yankees are, once again, scary?

“We’re back to being the Bronx Bombers, and I don’t think people want to play us in the playoffs,” Voit said after Tuesday’s game.

Before this season began, the Yankees were seen as one of the top World Series contenders. They had added Gerrit Cole, one of the best pitchers in baseball, to a team that won 103 games last year.

But this truncated 60-game season has introduced more randomness and urgency into what is normally a six-month marathon that slowly pushes the best teams to the top. The Yankees met expectations at the beginning of the season, jumping to a 16-6 start, but then,

once again, a wave of injuries struck. Unlike the 2019 team, though, this group struggled to overcome the absences, as the entire roster had difficulty being consistent. Now, the Yankees’ talent is finally shining through again — and the cavalry has arrived.

“We’re clicking at the right time,” Voit said. “And we’re getting a really good player back here soon, too, that makes it even scarier.”

Voit, 29, was referring to Judge, who had been out since the last week of August with the recurrence of a right calf injury that had already cost him two weeks last month. His return Aug. 26 lasted only six innings. The Yankees, who admitted that their first efforts to heal Judge failed, hoped that a longer rehabilitation had solved the problem once and for all.

When he first got hurt, Judge was the team’s leading power hitter. Voit has since taken that mantle for the Yankees — as well as for the rest of baseball. With his two home runs Tuesday, Voit was leading the major leagues with 18 homers — two more than the perennial All-Stars Nelson Cruz and Mike Trout entering Wednesday.

More impressive, Voit has produced this home run tear despite nagging foot pain. Hitting the balls over the fence might actually be better for his foot: He doesn’t have to sprint. (He still sometimes jogs around the bases with a slight limp.)

“That helps,” he said with a smile. “But I’m just going to fight through that, man. Just keep grinding. It’s something that lingers. I have good days and bad days.”

At the plate, Voit has had plenty of good days since the Yankees called him up on Aug. 2, 2018, a few days after acquiring him in what was then considered a minor trade with the St. Louis Cardinals. Since then, one advanced metric rated Voit the 10th most productive hitter in the major leagues, on par with 2019 National League most valuable player Cody Bellinger of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“He’s really becoming a great hitter in this league, and it’s consistent with what we’ve seen since we got him in ’18,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “He’s been an impact player.”

The Yankees got two more potentially impactful hitters back before Tuesday’s game, as Urshela and Stanton — plus pitcher Jonathan Loaisiga — returned from the injured list. While Urshela missed only 11 games because of pain in his throwing elbow, Stanton had missed 32 games since Aug. 8 with a left hamstring strain. His ailment was concerning given the multiple injuries he had during the 2019 season and how much the Yankees have invested in him (more than $200 million is left on his contract after this season).

Even as Torres sat out Tuesday night to nurse what Boone called minor quadriceps discomfort, the Yankees looked little like the team that dropped two of three games to the Blue Jays in Buffalo last week. The Yankees batted around in three consecutive innings. Urshela went 3 of 4 and played his usual dazzling defense at third base. Struggling catcher Gary Sánchez drove in

Giancarlo Stanton, left, returned from injury this week while Luke Voit, right, has been helping carry the Yankees’ offense in his absence. four runs, three on one home run.

“It’s been a while since we had fun like that,” Sánchez said.

Second baseman D.J. LeMahieu and Voit — the two hitters who have carried the Yankees’ offense all season — each drove in five runs. Stanton was the only batter in Tuesday’s starting lineup without a hit. (He did walk once.)

Deivi García, the 21-year-old rookie who has pitched like a veteran in his first four major league starts, tossed seven stout innings, continuing a trend of strong starting pitching that has fueled the Yankees’ recent turnaround. Since Sept. 8, the Yankees’ rotation — which is still without James Paxton — had a 1.72 ERA over nearly 37 innings entering Wednesday.

“A handful of those days the offense has stepped up, but I think it has all started with the starting pitchers,” Boone said after Tuesday’s game.

Boone said the Yankees would gradually ease Stanton and Judge back into action. Because Stanton received only about a dozen at-bats at the team’s alternate site in Moosic, Pa., before his return, Boone said he planned to mix in days off for Stanton early on so that he could be ready to play several days in a row by the end of next week. That would be fortuitous for the Yankees, since the playoffs begin Sept. 29.

As far as postseason seeding, Voit made his goal clear: He wants to play the first round of the playoffs, a best-of-three series, in the Bronx, which would require the Yankees finishing the regular season as a top-four seed. (The following two rounds would be in a neutralsite bubble in Southern California.)

“The first series being at home would be huge for us,” Voit said, “but I feel confident about whatever position we get to get into the playoffs to make a run.”

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

27

Candace Parker wants you to know she’s not done yet

By DOROTHY J. GENTRY

C

andace Parker had just recorded her WNBA-leading 10th doubledouble of the season, with 19 points and 10 rebounds in her final game before the playoffs.

But it didn’t faze her. For Parker, a two-time most valuable player looking to win her second league title, it’s never what she has done that matters. It’s what comes next.

“I feel like the season’s just beginning,” said Parker, the 34-year-old Los Angeles Sparks star. “The regular season is great, but that’s not what you play for.”

That final game, a loss to the topseeded Las Vegas Aces, left the Sparks with the third seed in the playoffs and a first-round bye — much-needed rest from the wear and tear of playing a condensed season in the league’s bubble at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. “I think overall we got better, especially with the situation — everyone was in the same bubble, playing games every other night,” Parker said. “My only wish is to be healthy going into the postseason, and that’s the case.”

The next games, including Thursday night’s single-elimination game against the Connecticut Sun, are, as Parker alluded to, what you play for. Her teammates could sense it; Parker, Sparks guard Sydney Wiese said, is “on a mission” this year.

“Candace is always Candace, but you could tell a different level of intensity and focus from the minute that we got to this bubble,” Wiese said.

“We go as she goes,” Wiese added, “and she feels that, she senses that. Her competitive energy, her desire to win, it trickles down to the rest of us. She’s really set the tone for us since the beginning of the season.”

Parker said the monthslong quarantine before the WNBA season helped her to be at her best when it began. Memories of a rough 2019 that saw her battle injuries, and a rocky end to the playoffs that ended with a sweep by the Sun, also served as motivation.

“There was nothing but time, and I used it in a positive way,” she said. “I was able to make appointments I needed to go to take care of my body and lift four or five times a week, do cardio and just come into the season ready.”

“I know you can’t really help being

Los Angeles Sparks forward Candace Parker says she has tried to turn last season’s playoff disappointment into fuel for a title challenge. injured last year and being in and out — it just didn’t sit well with me last year,” she added. “So I just kind of put that energy toward doing something more.”

Reinvigorated, Parker led the league in rebounding (9.7 per game) and on Tuesday was named the league’s defensive player of the year by The Associated Press. The award came more than a decade after she became the only player in WNBA history to win the MVP and the Rookie of the Year Awards in the same season (2008).

“Her commitment to this season has been a great catalyst for the success we’ve been able to have so far,” Sparks coach Derek Fisher said. “When a player of her caliber and experience shows up in great shape, healthy and engaged under difficult circumstances, it sets an example for others in their daily approach.”

Parker’s versatility — combining her size and length with uncommonly good ball-handling, passing and perimeter shooting — makes her unique, Fisher said.

“This sets her apart from other historically great professional women’s players,” Fisher said. “The fact that she is at this point in her career, performing at this

level, says a lot about how she still loves the game and has passion for it.”

This season, Parker has served as something like an extra coach, said Sparks rookie guard Te’a Cooper.

“She helps everyone,” Cooper said.

“She’s talking, she’s giving everything she’s got on the floor. She’s rebounding, assisting points, she’s doing everything.”

Even with as much as she’s doing for the Sparks, Parker is doing more off the court.

Parker also works as a basketball analyst on TNT and enjoys her favorite role — mom to 11-year-old daughter, Lailaa, who is in the bubble with her. They play board games, watch TV and paint — what they would be doing at home in Los Angeles, Parker said, “minus the L.A. traffic.”

“I think sometimes I’m a little bit overwhelmed with finding time to do stuff with work and television and being a mom, but I don’t take for granted I get to do what I love every day,” Parker said.

Parker works to balance her time but said she sometimes feels “guilt because I’m not able to be at everything, do everything.” Her “family and village” step in.

“I had Lailaa my second year in the league, so honestly it’s been me and her my whole career. I can’t remember life before her. We grew up together. She has the greatest positive attitude; I am so lucky to be her mom, so it’s not a challenge with her.”

Parker said her perspective on life has changed, too. Maybe it was the death of her beloved mentor and college coach Pat Summitt in 2016. Or the sudden death of Kobe Bryant, who was killed in a helicopter crash earlier this year.

“People think there’s always time to get better and have growth and do things the right way, but sometimes there’s not,” she said. “At the end of the day you should try to be the best version of yourself now.

“And honestly I want to leave something behind. Legacy is something people talk about when it’s all said and done, but legacy is created in the moment, in the present and you got to start establishing yours now.”

Parker said Bryant’s post-retirement life — which showed him being an active father, basketball coach and motivator — represented “the evolution of what you hope to see in individuals.

“He was becoming the best version of himself. It was always about his family, always about his kids. He was great, but he was a dad and that’s what I think tears everybody apart.”

The death of Summitt, the legendary Tennessee women’s coach, was difficult in different ways.

“Pat was so influential in my life,” Parker said. It bothers her, she said, that Summitt “is not able to see and be a part of all these memories that we’re making right now.

“I hear her voice a lot, more so off the court, just in the evolution of who I am as a human being.”

Parker said she doesn’t know how much longer she’ll play.

“I just know when the time comes and I am not myself — it’s not fun for me to not be the best version of myself — that’s it,” she said. “I don’t want to cheat the game of basketball that’s given me so much, so when it’s my time to go out, I’m going to do just that.

“I’m going to know. I’m going to wake up one day and that’s going to be it,” she said, adding. “For now, I’m focused on the present day.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

In the Big Ten, football gets to play by its own rules

Nebraska turned on its video board to herald the return of Big Ten football.

By BILLY WITZ

M

embers of several fraternities and sororities at Michigan State University have been ordered to isolate for two weeks after a coronavirus outbreak on campus. Wisconsin’s chancellor urged students to “severely limit” their movements after more than 20 percent of its tests on students over Labor Day weekend came back positive. At Iowa, where the fall semester is less than a month old, more than 1,800 students have tested positive, and there are a whopping 221 cases in the athletic department alone.

It was against this backdrop that the Big Ten Conference, with the virus running rampant on many of its campuses, reversed course Wednesday and declared it would play football starting next month. Conference leaders, who only five weeks ago postponed the fall season until the spring, said the science related to the pandemic had changed so much over the intervening 36 days that it was now safe to play.

The way the decision was met with hallelujahs in locker rooms, coaches’ offices, the warrens of social media occupied by die-hard fans and even at the White House — to say nothing of congratulations offered up by several reporters on a conference call with Big Ten leaders — it might have seemed as if Jonas Salk had risen and delivered a new vaccine.

Alas, a more fitting image is this: the conference presidents, fitted with fire-retardant suits, ordering another cocktail while their houses continued to burn.

When Northwestern’s president, Morton Schapiro, was asked how, with freshmen and sophomores pro-

hibited from living on his university’s campus and classrooms closed for the fall semester, it was appropriate for his football team to be playing, he replied, “That’s a great question.”

He then made a cursory effort to answer it.

“I did grapple with it, thinking that part of the campus is closed and maybe you shouldn’t play football until the campus, we hope, is open for the winter quarter, the first week in January,” said Schapiro, the chairman of the Big Ten’s council of presidents and chancellors. “At the end of the day, I found the arguments that if we could do it safely, we can play football and the other fall sports, there’s no reason not to go ahead and do it.”

As it turns out, Schapiro was one of 11 presidents who flipped on the original decision. That group included Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, a former Stanford football player who told NJ.com last week that he was worried about where the virus was headed next month, and that the push forward by the Southeastern, Atlantic Coast and Big 12 conferences had revealed a warped set of values. (A Rutgers spokesman said Holloway was unavailable for an interview Wednesday.)

The science that turned the decision, the conference said, centered on one item: the Big Ten’s ability to procure rapid testing capabilities, which it said would allow colleges to test their football players (and other fall athletes) on a daily basis. Rapid tests, though, have been found to be less accurate than other versions. They can miss infected people carrying small amounts of the virus, producing false negatives, or detect people at the tail end of infections who have only dead virus, producing false positives. Daily testing could help weed out those inac-

curacies.

Commissioner Kevin Warren, who was filleted last month for cloaking the decision not to play in secrecy, promised transparency Wednesday. And then, a few minutes later, he refused to say who the Big Ten was contracting with for the testing.

When the Pac-12, another of the nation’s biggest conferences, pulled the plug on football on Aug. 11, only hours after the Big Ten, it at least cited three criteria for a potential return to play: improved testing, more information on virus-related side effects (including heart inflammation) and a reduction in community infection rates.

The Big Ten said it was addressing many of those concerns. In addition to daily testing, it said it would require all coronavirus-positive athletes to undergo a cardiac MRI exam. But those expensive machines rarely exist in college towns; the closest one to Penn State, for example, is a nearly two-hour drive away, in Harrisburg, Pa. “Access would be a major issue if we said every athlete needed to get one of these,” said Dermot Phelan, a cardiologist in Charlotte, N.C., who is an adviser to the Atlantic Coast Conference, whose teams have already begun their seasons.

As for community infection rates, there are no stated thresholds that would keep the Big Ten from playing. James Borchers, the team doctor at Ohio State, who directed Saturday’s medical presentation to the conference’s presidents, said the important metrics are the team positivity rate (among the players) and the population positivity rate (players, coaches, staff). If the players test above 5 percent or the population rate exceeds 7.5 percent over a seven-day period, football activities must cease for seven days, the league said.

But John Swartzberg, an infectious disease professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, said that broader campus and community infection metrics should be essential in determining whether sports are played.

Swartzberg, who said he was speaking for himself and not the Pac-12 medical advisory board, of which he is a member, added: “To assume otherwise essentially says that the athletes are living in a bubble completely unrelated to the surrounding community.”

Of course, that seems to be precisely the point for the Big Ten. By now, it is a hollow exercise to wonder if the same testing regimen being created for and offered to the Northwestern football team will be presented to Northwestern’s theater department or marching band — at least not until they, too, bring in the millions of dollars in television revenue that the athletic department does.

Instead, the Big Ten’s decision to play football this fall — just like those of the other conferences that have returned to the field already — has stripped bare another layer of college football’s veneer. What the pandemic has done is make even more clear how it is past time to replace the term student-athlete with a more contemporary one: essential employee.

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

29

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

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

(Mar 21-April 20)

A younger colleague or neighbour’s behaviour is extremely aggravating. They seem to have no respect for decency. Make it clear their attitude is ruining morale and they will be reprimanded. You want to experience something different and this could lead you to new business pastures.

Taurus

The San Juan Daily Star

September 18-20, 2020

(April 21-May 21)

Having help with household duties will lift your spirits. It makes a difference when everyone joins in and does their share. If it is a struggle to keep on top of bills, the practical thing to do would be to put yourself and others in your home on a budget.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

You need a little time to help you come to terms with recent developments. It can sometimes feel as if you have the weight of the world on your shoulders but there is help around should you need it. Confiding in a friend you can trust or spending time in the company of a pet will help you change your perspective.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

You never seem to stop. The moment one job is finished, you’re getting started on the next.

There will be a lot of running around from one place to the next. As well as your own responsibilities, you have a number of errands to do for others. It might be time to drop a commitment that’s starting to be a burden.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Look before you leap. Avoid accepting a surprise offer because it sounds like fun. An impulsive move could backfire. A workmate seems reluctant to share their thoughts with you. You also suspect they are withholding information by remaining silent on an issue. If this is the way they want to be, keep your own thoughts and plans to yourself.

Do your best to persuade those in high places that your ideas are too good to waste.

Something or someone is holding a project back. You’re keen to get everything underway but it seems to be one delay after another.

You’re working with some new faces. Listen to your intuition if you feel someone is not to be trusted.

You’re kept occupied at home and in the workplace but you won’t want to spend every minute of the day on mundane chores. Arrange it so you have some time to do your own thing. Even if it’s just a walk around the block, the fresh air and exercise will feel energising.

Your boss or a senior colleague has been watching you from behind the scenes. Their support with a difficult assignment will be unexpected and welcome. Even when things seem to be going wrong, keep looking on the bright side. News about an older relative will give you food for thought. You could be seriously considering adding to your household.

Leo

Aquarius

(July 24-Aug 23)

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You’ve done your best but it may not be possible to get through everything you had planned. If you can’t see yourself meeting a deadline due to health reasons or because you are running out of time, let those in power know this. Providing you are honest, they will understand and find an alternative solution.

Financial matters need attention. These should have been sorted out a while ago. You will not have meant to leave it so late but you have been trying to fit a number of responsibilities into your days. An unexpected bill will mean you have to juggle the budget. You might discover something to your advantage while talking to a neighbour.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Someone will suggest they take over some of your responsibilities. You’re reluctant to let go but they can see you are exhausted and you should admit this to yourself too. If you had more time for hobbies and seeing friends you would feel more relaxed and more enthusiastic about your work.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Sometimes you have to sing your own praises. There is no time to hope someone else will put in a good word for you. If you want to be chosen for a plum assignment, move forward at lightning speed. Let people know you’re interested. Are you looking for love?

Your confidence shines. You could easily charm the object of your affection.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

September 18-20, 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

September 18-20, 2020

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