Wednesday Sep 2, 2020

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

San Juan The

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Auli’i Cravalho on Her New Netflix Drama ‘All Together Now’

P21

Time to Regain Autonomy

Bureaucracy Left Behind After Forensic Sciences Chief’s Ultimatum,Employees’ Protests P4

Governor Welcomes UTIER: PREPA Allowed Write-In Movement, Safety Equipment Pierluisi to Work for Her Certifications to Expire Urges P5 P4 Primary Voters’ Support NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

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28 EDITORIAL SEMANA, INC2, • Jueves, Wednesday, September 2020 27 de agosto de 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

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September 2, 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.

Gov’t bank accounts balance increases by 1.2%

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espite being in bankruptcy, the Puerto Rico government’s bank accounts totaled $20.7 billion as of July 31, a 1.2 percent increase over the balance on June 30, according to a report published by the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF by its Spanish initials).

The report published Monday shows accounts increased by $252 million from $20.4 billion on June 30.

The increase was the result of a $424 million increase in the central government’s treasury single account (TSA) balance, a $147 million hike in the accounts of public corporations and a $3 million increase in pension-related accounts.

A $304 million decrease was observed in other central government non-TSA accounts, meanwhile.

A $17 million decrease in restricted accounts and/ or those subject to bankruptcy Title III proceedings was recorded in the report.

The commonwealth government along with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the Puerto Rico Highways and Transportation Authority, and more recently the Public Buildings Authority, have been trying to restructure their debt in bankruptcy court.

The AAFAF also published a separate liquidity report for July on the income of some 15 component units from June 27 through July 31. Among them, three were most notable.

The Puerto Rico Ports Authority saw a year-to-date liquidity increase to $50.5 million from $50.1 million, due to inflows from Puerto Nuevo container operations

and federal funds for capital improvements, but operations continue to be significantly affected due to the coronavirus pandemic and the halting of cruise ship operations.

The Puerto Rico Public Buildings Authority (PBA) year-to-date liquidity decreased to $77.3 million from $77.9 million, primarily as a result of the disbursement of two PayGo payments in July and higher-than-anticipated payroll expenses due to timing, which are expected to reverse.

“These were offset by collections of approximately $8.8 million in FY20 [fiscal year 2020] past-due rents,” the report said.

The Puerto Rico Convention Center District Authority’s cash levels went up by $3 million to $17.1 million at the end of July because of $5 million in appropriations received from the general fund to offset fourth quarter operating losses.

“Cash is expected to decline significantly over the fiscal year as a result of depressed operating receipts from ongoing event cancellations due to the COVID-19 crisis,” the report said.

The report also included financial information related to the AAFAF, the Puerto Rico Integrated Transit Authority, the Medical Services Administration, the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Co., the Department of Economic Development and Commerce, the State Insurance Fund Corp., the Health Insurance Administration, the Cardiovascular Center for Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, the Housing Finance Authority, the Puerto Rico Tourism Co., the Puerto Rico Administration for the Development of Agricultural Enterprises, and the Automobile Accident Compensation Administration.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Forensic Sciences Institute to regain autonomy as governor signs HB 2075

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

A

fter Forensic Sciences Bureau (FSB) Commissioner María Conte Miller gave an ultimatum that she would resign over bureaucracy from the Department of Public Safety (DPS) that she said was harming the agency’s performance and employees protested to defend her and demand autonomy, the Forensic Sciences Institute (FSI) now returns as an independent governmental entity after Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced on Tuesday signed House Bill 2075 into law along with other bills approved during the special legislative session that concluded on Aug. 9.

During a press conference in Room 209-B at the Pedro Rosselló Convention Center, Vázquez said that while the government recognized that the Department of Public Safety (DSP) Law, signed in 2017, “had, and still has, an important mission when it comes to the island’s security,” the FSI (then called the FSB) faced more challenges than expected, including mounting backlogs in their investigations and other tasks.

The new law written by New Progressive Party Rep. José “Quiquito” Meléndez will allow the institution to perform better, Vázquez said.

“As Dr. Conte herself laid out, it’s important and necessary to count on an independent FSI;

this will allow that everyone, everyone at the institution, can perform their investigative and scientific work without major inconveniences,” the governor said. “The institute, as of 90 days [from now], will be an autonomous entity governed by a board chaired by the secretary of Justice [Inés del C. Carrau Martínez] and composed of the secretary of Public Safety [Pedro Janer], the Medical Sciences Campus chancellor [Segundo Rodríguez Quilichini], the Department of Health secretary [Lorenzo González Feliciano] and the Puerto Rico Police Bureau commissioner [Henry Escalera] and other three members who will be part of this board.”

Likewise, the governor said the legislation is important as she experienced working with them as the former secretary of Justice and collaborated with the now-FSI executive director, Conte Miller, who at the time worked as a forensic pathologist on many of her cases.

“As an attorney at the Department of Justice, I grew to see the FSI as being the answer, the important research arm and the indispensable tool in criminal investigations,” Vázquez said.

“I had the opportunity to spend time with Dr. Conte as a [forensic] pathologist on many cases, from violent crimes, cases of domestic violence, murdered children, children who were sexual abuse victims. I was an attorney and she was a forensic pathologist during every part of the

The Forensic Sciences Institute, headed by María Conte Miller, now returns as an independent governmental entity after Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced signed HB 2075 into law. process, so I know about their efficiency and that’s why I do and will always defend the FSI.” Meanwhile, Conte Miller said she was grateful to the Legislature for approving the bill, the Puerto Rican press whose efforts in covering the FSI, she said, led “in great measure” to its improvement, and is the instrument for inform-

ing the island, and the institute’s employees and their union as it helped them find the autonomy they demanded. She added that the legislative determination will help the FSI and DPS work effectively as a team.

“I have to thank the DPS colleagues for their kindness and respectful treatment that they always had toward us and now, more than ever, we’ll be a team as we can help more efficiently in your battle, which is ours, too,” Conte Miller said.

Meanwhile, the Star asked Vázquez if she still has any confidence in DPS Secretary Pedro Janer, as this outlet reported on Aug. 6 that then-FSB employees claimed that he had never stepped foot in the agency or acknowledged its needs. The governor said what matters at this time is that the agency is now independent.

“Anyway, now with the new legislation, they will have the opportunity to bring any concerns directly to the doctor [Conte Miller],” Vázquez said. “The [FSI] will be governed by the board itself, so I believe that those issues should dissipate.”

During the press conference the governor also signed bills that would benefit the public health field in various ways, such as adding new categories in the nursing practice, adjusting nurses’ income in both the public and private healthcare sectors, and protecting patients with clean claims from surprise medical invoices.

Vázquez Garced: The 120,000-plus votes she received in the primary were cast by people seeking ‘the alternative of a governor who represents the people’ Governor doesn't deauthorize ‘Wanda Vázquez 2020 Write-In’ social media campaign, urges NPP gubernatorial candidate Pedro Pierluisi to introduce himself to her supporters to gain their endorsement

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

W

hen a member of the press asked Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced on Wednesday about her opinion of the 2020 write-in campaign to keep her as governor in the general elections, she did not deauthorize the campaign, saying instead that it was a “spontaneous reaction” by the people of Puerto Rico.

“That’s the people of Puerto Rico. It’s a spontaneous reaction that I have no control over, and I believe that this gives space to someone who has expressed themselves by voting that way;

probably the question should be asked of them,” Vázquez said.

“Those more than 120,000 people are not an ‘x’ under a brand, they’re flesh and blood people who looked for a government, a governor, a sensitive government, so I believe that that message should get to the more than 120,000 voters so whichever candidate has the support of those voters.”

When asked if she was voting for New Progressive Party (NPP) gubernatorial candidate Pedro Pierluisi after previously retweeting a post from El Nuevo Día and commenting that she was going to vote for the NPP and believed in statehood, but that people had the right to choose, to vote with their conscience for those who represent their interests and that her statements “don’t need interpreters,” Vázquez said her words were “clear enough.”

“I believe that the statements I released yesterday on social media platforms are clear enough, and when I said that they don’t need interpreters, what I meant was that what I said during an interview done by [journalist] Ferdinand Pérez was clear,” the governor said. “He asked if I was going to vote for the NPP, and I answered that I was going to vote for the NPP. In relation to who I endorse as governor, that’s not what matters. What matters here is what I said on August 16 so the candidate can present [him- or herself] as an alternative for the more than

120,000 people who voted for me in the primary elections. …

What I urged [Pierluisi] to do was introduce himself to these people as the alternative with the sensibility that he could be the governor to all of these people, more than 120,000 votes that were for me. Those were my statements.”

Meanwhile, as for the appointment she announced on Monday in which attorney Raúl Márquez Hernández became the interim secretary of State, Vázquez confirmed that she will summon the Legislative Assembly for a special session to submit the nomination.

“There will be a special session; therefore, we are still reviewing the bills that will be presented in the session, and, without a doubt, we will submit the State secretary’s appointment,” the governor said.

As for Márquez Hernández’s salary, she replied that “it hasn’t been discussed, so we will wait to sit down with the secretary and negotiate.”

Vazquez’s statements came after a press conference in which she signed bills that addressed various issues from the public health field and another one that brought autonomy back to the Forensic Sciences Institute as it was separated from the Department of Public Safety.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

5

PREPA allows equipment certification to expire at the height of hurricane season

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) is allowing the annual certification of the machines that test gloves and safety equipment used by repairmen to expire, a situation that will prevent employees from being able to restore power service quickly, the union that represents most of the utility’s workforce said Tuesday.

The situation was denounced in a statement by Walberto Rolón, the secretary of health and safety of the Electrical Industry & Irrigation Workers Union (UTIER by its Spanish acronym). The certification has been expired since March.

Rolón accused PREPA of allowing the certificates to expire as part of a plan to justify the multi-milliondollar contract given to LUMA Energy to manage and operate the utility’s transmission and distribution system.

“PREPA’s administration once again demonstrates its lack of commitment to the service provided to the country by disabling its workers from restoring electricity service in the middle of the hurricane season and allowing its certification to expire since March,” Rolón said. “The machine is vital, both to protect the lives of workers and to quickly restore service. We are not at all surprised that this reckless act is a ruse to justify Luma’s [exorbitant] contract, burden consumers with delays in restoring power service, and leave the way open for LUMA.” Rolón noted that PREPA only has two of the highvoltage testing machines (manufactured by Hanco

International) to test and certify that the gloves and protective equipment of employees are safe to use and resist the high voltage of energized lines. One of these machines has had an expired certification since 2017 and the other, which is located in Monacillos, expired on March 7 of this year.

He also said that starting next week the utility’s guards and other personnel will not be able to use any of the safety gloves, since the six-month period since the last test was carried out expires. The union also filed a complaint with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

“On September 7, the last test that was done on the gloves with the certified machine expires,” Rolón said.

“From next week on there will be no certified gloves to use due to the Authority’s irresponsibility in letting this annual certification … expire. Queruel Díaz, the supervisor of the testing machine, kept the expiration of the certification hidden and kept conducting tests without the machine being certified with the standards that are needed for the equipment to protect life and property. For such action, we filed a complaint with OSHA for putting at risk the lives of over a thousand workers.”

The UTIER official said PREPA personnel work on faults in energized power lines, so it is extremely important for the testing machines to be in operation so that the equipment can be tested and certified as safe and secure. The tests help protect workers from voltage running through the power lines while a fault is being repaired.

“The operation of this machine is vital. We are talking about the lives of men and women who day by day repair breakdowns with fully energized cables,” Rolon said. “This situation not only puts the lives of the Authority’s employees at risk, it also puts the country’s electrical system at risk because a fault that can be fixed with the use of the equipment will now take longer because it is not possible to work with the energized line and a job that before could be solved in hours, now it could take days because there is no protective equipment … so that people are bothered by not having electricity and continue to justify the hiring of Luma.”

PDP House candidate: Electoral Commission hearing should be broadcast live

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he complaint before the Appellate Court requesting the dismissal of State Elections Commission (SEC) Chairman Juan Ernesto Dávila for breach of duty and negligence in the performance of his duties “should be broadcast live” in the opinion of Yaramary Torres, a Popular Democratic Party (PDP) candidate for the House of Representatives, who filed the complaint.

“Whether on local television or via internet streaming, this impeachment procedure is of great importance for all of Puerto Rico and we will respectfully request it from the Court,” Torres said.

On Monday the case was accepted by the court and the other cases on the same subject were consolidated with the PDP candidate’s complaint.

“The lawyers have already been instructed to deliver all the documentary evidence and the list of witnesses in the case tomorrow, Wednesday at 2 in the afternoon, so we believe that it will be attended to with the urgency that is required,” Torres said.

The complaint seeking the ouster of Dávila, the second SEC chairman in the current four-year term who was appointed in September 2018 by then-Gov. Ricardo Rosselló Nevares, is based on what the plaintiffs claim is the proven premise that he restricted, limited and altered the right to democratically choose candidates for elective positions in both the PDP and the New Progressive Party (NPP) during the recent party primaries.

“Here we are not looking to privilege one party over another. What we want is that voters can have the opportunity to trust their electoral system again,” Torres said. “Naturally, to achieve that, it cannot be chaired by a person who has been highly incompetent.

Dávila had already said that after the general election he would retire, and something or someone made him change his mind. And that is unacceptable.”

Likewise, the complaint filed by PDP Electoral Commissioner Nicolás Gautier was consolidated with Torres’.

“The Appellate Court seems to be ready to validate the statements issued by the Supreme Court in [NPP

gubernatorial candidate Pedro] Pierluisi et al. vs. SEC, where that forum resolved that the chairman of the SEC acted negligently and breached the Electoral Code,” Gautier said. “Let’s hope that Juan Ernesto Dávila reconsiders and resigns before he is dismissed in an embarrassing way due to his incompetence.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Parents say children not being allowed to enroll at Berwind

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

P

arents of students from Berwind Superior School said Tuesday that personnel from the island Education Department’s San Juan Region are violating their rights because they are not allowing their children to enroll in the school.

“As a representative of the parents on the school council, I have for several weeks been receiving many calls from mothers and fathers interested in enrolling their children in school; yours truly has compiled the information and sent it to school personnel,” said María Caraballo. “To date, these parents have not received a response on the status of their children’s enrollment. This violates the rights of these parents to the free choice of their [children’s] school and exposes these minors to not receiving the education to which they are also entitled.”

“The Berwind Superior School is one of the few or almost the only educational alternative for hundreds of young people from Monte Hatillo [condominium complex], Jardines de Country Club, San Martín, Las Camelias, Monte Park, Ramos Antonini, El Prado Jardines de Sellés, Las Dalias, El Flamboyán, Colinas de San Juan, De Diego, Prudencio Rivera Martínez, Parcelas Falú, Hill Brothers, Las Virtudes and other housing projects,” Caraballo said in a written statement.

Secretary of Education Eligio Hernández “On a daily basis we combat school dropout [rates] using as a reform strategy the curricular integration of the Vocational Marketing Program, sports and the arts into the teaching-learning process,” the school council member

said. “We sent a letter to Dr. Eligio Hernández, secretary of Education, requesting his immediate intervention in this situation that exposes our boys and girls to dropping out of school.”

Anti-hunger effort launched

in 40 island municipalities, 50 percent or more homes were subsisting below the poverty line, a figure that has increased since 2017.

According to the profile of child poverty in Puerto Rico conducted by the Institute of Youth Development, six out of 10 children on the island live in poverty.

The World Bank has established a policy imperative of reducing poverty to achieve the goals of food security, better nutrition and promotion of sustainable agriculture.

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he Food Bank of Puerto Rico, in an awarenessraising effort against hunger, on Tuesday launched the “Zero Hunger Puerto Rico” initiative, which will promote education and resources to work toward the goal of achieving food security, improving nutrition and

Denise Santos, president of the Food Bank of Puerto Rico

promoting sustainable agriculture in Puerto Rico.

“After the hurricanes, earthquakes and the pandemic we are experiencing, the veil has been lifted from what we do not want to see: Hunger on our island,” said Denise Santos, president of the Food Bank of Puerto Rico, an entity allied with Feeding America. “The increase in demand for food that we have had in the Food Bank demonstrates this reality. We can solve the problems we now ignore.

It is time to assume the inescapable responsibility to end hunger in Puerto Rico.”

To begin to achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture, the Zero Hunger Puerto Rico initiative will present five dialogues, virtual meetings and four documentaries that will be broadcast on various solution-oriented platforms during the week of Sept. 21-25.

The movement will be part of a collaborative agreement with the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics to begin developing the progressive goals of a number of sustainable development objectives of the United Nations’ Zero Hunger project.

The talks and documentaries of Zero Hunger Puerto Rico will be broadcast through the social networks of the Food Bank at times to be announced in advance.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

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As guns get drawn at protest sites, demonstrators fear a volatile new phase

By MIKE BAKER, JULIE BOSMAN and RICHARD A. OPPEL JR.

F

or months, Reese Monson, who helps organize security for the hundreds of protesters who gather in downtown Portland, Oregon, every night, has advised them to use shields made of plywood, pool noodles and 55-gallon drums — tools to deflect the riot-control measures used by the police.

Now, Monson said they were considering a new kind of shield when they go out to demonstrate against racial injustice: bulletproof vests.

“Whatever body armor you can find, we need that,” Monson said. “Whatever you can protect yourself with, we need that. Right now is a time of either life or death.”

For months, as protests by Black Lives Matter and other groups have erupted across the country, the persistent confrontations have been largely between protesters and the police, with the conflict playing out in tear gas volleys and lobbed projectiles. But in recent days the protests in Portland, Oregon, and in Kenosha, Wisconsin, have taken a more perilous turn — right-wing activists have arrived, bent on countering the racial justice protests with an opposing vision of America.

Violent street clashes between the two sides have broken out over the past two weeks, leaving three people dead.

The arrival of firearms has escalated the political debate over policing into precarious new territory. President Donald Trump, scheduled to visit Kenosha on Tuesday, warns that America’s cities are out of control, while Portland’s mayor blames the president for stoking the unrest.

Three months after George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police, setting off tumult nationwide, two opposite movements are brawling in the streets with no sign of letting up while the country begins the final stretch toward the Nov. 3 election.

After the Trump administration’s attempt at a law-and-order crackdown in Portland backfired in July, last month brought fresh upheaval. The police in Kenosha shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, in the back, fueling protests there and elsewhere, while right-wing groups in Portland came into the city to confront Black Lives Matter demonstrators.

Last week in Kenosha, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of Illinois went to the scene of unrest there, saying he had come to protect businesses. Before the night was over, two people had been fatally shot. A lawyer for Rittenhouse, who has been charged with homicides, has said he acted in self-defense.

Then in Portland on Saturday night, a member of the right-wing Patriot Prayer group was shot to death in an apparent confrontation outside a parking garage after a caravan of Trump supporters paraded into a sea of racial justice demonstrators.

The right-wing activists say they are protecting private property, protesting city officials’ failure to contain demonstrations, and offering support to the police.

But Cassie Miller, a senior research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center, sees peril: “The far right is now anointing themselves the only force standing between order and chaos, a dangerous step toward normalizing the political violence that they already hold a monopoly on.”

One federal law enforcement official, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, said the right-wing groups did not appear to have a clear

set of objectives.

“For a lot of these folks, the attention is the endgame,” said the official, who said the same appeared true of many hard-line leftist antifa demonstrators. “If you really sat down and said, ‘What are the policy objectives you’d like to see?’ They wouldn’t want that because there’s so much that comes with this, like having your voice heard in these settings and validating you to other followers.”

Lauryn Cross, an organizer with the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression, said activists have had to prepare differently because of the rising threat of right-wing counterprotesters. They have to do more security planning, including examining more closely the routes they plan to march and scoping out the area before an event.

Protesters in Portland have also been reassessing their approach. Monson said demonstrators have started using vehicles to shield the front and back of protest marches. Protesters are using lookouts and code words to alert one another while watching for potential attackers, he said.

Many of them are growing jittery about vehicles revving their engines and unfamiliar faces in the crowds. And some are bringing weapons: The police in Portland reported that two of 29 protesters arrested at a demonstration on Sunday night were carrying pistols.

Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, has called for calm and issued a plea to the president to work together in order to deescalate tensions. But even as Wheeler made the request at a news conference, Trump was firing back on Twitter, calling the mayor a “dummy” and suggesting that the federal government may send forces into the city.

Trump supporters are organizing yet another event in Portland for the coming weekend. Outside the city, one national anti-government group called for open civil war, saying that if Trump did not intervene in Portland, the militia would.

The police in both Kenosha and Portland faced criticism for doing little to prevent bloodshed as the clashes unfolded.

On Saturday, the police were aware that a caravan of Trump supporters would be coming through the city, but they were largely absent as conflicts erupted over many blocks, with fistfights breaking out on the streets. And in Kenosha last week, the police drove by one group of self-styled militia members, handing out water and thanking them for being there.

Portland’s police chief, Chuck Lovell, said he did not have the resources to keep the opposing groups separated; when asked, he said his officers would have few means of preventing a fullfledged firefight if both sides showed up heavily armed.

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” he said.

Sheriff David Beth of Kenosha County, in an interview on Monday, was critical of the police officers who had thanked the militia members.

“They were very wrong to say that,” he said.

The confrontation in Kenosha began when a group of armed militia members showed up with loosely drawn plans to protect the city.

One of them who arrived at Civic Center Park was Aaron Petroski, 38, who stood in the corner of the park wearing camouflage and carrying a long gun.

He said he had responded to a Facebook group called Armed Citizens to Protect our Lives and Property, a group that

Sheriff David Beth of Kenosha County said in an interview that the presence of self-styled militia members deepened the confusion during a fatal shooting. was created that day. By early evening Tuesday, more than 5,000 people had joined the group online.

Petroski said he was there to step in where the police had failed the night before, when looting and fires had ravaged Kenosha.

“I am not here in any way to counterprotest or silence anyone’s right to protest,” he said of the Black Lives Matter protests.

“I personally believe that the BLM movement has been hijacked by people doing violence.”

After police officers forced demonstrators out of the park with tear gas, the people who remained drifted down an empty street lined with businesses and houses. It was a volatile mix: protesters facing off against mostly white men with long guns, shoving one another and yelling before two protesters were killed during a dispute.

Beth said the presence of the self-styled militia deepened the confusion and complicated the situation.

“As law enforcement, you don’t know who the players are,” he said. “It adds tension to what’s going on, it adds confusion and it increases the confrontation level.”

Portland has seen three consecutive weekends of direct conflict between factions. On Aug. 15, one event organized by right-wing groups ended with an activist firing gunshots from a vehicle, according to authorities. At a similar event on Aug. 22, another person was seen waving a gun.

The situation in Portland on Saturday night was equally chaotic.Trump supporters drove through downtown while shooting paintballs from the backs of pickup trucks; protesters countered by throwing objects at the vehicles.

As the night wore on, video shows that the man who was fatally shot, Aaron J. Danielson, a Portland resident who supported the far-right group Patriot Prayer, was walking along a mostly empty road near the protests. In one video, a person yells, “We’ve got a couple right here.”

Justin Dunlap, a Portland resident who was livestreaming video from the scene, said in an interview that Danielson appeared to pull something from his hip, as if he were grabbing a gun. But he said it could also have been mace, and a cloud emerged in front of Danielson as two gunshots rang out. Authorities said he died of a single gunshot wound to the chest.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

‘I am stuck until that border opens’: Marooned in paradise

To reach the rest of the United States from Point Roberts, Wash., requires two international border crossings with a 24mile drive in between.

By RUTH FREMSON

A

home that long seemed like paradise is lately beginning to feel more like Alcatraz.

A 5-square-mile drop of land clinging to the southern end of British Columbia with views of snow-capped Mount Baker to the east and the San Juan Islands to the south, Point Roberts is detached from the rest of Washington state. Not far south of Vancouver, it is a relic of the Oregon Treaty in 1846, which set the northern border of what was then the Oregon Territory at the 49th parallel. To reach the rest of the United States from Point Roberts requires two international border crossings with a 24-mile drive in between.

The isolation is both a blessing and a curse during a pandemic. Despite having no coronavirus cases to date, Point Roberts may be the last place in the United States to return to normal because the Canadian government has extended its international border closure each month since it shut March 21. Only people with reasons deemed essential are allowed to cross, and the order has been strictly enforced.

The few businesses in Point Roberts depend on cross-border commerce. Canadian tourists and seasonal residents, who quadruple the population during the summer months,

generate 90% of their annual income. Some of the 1,300 yearlong residents fear that if the closure continues, they may never reopen.

Brian Calder, 79, whose family arrived in 1895, predicts that “Point Roberts is going to be a ghost town by mid-next year.”

Parks anchor the region’s four corners.

Children wander among cedar trees along an Enchanted Forest Trail decorated with figures of gnomes and fairies. Whales can be seen from the shore and deer roam past cottages edged by flowers and protected by thorny blackberry bushes. People wave to one another as they drive past and catch up in the only supermarket.

For generations, Canadians have traveled south to their seaside homes. They dock their boats in the marina, golf at the public course and dine in the restaurants. Others cross the border into Point Roberts for cheaper gas and milk.They pick up parcels, many from Amazon, that are delivered to one of the seven shipping stores — avoiding costly international fees.

Allan White, one of the few Canadians spending this summer in Point Roberts, stood at Maple Beach Park looking north to his condo building in the distance. He thinks the border should be closed and is prepared to abide by the 14-day quarantine when he goes home.

“I think Canadians have done a much

better job of handling the COVID than the Americans, which is a very strange thing to say because they are the smartest, most powerful country in the world that we have ever known and they’re with Brazil,” he said.

Most Canadians have stayed away. The marina is at less than half of its normal capacity; many Canadian owners moved their boats out when the border closed. Coyotes wander along the brown fairways on the golf course. Weeds poke 2 feet high through gravel driveways of shuttered homes. Only the Saltwater Cafe is open during the week and that may not last long, according to its owner, Tamra Hansen, who continues to operate at a loss.

If all the businesses close, she said, “none of the young people will have anywhere to work and they are going to leave. It’s going to end up being a retirement community.”

Point Bob, as the locals call it, has always had a cross-cultural feel. Many children go to school across the border in Tsawwassen, a 10-minute drive, or are bused to Blaine, Washington, 25 miles away. Residents partake in Vancouver’s diverse cultural scene, attending the symphony and theater. They are grateful that the virus has not touched them. At first they laughed when news reports described it as the safest place in America. As the border closure has been repeatedly extended, that

concept is wearing thin.

When it was announced that children would not be allowed to cross the border to attend school, parents banded together in a letter-writing campaign, joining others in the community already petitioning government officials to recognize the area’s unique situation.

Gov. Jay Inslee also jumped in, recently sending a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada in hopes of finding a solution for the residents of Point Roberts.

It has been heartbreaking for Ashley and Jordan Strub to realize how much they took for granted. They live with their two young sons in a house with a wide front porch surrounded by mature fruit trees and dozens of chickens.

Before the coronavirus, they crossed the border frequently, to go to the gym, to shop or just to socialize with friends. Some of their friends are leaving Point Roberts for the year in order to keep their children in school.

Strub, 42, said she felt like her community was being ripped apart. The couple are dismayed by reports of neighbors who have been harassed or who had their cars, with Washington license plates, vandalized when they did cross into Canada.

Daryl Marquette, who owns TSB Shipping Plus along with his wife, Bobbie, said, “99% of our customers are Canadian so that’s why we are reliant on the border opening.

Without them, we don’t have any business.”

The Marquettes were so proud when they became successful enough to offer health insurance to their staff. After the border closed, they let their 10 employees go.

“With absolutely no income we couldn’t continue to keep paying for that,” Marquette said. “Telling our employees that they had to buy their own health insurance was one of the worst days ever.”

She worries about them, knowing some have had to turn to a food bank for help.

Scott Elliston, 44, a former TSB Shipping employee, gets angry when he hears politicians say that unemployment is a disincentive to work. It is rough now that the extra $600 in weekly federal benefits has been phased out.

He and his wife have depleted their savings and had to borrow money from family.

“I can’t find another job because crossing the border for work is not essential either,” he wrote in an email. “So I am stuck until that border opens. It’s getting a bit scary.

“I try not to let my wife see how much this is eating me. I am trying to stay strong.

But even stone cracks.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

9

Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies fatally shoot a black man they say had a gun

By NEIL VIGDOR and AZI PAYBARAH

L

os Angeles sheriff’s deputies fatally shot a Black man who they said had a handgun Monday afternoon after a stop turned into a violent altercation, authorities said.

The Los Angeles County deputies handcuffed the man after firing at him several times in Westmont, a South Los Angeles neighborhood. The aftermath of the shooting was recorded by bystanders, who protested the authorities’ deadly use of force. As the day turned to evening, a crowd grew at the site of the shooting.

According to the Sheriff’s Department, the man, who was not immediately identified publicly, had been riding a bicycle when deputies tried to stop him.

The reason for the stop was a code violation related to bicycle riding, according to the department, which did not elaborate on the nature of the violation.

The man fled, and deputies chased him, the department said. When they caught up with the man near West 109th Place and Budlong Avenue around 3:30 p.m., a fight began.

At a news conference, Lt. Brandon Dean of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said the man had “punched one of the officers in the face” and dropped some items he had been holding. “The deputies noticed that inside the clothing items that he dropped was a black semi-automatic handgun, at which time a deputy-involved shooting occurred,” he said.

The Sheriff’s Department said the shooting was under investigation by multiple entities, including the district attorney’s office and the Internal Affairs Bureau, which is standard practice when a civilian is killed by an officer.

The shooting took place about four miles north of where Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies fatally shot an 18-year-old Latino man five times in the back in June in Gardena, use of force that the man’s family contends had been unjustified.

The Los Angeles arm of the Black Lives Matter movement urged its supporters on Monday to mobilize, tweeting that deputies had left the man’s “body facedown in the dirt.”

Hours after the shooting, more than 100 people congregated at the scene. Protesters standing behind yellow tape held up raised fists and signs like “Black Lives Matter,” “Defund the Police” and “Resign All LASD.” During earlier chants by the demonstrators, sheriff’s deputies stared silently back while the bright lights of two police vehicles shined at the crowd.

Taegen Meyer said she had turned out to protest to “stand with community, stand with families and

show our dedication to justice.” A group of people who had been protesting for three months coordinated on the encrypted messaging app Signal, she said, declaring it an emergency action.

The shooting comes as law enforcement officers across the nation are facing intense scrutiny over the use of deadly force and biased policing after George Floyd was killed by the police in Minneapolis. His death, which was captured on a bystander’s video, fueled nationwide protests against the police and prompted some to call for departments to be defunded.

Last week, police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, in the back while he was attempting to enter the driver’s side of an SUV during a dispute. Three of his children were in the back seat. Blake’s father told CNN on Monday that his son was paralyzed from the waist down.

President Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to Kenosha on Tuesday, a visit that state and local officials discouraged. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, has spoken with Blake’s father.

It was not immediately clear if the deputies involved in the shooting on Monday were wearing body cameras. In contrast to the Los Angeles Police

Department, which is a separate law enforcement agency, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has been slow to use body cameras, The Los Angeles Times reported in June.

The newspaper cited as reasons for the delay cost factors, a lack of a consensus on who is able to get access to the camera footage and red tape. It also reported that it was not uncommon for sheriff’s deputies to wear their own body cameras.

The focus on body cameras followed two fatal shootings by sheriff’s deputies within 24 hours in June. In one case, Andres Guardado, 18, a Latino security guard, was killed by deputies in Gardena.

The Sheriff’s Department said that Guardado had been carrying a loaded firearm that had a “prohibited magazine” and that he had not been in uniform or recognized as a licensed security officer by the state. Guardado’s family has said that the killing was not justified.

At the site of the shooting on Monday, a protester who gave his name only as Vision and was handing out “Honor King: End Racism” signs, said it was powerful to bring Black Lives Matter to urban neighborhoods. “They have to understand the importance of unity and to stand up for injustice and inequality,” he said.

Police officers at the site where a Black man was shot by Los Angeles County sheriffs’ deputies late Monday.

Protesters also gathered at the scene.

10

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Trump fans strife as unrest roils the U.S.

By PETER BAKER and MAGGIE HABERMAN

P

resident Donald Trump has been throwing accelerant on the fire of the nation’s social unrest rather than trying to put it out, seeking confrontation rather than calm at a volatile moment his advisers hope will help salvage his campaign for a second term.

Other presidents in times of tumult tried to settle down communities convulsed by racial and cultural divisions, but Trump has encouraged one side against another. He has threatened to deploy federal forces, condoned freelance actions by his own armed supporters, conflated peaceful protesters with violent rioters and used the strife to undercut his political opponents.

He plans to fly Tuesday to Kenosha, Wisconsin, uninvited and unwelcome by the local authorities in a state pivotal to the November election, to condemn what he calls “left-wing mobs” that are “marauding through our cities.” In his goal to cement his desired image as a “law-and-order president,” he will meet with the police and tour businesses damaged by rioting.

As of Monday evening, however, Trump had no plans to meet with the family of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man shot in the back seven times in front of his children, prompting the latest uproar. For that matter, the president has yet to even speak Blake’s name in public, much less comment on his case other than to say, when questioned, that the shooting captured on video “was not a good sight.”

But Trump has had plenty to say about the eruption of

street violence that followed as he blames Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden, and injects it directly into the presidential campaign. He has tried to make protests and riots his central issue, distracting from the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to kill roughly 1,000 Americans daily.

“The violence is fueled by dangerous rhetoric from far-left politicians that demonize our nation and demonize our police,” Trump said Monday at a news conference. “The violent rioters share Biden’s same talking points, and they share his same agenda for our nation,” he added. “The rioters and Joe Biden have a side. They’re both on the side of the radical left.”

Trump has hardly discouraged his own supporters, who have been traveling to protests itching for a fight. On Twitter over the weekend, the president justified the actions of his backers who fired at protesters with paintballs and pepper spray in Portland, Oregon, calling it the natural response to the mayor’s failure to crack down.

At Monday’s news conference, he went further and defended them. “That was a peaceful protest,” he said. “Paint is a defensive mechanism. Paint is not bullets.” He noted correctly that a supporter of his, Aaron J. Danielson, was shot to death during a clash with protesters in Portland, and he condemned that as “disgraceful.”

But he defended another of his supporters, Kyle H. Rittenhouse, 17, who showed up at a protest in Kenosha armed with a military-style rifle and has been charged with homicide after two demonstrators were shot and killed, suggesting the teenager

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters during a news conference in the White House briefing room on Monday, Aug. 31, 2020.

acted in self-defense. “I guess he was in very big trouble,” Trump said. “He probably would have been killed.”

The strategy is consistent with the president’s lifetime of provocation. From his time as a celebrity real estate developer, Trump has never been a conciliator, and he has long gravitated toward conflict and sought to escalate it. As president, he often plays to and amplifies racial divisions in the country.

Democrats have grown increasingly nervous in recent days, fearing that Trump was successfully gaining traction with the issue, motivating his own base to turn out and appealing to independents turned off by television images of burning cars and looting.

“There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on with Democrats,” acknowledged Terry McAuliffe, the former governor of Virginia and Democratic National Committee chairman. “We love to do that.”

But he argued that the issue ultimately would play to Biden’s benefit because, he maintained, Trump was the one who has fomented the strife. “Let us play on that field. I think it’s a great field for us to play on,” McAuliffe said. “Everyone knows we need healing, and that’s a strong suit for Biden. It’s a mistake for Trump, but he doesn’t have much to run on.”

Trump clearly does not want to run on the response to the coronavirus — which has been roundly criticized as the American caseload tops 6 million with 183,000 dead — and his focus on the street violence has managed to change the subject for a few days. He opened his news conference with an update on the pandemic but quickly shifted to the dangers of “the radical left.”

Trump’s advisers have made clear that they see the issue as an electoral boon. “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Kellyanne Conway, his departing White House counselor, said last week on “Fox & Friends.”

Trump’s trip to Kenosha on Tuesday is likely to add more tension to a city on edge since Blake’s shooting. The president said he tried calling the family of Blake — he did not use his name — but was told a lawyer would be on the line and therefore opted not to talk with them. “They did have a lawyer that wanted to be on the phone, so I said no, that’s inappropriate,” Trump said.

The president said he did speak with the family’s pastor.

Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr., told CNN that “we don’t have a family pastor.” But Benjamin Crump, a lawyer representing the family, said separately that a pastor for Blake’s mother referred the White House to the family’s legal team.

“I’m not getting into politics,” the elder Blake said as his son remained hospitalized and paralyzed. “It’s all about my son, man. It has nothing to do with a photo-op. It has to do with Jacob’s operation.”

Gov. Tony Evers and Mayor John Antaramian, both Democrats, have asked the president not to come. Antaramian said he found out about the president’s planned visit through a text from a friend.

“From my perspective, right now is not the time,” Antaramian said. “When you look at the issues that are going on in the community, this community is trying to heal, we’re trying to pull together. I think that at this point in time, it’s not the best idea.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

11

Small-business failures loom as federal aid dries up

Patrons on Friday, Aug. 28, 2020, sit at outdoor tables at the Cheers Replica bar in Faneuil Hall in Boston, which depended heavily on tourist traffic that collapsed during the pandemic.

By BEN CASSELMAN

T

he United States faces a wave of smallbusiness failures this fall if the federal government does not provide a new round of financial assistance — a prospect that economists warn would prolong the recession, slow the recovery and perhaps enduringly reshape the American business landscape.

As the pandemic drags on, it is threatening even well-established businesses that were financially healthy before the crisis. If they shut down or are severely weakened, it could accelerate corporate consolidation and the dominance of the biggest companies.

Tens of thousands of restaurants, bars, retailers and other small businesses have already closed. But many more have survived, buoyed in part by billions of dollars in government assistance to both businesses and their customers.

The Paycheck Protection Program provided hundreds of billions in loans and grants to help businesses retain employees and meet other obligations. Billions more went to the unemployed, in a $600 weekly supplement to state jobless benefits, and to many households, through a $1,200 tax rebate — money available to spend at local stores and restaurants.

Now that aid is largely gone, even as the economic recovery that took hold in the spring is losing momentum. The fall will bring new cha-

llenges: Colder weather will curtail outdoor dining and other weather-dependent adaptations that helped businesses hang on in much of the country, and epidemiologists warn that the winter could bring a surge in coronavirus cases.

As a result, many businesses face a stark choice: Do they try to hold on through a winter that could bring new shutdowns and restrictions, with no guarantee that sales will bounce back in the spring? Or do they cut their losses while they have something to salvage?

For the Cheers Replica bar in Faneuil Hall in Boston, the answer was to throw in the towel after nearly two decades in business.

“We just came to the conclusion, if we’re losing that much money in the summertime, what’s the winter going to look like?” said Markus Ripperger, president and chief executive of Hampshire House, the bar’s parent company.

Many businesses that failed in the early weeks of the pandemic were already struggling, had owners nearing retirement or were otherwise likely to shut down in the next couple of years. Those closing down now look different.

Cheers was a long-standing, successful business with access to capital and owners willing to invest to keep it going. But the bar, built to resemble the one on the 1980s sitcom, depended heavily on tourist traffic that collapsed during the pandemic.

On Friday, the Commerce Department

reported that consumer spending rose only modestly in July after two months of resurgence and remained below pre-pandemic levels. Economists warn that without the $600 a week in extra unemployment insurance, spending is likely to slow further this fall.

Data from Homebase, which provides time-management software to small businesses, shows that roughly 20% of businesses that were open in January are closed either temporarily or permanently. The number of hours worked — a rough proxy for revenues — is down by even more during what should be the year’s busiest period. Both figures have stalled or turned down in recent weeks.

Small businesses have grown more pessimistic as the pandemic has dragged on. In late April, about a third of small businesses surveyed by the Census Bureau said they expected it to take more than six months for business to return to normal. Four months later, nearly half say so, and a further 7.5% say they do not expect business ever to bounce back fully. About 5% say they expect to close permanently in the next six months.

The ultimate damage could be much greater. In a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a small-business lobbying group, 21% of small businesses said they would have to close if conditions did not improve in the next six months. Other private-sector surveys have found similar results.

Widespread business failures could cause lasting economic damage. Nearly half of American employees work for businesses with staffs under 500, meaning millions of jobs are at stake. And while new businesses would inevitably spring up to replace those that close, that process will take far longer than simply reopening existing businesses.

“The consequences to allowing a tidal wave of closures is we will make every aspect of the recovery harder,” said John Lettieri, president and chief executive of the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington research organization.

There could also be longer-run implications. Despite high-profile bankruptcies in the retail industry and other sectors, many large corporations have been able to solidify their position during the pandemic: demanding concessions from landlords, borrowing billions of dollars at low interest rates and leveraging sophisticated supply chains and distribution systems to reach suddenly homebound customers.

Small businesses, which usually have less access to credit and rely more heavily on foot traffic, have been struggling to survive.

The challenge has been particularly acute

for Black-owned businesses, which were more than twice as likely to close down in the early months of the pandemic than small businesses overall, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Black-owned businesses were more likely to be in areas hit hard by the virus, had less of a financial cushion and were less likely to have established banking relationships, which put them at a disadvantage in seeking loans under the emergency Paycheck Protection Program in the critical first weeks that the aid was available.

By the time they got access to the federal money, “many Black-owned businesses were already out of business,” said Ron Busby, president and chief executive of the U.S. Black Chambers.

“We just couldn’t make it that long.”

Maurice Brewster is hanging on. He runs Mosaic Global Transportation, a California company that was growing quickly before the pandemic running the private buses that shuttled tech workers between their San Francisco homes and their suburban office campuses.

Those campuses have been all but empty since March, and many companies aren’t planning to bring workers back until next year. Other parts of Brewster’s business — providing transportation for conventions, wine tours and other events — are also suffering.

To survive, Brewster, who is Black, has slashed costs and sought new lines of business, including delivering packages for Amazon — “anything to get the vehicles moving and get some revenue coming in the door,” he said.

Economists say there is time to limit the damage. Despite a rocky start, the Paycheck Protection Program eventually paid out more than half a trillion dollars in loans and probably saved many businesses from failure, according to research from economists at the University of Illinois and Harvard. But the program lapsed in August, and if Congress doesn’t move soon to replace it, the earlier effort could end up delaying failures rather than preventing them.

Many experts still expect Democratic and Republican leaders to reach a deal on an aid package that includes support for small businesses, but a new, large-scale program seems increasingly unlikely.

“Why didn’t we use the time that PPP bought us to design the kind of program that would be commensurate with the national challenge that we’re facing?” Lettieri, of the Economic Innovation Group, asked. “That’s all PPP was. It was a mechanism to buy time. It was never the long-term solution.”

12

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Samsung heir is indicted but avoids jail

Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, center, at the Seoul Central District Court in June.

By CHOE SANG-HUN

L

ee Jae-yong, the heir to the South Korean tech and industrial giant Samsung, was indicted on Tuesday on charges of engaging in stock price manipulation, unfair trading and other illegal means to tighten his control over the country’s biggest conglomerate.

But prosecutors could not arrest him because the Seoul Central District Court had earlier refused to issue a warrant allowing prosecutors to arrest Lee, who has been running Samsung since a heart attack incapacitated his father, Lee Kun-hee, in 2014. Samsung has denied the allegations.

Prosecutors may not have a slam-dunk case. The court’s refusal to issue an arrest warrant raised doubts in South Korea about the strength the prosecution’s cause, particularly after a review panel in June recommended against indicting Lee because of a lack of incriminating evidence. Lee requested the outside review of the government’s investigation, invoking a regulation prosecutors introduced in 2018 to enhance the neutrality and fairness of their inquiries.

Successive leaders of South Korea, including President Moon Jae-in, have taken office vowing to eradicate corruption at the chaebol, or family-controlled conglomerates, which dominate their country’s economy.

South Korean courts have often proven lenient toward chaebol chiefs convicted of white-collar crimes. Lee’s father was convicted twice of bribery and other corruption charges, but he never spent a day in prison.

Lee, commonly known as J.Y. Lee in the West and arguably South Korea’s most influential businessman, previously spent a year on charges that he bribed Park Geunhye, the impeached and ousted former president of South Korea.

In a statement released on Tuesday, lawyers for Lee called the charges against him “one-sided arguments not based on evidence or legal principles and are not true,” and added that the prosecutors’ decision to indict Lee “is not only unfair but also will damage the people’s trust in them.”

Lee in the past has denied any wrongdoing, but he has sought to defuse public anger against Samsung and his family.

On May 6, he apologized for the recurring corruption scandals at Samsung. He admitted that those scandals stemmed from attempts to ensure a father-to-son transfer of managerial power at the company, and said he will be the last of his family members to lead the corporate empire.

But Lee stopped short of clarifying whether he or Samsung broke the law in such efforts.

“All of the problems basically started from this succession issue,” he said at the time. “From now on, I will make sure that no controversy happens again regarding the succession issue.”

Lee holds the position of vice chairman at Samsung.

The company is ingrained in the everyday life of South Korea through a sprawling array of businesses that include electronics, financial services, heavy manufacturing and more. His

family controls Samsung through a series of legal and financial arrangements among the conglomerate’s many arms.

On Tuesday, prosecutors formally indicted Lee again on criminal charges stemming from a merger of two Samsung affiliates in 2015 that helped him increase his control over the entire Samsung empire, including its crown jewel, Samsung Electronics.

Prosecutors also indicted 10 other current and former Samsung officials, including former top executives Choi Gee-sung and Kim Jong-joong, who were also accused of engaging in stock-price manipulation, unfair trading and audit-rule violations as part of a systematic effort to help transfer the managerial control of Samsung from Lee’s father to his son, now 52.

Such efforts culminated in the 2015 merger of the two Samsung affiliates, Samsung C&T and Cheil Industries Inc., prosecutors said.

According to prosecutors, Lee and his lieutenants conspired to lower the value of Samsung C&T and inflate that of Cheil Industries ahead of their merger. As part of their plot, prosecutors said, the Samsung executives were also committed accounting fraud to inflate the value of Samsung Biologics, a subsidiary of Cheil Industries.

In the 2015 merger, one share of Cheil Industries was traded for about three shares of Samsung C&T. The deal helped Lee enormously, prosecutors say.

Before the merger, Lee was the largest shareholder of Cheil Industries, with a nearly one-quarter ownership stake.

He owned no share of Samsung C&T. The inflated value of Cheil Industries gave Lee a bigger share in the company created through the merger than prosecutors said he deserved. The company created through the merger, also named Samsung C&T, is a linchpin in controlling the entire conglomerate.

Samsung denied the stock-manipulation allegation, as well as Lee’s involvement in the decision-making at Samsung Biologics.

In 2017, Lee was sentenced to five years in prison for providing Park, then president of the country, and one of her friends with $7 million in bribes to obtain the government’s support for the 2015 merger. In February 2018, an appeals court judge reduced his prison term to 2 1/2 years and suspended the sentence, releasing him from prison. The judge ruled that the amount of bribes Lee had provided was less than half of the sum determined by the trial court.

Events have since turned against Lee. In August, the Supreme Court of South Korea ruled that the appeals court had underestimated the value of the bribes, and sent the case back to the lower court for retrial.

In November 2018, the government’s Securities and Futures Commission formally accused Samsung Biologics of accounting fraud. Prosecutors have since expanded the probe into the 2015 merger, building new criminal charges against Lee. But the market has signaled its support for Lee and Samsung Biologics, company officials said, citing the subsidiary’s stock prices. Share prices increased from 410,000 won ($346) in December 2018, when prosecutors raided the company, to 783,000 won ($661) on Tuesday.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

13 Stocks

Tech stocks fuel Wall Street rally as factory activity expands

T

he S&P 500 and the Nasdaq hit new highs on Tuesday with technology leading the charge as Apple and Zoom Video soared and better-than-expected U.S. manufacturing sector data fueled optimism about the economic recovery.

In the previous session Wall Street’s three main indexes had recorded their fifth straight monthly gain and their strongest August advance in more than three decades, which was also partly thanks to help from technology stocks and central bank support.

On Tuesday heavyweight Apple Inc was up 4%, rising for the second straight day after its stock split took effect. A report also said the company had asked suppliers to make at least 75 million 5G iPhones for later this year.

Zoom Video Communications Inc surged 39% after the video-conferencing platform raised its annual revenue forecast by more than 30% as it converted more of its huge free user base to paid subscriptions.

“There’s a bit of support from the economic data as far as it improves sentiment for the market but I think today investors are looking at the good earnings we saw coming out of tech,” said Veronica Willis, investment strategy analyst at Wells Fargo Investment Institute in St. Louis.

ISM data showed U.S. factory activity expanded for the third straight month to a reading of 56.0 in August, the highest since November 2018. The figures follow encouraging manufacturing surveys from China and Europe earlier in the day.

However, employment continued to lag, according to ISM data, supporting views that the labor market recovery was losing momentum. Investors will keep a close eye on the monthly U.S. jobs report due on Friday.

At 2:09 p.m. EDT, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 110.1 points, or 0.39%, at 28,540.15, the S&P 500 gained 15.84 points, or 0.45%, to 3,516.15 and the Nasdaq Composite added 136.28 points, or 1.16%, to 11,911.74.

While the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 were scaling all-time highs, the blue-chip Dow was still about 3.5% below its February peak.

Technology, materials and consumer discretionary stocks led gains among the major S&P sectors.

Hopes that Senate Republicans will unveil a new coronavirus relief bill next week also helped boost sentiment.

But other strategists expect more market volatility as U.S. politics will take center stage in the coming weeks. Republican President Donald Trump, who is running for re-election against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, has seen his polling gap with the former vice president narrow recently.

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14

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘Here we go again’: A second virus wave grips Spain

By PATRICK KINGSLEY and JOSÉ BAUTISTA

A

t midday Sunday, there were 31 patients inside the main coronavirus treatment center in Málaga, the city with the fastest-rising infection rate in southern Spain. At 12.15 p.m., the 32nd arrived in an ambulance. Half an hour later came No. 33.

The garbage can by the door overflowed with masks and blue surgical gloves. Relatives hovered in silence outside — one of them in tears, another feeling a pang of déjà-vu.

“My brother-in-law had the virus in the spring,” said Julia Bautista, a 58-year-old retired office administrator waiting for news Sunday of her 91-year-old father.

“Here we go again,” she added.

If Italy was the harbinger of the first wave of Europe’s coronavirus pandemic in February, Spain is the portent of its second.

France is also surging, as are parts of Eastern Europe, and cases are ticking up in Germany, Greece, Italy and Belgium, too, but in the past week, Spain has recorded the most new cases on the continent by far — more than 53,000. With 114 new infections per 100,000 people in that time, the virus is spreading faster in Spain than in the United States, more than twice as fast as in France, about eight times the rate in Italy and Britain, and 10 times the pace in Germany.

Spain was already one of the hardest-hit countries in Europe, and now has about 440,000 cases and more than 29,000 deaths. But after one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns, which did check the virus’ spread, it then enjoyed one of the most rapid reopenings. The return of nightlife and group activities — far faster than most of its European neighbors — has contributed to the epidemic’s resurgence.

Now, as other Europeans mull how to restart their economies while still protecting human life, the Spanish have become an early bellwether for how a second wave might happen, how hard it might hit, and how it could be contained.

“Perhaps Spain is the canary in the coal mine,” said Professor Antoni Trilla, an epidemiologist at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, a research group. “Many countries may follow us — but hopefully not at the same speed or with the same number of cases that we are facing.”

To be sure, doctors and politicians are not as terrified by Spain’s second wave as they were by its first. The mortality rate is roughly half the rate at the height of the crisis — falling to 6.6% from the 12% peak in May. The median age of sufferers has dropped to around 37 from 60. Asymptomatic cases account for more than 50% of positive results, which is partly due to a fourfold rise in testing. And the health institutions feel much better prepared.

“We have experience now,” said Dr. María del Mar Vázquez, the medical director of the hospital in Málaga where Bautista’s father was being treated.

“We have a much bigger stock of equipment, we have protocols in place, we are more prepared,” Vázquez said. “The hospitals will be full — but we are ready.”

Yet part of the hospital is still a building site — contractors have yet to finish a renovation of the wing of the hospital that deals with coronavirus patients. No one expected the second

In the past week, Spain has recorded more new coronavirus infections per capita than anywhere else in Europe, and experts fear it is the beginning of a new phase of the pandemic. wave for at least another month.

And epidemiologists aren’t certain why it arrived so soon.

Explanations include a rise in large family gatherings; the return of tourism in cities like Málaga; the decision to return responsibility for combating the virus to regional authorities at the end of the nationwide lockdown, and a lack of adequate housing and health care for migrants.

The surge has also been blamed on the revival of nightlife, which was reinstated earlier and with looser restrictions than in many other parts of Europe.

“We have this cultural factor related to our rich social life,” said Ildefenso Hernández-Aguado, a former director-general of public health for the Spanish Government. “People are close.

They like to get to know each other.”

For several weeks in places like Málaga, nightclubs and discos were allowed to open until as late as 5 a.m., as regional politicians attempted to revive an economy dependent on tourists and partygoers. Revelers were allowed only to dance around a table with friends, rather than mixing with strangers — but the rules were not always observed.

In one notorious incident in early August, a performer was filmed spitting at dancers on a crowded dance floor at a beach club outside Málaga.

The venue was quickly closed, all nightclubs were ordered to shut two weeks later, and bars must now shut by 1 a.m. But critics fear the restrictions are still far too lax.

As beds continued to fill up in Málaga’s hospitals this weekend, residents were still cramming into bars along certain beach fronts until well past midnight. In some bars, the tables were tightly packed together — far closer than the current rules of two meters, or about six feet, allow.

At closing time, drinkers spilled out onto the beaches and pontoons, mostly without wearing masks. There they congregated in groups of more than 20 — a normal sight during any other Spanish summer, but far larger than the gatherings of 10 or fewer now allowed by law.

Some were teenagers who said they had recently recovered

from a mild form of the virus, and who now therefore considered themselves immune. Others felt the pandemic restrictions were an overreaction.

“I don’t think COVID is real,” said Victor Bermúdez, a 23-year-old shop assistant at an early morning gathering on a pontoon jutting into the Mediterranean. “Well, yes, it’s real — but it’s not as serious as they say. It’s all a plan to kill the poor and boost the rich.”

During the lockdown, the central government set a clear agenda from Madrid. But with the lifting of the state of emergency at the end of June, certain powers were returned to each of Spain’s 17 regional governments, leading to a disjointed and confused approach.

When regions attempted to enforce restrictions on local life, some of their decisions were struck down by local judges, who argued that only the central Parliament had the power to introduce such measures.

“We don’t have the legal tools that guarantee us the ability to take decisions,” said Juan Manuel Moreno, the president of the regional government in Andalusia, the region in which Málaga lies.

The debate has also become the latest proxy for a bitter conflict over the Spanish Constitution that has been brewing for more than four decades. For federalists and Catalan separatists, for example, the debacle highlights how power was never properly devolved after the death in 1975 of the dictator Francisco Franco. For Spanish nationalists, it instead shows how the process of decentralization has already gone too far.

“There is a kind of war going on to show what kind of political system is better,” said Nacho Calle, the editor of Maldita, a prominent fact-checking service. The decentralized approach has led to a piecemeal system of tracking and tracing potential coronavirus victims. Some regions employ several thousand trackers to trace people who might have come into contact with infected people, while other regions hired only a few dozen — slowing the rate at which potential patients are told to enter quarantine.

And even in regions with large numbers of trackers, like Andalusia, health workers on the ground report that the process is still too slow and understaffed in certain locations.

A lack of institutional support for undocumented migrants has also contributed to the second wave, according to some experts. Some recent outbreaks began among foreign farmhands living in cramped communal accommodations.

But in general, doctors say that Spain is in a far stronger position to fight the virus than it was in March.

National coordination is improving — the central government last week agreed to a deal to deploy 2,000 soldiers as contact tracers. Testing speeds are accelerating — in Málaga, the biggest hospital can process tests within a single morning, thanks to the recent purchase of a series of robots. Across the road, a makeshift hospital built in a rush in April stands empty, ready for a rise in cases.

“It’s not like the first wave,” said Carmen Cerezo, 38, a train attendant waiting outside the Málaga hospital while her father was tested for coronavirus inside.

“We’re calmer now,” she said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

15

Far-right Germans try to storm Reichstag as virus protests escalate

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

I

t was shortly after 7 p.m. when a self-described healer got on stage outside the German Parliament and urged the jeering crowd of protesters to storm the building: “There is no more police!” she shouted. “We have won!”

What followed was a scene many Germans thought had been confined to their history books: Hundreds of far-right activists waving the black, white and red flag of the pre-1918 German Empire that once inspired the Nazis broke through a police barrier and tried to force their way into the building.

It took only a few tense minutes before police, though vastly outnumbered, managed to push them back. But Saturday’s events marked an alarming escalation of the protests against Germany’s response to the pandemic that have grown steadily bigger and — on the fringes at least — angrier.

Strikingly, that outpouring of anger comes at a time when Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is enjoying high levels of trust and popularity, and the great majority of Germans approve of its virus control measures. Germany has managed the pandemic well, keeping the number of deaths low, reopening schools and pumping billions of euros into welfare programs that so far have kept unemployment at bay.

Small as it is in numbers, though, the group who tried to take over the historic Parliament building, the Reichstag, prompted shocked responses and grim comparisons to Germany’s past.

“The fact that Nazis with imperial war flags try to storm the Bundestag recalls the darkest period in German history,” Robert Habeck, the co-leader of Germany’s Green party, told the Funke media group.

“It is intolerable that the Reich flag should fly again at the German Parliament,” said Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, head of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right party.

Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called it “an unbearable attack on the heart of our democracy.”

Some 38,000 protesters from all over the country flocked to the German capital last weekend, the biggest number since the marches started in April. It was an eclectic crowd. There were anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., anticapitalists, esoterics, ordinary citizens angry at having to wear face masks — but also about 3,000 members of the far-right scene.

“We have everything from Hare Krishna fans to Adolf Hitler fans on the streets,” said Matthias Quent, an expert on far-right extremism and the director of an institute that studies democracy and civil society. “It’s a very disparate crowd, but what unites people is an angry discontent with the establishment. It’s a mix of populist and egoist outrage.”

The far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, has tried to exploit the pandemic in the same way it used the refugee crisis in 2015, when the government accepted more than 1 million migrants into the country, to feed a narrative of impending crisis and government failure.

The migrant wave helped propel the AfD into Parliament in the last election, but the issue has lost much of its political potency, as the resettlement has been broadly deemed a success. And with its own lawmakers and voters deeply split over the country’s coronavirus measures, the party has seen its share of the vote dip below 10% in recent polls.

“In Germany, like many other European countries, we see that far-right parties are losing ground, that there is growing trust in incumbent governments,” Quent said. “In the short term the pandemic can’t be exploited by far-right parties.”

If the economy deteriorates further and unemployment rises, that equation may change, he said. Already, the AfD and more extreme far-right groups are trying to capitalize on the discontent as they begin positioning themselves for what may be a much uglier political scene some months from now.

What worries officials and extremism experts more immediately is that even if the far right is a minority at the protests, it is radicalizing. Among those calling on supporters to join the protest Saturday were Björn Höcke, an AfD firebrand, and Martin Sellner, star of the extremist Generation Identity movement, both of whom have been classified as far-right extremists by the domestic intelligence service.

Message boards are flush with far-right conspiracy theories and prepper groups, which have long fantasized about a crisis so deep that it would lead to the collapse of Germany’s liberal order. Ahead of Saturday’s protest, which the city government had tried to block before being overruled by a court, several public groups on messaging app Telegram had called for a “storm on Berlin.”

Some had posted photos of themselves and their weapons.

“That is very unusual for Germany,” Quent said.

Authorities are on high alert. Over the past 14 months, far-right terrorists have assassinated a regional politician on his

front porch near the central city of Kassel, attacked a synagogue in Halle, in the east, and in February, killed 10 people in the west, in Hanau. Even before the pandemic hit Germany, far-right extremism and far-right terrorism had been officially identified as the biggest danger to the country’s democracy.

At a same time, senior intelligence officials have expressed concern about far-right extremists infiltrating Germany’s security services. Cases of far-right extremists in the military and the police, some hoarding weapons and explosives, have multiplied alarmingly in recent years. In July, the government disbanded an entire company of the KSK, the country’s special forces, because it was infested with far-right extremists.

Meanwhile, it was three police officers who stood their ground Saturday at the entrance to the Reichstag, the historic Parliament building, and held off the angry mob. A video of the three men pushing back against the demonstrators for several minutes before reinforcements arrived has gone viral in Germany.

It also ignited an uneasy debate about how to better protect the Reichstag. It is a point of pride that the building dedicated to “The German People,” as the inscription above its portico reads, remains open to those very people.

The best-selling tabloid Bild has called the police officers who protected it “heroes,” and Monday, Steinmeier received them at his residence to officially thank them.

“Far-right extremism has deep roots in our society,” Steinmeier said. “It is a serious danger.”

Riot police officers in front of the Reichstag during a demonstration on Saturday. Hundreds of far-right protesters broke through the line and stormed the building.

16

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Sudan signs peace deal with rebel alliance

By ABDI LATIF DAHIR

H

oping to put an end to nearly two decades of bloodshed that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions more displaced, the transitional government of Sudan signed a peace agreement with an alliance of rebel groups Monday to end fighting in Darfur and the southern regions of South Kordofan and the Blue Nile.

It was the first major breakthrough in a peace process that started soon after the ouster of Omar al-Bashir, the longtime Sudanese dictator accused of atrocities in Darfur that earned him an indictment on genocide charges in an international court.

After al-Bashir was ousted in April 2019, a joint military-civilian government promised to bring both democ-

racy and peace. But with violence and massacres in Darfur being reported as recently as July, there was concern that promises of peace would once again fall short and the nation would descend into a familiar cycle of bloodshed.

While observers cautioned that Monday’s deal needed to be followed with concrete reforms, it was widely viewed as a critical first step to a more enduring peace. More than 300,000 people have been killed in years of fighting in Darfur, according to the United Nations. Another 2.7 million were forced from their homes. Thousands more have died in fighting in South Kordofan and the Blue Nile since fighting first broke out in the region in 2011.

Reasons for caution remain, observers said: At least two rebel factions did not join the peace talks, and pre-

A camp for internally displaced people in North Darfur, Sudan, on Oct. 18, 2005.

After years of bloodshed, the Sudan’s transitional government reached an agreement with most but not all of the groups fighting in Darfur and elsewhere.

vious accords, including in 2006 and 2011, have failed to end the killing.

While the largest armed groups were involved in the talks and, under the terms of the agreement, militants will now be able to transition into the national security forces, it was still unclear whether the military itself would be reformed.

Still, previous agreements came when al-Bashir controlled Sudan and there was hope that the change in government could help break past cycles of violence.

Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok of Sudan said it was a moment for optimism, dedicating the agreement to “children who were born in displacement and refugee camps and to the mothers and fathers who miss their villages and cities.”

He said that since the protests first erupted against the rule of al-Bashir in December 2018, the Sudanese people had looked hopefully for “the promise of justice, the promise of development, and the promise of safety.”

“Today is the beginning of the road to peace, a peace that needs a strong and solid will,” he said.

The deal was signed in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, where the transitional government and rebel factions have been negotiating for almost a year.

The final agreement covers issues related to power sharing, transitional justice, integrating rebel forces into the army, the return of displaced people and land ownership.

Hamdok was accompanied in Juba by Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah alBurhan, the head of Sudan’s 11-member sovereign council, and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, also known as Hemeti. Hamdan was an

enforcer for al-Bashir and himself once led a militia accused of genocidal violence in Darfur.

They were joined by the South Sudanese president, Salva Kiir. A fragile peace is also holding in South Sudan, where more than 400,000 people have been killed since a civil war began in 2013.

With the men sat together on a podium for a signing ceremony, the room broke into applause and ululations as members of rebel groups waved the signed peace documents in the air. Representatives from governments including Ethiopia, Egypt, Chad and Britain were also at the ceremony.

The Darfur conflict began in 2003 when rebels from the region launched an insurgency against the government following complaints of political and economic marginalization by al-Bashir and the Arab-dominated leadership in Khartoum.

In 2009, the International Criminal Court indicted al-Bashir over crimes in the region, including accusations of genocide, rape, torture and contaminating wells and water pumps of communities thought to be close to the armed groups.

Since coming to power, Hamdok has introduced long-awaited political and economic reforms and has promised his administration would deliver peace and justice to victims.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Sudan, a trip aimed at supporting the country’s fragile transitional period. Hamdok and Pompeo discussed efforts to remove Sudan from the United States’ list of state sponsors of terrorism — a designation that has crippled Sudan’s economy and deterred foreign investment.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

17

‘Hotel Rwanda’ hero, Paul Rusesabagina, is held on terrorism charge

By ABDI LATIF DAHIR

P

aul Rusesabagina, whose bravery in saving more than 1,200 fellow Rwandans from genocide inspired the film “Hotel Rwanda,” has been arrested by the authorities in Rwanda who are holding him there on charges that include terrorism, arson and murder.

During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Rusesabagina, a Hutu who was working as a manager at a hotel in the capital, Kigali, helped shelter people fleeing the violence that eventually killed as many as 1 million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

But in recent years, Rusesabagina, 66, has become an opponent of the government of Rwanda’s long-serving president, Paul Kagame, who has kept the country politically and economically stable but is accused by human rights groups of brutally silencing his critics. Kagame’s government has alleged for years that Rusesabagina is supporting Rwandan rebels attacking the country from abroad.

The Rwanda Investigation Bureau said in a statement on Twitter on Monday that Rusesabagina was suspected of being “the founder, leader, sponsor and member of violent, armed, extremist terror outfits,” including the Rwanda Movement for Democratic Change and the Party for Democracy in Rwanda, both opposition parties. The Movement party has a militant wing, which operates in the region and which the Rwandan government considers a terrorist group.

The bureau also accused Rusesabagina of helping to carry out attacks in 2018 “against unarmed, innocent Rwandan civilians on Rwandan territory.”

The authorities did not provide any evidence of the charges against him.

The Rwanda Investigation Bureau said that he was arrested “through international cooperation,” but did not say which countries or agencies may have assisted, or where or when he was arrested.

Rusesabagina last spoke to his wife last Thursday from Dubai, and his whereabouts was unknown until he surfaced on Monday in Rwanda, according to Kitty Kurth, a spokeswoman for his Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, who is based in Chicago.

“We believe he was kidnapped and taken by extraordinary rendition to Rwanda,” Kurth said in a statement. “He is a regular critic of human rights violations in Rwanda, and the Rwandan government regularly brings false charges against all critics in order to try to silence them.”

He left Rwanda years ago, saying he was afraid to go back home, and has Belgian citizenship and an American green card, Kurth said in a telephone interview. He has homes in San Antonio and Brussels, and the family is pleading with U.S. officials to intervene.

The State Department said it was aware of the arrest and was monitoring the situation.

Officials in Kigali publicly led Rusesabagina — handcuffed, masked and dressed in a black suit and a red tie — into the offices of the Rwanda Investigation Bureau on Monday to hear the charges against him. Rwandan authorities said he was being held at a police station in Kigali.

Busingye Johnston, the Rwandan minister of justice and

Paul Rusesabagina, who was hailed as a hero for saving fellow Rwandans, was detained and paraded before the news media in handcuffs in Kigali on Monday attorney general, said in a Twitter post: “Those suspected of killing and wreaking terror on Rwandans, those suspected of masterminding, sponsoring or financing terror against Rwandans, will be brought to justice.”

Kagame, who has presided over the country since 2000, has been lauded for ushering in progress and stability in Rwanda, which is in central Africa. But rights groups have accused his government of heavy-handedness, and say that executions, disappearances and torture are common.

In 2018, Diane Rwigara, a critic who sought to unseat Kagame in the 2017 elections, was imprisoned for more than a year, and then acquitted, along with her mother, of charges of forgery and inciting insurrection.

In February, Rwandan singer Kizito Mihigo was found dead in his cell, days after authorities arrested him on charges of trying to cross into Burundi and join terrorist groups. The authorities said he killed himself, but rights groups called for further investigation.

Human Rights Watch said in April that the government was arbitrarily detaining people in stadiums as it enforced coronavirus restrictions.

“The growing list of human rights defenders, journalists, civic activists, opposition members and critics of Kagame, like Rusesabagina, who have been arrested, or otherwise killed or disappeared, is truly staggering,” said Jeffrey Smith, the executive director of Vanguard Africa, a nonprofit that advocates ethical leadership and democracy on the continent. “What Kagame and Rwanda’s ruling party have effectively done is to make

the argument, both in rhetoric and in practice, that criticism, resistance or opposition to their rule amounts to terrorism.”

Rusesabagina rose to fame after his story was captured in the 2004 Oscar-nominated film “Hotel Rwanda,” which starred actor Don Cheadle.

His story, showing how one man’s actions saved many who were facing death, helped to publicize the brutality of the genocide. Rusesabagina confronted the Hutu militias, who repeatedly came to the hotel with orders to kill, by using a mixture of flattery, slyness and diplomacy — and when all else failed, by offering them alcoholic drinks and gifts. While some of his tactics were criticized, he has argued that his actions were only to save the lives of his fellow citizens.

“I still don’t understand why those men in the militias didn’t just put a bullet in my head and execute every last person in the rooms upstairs but they didn’t,” Rusesabagina recalled in his 2006 autobiography, “An Ordinary Man.” “None of the refugees in my hotel were killed. Nobody was beaten. Nobody was taken away and made to disappear,” he wrote. “People were being hacked to death with machetes all over Rwanda, but that five-story building became a refuge for anyone who could make it to our doors.”

In 2005, President George W. Bush awarded Rusesabagina the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with the award citation saying he “demonstrated remarkable courage and compassion in the face of genocidal terror.”

“His life,” the citation said, “reminds us of our moral duty to confront evil in all its forms.”

18

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

Biden condemned violence. Why won’t Trump?

By MICHELLE GOLDBERG

W

hen Elizabeth Neumann went to work in counterterrorism in Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, she thought she’d be focused on Islamic extremism, as she was in George W. Bush’s administration. But as the assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at DHS, she soon realized that she had to take the threat of white-supremacist terrorism seriously.

“It was probably 2018 when we started to realize that this was not just a blip, that Charlottesville wasn’t just a blip,” she told me.

Even as she and her colleagues worked to understand how domestic white supremacists were being emboldened, there was a series of shocking attacks, including the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in October 2018.

Europeans working in counterterrorism told their American allies that the threat of right-wing extremism was eclipsing that of returning Islamic State fighters.

“They were talking to us going: ‘Hey, you guys are the exporters here. You need to do something about this,’” said Neumann.

But combating white nationalism isn’t easy when you work for an administration that incites it. As she said in a recent Republican Voters Against Trump ad, the president’s language “gave permission to white supremacists to think

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A state Department of Corrections building burning in Kenosha, Wis., last Monday as demonstrators protested a police killing. that what they were doing is permissible.”

You’ve probably heard analysis like this from the leftleaning Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. This is coming from someone who voted for the president and worked for him until April.

Such violence is the main terrorist threat facing America. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, right-wing extremists were behind two-thirds of terrorist attacks and plots in the United States last year, and over 90% of such attacks between Jan. 1 and May 8 this year. Trump has inspired and encouraged them.

Yet if you follow coverage of the presidential campaign, political violence appears to be seen, by Democrats and Republicans alike, as largely a problem for Joe Biden.

Shortly after an apparent Trump supporter named Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with murder in the killing of two leftwing protesters in Wisconsin, a CNN headline said, “Why Democrats Are Worried About Kenosha.”

I’m not faulting CNN here. Democrats are worried. I’m worried. At least one presidential poll has shown tightening.

Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican, has conducted focus groups of largely disaffected female Trump voters, and has seen hints that urban unrest could be helping the president. There’s reason to fear that the president’s attempts to terrify suburban swing voters could work, especially if the media uncritically transmits his propaganda. But that only shows how much American politics is trapped in Trump’s alternate reality.

To try to break out of it, Biden’s campaign has gone on the offensive. On Sunday, he issued a statement condemning violence “of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right” and challenging Trump to do the same. On Monday he drove home the point: “This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the vio-

lence because for years he’s fomented it.”

Biden is right. However violence plays politically, the reality is that only one of the two candidates cheers it. Trump has urged his fans to thuggery since his first presidential campaign. He invited Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple charged with felonies for waving guns at Black Lives Matter protesters, to speak at the Republican National Convention.

Recently he liked a tweet sympathizing with Rittenhouse, who has emerged as a macabre folk hero among some Republicans. During a Monday news conference, the president defended Rittenhouse, arguing that he was acting in self-defense.

“It’s not just the president, it’s the entire Republican Party right now, kind of implying that we’ve got to take matters into our own hands and seek law and order,” said Neumann.

This weekend, a convoy of Trump supporters in flagbedecked trucks headed into Portland, Oregon, to confront left-wing demonstrators. Once in the city, they shot paintballs and pepper spray at protesters. On Twitter, Trump called them “GREAT PATRIOTS.” None of this means the left is blameless. During this weekend’s confrontation in Portland, Aaron Danielson, a member of a far-right group called Patriot Prayer, was shot to death, and a man who describes himself as “100% antifa” is reportedly being investigated for the killing. Whoever did it, Danielson’s death is a travesty and, unless he was killed in self-defense, a deep moral stain.

There’s no denying that some of the convulsive demonstrations of recent months have given way to violence and nihilistic destruction. When protesters in Seattle tried to set up a radically utopian police-free zone, six people were shot in 10 days, two of them fatally.

But Biden is hardly a catalyst to left-wing extremism.

Besides, at least some of the violence associated with the Black Lives Matter protests has been perpetrated by far-right provocateurs. In his speech at the RNC, Vice President Mike Pence condemned the murder of a federal officer, Dave Patrick Underwood, “who was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California.” He neglected to mention that the man charged in the killing, Steven Carrillo, was reportedly linked to the Boogaloo Bois, an outgrowth of the militia movement that seeks to incite a second civil war.

Like the Boogaloo Bois, Trump sees his interests served by the destruction of civic peace. “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s departing senior adviser, told “Fox & Friends” last week.

If the president succeeds in making political violence a Biden liability, he’ll have all the more incentive to set this country on fire.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

19

Organizaciones ambientales rechazan planes de gas natural y privatización en Plan Integrado de Recursos de la AEE Por THE STAR

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as organizaciones ambientales que integran la Alianza Energía Renovable Ahora (AERA) rechazaron este martes que el Negociado de Energía de Puerto Rico aprobara un Plan Integrado de Recursos (PIR) para la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica (AEE) con un enfoque en la privatización, la gasificación de las centrales de Palo Seco y San Juan, y que mantiene los contratos con AES y EcoEléctrica al igual que contratos de alto costo de tecnologías renovables a gran escala en fincas de valor ecológico.

“Los sistemas de paneles solares en techos con sistemas de almacenamiento (baterías) y programas de eficiencia energética serían la mejor opción de energía renovable para Puerto Rico”, aseguró Julia Mignucci, portavoz de Mayagüezanos por la Salud y el Ambiente, en comunicación escrita.

Sin embargo, reprochó que el Negociado permitirá que el plan de energía renovable se implemente a través de solicitudes de propuestas y contratos de compra de energía. Esto implica que implementar la energía renovable quedará en manos de compañías privadas, no la AEE. “El balance del PIR es negativo porque sigue empujando el modelo de privatización de la AEE”, afirmó Federico Cintrón Moscoso, portavoz de AERA y director ejecutivo de la orga-

nización El Puente – Enlace Latino de Acción Climática.

“La AEE otorgó un contrato multimillonario a New Fortress Energy sin esperar a que se aprobara primero el PIR y ahora el Negociado de Energía lo ratifica. El Negociado de Energía debe ordenar que se cancele inmediatamente el contrato”, exigió Adriana González, organizadora de base de Sierra Club Puerto Rico.

Las organizaciones de AERA criticaron, además, que el Negociado de Energía autorizó $5 millones para que la AEE comience la planificación de una nueva unidad de gas y almacenamiento de energía en la central Palo Seco, y que el PIR aprobado no eliminó el contrato a la carbonera AES Puerto Rico.

“El PIR no contempla el retiro de la planta de carbón en Guayama antes del 2027. Las comunidades que se han visto afectadas por la quema de carbón por casi 18 años, necesitan un PIR que proteja su salud”, comentó Timmy Boyle, portavoz de la Alianza Comunitaria Ambientalista del Sureste.

Lydia Diaz de Comité Yabucoeño Pro-Calidad de Vida explicó que, en el PIR, el Negociado de Energía requirió que la AEE, dentro de 60 días, desarrolle un borrador del plan de adquisiciones para energías renovables y almacenamiento a través de la privatización que tan caro le ha salido a Puerto Rico.

Víctor Alvarado Guzmán, portavoz del Comité Dialogo Ambiental cuestionó que los $2 mil millones aludidos en el PIR para trabajos en el sistema de transmisión vaya a enriquecer a LUMA Energy y sus afiliadas y perpetuar la transmisión de energía de las grandes plantas contaminantes en el sur al norte de Puerto Rico.

No obstante, las organizaciones ambientales de AERA celebraron el rechazo del Negociado de Energía a otros proyectos de gas natural que proponía la AEE en el PIR. El Negociado de Energía rechazó específicamente el Plan de Modernización del Sistema de Energía de la AEE, que incluía los planes para desarrollar nuevas plantas de gas natural en San Juan, Mayagüez y Yabucoa, porque no demuestra un beneficio económico.

“Esto es un triunfo de acción comunitaria y participación ciudadana. Las organizaciones ambientales de AERA luchamos para que se nos incluyera como interventores en el proceso del PIR, que la AEE quería llevar a cabo a puertas cerradas”, destacó la activista Myrna Conty, coordinadora de la Coalición de Organizaciones Anti-Incineración.

“Conseguimos que se celebraran cinco vistas públicas alrededor de Puerto Rico, que estuvieron abarrotadas de ciudadanos preocupados por los planes para construir más terminales y plantas de gas metano en San Juan, Mayagüez y Yabucoa. Nos alegra que el Negociado de Energía haya descartado estos planes al escuchar las preocupaciones presentadas por las organizaciones y el pueblo de Puerto Rico”, acotó Amy Orta, coordinadora de política ambiental de El Puente – Enlace Latino de Acción Climática.

Las organizaciones que forman parte de Alianza Energía Renovable Ahora son: CAMBIO PR, Sierra Club Puerto Rico, Comité Diálogo Ambiental, Earthjustice, El Puente-ELAC, Campamento contra las cenizas en Peñuelas, Amigos del Río Guaynabo, Coalición de Organizaciones Anti-Incineración, Comité Yabucoeño Pro-Calidad de Vida, Alianza Comunitaria Ambientalista del Sureste y Mayagüezanos por la Salud y el Ambiente.

Programa de Sección 8 presenta nuevo portal en línea para ofrecer servicios Por THE STAR

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a Administración de Vivienda Pública (AVP) informó el martes que el Programa de Sección 8 lanzó un nuevo portal en línea que permite a los participantes tener acceso a los diversos servicios del programa.

“Estos tiempos presentan nuevos retos que poco a poco hemos ido atendiendo. Hoy con esta herramienta que lanzamos para todos los participantes del programa de Sección 8, ofrecemos alternativas para facilitar el acceso a diversas transacciones mientras tomamos las medidas preventivas de distancia-

miento social”, explicó el administrador de AVP, William Rodríguez Rodríguez en comunicación escrita.

De igual forma, el funcionario destacó que “siguiendo las instrucciones de la gobernadora Wanda Vázquez Garced, y lo que ha sido nuestra política pública, con este portal ofrecemos acceso a los servicios del programa de manera segura y eficiente”.

Entre algunos de los servicios disponibles están la posibilidad de que los participantes pueden cotejar revisiones anuales; cotejar revisiones interinas o ajustes; solicitar cambio de vivienda; solicitar una cita y darle seguimiento; así

como realizar un cambio de dirección, teléfono o correo electrónico.

Los usuarios también podrán dar seguimiento al proceso de mudanza, informar cambios, tomar orientaciones, completar recertificaciones y descargar documentos.

Los participantes deberán registrarse en el portal para poder acceder a los servicios. El portal estará disponible en la página de la AVP, www.avp.pr.gov, bajo la pestaña de Servicios.

De igual forma, el administrador adelantó que espera próximamente anunciar una nueva herramienta tecnológica para los residentes de Vivienda Pública.

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Wednesday, September 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘Bill & Ted’ explained by Gen X to Gen Z

Keanu Reeves, right, and Alex Winter in the 1989 film “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” A New York Times reviewer at the time called them “inconsistent ciphers” in a “painfully inept comedy.”

By AZI PAYBARAH, JOHNNY DIAZ, CHRISTINA MORALES and BRYAN PIETSCH

I

n 1989, two teenagers used a magic telephone booth to travel through time to finish a school project. For many people around their age, the movie about those teenagers, Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, enshrined them in pop culture history: excellent avatars for a generation of affable, shaggy slackers.

For people around that age now — 31 years later, in an era without phone booths — very little of a new movie released Friday about Bill and Ted in middle age makes any sense.

So two representatives of Gen X, Johnny Diaz and Azi Paybarah, volunteered to explain the appeal of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” to two members of Gen Z, Christina Morales and Bryan Pietsch. The following is an edited and condensed version of that attempt to take Christina and Bryan through time.

Before the movie …

Q: Azi and Johnny, set the scene.

What was life like in the sepia-toned days of the late ’80s and early ’90s?

Johnny: Ahh, the early ’90s. Michael Keaton was Batman. Mustangs, Miatas and

Camaros were popular. So were “Saved by the Bell” and “90210.” Trips to Blockbuster were routine. MTV was in vogue. Thanks to Madonna, just about everyone was trying to figure out how to vogue. Tie-dye shirts, jean shorts and Keds sneakers (at least in South Florida). Mullets.

Azi: At home, you shared a landline.

If you weren’t home and someone called, it would just ring and ring.

Q: So how do Bill and Ted enter into this?

Johnny: Bill and Ted are two California slackers with very good heads of hair and big heavy metal dreams. They have to pass history class in order to save the future by time-traveling in a phone booth — their version of the DeLorean from “Back to the Future” — to collect a handful of famous historical figures for their class project.

Amazingly, everyone is able to squeeze into the booth.

Azi: Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon and Socrates walk into a mall. Two kids will write a song that brings peace to the galaxy, but they can’t get through history class. It’s ridiculously aspirational (world peace!) and absurdly low risk.

Q: Christina and Bryan, Does any of this seem familiar? Phone booths? Heavy metal? Keanu Reeves?

Bryan: My third grade classroom had an out-of-order telephone booth that we would hang out in for silent reading time, but I’ve never used one to make a call. People still did that in the early ’90s?

Christina: I have heard of phone booths, George Carlin and Keanu Reeves.

But the only memory I have of a phone booth is seeing one of those classic red ones in London … at Epcot. My familiarity with Keanu Reeves is through YouTube pop culture. I first Googled him when Trisha Paytas made videos with a cardboard cutout of him.

Q: Does any of this seem appealing?

Or dusty and old?

Bryan: Time-travel movies are always fun. And nothing’s too dusty and old for me! Except maybe silent films.

Christina: I second Bryan. I especially like the essence of “Back to the Future” with historical figures. That being said: Anything that’s from the ’90s is dusty and old. But it doesn’t mean it’s lost its worth.

Q: Had you heard of Bill and Ted? Do you think they’ve influenced other movies?

Bryan: In the words of Keke Palmer, “Sorry to this man,” but I hadn’t heard of Bill and Ted until we started talking about them on Slack. Maybe they’ve had an impact that I didn’t know about.

Christina: When I asked my younger brother about them, we both assumed this was related to the movie “Ted,” with the crude teddy bear and Mark Wahlberg.

Bryan: The title also conjured images of a teddy bear in my head.

After the movie …

Q: In 1989, a reviewer for The New York Times called the first adventure “a painfully inept comedy” whose heroes were “inconsistent ciphers” and “fond of odd words, such as bodacious.” Where do your reviews land?

Bryan: My first laugh-out-loud moment in the movie was not from intentional comedy but from a sad irony. In the opening scene, Rufus, the time-travel sherpa, says that in the year 2688, “The air is clean, the water is clean, even the dirt is clean.”

I’m anticipating that by the end of the century, people will be breathing out of tanks and there will be no water.

In a more clearly fun note: Bill’s crop

top is totally back in style now, thanks to TikTok teens.

A not fun note: I thought it was cute when Bill and Ted hug each other after Ted survives a close call with a knight. But then they use a homophobic slur, a sign of how times have changed.

Christina: I also laughed at the line about the clean Earth — it’s sad that it was funny, but the irony lands the same.

The movie was honestly the comedic relief I needed in 2020, even if some of the comedy doesn’t hit the most favorable note today, as Bryan said. (Like the weird sexualization of Bill and Ted’s classmate who becomes Bill’s stepmother.)

But like Bryan, there were tons of funny quotes and scenes that made me laugh, like “Caesar is the salad dressing dude.” It was also funny to see the special effects and what was thought modern in the late 1980s, like the idea that the future would be so influenced by rock ’n’ roll greats.

And some of the movie is just perennial teenage humor, like when Bill and Ted pick the number 69 or when Ted says, “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” Like, duh, but it’s still hilarious.

Q: Johnny and Azi, do you feel vindicated? Have you already seen the new movie?

Azi: I haven’t seen the movie, but I heard an NPR podcast review it, which feels like the perfect encapsulation of how I’ve outgrown the franchise — and which is what the Bill and Ted trilogy has tried to do, pivoting the story to their daughters and wives. What made us laugh back then would make us cringe today.

So it feels like a victory, dusting off these characters and rewriting the story to appeal more to a new generation, rather than recycle jokes for an older one.

Johnny: I couldn’t resist. I coughed up $20 to watch it. I wanted to see how their wacky humor held up (it did) and how their charming friendship endured (it’s everlasting). This was a fun nostalgia trip with two middle-aged guys who are only slightly more mature. It was great to see the next generation, their daughters, carry on the family tradition of bringing humanity into rhythm and harmony. And even 30 years later, the guys still rock great heads of hair.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

21

Auli’i Cravalho on her new Netflix drama and the smell of wet dog

By NANCY COLEMAN

A

lot has changed for Auli’i Cravalho since her first film.

The actress was 14 when Disney tapped her to star in “Moana,” voicing the animated musical’s titular island heroine. She still lived with her mother on Oahu in Hawaii, where she was focused on choir, AP classes and a budding interest in microbiology.

Five years later, Cravalho’s new home base is her Los Angeles apartment, where for the first time, she is living on her own — save for her year-old tuxedo cat, Rocco, who begrudgingly has roughly half a dozen bow ties in his wardrobe. (“He and I are really good friends now,’ she said. “But in the beginning, it was a lot of hissing.”)

Cravalho still wants to go to college, but school is on pause as her career flourishes: Her sophomore starring role, in the Netflix drama “All Together Now,” was released Friday. She plays Amber Appleton, a high school student balancing homelessness and a fraught family life with her dreams of becoming a singer and enrolling at Carnegie Mellon University.

So Cravalho is juggling a lot of change: a move, growing up, a shift from animation voice-over to live action — not to mention the isolation that has come with the pandemic, exacerbated for someone so outgoing and energetic.

But at least one thing is still the same: her mother, Puanani, moved into a place of her own in Los Angeles, just 10 minutes from Cravalho. They recently watched her new film together for the first time.

“My mom was crying next to me, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, why am I doing those things with my hands?’” Cravalho said, adding, “She was like, ‘You’re great!’ And I was like, ‘Does my face always look like that?’”

In a recent Zoom interview from her apartment, Cravalho discussed the ties she feels to the role, what it was like shooting her first live action film and castmates like Carol Burnett and a well-trained Chihuahua. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: What was your audition process like?

A: I had actually auditioned for Brett Haley, our director, for another one of his Netflix films. He was like, “You know, you’re not quite right, but I’ll keep you in mind.” And I was like, sure. But he actually did.

“All Together Now” is something that touched my heart as soon as I read the script. I related so personally to Amber coming from a single-parent household myself — she’s so hopeful and also has big dreams and passions in music. It just felt like the perfect role for me. The script also had a beautiful ability to connect this hope to realism. We get to see her be a little bit more real about how difficult it is to be an optimist all the time.

Q: On NBC’s “Rise” in 2018, you played another student dealing with hardships in her home life. Did you find there were similarities between “All Together Now” and the show?

A: I’m blessed to have played strong women. I got to start off with Moana, who goes where her parents haven’t gone before, and I felt that way also with Lilette from “Rise.” She has that musical influence and wants so much more for her life and isn’t afraid to call people out sometimes. And now I get to

Auli’i Cravalho, who is starring in the Netflix drama “All Together Now,” in Los Angeles on Aug. 23, 2020. play Amber, and she had music, but that wasn’t only her story. I hope I get to continue that trajectory of strong women.

Q: Even though you’ve done several live-action projects since “Moana,” this is really the first feature film where we’re seeing your face. What has that transition been like?

A: It’s very nerve-wracking. I had a bit of a knack for voice-over, because I’d been singing for such a long time — I was in my school choir and my church choir. This is very different. My face is in every scene. I have to really thank my director for being so collaborative and allowing me to find my character’s voice, even allowing ad-libbing. The cast was also fantastic — we have a cast that’s non-neurotypical and differently abled, so these real relationships also get to shine on this screen.

Q: This film has some really emotional moments and certainly dives into some dark places for your character. How did you approach those scenes?

A: “All Together Now” runs the full gamut of emotions — there are the socioeconomic positions that people of color might be in and the mental health struggles as well that stem from that. There’s also so much more compassion that can be shown to these individuals, and we see from Amber that her upbringing causes her a little bit of shame, which keeps her reality a secret from many of her close friends. They aren’t easy topics to talk about.

Q: What were some of the biggest challenges?

A: This being my first film, I was very, very nervous. I also moved to Portland for about two months, and that was the longest I’ve ever been away from my mom. In a way, I felt like I was truly an actor for the first time because, at the end of each day, I had nothing left. I came home to my cat and I went to bed. But it felt great.

Q: There’s an original song in the film that your character sings — what was it like shooting that scene?

A: “Feels Like Home” is such a beautiful song, written by Keegan DeWitt. I remember we got together, and he was like, “What key do you want to sing it in?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, I get to choose that?” Brett Haley got most of the song in one take, which was really important to him but stressed me out, bro.

Q: There’s another character you share much of your screen time with — Bobby Big Boy, Amber’s (adorable) Chihuahua.

A: We have one dog: the myth, the legend, TinTin. So cute. He is so well-trained, but he’s also an older pup, so we put him in a little sweater or jacket all throughout the film, because we’ve got to keep him warm. I’m carrying him in my backpack, I’m carrying him in my jacket, and with Portland, it’s a little rainy, so I smelled like wet dog a lot.

Q: You also got to work with Carol Burnett.

A: When the name Carol Burnett was whispered, so quietly, as to not disturb the juju, I remember being very excited — “We got Carol!” Which is a direct line from “Annie,” “We Got Annie” — that’s how I knew Carol Burnett, because she played Miss Hannigan, and my mom knew her of course from “The Carol Burnett Show,” so both of us were screaming when we saw the official announcement. She’s so kind, and from an acting perspective, she is so natural.

Q: The film ends on a note where it definitely feels like there is more of this story to tell. Will there be any sort of sequel?

A: I have no idea. This isn’t even me being cutesy about it; I have absolutely no clue. I really love Amber’s story, and I do agree that the way that we leave you in the film, her story isn’t finished. So I don’t know, but I’d be excited to see it.

Playing a homeless teen in “All Together Now” was taxing for several reasons, but the voice of “Moana” was happy to continue her run of strong female roles.

FASHION The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, March 4, 2020 Wednesday, September 2, 2020 20 22

Lady Gaga’s masks win the VMAs

Lady Gaga and some of her fashion masks at the MTV Video Music Awards.

By VANESSA FRIEDMAN

T

he question of what the red carpet, that weird celebrity style ritual that reached its apogee in the early 21st century as a marketing/social media/fashion Frankenstein’s monster, would become in a COVID-19 world — could it still exist at all, when most people have given up on party dressing entirely — was finally answered Sunday night at, of all places, the 2020 MTV Video Music Awards. And it was answered by Lady Gaga.

Held live around New York City, socially distanced but without an audience, the VMAs were the last of the summer award shows, and the first to attempt some semblance of old days pizazz, rather than Zooming-from-your-living-room relatability. Keke Palmer hosted, and both acknowledged the tragedies of the day — the death of Chadwick Boseman, the shooting of Jacob Blake — and engaged in multiple-dress modeling.

Not everyone wanted in. Taylor Swift accepted her prize

remotely. So did BTS, though the band performed in a prerecorded segment in very snazzy suits and ties. There was a space where hosts and performers could pose on their ownsome for arrival photos to show off their clothes, but they didn’t quite reach the usual critical mass: Sofia Carson, in red Giambattista Valli with a giant poufy peplum; Joey King in a short rose-print Versace; Machine Gun Kelly in hot pink Berluti.

It was nice to see them make an effort, and to experience a bit of a vicarious dressing-up thrill, even if without the attendant crowds and paparazzi. It also felt as if something was missing, like a hot-air balloon slowly deflating. (Why are those people all gussied up and standing there by themselves?)

But then came Lady Gaga. She puffed it back up all by herself.

The TheSan SanJuan JuanDaily DailyStar Star She accepted her many awards in person. She performed.

She changed clothes every single time she appeared, and she appeared seven times. And almost every time she appeared in her seven different outfits, she wore a different face mask.

In the process she used her image to do for mask fashion and designers what used to be done for, say, Dior and Chanel.

First came her entry-making silver circular Area coat, with a matching clear face shield/astronaut helmet by Conrad by Conrad that made reference to the VMA Moonman himself. To accept her Artist of the Year award, she wore an Iris Van Herpen bird of paradise dress with a swirling pink Cecilio Castrillo face mask. For the Song of the Year award, a gigantic iridescent emerald green shirtdress ballgown from Christopher John Rogers and a matching bejeweled and tusked Lance V. Moore mask. She looked like some sort of superglamorous mastodon.

And so it went. In her performance from “Chromatica,” Gaga appeared in a pink and black bodysuit, mask by Diego Montoya and Smooth Technology. And finally, she wore a giant feathered Valentino couture cape and silver bodysuit with a silver Maison Met mask, which she also wore for her last change into a silver cape by Candice Cuoco to accept the Tricon award.

Her clothes were eye-catching, but her masks were unforgettable. Even on an evening that also included Miley Cyrus poking fun at her own history in a sheer Mugler dress, not to mention wearing a sequined tank top and panties on top of a disco ball.

Thanking everyone at the end, Gaga said: “I might sound like a broken record, but wear a mask. It’s a sign of respect.”

Masktivism! That’s one way to inject meaning into what had become, by any measure, a format increasingly sapped of its soul and original purpose (self-expression). As we move forward into more red carpet events — next up is the Venice Film Festival, which starts this week and where Cate Blanchett, as jury president, has vowed to wear only gowns from her own closet — the bar has been raised.

Lady Gaga, as she accepted the Tricon award.

From left, Sofia Carson in Giambattista Valli, Machine Gun Kelly in Berluti, and Joey King in Versace.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

23

Exercise may boost your vaccine response

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

I

f you are an athlete, you may gain greater immunity from a flu shot than people who are less active, according to two complementary and timely new studies of exercise and vaccinations. The two studies, which involved the same group of elite runners, swimmers, wrestlers, cyclists and other athletes, suggest that intense training amplifies our vaccine response, a finding with particular relevance now, as the flu season looms and scientists work to develop a COVID-19 vaccine.

Having an immune system primed to clobber infections and respond robustly to vaccinations is obviously desirable now, during the ongoing pandemic.

And in general, exercise aids immunity, most science shows. People who work out often and moderately tend to catch fewer colds and other viruses than sedentary people. More immediately, if you exercise your arm in the hours before a flu shot, you likely will develop a stronger antibody response than if you rest that arm, a few small studies indicate.

But there have also been suggestions that under certain circumstances, exercise may dampen the immune response. Some epidemiological research and personal stories from athletes hint that intense, exhausting exercise might be detrimental to immunity in the short term. Marathon racers, for example, report catching colds at disproportionately high rates soon after a race, although some physiologists suspect these postrace respiratory problems are inflammatory, not infectious.

The upshot, though, is that many questions have remained unanswered about whether and how strenuous workouts affect immunity and our bodies’ ability to respond favorably to a vaccination, such as the seasonal flu shot.

So, for the new studies, scientists from Saarland University in Germany and other institutions decided to convince a large group of competitive athletes to get vaccinated, an effort more difficult than most of us might expect. In surveys, elite athletes tend to report relatively low rates of vaccination for the flu and other conditions, since many worry the shot will cause side effects that affect their training.

But the researchers managed to recruit 45 fit, young, elite athletes, male and female. Their sports ranged from endurance events, like the marathon, to power sports, including wrestling and hammer throw, to team sports, such as basketball and badminton. All of the volunteers were in the middle of their competitive seasons during the studies.

For the first of the two experiments involving these athletes, which was published in January in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, the researchers hoped to estab-

Two new studies of elite athletes found that working out amplifies the immune response to a flu shot. lish whether being an athlete and having an athlete’s outsized fitness would goose or impede the young people’s immune reaction to a flu shot. So, the scientists also recruited an additional 25 young people who were healthy but not athletes to serve as a control group. The researchers drew blood from everyone.

Afterward, all of the young people received a flu shot and kept notes about any side effects they felt, such as a sore arm. The groups returned to the lab for followup blood draws a week, two weeks and six months after the vaccination. Then the researchers checked their blood for anti-influenza immune cells and antibodies.

They found significantly more of those cells in the athletes’ blood, especially in the week after the shot, when everyone’s cellular reactions peaked. The athletes showed a “more pronounced immune response,” with presumably better protection against flu infection than the other young people, said Martina Sester, an immunologist at Saarland University and study co-author.

The researchers speculate that the athletes’ immune systems had been strengthened and fine-tuned by the daily physical demands and damage of training, allowing them to respond so effectively to the vaccine.

But those results, while notable, did not look at the acute effects of exercise and whether a single, intense workout might alter the body’s reactions to a vaccine, for better or worse. So, for the second of the new studies, which was published in July in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the scientists returned to the same data, but focused now only on the immune reactions of

the athletes.

They compared the numbers of immune cells and antibodies in those athletes who happened to have gotten their flu shot within two hours of their most recent training session against those of athletes whose shot had come a day after their last workout. If intense training blunted immune reactions, then the first group of athletes would be expected to show fewer new immune cells than those who had gotten their shot after a longer rest.

But the researchers found no differences. Whether the athletes’ inoculations came almost immediately after training or a day later, their immune reactions were the same. A strenuous workout beforehand had not lowered — or boosted — the response.

Together, the two studies tell us that being in shape is likely to increase our protection from a vaccination, no matter how intensely or when we work out before the shot, Sester said.

Of course, these studies focused on elite, competitive athletes, which most of us are not. But Sester believes even more casual recreational athletes are likely to mount better flu-vaccine responses than sedentary people. Likewise, she and her colleagues expect high fitness should improve immune responses to other vaccines, including, potentially, a COVID-19 shot.

“The basic principles of vaccine response are probably the same,” she said. Future studies will have to confirm that possibility, though, if and when a vaccine becomes available.

24 Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia concediendo el remedio así solicitado sin más citarles ni oírles. El abogado de la parte demandante es el Ledo. Gerardo M. Ortiz Torres, cuya direcLEGAL NOTICE ción física y postal es: Cond. El ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE Centro 1, Suite 801, 500 Muñoz PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE Rivera Ave., San Juan, Puerto PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA Rico 00918; cuyo número de SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN. teléfono es (787) 946-5268, el AMERICAS LEADING facsímile (787) 946-0062 y su FINANCE LLC correo electrónico es: gerardo@ Demandante, v. bellverlaw.com. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello de este TribuISIDORO TORRES GONZÁLEZ, SU ESPOSA nal, en San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy día 19 de agosto de 2020.

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T/C/C CARMELO RODRIGUEZ T/C/C CARMELO HENRY RODRIGUEZ POR SÍ Y EN CUANTO A LA CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA; SUCESION AURORA APONTE LOPEZ T/C/C AURORA RODRIGUEZ COMPUESTA POR REINALDO RODRIGUEZ PABON; JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIONES DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES “CRIM”

Demandados CIVIL NUM. CA2020CV00640.

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

A: JOHN DOE y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES MIEMBROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION AURORA APONTE LOPEZ T/C/C AURORA RODRIGUEZ

POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al Tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberé presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de

@

COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE Demandados PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE CIVIL NÚM.: SJ2020CV03224.

PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO SUPERIOR DE SAN JUAN. POR LA ViA ORDINARIA Y ALTAGRACIA VÉLEZ EJECUCIÓN DE GRAVAMEN MOBILIARIO (REPOSESIÓN PEÑA T/C/C ALTAGRACIA DE VEHÍCULO). EMPLAZAVÉLEZ VEGA MIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADEMANDANTE Vs. DOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL DORAL FINANCIAL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. CORPORATION H/N/C HF DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO MORTGAGE BANKERS RICO SS. BANCO POPULAR DE

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Quedan emplazados y notificados que en este Tribunal se ha radicado Demanda sobre cobro de dinero por la vía ordinaria en la que se alega que los demandados ISIDORO TORRES GONZÁLEZ, SU ESPOSA FULANA DE TAL, Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS, le adeudan solidariamente al Americas Leading Finance, LLC la suma de principal de $20,061.01, más los intereses que continúen acumulando, las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado según pactados.

Además, solicitamos de este Honorable Tribunal que autorice la reposesión y/o embargo del Vehículo. Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que, si no comparecen a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación del Edicto, a través del

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

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE COMO POSIBLES TENEDORES DESCONOCIDOS.

Quedan emplazados y notificados de que en este Tribunal se ha radicado una demanda en su contra. Se les notifica para que comparezca ante el Tribunal dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto y exponer lo que a su derecho convenga, en el presente caso. En la Demanda se alega Que la demandante suscribió una Hipoteca en garantia de un pagaré a favor de Doral Financia! Corporation hin/e HF Mortgage Bankers, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $99,949.00, con intereses al 7.00% anual, vencedero el

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

día primero de julio de 2029.

Que mediante la escritura número 423 en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 16 de junio 1999, ante el notario Kendall E. Krans Negrón, la parte demandante constituyó hipoteca en garantía de pagaré bajo la misma fecha y ante el mismo notario, a favor de Doral Financia! Corporation h/n/c HF Mortgage Bankers, o a su orden, por la suma de $99,949.00, con vencimiento el primero de julio de 2029, y cuya obligación hipotecaria fue anotada mediante la inscripción al folio ciento cincuenta y dos (152) del tomo mil doce (1012) de Sabana Llana, finca número cinco mil cuatrocientos cincuenta y cinco (5,455), inscripción novena (9na). Que el pagare hipotecario grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar número treinta y cinco (35) del bloque BF del plano de inscripción para la urbanización Extensión Country Club, sita en el barrio Sabana Llana de la municipalidad de Río Piedras, San Juan, Puerto rico, con un área de trescientos cincuenta punto veintiocho (350.28) metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, en veinticinco (25.00) metros con el solar número treinta y cuatro (34), por el SUR, en una distancia de veinticinco (25.00) metros con el solar número treinta y seis (36), por el ESTE, en una distancia de trece punto ochenta (13.80) con la calle número cuarenta y cinco (45) y por el OESTE, en una distancia de catorce punto veintidós (14.22) con el solar número trece (13). Enclava una casa. Catastro número: cero ochenta y siete guion cero diez guion doscientos veintinueve guion doce guion cero cero uno (087-:010-229-12-001) Inscrita al folio veintiuno (21) del tomo ciento veintiséis (126) de Sabana Llana, finca número cinco mil cuatrocientos cincuenta y cinco (5,455) Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan Sección quinta (V).

Se alega, además, que dicho pagaré se encuentra extraviado.

Se les apercibe y notifica que, si no contestan la demanda radicada en su contra, radicando el original de la misma y enviando copia de su contestación a la abogada de la parte demandante: LCDA. MARJALIISA COLON VILLANUEVA, PO BOX 7970 PONCE, PUERTO RICO 00732, TELEFONO 787-843-4168; CORREO ELECTRONICO mcolon@wwclaw.com dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto, se les anotará la rebeldía en su contra y se dictará sentencia en su contra, conforme se solicita en la Demanda, sin más citar, ni oír. Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, a 21 de agosto de 2020.Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Sec Regional. Sonia I

(787) 743-3346

Wednesday, September 2, 2020 Rivera Gambaro, Sec del Tribu- dos mil setecientos siete (2, nal Conf.

707, inscripción tercera (3ra).

Que grava la propiedad que se LEGAL NOTICE describe a continuación: RÚSESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE TICA: Parcela de terreno radiPUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE cada en el Barrio Maricao afuera PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA del término MZ2020CV00729 14/08/2020 04:16:08 pm EnSUPERIOR DE MA YAGUEZ. Núm. 3 Pá_gina 2 de 2 WILMINGTON SAVINGS trada municipal de Maricao, Puerto FUND SOCIETY, FSB, Rico, con una cabida de setenta d/b/a Christiana Trust, as y siete mil novecientos cuarenta indenture Trustee, for the y cuatro punto nueve ocho seis (77,944.9863) metros cuaCSMC 2016-PR 1 Trust tres drados equivalentes a diecinueMortgage-Backed Notes, ve punto ocho tres uno (19.831) Series 2016-PR1 cuerdas. En lindes por el NORParte Demandante v.

TE, con camino municipal, con terrenos de la Puerto Rico ReASSOCIATES constriccion Adminístration y INTERNATIONAL la parcela de uso público; HOLDING CORPORATION con por el SUR, con terrenos de haciendo negocio como José Collazo, Anfbal Martínez y CITIFINANCIAL; JOHN Virginia Rodríguez, por el ESTE, DOE Y RICHARD ROE con Wilfredo Sánchez y por el como posibles tenedores OESTE, con terreno de José Collazo. Inscrita al folio ciento desconocidos cincuenta y nueve (159) del Parte Demandada tomo noventa y tres (93) de MaCIVIL NUM: MZ2020CV00729. ricao, finca número dos mil seSOBRE: CANCELACION DE tecientos siete (2, 707). Registro PAGARE EXTRAVIADO.EM- de la Propiedad de San Germán.

PLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. SE LES APERCIBE que, de no ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉ- hacer sus alegaciones responRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS sivas a la demanda dentro del EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE término aquí dispuesto, se les ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO anotará la rebeldía y se dictará SS. Sentencia, concediéndose el reA: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD medio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Expedido ROE como posibles tenedores desconocidos bajo mi firma y sello del TribuPOR LA PRESENTE se les em- nal en Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, plaza y requiere para que con- a 18 día de AGOSTO de 2020. teste la demanda dentro de los LCDA NORMA G SANTANA IRItreinta (30) dias siguientes a la ZARRY, SECRETARIA(O) REpublicación de este Edicto. Us- GIONAL. F/ BETSY SANTIAGO ted deberá radicar su alegación GONZALEZ, SECRETARIA(O) responsiva a través del Sistema AUXILIAR. Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramaiudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, Lcda. Marjaliisa Colón Villanueva, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-843-4168. En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cancelación de pagare extraviado. Se alega en dicho procedimiento que se extravió un pagaré hipotecario, a favor Associates lnternational Holdings Corporation, haciendo negocio como Citifinancial, o a su orden, por la suma de cuarenta y seis mil dólares ($46,000.00), según escritura número ciento ochenta y dos (182), otorgada en Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, el día veintiséis (26) de junio de dos mi siete (2007) ante la Notario Mónica Marie Carretero Rodríguez. Inscrita al folio veintidós (22) del tomo ciento quince (115) de Maricao, finca número

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTJCIA REGION JUDICIAL DE FAJARDO SALA SUPERIOR DE LUQUILLO.

CATENA ARDIRI OLAVARRIA, JOSEPH JR. ARDIRI OLAVARIA, LYDIA ARDIRI OLAVARRTA Y JOSEPH ARDIRI CAMPANA Parte Demandante v.

HOUSING INVESTMENT CORPORATION, JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE,

Parte Demandada CASO NUM . LU2020CV00079.

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

A: HOUSING INVESTMENT CORPORATION y JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE o sea, las personas

The San Juan Daily Star ignoradas que puedan ser tenedores del pagare extraviado .

Por la presente se les notifica que se ha presentada ante este tribunal una Demanda , en el caso de epígrafe, en la cual se solicita la cancelación de un pagare a favor de Housing Investment Corporation , o a su orden, por la suma de $30,950.00 , con interés al 9%, y vencedero 1 de octubre del 2008, según consta escritura # 1826, otorgada en San Juan, el día 1 de septiembre del 1978, ante el notario Raul J. Vila Selles, inscrita al folio 186vto del tomo 104 de Luquillo finca # 5612 inscripción 3ra, de fecha, 9 de octubre del 1978. y que grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación: Solar radicado en la Urbanización Colinas de Luquillo (Lomas de Sta Teresa) de los Barrios Mata de Plátanos y Sabana de Municipio de Luquillo, Puerto Rico, que se describe con el numero, área y colindancia que se relacionan .

Solar numero ciento veintiocho con un area de dos mil seiscientos metros cuadrados con veinticinco centímetros , en lindes por el NORTE, con el solar ciento veintinueve en setenta y ocho metros, por el SUR con la calle cuatro, solar ciento veintisiete y Luis Carrion, distancia de seis metros con treinta y ocho centímetros cuarenta y ocho metros con veinticinco centímetros y veinte metros, respectivamente que hacen un total de setenta y cuatro metros con sesenta y tres centímetros; por el ESTE, con la cal le cuatro y el solar ciento veintisiete, distancia de cinco metros con cuarenta y siete centímetros curva veinticinco metros con cincuenta y tres centímetros · y treinta y seis metros con setenta y cinco centímetros, respectivamente, hacienda un total de sesenta y siete metros con setenta y cinco centímetros, y por el OESTE, con el solar, ciento cuarenta y dos y el solar ciento veintisiete , distancia de sesenta metros con veintiún centímetros y seis metros, que hacen un total de sesenta y seis metros con veintiún centímetros.

Se le advierte que este edicto se publicara en un periódico de circulación general una sola vez y que si no comparece a contestar dicha Demanda dentro del termino de treinta (30) días, contados a partir de la publicación de este edicto, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su discreción, lo entiende procedente. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), el cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electróni-

ca: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio. El abogado de la parte demandante es: Ledo.

Raul Rivera Burgos, RUA 8879, Estancias de San Fernando, Calle 4, Numero 4, A-35 , Carolina, P.R. 00985, Tel. (787) 238-7665, Email: raulrblaw@gmail.com.

Wanda I. Segui Reyes, Secretaria Regional. Katherine Robles Torres, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal.

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

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante Vs.

JOHN DOE y RICHARD ROE

Demandados CIVIL NUM; SJ2020CV04370.

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

A: JOHN DOE y RICHARD ROE

Se lea notifica que en la Demanda quo se presente en el caso de epígrafe se alega que un pagaré hipotecario fue otorgado el 24 do mano del 2004, se otorgo un pagaré a favor de Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaría Puerto Rico (hoy Oriental Bank), a a su orden, par Ia suma do $23,000.00 de principal, con intereses al 8.50% anual, y vencedero a la presentación, ante la Notario Claribel Toro Hernández. La hipoteca fue constituida. mediante la escritura número 49 del 24 dé mano del 2004, ante la Notario Claribel Toro Hernández, inscrita al folio 25 del tomo 1572 do Rio Piedras Norte, finca 31523, inscripción 2, Registro de la Propiedad do San Juan, Sección II. El inmueble gravado mediante la hipoteca antes descrita es Ia finca número 31523 inscrito al folio 151 del tomo 1096 do Rio Piedras Norte, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección II. La obligación evidenciada par el pagaré autos descrito fue saldada en su totalidad. Dicho gravamen no ha podido ser cancelado por haberse extraviado ci original del pagaré. El original del pagaré antes descrito no ha podido ser localizado, a pesar do las gestiones realizadas. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaría Puerto Rico, hoy Oriental Bank, es ci acreedor que consta en el Registro de la Propiedad. El ultimo tenedor conocido del pagaré antes descrito fue Oriental Bank. POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza

The San Juan Daily Star y requieren que presenten al Tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los treinta (30) días de haber sido publicado este emplazamiento excluyéndose el día de la publicación.

Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC) al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original do su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia al abogado do la parte demandante LCDO. JAVIER MONTALVO CINThON, DELGADO & FERNANDEZ, LLCPO Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 00910-1750, TeL (787) 274-1414 /Fax (787) 764-8241 Email: jmontalvo@ delgadofernandez.com. SE LE APERCIBE que, de no hacer sus alegaciones responsiva a la demanda dentro dcl término aquí dispuesto, se lea anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndo el remedio solicitado en Ia Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. EXTENDIDO BMO Ml FIRMA y el Sello del Tribunal, hoy 19 de agosto de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria. Sonia I Rivera Gambaro, Sec Auxiliar del Confidencial.

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

LA SUCESIÓN DE LESLEIGH COX TRAVELSTEAD T/C/C LESLEIGH CHERYL COX MELVIN T/C/C LESLEIGH CHERYL TRAVELSTEAD COMPUESTA POR HAILEY EDDY T/C/C HAILEY COX, Y BRANDON COX, Y LA SUCESIÓN DE DAVID ALAN TRAVELSTEAD T/C/C DAVID A. TRAVELSTEAD T/C/C DAVID ALAN TRAVELSTEAD CHAPMAN COMPUESTA POR ANNETTE TRAVELSTEAD LANDIS, JIM TRAVELSTEAD, Y JOHN TRAVELSTEAD; Demandantes, v.

CITIBANK, N.A., FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANO DEL CUAL;

Demandados CIVIL NÚM. SJ2020cv03665.

SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ HIPOTECARIO EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE

P.R. S.S.

A: FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANO DEL CUAL, o sea las personas desconocidas que puedan ser tenedores del pagare extraviado.

POR MEDIO del presente edicto se le notifica de la presentación de una Demanda en su contra.

Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través de Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramá. judicial.pr , salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del Tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el Tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el Tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. La parte demandante alega que por la Escritura Numero 123 de Hipoteca en Garantía de Pagaré otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 12 de mayo de 1998, ante el Notario Público Pedro · D. Quiles Mariani, suscribió un pagaré hipotecario a favor de Citibank, N.A., o a su orden, por la suma principal de $200,000.00, con un interés al 7 Y4 % autenticado mediante testimonio número 23,056 del Notario Público Pedro D. Quiles Mariani ( en lo sucesivo, el “Pagaré Hipotecario”), vencedero el lro de junio de 2028, y en garantía del mismo constituyó hipoteca sobre la finca que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Casa terrera de mampostería y azotea con su solar, marcado con el número Doce (12) antes, hoy Doscientos Cincuenta y Seis (256) de la Calle Norzagaray sitio Boulevard del Valle de San Juan, Puerto Rico, midiendo el solar nueve punto cuarenta metros (9.40 m.) de frente por diez punto setenta y cinco (10.75) metros de fondo, con área de ciento un metros cuadrados (101 m.c.), colinda por la izquierda con casa de los herederos de Nicolás Fernández; por la derecha con casa de Nicolás Dauboria; por el fondo con casa de Manuel Guenderlam y por el frente con dicha calle. Inscrita al folio ciento 15 del tomo 127 de San Juan Antiguo, finca número 394, Registro de la Propiedad, Primera Sección de San Juan. El original del pagaré hipotecario antes mencionado se ha extraviado o la posesión la ostenta los demandados de epígrafe, sin que la parte demandante lo haya podido localizar a pesar de las gestiones realizadas, por lo cual no lo tiene para la cancelación correspondiente en el Registro de la Propiedad y por ello comparece a este Honorable Tribunal solicitando su cancelación. Que se incluye a

Wednesday, September 2, 2020 Fulano De Tal y a Mengano Del Cual como posibles tenedores desconocidos del pagaré hipotecario extraviado. POR EL PRESENTE EDICTO, se le emplaza y requiere para que conteste la Demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este edicto notificándole con copia de dicha contestación al Ledo. Luis G. Parrilla, 221 Avenida Ponce De León, Piso 5, Hato Rey, Puerto Rico 0091 7; sin más citarle ni oírle. Expedido bajo mi firma y el sello del Tribunal de San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy 14 de agosto de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Sec del Tribunal. Rosa M. Torrens Colon, Sec Serv Sala.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA AL TA.

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Parte Demandante vs.

ANGEL L. OUFFRE RODRIGUEZ, ELDIN DEL ROSARIO CARMONA Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

Parte Demandada CIVIL NUM.: VA2019CV00290.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO (ORDINARIO). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO EMmDO POR EL TRIBUNAL DE.PRIMERA INSTANCIA DE PUERTO RICO, SALA DE SUPERIOR DE VEGA AL TA.

A: ELDIN DEL ROSARIO CARMONA, por sí y en representación de la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales Compuesta por ella con Ángel L. Ouffre Rodríguez, parte codemandada en el caso de: Banco Popular de Puerto Rico vs. Ángel L. Ouffre Rodríguez, Eldin Del Rosario Carmena, y la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales Compuesta por Ambos, Civil Núm.: VA2019CV00290, sobre Cobro de Dinero (Ordinario).

Se le notifica a usted, ELDIN DEL ROSARIO CARMONA, por sí y en representación de la Sociedad Legal de Gananciales Compuesta por ella con Ángel L. Ouffre Rodríguez, que en la Demanda Enmendada que originó este caso se alega que usted le adeuda a la parte demandante, BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO, las siguientes cantidades: a. $23,886.31 de principal, $432.48 de intereses hasta el 12 de septiembre de 2019, más los intereses que se devenguen a partir de la fecha de radicación de la Demanda al tipo legal, hasta el total y completo pago de la obligación, $66.45 de

cargos por mora y la cuantía de $2,438.52 pactada para las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. La deuda es por concepto de un préstamo que les fue desembolsado por la demandante y cuyos últimos cuatro dígitos son 0104. a. $4,373.53 de principal e intereses devengados hasta el 12 de septiembre de 2019, más los intereses que se devenguen a partir de la fecha de radicación de la Demanda al tipo legal, hasta el total y completo pago de la obligación, y una suma razonable para las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, por concepto de las sumas desembolsadas por el uso de los demandados de una tarjeta de crédito VISA Novel cuyos últimos cuatro dígitos son 8607. Se le emplaza y requiere que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto, a través del Sistema Unificado de Administración y Manejo de casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramaiudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Deberá notificar a la licenciada: María S. liménez Meléndez al PO Box 9023632, San Juan, Puerto Rico 009023632; teléfono: (787) 723-2455; abogada de la parte demandante, con copia de la contestación a la demanda enmendada. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda enmendada o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Expedido en Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, a 27 de agosto de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Sec Regional. Carmen Melendez Hernandez, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE MA YAGUEZ SALA SUPERIOR.

ORIENTAL BANK COMO AGENTE DE SERVICIOS DE THE MONEY HOUSE, INC. DEMANDANTE

LUIS MANUEL RIVERA CUEVAS , YOLANDA RIVERA RODRIGUEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: MZ2020CV00034.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA (VÍA ORDINARIA). EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA El

25

Presidente de los Estados Uni- Puerto Rico. Usted deberá predos El Estado Libre Asociado de sentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado Puerto Rico.

A la parte co-demandada: de Manejo y Administración de (SUMAC), al cual puede LUIS MANUEL RIVERA Casos acceder utilizando la siguiente CUEVAS, YOLANDA dirección electrónica: https:// RIVERA RODRIGUEZ Y unired.ramajudiciat.pr/sumac LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE /, salvo que se represente por BIENES GANANCIALES derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación COMPUESTA POR responsiva en la secretaría del AMBOS, a sus últimas tribunal y notifique copia de la direcciones conocidas: Contestación de la Demanda a las oficina s de CARDONA & (a) PR 108 KM 14.2 LAW OFFICES, BARRIO ANONES LAS MALDONADO P.S.C. ATENCIÓN al Ledo. DunMARIAS, PR006 70; (b) can Maldonado Ejarque, P.O. PO BOX 6731 MAYAG Box 366221, San Juan, Puerto UEZ, PR 00681; (e) G-2 Rico 00936-6221; Tel (787) 622CALLE Y AUREL URB. AL 7000, Fax (787) 625- 7001 , Abogado de la Parte Demandante.

TURAS DE MAYAGUEZ Dentro de los treinta (30) días MAYAGUEZ, PR 00680 siguientes a la publicación de Por la presente se le(s) notifica este Edicto , apercibiéndole que que se ha radicado en la Se- de no hacerlo así dentro del tércretaría de este Tribunal una mino indicado , el Tribunal podrá Demanda en Cobro de Dinero anotar su Rebeldía y dictar Seny Ejecución de Hipoteca en tencia, concediéndose el remesu contra , en la cual se alega dio solicitado sin más citarle(s) entre otras cosas que la parte ni oirle(s). EXPEDIDO bajo mi demandada adeuda a la parte firma y con el Sello del Tribudemandante por concepto de nal. DADA hoy 28 de AGOSTO hipoteca la suma de $79, 749 de 2020, en Mayagüez, Puerto .95 por concepto de principal Rico. LCDA NORMA G SAN, desde el 1ro de septiembre TANA IRIZARRY, SECRETARIA de 2019, más intereses al tipo REGIONAL. F/ BETSY SANTIApactado de 5.00% anual que GO GONZALEZ, SECRETARIA continúan acumulándose hasta AUXILIAR TRIBUNAL l. el pago total de la obligación.

LEGAL NOTICE Además la parte demandada adeuda a la parte demandante ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE los cargos por demora equiva- PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE lentes a 4.00% de la suma de PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA aquellos pagos con atrasos en SUPERIOR DE FAJARDO. exceso de 15 días calendarios ARACELIS GARCIA CRUZ de la fecha de vencimiento; los Demandante Vs. crédito s accesorios y adelanto THAIS YAMIL LOPEZ s hechos en virtud de la escriROJAS; KRISD tura de hipoteca ; y las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogaJONATHAN PEREIRA do equivalentes a $8,250.60.

LOPEZ Además la parte demandada se Parte Demandadas comprometió a pagar una suma CASO NÚM: FA2020RF00053. equivalente a $8,250.60 para SALA: 204. SOBRE: CUSTOcubrir cualquier otro adelanto DIA-MONOPARENTAL O COMque se haga en virtud de la es- PARTIDA. EMPLAZAMIENTO critura de hipoteca y una suma POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIequivalente a $8,250.60 para DOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIcubrir intereses en adición a los DENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U. EL garantizados por ley y cualquie- ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE ra otros adelantos que se hagan PR. SS. en virtud de la escritura de hiA: KRISD JONATHAN poteca número 35, otorgada en PEREIRA LÓPEZ San Juan , Puerto Rico , el día 6 de julio de 2017, ante el notario 7601, Daffan LNTRLR 164, Vicente A. Sequeda Torres, ins- Austin, Texas, E.U. 78724 crita al Folio 45 del Tomo 163 de POR LA PRESENTE se le noLas Marías, de la finca número tifica que la demandante ha 3399, Registro de la Propiedad radicado una Demanda sobre de San Sebastián. Por razón de custodia-monoparental o comdicho incumplimiento, y al am- partida. Habiéndose ordenado paro del derecho que le confiere la publicación de un Emplazael Pagaré , el demandante ha miento por Edicto para empladeclarado tales sumas vencidas zarlo a usted, durante el térmi, líquidas y exigibles en su tota- no que establece la Ley, en un lidad. Este Tribunal ha ordenado periódico de circulación general que se le(s) cite a usted(es) por en la Isla de Puerto Rico. POR edicto que se publicará una sola ESTE MEDIO, se le emplaza vez en un periódico de circula- por Edicto y requiere a usted, ción general. Por tratarse de una la parte con interés, para que obligación hipotecaria y pudien- notifique al: do usted tener interés en este LCDO. RICARDO M. PRIETO GARCÍA, caso o quedar afectando por el a su dirección postal 6 CALLE remedio solicitado, se le emplaza por este edicto que se pu- CELIS AGUILERA S, SUITE 201-A, FAJARDO, PUERTO RICO, 00738, blicará una vez en un periódico Tel. (787) 860-0875, y/o a su email: de circulación diaria general de

prietolawoffice@yahoo.com, con copia de su contestación a las alegaciones de la Demanda en este caso, las cuales podrá usted examinar en la Sala de Fajardo, del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sección Superior, dentro de los treinta (30) días contados desde el siguiente día a la fecha de la publicación de este Emplazamiento por Edicto, con la advertencia a los efectos de que si no contesta la demanda presentando el Original de la Contestación, ante el Tribunal correspondiente, con copia a la parte demandante, se le anotara la rebeldía y se dictara Sentencia para conceder el remedio solicitado sin más citarle ni oírle. EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA, y el sello del Tribunal en Fajardo, Puerto Rico, hoy 18 de agosto de 2020. Wanda I Segui Reyes, Secretaria Regional. Moraima Saliceti Solis, Sec Serv a Sala.

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

COOPERATIVA DE AHORRO Y CRÉDITO ORIENTAL PARTE DEMANDANTE v

SUCESIÓN DE GILBERTO RIVERA VEGA COMPUESTA POR JOAQUÍN RIVERA VELÉZ, FULANO DE TAL, MENGANO DE TAL Y SU VIUDA LEDA M. EGEA CANDELARIO

PARTE DEMANDADA CIVIL NÚM.: FA2019CV01420.

SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO e INTERPELACION JUDICIAL. SALA: 307. EMPLAZAMIENTO Y MANDAMIENTO DE INTERPELACIÓN JUDICIAL POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. DE AMERICA EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.

A: JOAQUÍN RIVERA VELÉZ Y SU VIUDA LEDA M. EGEA CANDELARIO, EN LA CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA, COMO MIEMBROS DE LA SUCESIÓN DE GILBERTO RIVERA VEGA Y LOS CODEMANDADOS FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANO DE TAL COMO PERSONAS CON NOMBRES DESCONOCIDOS Y/O FICTICIOS COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE GILBERTO RIVERA VEGA Dirección física y postal: Urb. Alturas de Monte Brisas, Calle 4 02 , Fajardo, Puerto Rico 00738; Urb. Sunny Hills,

Calle Haiti 012 Bayamón, Puerto Rico 00956.

Por la presente se les notifica que ha sido presentada en este Tribunal una Demanda en su contra en el pleito de epígrafe. Los abogados de la parte demandante son: Lcdo. Juan A Santos Berríos - RUA 9774; Ledo. José R. González Rivera - RUA 13105; Ledo. Ricardo A Acevedo Bianchi - RUA 20637, AGS Legal Collections, LLC; PO BOX 10242, HUMACAO, PR 00792; Tel. (939) 545-4300; email: agslegalcollections@ gmail.com Se les advierte que este edicto se publicará en un (1) periódico de circulación general una (1) sola vez y que si no comparece a contestar dicha Demanda radicando el original de la misma a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC) , al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr , salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del Tribunal Superior, Sala Superior de Fajardo, con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, dentro del término de treinta (30) días contados a partir de la publicación del edicto, se entenderá que aceptaron la herencia a beneficio de inventario, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia en su contra concediendo el remedio solicitado en la Demanda sin más citarles ni oírles. En un término de diez (10) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto , la parte demandante notificará por correo certificado con acuse de recibo , copia de la Demanda y del Emplazamiento y Mandamiento de Interpelación Judicial por Edicto, a las últimas direcciones postales conocidas de Joaquín Rivera Vélez y su viuda Leda M. Egea Candelaria , en la cuota viudal usufructuaria , como miembros de la Sucesión de Gilberto Rivera Vega y los codemandados Fulano De Tal y Mengano De Tal como personas con nombres desconocidos y/o ficticios como posibles herederos desconocidos de Gilberto Rivera Vega.

Además, se les interpela judicialmente, a tenor con el Artículo 959 del Código Civil de Puerto Rico, 31 L.P.R.A. § 2787, para que en un término de treinta (30) días de haber sido publicado este edicto, excluyendo el día de su publicación, acepten o repudien, mediante instrumento público o comparecencia judicial especial , la herencia del causante, Gilberto Rivera Vega, apercibiéndoseles que de no expresarse dentro de dicho término , se tendrá por aceptada la herencia a beneficio de inventario B.B.V.A. v. Latinoamericana , 164 D.P.R. 689 (2005) . Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 26 de agosto de 2020.

Wanda l. Segui Reyes , Secretaria. Katherine Robles Torres, Sub-Secretario(a).

26

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Coco Gauff, last year’s crowd favorite, loses in the first round without one

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

W

ith no roar from the fans, all that was left on Monday for Coco Gauff was the roar of the planes as they passed over the all-butempty Louis Armstrong Stadium.

Down below was a strange scene: Gauff and Anastasija Sevastova, an opponent nearly twice her age, locked in an edgy and erratic duel surrounded by stands covered in big blue tarps.

A year ago, Gauff, an American teenager who has embraced the big occasion in her short career, rode a wave of support in Armstrong Stadium to reach the third round of the U.S. Open. But against Sevastova, she failed to recapture the same form and was defeated in the first round, 6-3, 5-7, 6-4, amid the silence.

“I just got on tour a little over a year ago, so I still have a lot to learn and a long ways to go,” said Gauff.

That was abundantly clear on Monday. Gauff double faulted 13 times and had her serve broken seven times against Sevastova, the No. 31 seed from Latvia. Though Gauff avoided double faults in the final game of the match, she was unable to avoid a series of errors off her less reliable forehand wing.

“I hope everybody gives Coco plenty of time,” said Tracy Austin, one of tennis’ most remarkable wunderkinds, who reached No. 1 and won two U.S. Opens in her teens. “I think it would be kind, and it would be the right thing to do. Take it from someone who has been through it and who all of the sudden was thrust into I don’t want to call it chaos but an intense spotlight.”

Sevastova can be a challenge for a player of any age. She is a crafty 30-year-old veteran who is adept at mixing spins and tactics and has an often-devastating backhand drop shot. Though she has struggled in 2020, both before and after the extended tour hiatus because of the coronavirus pandemic, she has had her best results at the U.S. Open, reaching the quarterfinals in 2016 and 2017 and the semifinals in 2018.

She battled herself mentally on Monday, surrendering a winning position with a 4-2 lead in the second set with a series of errors as she frequently cast withering glances at Ronald Schmidt, her coach and boyfriend.

Gauff had internal tussles of her own, putting a hand to her forehead repeatedly after double faults and looking imploringly toward her father Corey and mother Candi, who were sitting courtside with masks covering most of their faces. But both players stabilized in the final set with the final game providing the only break of serve.

“I wish I would play like this when I was 16 years old,” Sevastova said admiringly of Gauff. “Great player. Nothing more to say. I think she maybe started a bit slower than me, but she was getting better as the match went on. That’s so important I think in tennis.”

Gauff, who reached the fourth round of Wimbledon in her first Grand Slam tournament in 2019, start-

Coco Gauff on Monday after she defeated Venus Williams in the first round of the Australian Open. ed this season auspiciously, upsetting Naomi Osaka in the fourth round of the Australian Open in January before losing in the quarterfinals in three sets to American compatriot Sofia Kenin, the eventual champion.

She spent the forced break at home in Delray Beach, Fla., practicing with her father Corey and her co-coach Jean-Christophe Faurel. She then played a strong comeback tournament at the Top Seed Open in Lexington, Ky., defeating two seeded players — Aryna Sabalenka and Ons Jabeur — in taut threeset tussles before losing in the semifinals to Jennifer Brady, another eventual champion.

But Gauff was unable to produce consistent tennis in the two-tournament bubble in New York, losing 6-1, 6-3 in the first round of the Western & Southern Open to Maria Sakkari, the No. 13 seed, and then losing to Sevastova in their first meeting. Though it is tempting to attribute Monday’s defeat to Sevastova’s unusual style, Gauff did manage to prevail in Lexington against Jabeur, a player with a similarly varied game and flair for the exotic shot.

It seems premature to speculate about a sophomore slump for Gauff. But Gauff’s serve and forehand have been less than dependable in recent weeks with double faults and errors piling up. Gauff has struggled to find consistency with her service toss and repeatedly caught her toss on Monday, particularly in the first two sets.

“It’s surprising that Coco’s serve was not retooled more during pause of play,” said Pam Shriver, a former U.S. Open singles finalist who is now an ESPN analyst, in a post on Twitter. “Toss too high. Toss too erratic. Pause on take-back too long. Not enough weight transfer.”

Sevastova often played to Gauff’s forehand on important points and did so again during the final game, when Gauff made four unforced forehand errors, including the final stroke of the match, which landed in the net on Sevastova’s fourth match point.

Until Monday, Sevastova had not won a singles match in a regular tour event this season, going 0-7.

But her only other victory in 2020 was a big one: coming against Serena Williams in Latvia’s 3-2 defeat to the United States in a Fed Cup qualifying round match. That was Williams’ first singles loss in Fed Cup, which, it should be pointed out, she has played sparingly through the decades.

But when in form, Sevastova’s unusual game can bewitch the opposition, and she deployed her arsenal of pace changes and drop shots effectively against Gauff, one of the fastest players on tour even at her young age.

“She’s moving so well, it’s tough to finish the point,” Sevastova said. “She hits amazing backhand.

Forehand for sure could be better. Still, it’s uncomfortable to play her.”

But surely much more comfortable without a packed stadium creating a ruckus after every Gauff winner. The atmosphere was transcendent in Armstrong Stadium in 2019. It was Zen-garden quiet on Monday except for those planes.

It was all a stark opening-day reminder of how different this U.S. Open is from its predecessors.

Though she is only 16, it is hard to imagine Gauff playing in a weirder atmosphere. And the reassuring news as she returns to the practice court to prepare for her first French Open is that she should have many U.S. Opens still to come with the crowds in her corner.

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

27

The Padres bulk up and set their sights on catching the Dodgers

By TYLER KEPNER

A

s he canvassed the major leagues before Monday’s trading deadline, A.J. Preller even spoke with Andrew Friedman, his chief rival in the National League West. Friedman runs baseball operations for the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that has it all. Preller is the general manager of the San Diego Padres, their historically hapless neighbor.

“Looking at the Dodgers, they’ve done it as well as anybody here over the course of really the last decade or so,” Preller said Monday. “I told Andrew the other day, I’m actually disappointed in them because I thought they were going to go about 50-10 this year, so they’re maybe underachieving. But they have a great team. There are other really good teams in the National League, but they clearly have set the bar.”

The Padres are taking their best shot to clear it. They sent six players to the Cleveland Indians for the prize of the deadline, starter Mike Clevinger, capping a three-day blitz that brought them nine major leaguers via deals with the Indians, the Seattle Mariners, the Boston Red Sox, the Los Angeles Angels and the Kansas City Royals.

The Padres scattered 16 players — mostly prospects — across the league to get their haul, which included Clevinger and outfielder Greg Allen from Cleveland; catcher Austin Nola and relievers Austin Adams, Dan Altavilla and Taylor Williams from Seattle; first baseman Mitch Moreland from Boston; catcher Jason Castro from the Angels and reliever Trevor Rosenthal from Kansas City.

“It’s the most exciting team in baseball by far right now,” said Clevinger, a five-year veteran who is 42-22 with a 3.20 ERA in his career. “It’s definitely the place to be right now. I’m stoked that they wanted me here.”

The Padres arrived at the deadline with a 21-15 record, five games behind the Dodgers, who were 26-10 as they rumbled toward their eighth division title in a row. The Dodgers’ problems tend to come in October — they have not won a championship since 1988 — but their talent, money and acumen make them an annual threat.

Chances don’t come around quite so often for San Diego. The Padres have won only two pennants and no titles since they were founded in 1969. They have endured nine consecutive losing seasons and last reached the playoffs in 2006, when they lost a division series to St. Louis. Dave Roberts, now the Dodg-

Fernando Tatis, right, and Manny Machado got a bunch of new teammates over the weekend, adding to an already-potent Padres squad. ers’ manager, made the last out.

The Padres hired Preller, a dogged executive with a strong international scouting background, from Texas after the 2014 season. He immediately made a series of splashy deals, but the team actually got worse, losing at least 91 games in each of the last four seasons.

Yet one of the veterans Preller acquired before his first season, starter James Shields, is still paying big dividends. Preller traded him to the Chicago White Sox in 2016 for a 17-year-old prospect named Fernando Tatis Jr., now a breakout star who led the majors in homers, total bases and runs scored through Sunday.

“Internally, we kind of targeted this 2020 season a few years ago as a year that we wanted to hopefully start a run of years where every single season we can be competitive and a team that we expect to play deep into October,” Preller said. “So far it’s been a good month-plus in the season, but we understand there’s a lot of baseball still to be played.”

The Padres expected a major impact from young players like Tatis and starters Dinelson Lamet and Chris Paddack,

which allowed them to splurge in free agency for veteran infielders Eric Hosmer and Manny Machado. Now Clevinger gives the team another overpowering starter; Rosenthal replaces injured closer Kirby Yates in the back of the bullpen; Nola and Castro form a solid right-left catching platoon, and Moreland (Boston’s leading hitter, with a .328 average) can share first base with Hosmer or serve as designated hitter.

Clevinger was cast aside by the Indians after he violated coronavirus-related safety protocols in early August, leaving the team hotel with Zach Plesac, a teammate, after a game in Chicago. The Indians initially knew only about Plesac and sent him home by car. Clevinger flew home with the team anyway, which teammates viewed as reckless and irresponsible after finding out he had been with Plesac.

The Indians banished both pitchers to the team’s alternate training site, bringing Clevinger back for one start before shipping him out. He said he had hoped the Padres would trade for him, and that his exit from Cleveland did not reflect who he is.

“It doesn’t define what I’ve done the past five years, the kind of teammate and the kind of person I am,” Clevinger said.

“I knew the changes that had to be put in place and maybe some self-reflecting that needed to be done was done. I never want to put any other organization, let alone the Indians, in some predicament like that again.”

Plenty of other teams made deals on Monday, eager for a chance to be part of the largest playoff field in baseball history. On opening night of this abbreviated 60-game season, the league and the union agreed to a new best-of-three round to replace the wild-card game.

Sixteen teams will qualify — up from 10 — including the first- and second-place teams from each division, as well as the teams with the next two best records in each league.

The Toronto Blue Jays held the final American League playoff spot Monday, an impressive showing by a team that was evicted from its home country in July. The Canadian government wanted to limit travel in and out of the country, so the Blue Jays have played their home games in Buffalo, N.Y., where the righthander Taijuan Walker beat Baltimore on Saturday in his first start since a trade from Seattle last week.

On Monday the Blue Jays added two more starters before the deadline, acquiring left-hander Robbie Ray from Arizona and right-hander Ross Stripling from the Dodgers. Both are former All-Stars who have struggled this season, as is Mike Minor, a left-hander who was dealt Monday from the Texas Rangers to the Oakland Athletics, who lead the AL West.

And in exchange for players to be named later, the Rangers, who are far out of the race, also sent two veterans to the New York Mets: catcher Robinson Chirinos and infielder Todd Frazier, who spent 2018 and 2019 with the Mets.

Chirinos started five World Series games for Houston last fall but was batting just .119 with no homers this season. Frazier was batting .241 with two home runs.

The Mets also acquired reliever Miguel Castro from Baltimore for pitching prospect Kevin Smith. Castro, a right-hander, has a 4.02 ERA in 16 games this season, with 24 strikeouts and five walks in 15 2/3 innings.

Other notable players traded Monday included outfielder Starling Marte (Arizona to Miami), outfielder Kevin Pillar (Boston to Colorado), infielder Jonathan Villar (Miami to Toronto), reliever David Phelps (Milwaukee to Philadelphia) and reliever Archie Bradley (Arizona to Cincinnati).

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

John Thompson’s success at Georgetown made him ahead of his time

By HARVEY ARATON

T

he story, as John Thompson Jr. often shared it, was that he was told by the Georgetown president, upon being hired to coach the university’s moribund men’s basketball program in the spring of 1972, that it would be great if he could win a few games. Maybe even qualify for a slice of postseason affirmation in the National Invitation Tournament.

Thompson, however, was already much less interested in invitations than he was in crashing the bigger tournament party along with the sport’s culturally protected borders. But why tip his hand?

Why surrender so easily the specter of expectation to his employer and create an immediate narrative for falling short?

He said, simply and shrewdly, “Yes, sir, I’ll try.”

By his second season, the 3-23 team Thompson inherited was .500. By his third season, the Hoyas were in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1943. A dozen years into Thompson’s Hall of Fame career, he became the first Black coach to win the Division I national title, in 1984.

Without much time to recruit for his first Georgetown squad, Thompson brought three players from the small Catholic high school team he was coaching in Washington and two others from that basketball-rich city. All were Black, immediately raising eyebrows and unearthing a measure of grapevine resentment at the mostly white Jesuit bastion of academia.

Thompson didn’t blink, or back down.

Across that first decade and especially into the early 1980s — better known as the “Patrick Ewing Era” — he knew the program would run on his terms. Not surprisingly, the news media’s response, dubbing Thompson’s player protective methodology as “Hoya Paranoia,” was derisively swift.

Upon his death Monday at 78, and in the midst of what has become a longoverdue movement to confront America’s racial privations, it would seem appropriate to recast those knee-jerk characterizations of Thompson’s relationship with the at-large college basketball community.

Sure, the rhyme was catchy. But doesn’t the obsession with Thompson’s policies — and within a sport that once rational-

John Thompson Jr. celebrates with Patrick Ewing after Georgetown defeated Houston to win the 1984 N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament. ized or celebrated the likes of Bob Knight — now sound more paranoid on the part of what then was an overwhelmingly white news media?

“A lot of things we did was attributed to paranoia, but it wasn’t,” Thompson said the last time we spoke, at halftime of a Georgetown game during the 2017-18 season — Ewing’s first as head coach. “It was the decisions we made as an educational institution. And in Patrick’s case, it was because of his talent and the demand being so much higher on him.”

In other words, the news media strategies were far from the random ravings of a man who, at 6-foot-10 and 300 pounds, was truly a tower of game-changing power, willing to do and say things that made people necessarily uncomfortable.

He was ahead of his time, speaking to a generation of young players and especially those who had a thought or two of possibly achieving the statistically improbable goal of being Black and coaching on a major college campus.

Tommy Amaker, for one. He was a teenage freshman point guard at Duke, out of northern Virginia and thus wellacquainted with the Hoyas on the 1984 spring night when Thompson, moments after vanquishing Houston in the NCAA

final, was asked on national television how it felt to be the first Black coach to win it all.

“He made a statement that night I never forgot,” Amaker, now coaching at Harvard after stops at Seton Hall and Michigan, said in a telephone interview.

“He said something like, ‘I take offense to that question because I may be the first to do it but I’m not the only one who has the ability or is willing to do the hard work.

It’s about having the opportunity.’”

Amaker, whose 1998-99 Seton Hall team defeated Georgetown in Thompson’s final game, said, “For me, what he said after that game had great impact.”

Thompson wasn’t the ogre he too often was made out to be, even if he effectively played one on TV. That night we spoke, he was sitting courtside, near the Georgetown bench. “What do you want,” he barked. Then he pointed to the empty seat next to him and said, “If I wasn’t mean, you wouldn’t know it was me, would you?”

Who was John Thompson? Once upon a time, another kid who grew up poor in the nation’s capital and who made it out — via Providence College and the Boston Celtics — with the bounce of a ball. That, in effect, became his mission

at Georgetown, unapologetically recruiting African American talent, insisting he was no different from the hockey coach at Providence who exclusively mined Canada for players because that’s where the hungriest players were found.

In a 1980 Sports Illustrated article filled with allegations and insights about the double standards that existed for white and Black strivers in the college game and especially in the news media vernacular, he admitted, “I’m not a guru, I’m not an altruist, and I’m certainly no saint. What I am is a basketball coach.”

No evaluation would objectively doubt that he occasionally stretched the ethical boundaries, academic and otherwise, like the rest of the big-time sideline foot-stompers. Not every cause he championed — his boycott of a 1989 game in protest of a standardized testing rule he believed was racially biased, for one — was universally applauded.

Nor did he ever deny being a capitalist, on the Nike gravy train, preaching these inequities to his players so they might think about what the benefit of a Georgetown degree might do for them.

Whatever one thinks of the sport, the bottom line was that Thompson created something luminous and lasting at Georgetown from virtually nothing.

And when he received his due, entering the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999, with Ewing, Dikembe Mutombo and the Celtics patriarch Red Auerbach beside him onstage, it was Mutombo who stepped forward to place Thompson’s trademark game towel where it usually sat during a game.

On that of all nights, the chip that so many saw on his shoulder had to be covered. However big it actually was, it was hardly the essence of the man.

JOSÉ BURGOS Técnico Generadores Gas Propano

787•607•3343

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 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 loved one isn’t thinking clearly. Their thoughts wander from the subject discussed and you may have to persuade them to keep focused. You need to make a decision on an important issue and they need to be reminded there are aspects of this situation they have overlooked. They will thank you for your patience.

Taurus

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

(April 21-May 21)

Intuitively, you know you are capable of succeeding in anything you take on today. You have thought about the pros and cons and even if things go slightly wrong, you know you will get through it. You might be stretching yourself by accepting a challenge but if you didn’t think you could do it, you wouldn’t be taking it on.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

A partner or close friend will inspire you to want to look more closely at plans for the future. With their encouragement, you might agree to look into the possibility of taking an education or training course. There may be problems fitting this into your schedule but if it’s important to you, you will find a way.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

You will get some positive feedback on your efforts to help advance a group project. Someone in a position of power would like to reward you for your contribution. A goal that has been eluding you is now within your grasp. You never gave up hope on this dream and very soon, it will be turned into a reality.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

It doesn’t matter whether it is a money, work or legal problem that needs attention, you need to judge this in a strictly sensible way. Don’t leave important business for someone else to deal with. They may not be capable and you will only have yourself to blame for not having attended to this matter on your own.

When you look back, you realise you were forced into making a decision you weren’t ready for. You might feel annoyed with yourself for having allowed some people to influence or manipulate you. This is a good time to take another look at the situation and how to make some changes that suit you and not others.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

If someone takes offense because you ignore their advice, so be it. Friends will share their views, whether or not you ask them to. You have a right to make your own decisions and because you will have given a matter some considerable thought, you can trust yourself to make the best choice.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

You’re proud of a loved one for having achieved a cherished goal. They’ve worked hard to get this far and you won’t hesitate to put in a good word for them in places that matter. This might take the form of a recommendation for a job or putting their name forward for an exciting opportunity.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You will get the chance to bring talents you have been hiding out into the open. A team you are working with will be impressed by your skills and you will benefit from this emergence more than you could have imagined.

Don’t be surprised if you start wondering why you kept this ability to yourself for so long.

An unexpected gift will arrive and it will feel like a wish has been granted. Whether you have been given a sum of money, an item of jewellery or a travel package, the important thing is to enjoy the moment and give thanks to your guardian angel. A coin you find could be lucky for you. Don’t spend it; keep it in your pocket.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Don’t let a friend or colleague’s negativity stop you moving forward with an exciting plan.

They might feel they’re doing you a favour by pointing out all the negative points of your ideas. You happen to know the positives outweigh the negatives and you are determined to go ahead with or without their support.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

A decision you’ve been wary about making needs to be decided on. People are waiting for an answer. If you would like to go ahead but only on certain conditions, don’t be afraid to suggest these today. A compromise can be reached and before you know it you will be embarking on an exciting project.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

32

The San Juan Daily Star

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

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