Tuesday Sep 29, 2020

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

San Juan The

50¢

DAILY

Star

The Truth About Trump’s Tax Records

P8-9

Investigation Continues Heartbreaking: Body Found in Dorado Belongs to Missing 20-Year-Old Woman Forensic Sciences Chief Does Not Deny or Confirm That Rosimar Rodríguez Died Violently P3

Education Secretary Distances Himself from Decisions on WIPR’s Future P5

NOTICIAS EN ESPAÑOL P 19

Union Warns: Natural Resources Building Has Poor, Unsanitary Conditions P5

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

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September 29, 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.

FSI confirms body found in Dorado was missing 20-year-old woman

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

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

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orensic Sciences Institute (FSI) Executive Director María Conte Miller announced Monday that a dead body found in Dorado was identified through dental records as that of 20-year-old Rosimar Rodríguez Gómez, the woman who had been reported missing since Sept. 17 in Toa Baja.

“I can’t give you details of her cause of death because the investigation is still ongoing and it is up to the agents and prosecutors if any information will be provided,” Conte Miller said. “What I can tell you is that we acted with all the haste and urgency that the situation required in order to at least bring peace to the family amid the uncertainty that this family lived through during these days.”

The FSI executive director said meanwhile that she couldn’t confirm or deny additional information because she was not the forensic pathologist in charge of the investigation and she was not authorized to provide such information. She said such details would be reported by the head pathologist to the investigative agents and prosecutors who would be in charge of the case.

“We have confirmed it scientifically, and we have determined the cause of death, and the autopsy has concluded,” Conte Miller said. “Now we will provide all the positive identification information to her family first so they can begin their grieving stage and conclude what they have experienced through these days.

Then the autopsy is finished and the institution issues a certification that will let authorities carry out their investigation, and if there’s a suspect, if that’s what proceeds, submit charges, or take the appropriate steps according to the legal perspective.”

Conte Miller added that the cause of death would not be announced as she would leave that responsibility to the prosecutors; however, when a member of the press asked if the cause of Rodríguez Gómez’s death was due to violence, she responded that “the death was not natural.”

Earlier in the day, Bayamón Criminal Investigation Corps (CIC by its Spanish initials) Director Capt.

Ricardo Haddock told the Star that they were awaiting a search warrant for a white Suzuki SX4 that the Puerto Rico Police Bureau (PRPB) had located in the district of Caimito and that fit the description of the vehicle used to kidnap the 20-year-old. Haddock said the warrant “was soon to be released” so the CIC could search for any evidence inside the vehicle.

Meanwhile, Haddock told the Star that the police had yet to identify any person of interest in the case.

He had said previously that 10 to 12 people had been interviewed as part of the investigation to find Rodríguez Gómez’s whereabouts and to determine what had happened. However, “not all of the interviewed were persons of interest,” he said.

According to the PRPB, from January of this year to Aug. 30, the bureau had received 109 complaints of missing women, of which 103 have been located to date, and 107 missing children between the ages of 13 and 17, of which 97 have been located. Meanwhile, of the 21 women reported missing this year, nine have yet to be located.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

House speaker: Governor should activate ‘Pink Alert’ in response to gender violence

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

S

peaker of the Puerto Rico House of Representatives Carlos “Johnny” Méndez Núñez expressed regret Monday that Gov. WandaVázquez Garced had not activated the Pink Alert (known in Spanish as Alerta Rosa) law, which allows reporting cases of gender violence.

“It is regrettable that on many occasions the Legislative Assembly acts and the executive [branch] does not execute,” Méndez Núñez said in a radio interview.

“Simply the actions, the purpose and pub-

lic policy that is established by the [lower] chamber and Senate, agency heads or the [senior officials] themselves do not give it the importance it deserves.”

“The actions that the Legislative Assembly often take and the public policy it establishes are precisely because we are in direct contact with the needs of the citizens. They are not whims,” Méndez Núñez said regarding the Pink Alert law, which was approved a year ago.

“It is sad that this protocol that is clearly established in law and that should have been activated immediately, has not been activated,” he added.

PIP candidate for mayor of San Juan calls for public policy commitment to gender perspective

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

P

uerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) candidate for mayor of San Juan Adrián González Costa said Monday that given the national emergency due to the wave of gender violence cases, it is absolutely unacceptable that people who aspire to lead the government reject the proposal to include the gender perspective and show ignorance about such an important issue.

“Such was the case in the debate between the candidates for governor, in which misconceptions reigned [on matters] such as sexual preference, tolerance, and even the PDP [Popular Democratic Party] candidate’s refusal to believe in the inclusion of education with a gender perspective,” González Costa said. “That is why I call on those who aspire to lead San Juan to express themselves on this important issue, San Juan being

the city with the highest incidence of cases of gender violence and sexual assaults.”

The PIP mayoral candidate added in a written statement that there must be “a commitment in a clear, transparent and frank way to include education with a gender perspective in the proposals of those who aspire to govern the city.”

In this regard, he noted that his government program for San Juan contains specific proposals for including education with a gender perspective -- both in government work and in the capital’s educational system -- as well as the PIP #PatriaNueva government program of Juan Dalmau’s campaign for the governorship. At the same time, González Costa detailed two of the most outstanding aspects of those proposals: 1. Government management of the municipality and gender issues to ensure that all formulation of public policy, legislation, executive orders or decisions of the

executive branch of the municipality include a gender perspective based on equity.

2. Inclusion of the gender perspective and courses on sexuality in the curriculum of schools in the municipal education system.

“The absence of an education with a gender perspective is the reason why, even in a discussion between people who aspire to lead the country, terms are still used and positions are assumed that perpetuate discrimination and that in the most drastic cases promote violence against women, [violence based on] gender,” González Costa said. “In the middle of the 21st century, opposing the inclusion of an instrument as important as this to promote equality or simply keeping silent, as has been the case with the PDP candidate [for mayor of San Juan] in the face of the refusal of her [party’s] candidate for governor to support these initiatives, is to live in disconnection with reality and in contempt of the life and rights of other people.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

5

Education chief vows to be ‘respectful’ with legislative determination on WIPR’s future

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

W

ith the future of the Puerto Rico Corporation for Public Broadcasting (known as WIPR by its Federal Communications Commission call sign) remaining unclear as both House Bill 2524 and Senate Bill 1640 have yet to be evaluated in the island Legislature’s sixth special session -- a process that could lead to WIPR becoming a non-profit corporation -- Education (DE) Secretary Eligio Hernández told the Star on Monday that in order to return WIPR to the DE, something WIPR workers are calling for, a new bill must be filed. However, he said twice that he will “be respectful with any bill established by the legislative branch and welcomed by the executive branch.”

Even though WIPR employees and the Actors Association said Sunday that it is possible for the DE to keep the public corporation running as its annual operating cost rounds up to $5 million, which they said can be easily provided from the DE’s $4 billion annual bud-

get instead of privatizing the entity, Hernández said otherwise, pointing out that the numbers were incorrect. He said the department’s annual budget is $3.6 billion, but around $1.53 billion is reserved for the retirement system.

“Of all the budget that was allocated at DE, there’s a billion [dollars] that we can’t even see, that we can’t manage that way as it is [allocated] for the retirees. The agency can’t touch that money,” he said. “It’s a bit technical, but it’s always worth bringing up because they always tell us that our budget is around $3 billion, and I say, ‘I wish I could manage those $3 billion.’ But the answer is

no, it gets reduced down to 30 percent due to pensions, which leads us to a tight budget.”

As for WIPR receiving funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to cover operating costs after providing educational services to the DE, Hernández said the allocation of such funds “has to be related to activities involved with COVID-19.” The DE secretary added that the department’s education plan under the CARES Act contemplated $6 million for televised education.

“DE’s funds are consigned to the DE for our current projects. We don’t have funds in an account waiting to be decided where they will be used,” Hernández said. “Nonetheless, DE is very aware of the outreach that tele-education has not only in Puerto Rico but also the world.

We, with this project, guarantee an additional tool for Puerto Rican families, but the internal issue on operation and management at WIPR corresponds to them, their board, and the legislative power that is capable of establishing their own vision and, obviously, we live in a republican-type democratic country, where there is the separation of powers; there are other

managers who would make those decisions.”

As for the DE collaborating with WIPR on the summer class television program “En Casa Aprendo,” Hernández said it “has become [a matter] of considerable relevance due to the COVID-19 pandemic.” After the success and outreach of the program, he said, there are similar projects coming in the near future focused on teaching sign language on all levels, promoting social and emotional support toward students and parents, and tutoring in challenging courses such as math.

When the Star asked if “En Casa Aprendo” and other such projects were not at risk due to WIPR’s possible privatization, Hernández responded, “No, incidental matters involving administrative procedures that are ongoing at WIPR are directly addressed by the [public] corporation; the DE has no say in these matters.”

“However, both entities signed an agreement, which is focused on purchasing production time and broadcasting all programs to the audience,” the Education chief said. “Written agreements are honored. We don’t anticipate any problems.”

Unions denounce poor condition of DNER building

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

T

he Environmental Quality Board Employees Union UAW Local 2337 and the Central Federation of Workers (FCT by its Spanish initials), which represents the employees of the Solid Waste Management Authority and the National Parks Program, denounced on Monday what they said are the poor, depressing and unsanitary conditions of the central building of the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources (DNER), and called on Secretary Rafael Machargo Maldonado to establish a plan that guarantees the health and safety of the personnel working in the agency and its visitors.

“We [are alerting] the media so that the country can see the conditions [of] the central building of the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, so that they see with their own eyes the unsanitary conditions in which hundreds of employees work in a sick building, full of fungus,” said Miguel Rivera, president of UAW Local 2337. “A building where, to top it all off, the administration does not follow antiCOVID protocols. We urge Secretary Rafael Machargo to take immediate action to resolve

this situation, which threatens the health of employees, or we as employee representatives will take other actions to resolve it.”

Wilkin López, international representative of the UAW, said the conditions inside the building are alarming at a time when Puerto Rico is facing the COVID-19 pandemic and when employees have been called back to work in person in government offices.

“This is a health and safety issue. It is alarming given the time we are living in, with the COVID-19 pandemic attacking our members, families and visitors,” López said. “We have given Secretary Machargo several alternatives and so far no plan has been presented. We demand action, commitment and the guarantee of an environment in which the physical and mental health of our people is not affected.”

Meanwhile, Antonio Cabán, president of the Central Federation of Workers, noted that the health situation in the building is aggravated by the condition of the air conditioning system.

“During the month of August and so far in September, work has been interrupted 16 times due to the continuous failures and low cooling capacity of the air conditioning, which, in turn, increases the potential risk of infection from COVID-19 and other related viruses,” Cabán

said. “We are not going to wait for a tragedy to happen to demand that action be taken.”

“The saddest thing about this is that the agency has the money to buy a new air conditioning system, because it was assigned the funds more than a year ago, and due to bureaucracy or incompetence today that money still sits in the bank account instead of being used for what it was assigned,” he added. “The practice of counting on money and not using it efficiently cannot continue.”

The union leaders said that on Aug. 20, Machargo informed them that the DNER had certified that the air system must be replaced with a new unit, that a bid had not yet been held to acquire it and that the work amounted to some $1.7 million.

“Machargo told us that he was going to issue an emergency administrative order … to discard the bidding and that he would ask the General Services Administration to make an exceptional purchase because it complies with the provisions of the internal memo regarding the health risk faced by employees and visitors,” Cabán said. “However, at the moment, we do not have any information on the procedures carried out or the response of the relevant agencies. We do not know what happened with the

purchase of the air [conditioning] system, we do not know if the administrative order was made, we do not know anything. To this we add that the advanced deterioration of the building from the fungus that can be perceived with the naked eye on the walls and windows, the lack of protective and disinfection equipment, and the fact that the respective Health and Safety Committee has not been activated.”

The Environmental Quality Board Employees Union UAW Local 2337 and the Central Federation of Workers called on Secretary Rafael Machargo Maldonado to establish a plan that guarantees the health and safety of the personnel working in the agency and its visitors.

6

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

PR economy included in US trade statistics for first time. These were the prototype results

By THE STAR STAFF

T

he Bureau of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce has released prototype annual estimates of gross domestic product (GDP) for Puerto Rico for 2012 to 2018.

The statistics marked the first time the federal government has issued statistics for the local government in the area of economy and trade.

The prototype estimates show that the Puerto Rico economy, as measured by inflation-adjusted (or “real”) GDP, expanded from 2012 to 2014, before turning down in 2015 and continuing to decrease through 2018. Exports of goods and services was a key contributor to changes in real GDP over this period.

Within exports and imports of goods and services, much of the volatility reflected trade in intellectual property-intensive goods, including pharmaceuticals and organic chemicals, and medical and scientific equipment and appliances. In Puerto Rico, subsidiaries of large nonresident multinational enterprises operate within the industries engaged in the manufacturing of the goods.

GDP measures the value of goods and services produced within the geographical borders of a region in a given period, regardless of who owns the factors of production.

Puerto Rico GDP therefore includes production owned by nonresidents, such as nonresident multinational enterprises, that occurs in Puerto Rico.

Real GDP expanded from 2012 to 2014 before turning down in 2015 and continuing to decrease through 2018. The growth from 2012 to 2014 was more than accounted for by exports. Exports of goods grew significantly in these years, especially pharmaceuticals and organic chemicals, and medical and scientific equipment and appliances. The largest decline in real GDP over the period was in 2017, reflecting the widespread impact of hurricanes Irma and Maria on exports of goods, private inventory investment, and personal consumption expenditures (also referred to as consumer spending).

In 2018, real GDP declined 0.9 percent.

Although consumer spending, private inventory investment, and construction activity grew significantly in the year after the hurricanes, these increases were offset by an increase in imports, which is a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, and a decrease in exports.

Regarding personal consumer expenditures, real consumer spending for Puerto Rico decreased in each year from 2012 to 2017.

The average annual growth rate for this period

was -1.9 percent, consistent with a steady decline in the resident population over this time period.

The largest decreases in real consumer spending occurred in 2014 and 2017. In 2014, as wages dropped and consumer prices continued to increase, residents reduced their spending on both goods and services. The declines within goods were widespread; the largest decreases were for motor vehicles and “other” nondurable goods, which includes items such as medicine and clothing. In 2017, hurricanes Irma and Maria caused catastrophic damage that restricted residents’ access to many goods and services. The decreases in health care, housing and utilities, and “other” services (including education services) were especially large.

Despite a continued decrease in population, real consumer spending increased 3.4 percent in 2018, supported by disaster-related insurance payouts and government payments to households. The largest contributor to the growth in 2018 was durable goods, including purchases of motor vehicles.

Private fixed investment (PFI) measures spending by private businesses, nonprofit institutions, and households on fixed assets in the Puerto Rico economy. Spending is grouped into three categories: structures, equipment, and intellectual property products.

From 2012 to 2018, real PFI for Puerto Rico increased in all years.

Real spending on structures by the private sector increased significantly in 2018, reflecting the rebuilding of properties after hurricanes Irma and Maria. The 2018 increase more than offset the combined decreases in spending from 2012 to 2017. The largest declines for these years occurred in residential construction, reflecting the continued drop in demand for homes, coupled with an even further decline in 2017.

Real spending on equipment grew in each year over this period, except in 2015.

The highest growth occurred in 2018, with an increase larger than the combined increases in equipment investment from 2012 to 2017.

The growth in 2018 largely reflected business purchases to replace damaged or destroyed equipment, including industrial machinery, following the 2017 hurricanes.

Real spending on intellectual property products (IPP) increased in each year over this period. The majority of these expenditures were for software and for research and development funded by computer services providers.

Change in private inventories, also referred to as inventory investment, is a measure of the value of the change in the physical

volume of inventories that businesses maintain to support their production and distribution activities. In general, inventory investment is one of the most volatile components of GDP, giving it an important role in shorter-run variations in GDP growth.

The largest decrease in real inventory investment occurred in 2017 when inventories were negatively affected by hurricanes Irma and Maria. The main contributor to the drawdown in inventories was the chemical manufacturing industry, which includes pharmaceutical manufacturers. The largest increase occurred in 2018 as the economy began to recover from the 2017 hurricanes.

Net exports of goods and services is the difference between Puerto Rico exports of goods and services and Puerto Rico imports of goods and services. Exports measures the portion of Puerto Rico’s total production of goods and services that is provided to the rest of the world, including the rest of the United States. Imports measures the portion of total Puerto Rico expenditures that is accounted for by goods and services provided by the rest of the world. Together, the two measures reflect the extent to which Puerto Rico participates in the global marketplace.

For Puerto Rico, net exports of goods and services is a critical component of GDP, due to its size relative to total GDP and its volatility. Over the period 2012 to 2018, the ratio of net exports to GDP was 24 percent.

Over the period 2012 to 2018, net exports was positive in all years. The majority of Puerto Rico’s trade surplus was in goods.

The surplus on pharmaceuticals and organic chemicals ranged from $21.8 billion to $34.1 billion each year.

Real exports of goods grew from 2012 to 2015; the highest growth was in 2014 to 75 percent.

The increase in 2014 reflected growth of over 40 percent in medical and scientific equipment and appliances. Real exports of goods turned down in 2016 and then decreased 13.5 percent in 2017, reflecting the effects of hurricanes Irma and Maria on the manufacturing sector.

Real exports of goods continued to decline in 2018. The largest contributor to the decline was a 74.3 percent decrease in exports of foods, feeds and beverages.

Real exports of services increased in each year over this period, at an average annual growth rate of 3 percent.

Puerto Rico depends heavily on imported goods and services for production by busin esses and consumption by households. From 2012 to 2018, the ratio of imported goods and services to GDP for Puerto Rico was 46 percent.

The pattern of change in real imports was

driven by goods. The largest decrease was in 2017 and was more than accounted for by a decline in imports of pharmaceuticals and organic chemicals. The decrease reflected the effects of the hurricanes, which disrupted manufacturing activity on the island.

Government consumption expenditures and gross investment — or government spending — in Puerto Rico measures final expenditures accounted for by the central government (including the Commonwealth Government of Puerto Rico and its component units), the municipal governments, and the U.S. federal government. Government consumption expenditures consist of spending by government agencies, except government enterprises, to provide goods and services to the public.

Gross investment consists of spending by all government agencies, including government enterprises, for structures, equipment, and intellectual property products used in producing those goods and services.

Real government spending decreased from 2012 to 2016 to almost negative 5 percent, reflecting declines in government employment and construction spending by the central government. Over this period, the central government accounted for approximately two-thirds of total government spending, In 2017 and 2018, real government spending increased, reflecting spending on hurricane response and recovery activities. Many of these activities were funded by grants and direct federal assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

After decreasing each year from 2013 to 2016, real government gross investment increased 23.2 percent in 2017 and 87.2 percent in 2018. These increases reflected post-disaster rebuilding, particularly by the central government. Structures investment by the central government increased 39.8 percent in 2017 and 117.7 percent in 2018, largely due to spending to restore the power grid.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

7

Masks, floor decals, mute buttons: How schools are scrambling to open

By ELIZA SHAPIRO and JAMES ESTRIN

N

ine students will sit at desks 6 feet apart in classrooms that used to hold 30 children. Gyms, cafeterias and auditoriums will be largely off-limits. And, if all goes according to plan, students and staff will not see each other in-person without their masks on for many months to come.

When hundreds of thousands of children in the nation’s largest school system stream back into school buildings this week for the first time since March 13, they will find their schools and classrooms transformed.

New York City is the only major school district in America restarting in-person classes this month, and that herculean task has not unfolded entirely as planned. Mayor Bill de Blasio has twice delayed the start of in-person classes for most students. And Sunday, the union representing the city’s principals called on the state to take over the reopening effort from de Blasio.

Under the latest reopening plan, some young children and students with advanced disabilities returned to schools last week, and classrooms will be open for the rest of the system this week.

Here’s what the city’s schools looked like in the weeks leading up to the reopening, as principals and teachers scrambled to prepare for a school year unlike any other.

A classroom can be anywhere When it comes to the youngest students, “We’re all about the hugs, the sitting together, rolling around on the floor together, that can’t happen now,” said Julie Zuckerman, principal of Public School 513 in Washington Heights.

Zuckerman has been thinking of ways to recreate some of that spontaneity. This month, before the start of in-person classes, her students and their parents gathered in a park near the school to play games and get to know their teachers.

Other schools are making use of outdoor space, from playgrounds to adjoining streets and sidewalks. At SAR Academy, a private Jewish school in the Bronx, morning prayers are held in the schoolyard, with painted circles marking where each child should sit.

SAR was the very first school in New York City to close in March as the virus spread, and it is now one of the first batch of schools that has reopened for in-person learning in September.

Transforming school buildings Many of New York’s roughly 1,400 school buildings are about a century old, and the city has had to scramble to upgrade ventilation in buildings already in urgent need of repair. In some cases, that has meant prying open windows that have been shut for years. In other buildings, more involved repairs have been made, and some classrooms have been deemed unsafe and will not reopen at all.

Michael Perlberg, principal of Middle School 839 in Brooklyn, said he had spent hours learning the intricacies of his building’s ventilation system.

“There are four to five hours of my day when I’m dealing with things I never thought I’d be dealing with,” he said.

Sandra Cordero, a community assistant at Public School 513 in Washington Heights, hung up signs reminding the students to wear their masks. The schools made its own signs so it could include students from different backgrounds.

Perlberg’s entire staff did a dress rehearsal of the first day of school earlier this month, before they learned that in-person classes would be further delayed. Teachers stood on decals marking where students would stand and cycled in and out of classrooms while keeping 6 feet of distance.

After city schools were left with little personal protective gear and hand sanitizer in the spring, when the virus was spreading largely undetected throughout the city, de Blasio promised that schools would have sufficient cleaning supplies, masks and other materials when they reopened.

But some teachers have said that the personal protective gear they’ve received will only last a few weeks.

What learning looks like now Whether children return to classrooms or take their classes exclusively online, learning will look radically different for all of New York City’s 1.1 million students this fall.

Almost no students will attend school five days a week.

Instead, children who opt for in-person classes will report to classrooms one to three days per week and learn from home the rest of the time. Just under half of the city’s students have already opted out of in-person classes through the fall and will take online classes only.

Science experiments are off the table for this semester.

Young children will have to master the art of the mute button — or, more likely, be supervised constantly throughout the

day — in order to participate in class.

Principals have spent months trying to figure out how to arrange their schedules so that students are learning the same material at roughly the same pace, no matter where they are.

And it is possible that all students could be sent home at any time, if there are small outbreaks in classrooms or school buildings, or if the city’s average test positivity rate ticks up to 3%, from about 1% now.

“There might be a second wave, and we need to have a program that we can just shift” to all-remote, Perlberg said.

At SAR, some in-person classes are being livestreamed to students at home. Children in the classroom and in their bedrooms can raise their hands to answer questions. It’s a practice that districts around the country are experimenting with, but it has been discouraged in New York’s public schools by the teachers’ union because it requires teachers to instruct two groups simultaneously.

Educators across the city said they know they will need to change their meticulous plans after students spend more time in school buildings.

“There’s only so much change that people can handle in a small amount of time,” Perlberg said. “Part of the key to being successful is going to be stopping, reassessing and letting things go that aren’t working.”

8

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

18 Revelations from a trove of Trump tax records

By DAVID LEONHARDT

T

he New York Times has obtained taxreturn data for President Donald Trump and his companies that covers more than two decades. Trump has long refused to release this information, making him the first president in decades to hide basic details about his finances. His refusal has made his tax returns among the most sought-after documents in recent memory.

Among the key findings of The Times’ investigation: — Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years that The Times examined. In 2017, after he became president, his tax bill was only $750.

— He has reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that is the subject of an audit by the Internal Revenue Service.

— Many of his signature businesses, including his golf courses, report losing large amounts of money — losses that have helped him to lower his taxes.

— The financial pressure on him is increasing as hundreds of millions of dollars in loans he personally guaranteed are soon coming due.

— Even while declaring losses, he has managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses, including residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for television.

— Ivanka Trump, while working as an employee of the Trump Organization, appears to have received “consulting fees” that also helped reduce the family’s tax bill.

— As president, he has received more money from foreign sources and U.S. interest groups than previously known. The records do not reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.

It is important to remember that the returns are not an unvarnished look at Trump’s business activity. They are instead his own portrayal of his companies, compiled for the IRS. But they do offer the most detailed picture yet available.

Below is a deeper look at the takeaways.

The main article based on the investigation contains much more information, as does a timeline of the president’s finances. Dean Baquet, the executive editor, has written a

The Trump Tower Manila, which Donald Trump licensed his name to, in Manila, Philippines, Sept. 24, 2020.

In 2017, Trump or his companies paid $156,824 in taxes in the Philippines. note explaining why The Times is publishing these findings.

THE PRESIDENT’S TAX AVOIDANCE Trump has paid no federal income taxes for much of the past two decades.

In addition to the 11 years in which he paid no taxes during the 18 years examined

by The Times, he paid only $750 in each of the two most recent years — 2016 and 2017.

He has managed to avoid taxes while enjoying the lifestyle of a billionaire — which he claims to be — while his companies cover the costs of what many would consider personal expenses.

This tax avoidance sets him apart from most other affluent Americans.

Taxes on wealthy Americans have declined sharply over the past few decades, and many use loopholes to reduce their taxes below the statutory rates. But most affluent people still pay a lot of federal income tax.

In 2017, the average federal income rate for the highest-earning 0.001% of tax filers — that is, the most affluent 1/100,000th slice of the population — was 24.1%, according to the IRS. Over the past two decades, Trump has paid about $400 million less in combined federal income taxes than a very wealthy person who paid the average for that group each year.

His tax avoidance also sets him apart

from past presidents.

Trump may be the wealthiest U.S. president in history. Yet he has often paid less in taxes than other recent presidents. Barack Obama and George W. Bush each regularly paid more than $100,000 a year — and sometimes much more — in federal income taxes while in office.

Trump, by contrast, is running a federal government to which he has contributed almost no income tax revenue in many years.

A large refund has been crucial to his tax avoidance.

Trump did face large tax bills after the initial success of “The Apprentice” television show, but he erased most of these tax payments through a refund. Combined, Trump initially paid almost $95 million in federal income taxes over the 18 years. He later managed to recoup most of that money, with interest, by applying for and receiving a $72.9 million tax refund, starting in 2010.

The refund reduced his total federal income tax bill between 2000 and 2017 to an annual average of $1.4 million. By comparison, the average American in the top 0.001% of earners paid about $25 million in federal income taxes each year over the same span.

The $72.9 million refund has since become the subject of a long-running battle with the IRS.

When applying for the refund, he cited a giant financial loss that may be related to the failure of his Atlantic City casinos. Publicly, he also claimed that he had fully surrendered his stake in the casinos.

But the real story may be different from the one he told. Federal law holds that investors can claim a total loss on an investment, as Trump did, only if they receive nothing in return. Trump did appear to receive something in return: Five percent of the new casino company that formed when he renounced his stake.

In 2011, the IRS began an audit reviewing the legitimacy of the refund. Almost a decade later, the case remains unresolved, for unknown reasons, and could ultimately end up in federal court, where it could become a matter of public record.

BUSINESS EXPENSES AND PERSONAL BENEFITS Trump classifies much of the spending on his personal lifestyle as the cost of business.

His residences are part of the family business, as are the golf courses where he spends so much time. He has classified the cost of his aircraft, used to shuttle him among his homes, as a business expense as well.

Haircuts — including more than $70,000 to style his hair during “The Apprentice” — have fallen into the same category. So did almost $100,000 paid to a favorite hair and makeup

The Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., June 26, 2020. Mar-a-Lago, where a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed President Donald Trump to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the business, is also a source of millions in tax deductions.

The San Juan Daily Star artist of Ivanka Trump.

All of this helps to reduceTrump’s tax bill further, because companies can write off business expenses.

Seven Springs, his estate in Westchester County, New York, typifies his aggressive definition of business expenses.

Trump bought the estate, which stretches over more than 200 acres in Bedford, New York, in 1996. His sons Eric and Donald Jr. spent summers living there when they were younger.“This is really our compound,” Eric told Forbes in 2014. “Today,” the Trump Organization website continues to report, “Seven Springs is used as a retreat for the Trump family.”

Nonetheless, the elder Trump has classified the estate as an investment property, distinct from a personal residence. As a result, he has been able to write off $2.2 million in property taxes since 2014 — even as his 2017 tax law has limited individuals to writing off only $10,000 in property taxes a year.

THE ‘CONSULTING FEES’ Across nearly all of his projects, Trump’s companies set aside about 20% of income for unexplained ‘consulting fees.’

These fees reduce taxes, because companies are able to write them off as a business expense, lowering the amount of final profit subject to tax.

Trump collected $5 million on a hotel deal in Azerbaijan, for example, and reported $1.1 million in consulting fees. In Dubai, there was a $630,000 fee on $3 million in income. Since 2010, Trump has written off some $26 million in such fees.

His daughter appears to have received some of these consulting fees, despite having been a top Trump Organization executive.

The Times investigation discovered a striking match: Trump’s private records show that his company once paid $747,622 in fees to an unnamed consultant for hotel projects in Hawaii and Vancouver, British Columbia. Ivanka Trump’s public disclosure forms — which she filed when joining the White House staff in 2017 — show that she had received an identical amount through a consulting company she co-owned.

MONEY-LOSING BUSINESSES Many of the highest-profile Trump businesses lose large amounts of money.

Since 2000, he has reported losing more than $315 million at the golf courses that he often describes as the heart of his empire. Much of this has been at Trump National Doral, a resort near Miami that he bought in 2012. And his Washington hotel, opened in 2016, has lost more than $55 million.

An exception: Trump Tower in New York,

Tuesday, September 29, 2020 which reliably earns him more than $20 million in profits a year.

The most successful part of the Trump business has been his personal brand.

The Times calculates that between 2004 and 2018, Trump made a combined $427.4 million from selling his image — an image of unapologetic wealth through shrewd business management. The marketing of this image has been a huge success, even if the underlying management of many of the operating Trump companies has not been.

Other firms, especially in real estate, have paid for the right to use the Trump name. The brand made possible the “The Apprentice” — and the show then took the image to another level.

Of course, Trump’s brand also made possible his election as the first U.S. president with no prior government experience.

But his unprofitable companies still served a financial purpose: reducing his tax bill.

The Trump Organization — a collection of more than 500 entities, virtually all of them wholly owned by Trump — has used the losses to offset the rich profits from the licensing of the Trump brand and other profitable pieces of its business.

The reported losses from the operating businesses were so large that they often fully erased the licensing income, leaving the organization to claim that it earns no money and thus owes no taxes. This pattern is an old one for Trump. The collapse of major parts of his business in the early 1990s generated huge losses that he used to reduce his taxes for years afterward.

LARGE BILLS LOOMING With the cash from ‘The Apprentice,’ Trump went on his biggest buying spree since the 1980s.

“The Apprentice,” which debuted on NBC in 2004, was a huge hit. Trump received 50% of its profits, and he went on to buy more than 10 golf courses and multiple other properties. The losses at these properties reduced his tax bill.

But the strategy ran into trouble as the money from “The Apprentice” began to decline. By 2015, his financial condition was worsening.

His 2016 presidential campaign may have been partly an attempt to resuscitate his brand.

The financial records do not answer this question definitively. But the timing is consistent: Trump announced a campaign that seemed a long shot to win but was almost certain to bring him newfound attention, at the same time that his businesses were in need of a new approach.

9

President Donald Trump in the presidential limo at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, Sept. 12, 2020.

The presidency has helped his business.

Since he became a leading presidential candidate, he has received large amounts of money from lobbyists, politicians and foreign officials who pay to stay at his properties or join his clubs. The Times investigation puts precise numbers on this spending for the first time.

A surge of new members at the Mar-a-Lago club in Florida gave him an additional $5 million a year from the business since 2015. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $397,602 in 2017 to the Washington hotel, where it held at least one event during its World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians.

In his first two years in the White House, Trump received millions of dollars from projects in foreign countries, including $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey.

But the presidency has not resolved his core financial problem: Many of his businesses continue to lose money.

With“The Apprentice”revenue declining,Trump has absorbed the losses partly through one-time financial moves that may not be available to him again.

In 2012, he took out a $100 million mortgage on the commercial space in Trump Tower. He has also

sold hundreds of millions worth of stock and bonds.

But his financial records indicate that he may have as little as $873,000 left to sell.

He will soon face several major bills that could put further pressure on his finances.

He appears to have paid off none of the principal of the Trump Tower mortgage, and the full $100 million comes due in 2022. And if he loses his dispute with the IRS over the 2010 refund, he could owe the government more than $100 million (including interest on the original amount).

He is personally on the hook for some of these bills.

In the 1990s, Trump nearly ruined himself by personally guaranteeing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, and he has since said that he regretted doing so. But he has taken the same step again, his tax records show. He appears to be responsible for loans totaling $421 million, most of which is coming due within four years.

Should he win reelection, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president. Whether he wins or loses, he will probably need to find new ways to use his brand — and his popularity among tens of millions of Americans — to make money.

10

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

For conservative Christian women, Amy Coney Barrett’s success is personal

By RUTH GRAHAM

R

uth Malhotra had just arrived in Florida for a vacation with some girlfriends from high school and their families when President Donald Trump was scheduled to introduce his next nominee for the Supreme Court on Saturday afternoon. A college football game was on the television at their rented beach house. “Turn off football and turn on CSPAN!” she told her friends. “We’ve got to watch this; this is historic.”

Malhotra, 36, a lifelong evangelical Christian who works in communications for a Christian ministry, has little personal affection for Trump.

So she was surprised to find herself tearing up as the he introduced Judge Amy Coney Barrett in the Rose Garden, describing her as “a woman of unparalleled achievement, towering intellect, sterling credentials, and unyielding loyalty to the Constitution.”

Malhotra’s mother was watching at home back in Georgia, and felt a spark of recognition in Trump’s description of a selfless, family-oriented woman who reveres the Constitution. Her mother texted: “Trump’s description of Amy reminds me of you.”

Barrett’s nomination pleased many conservatives, who see in her legal credentials and judicial philosophy the potential for her to be the next Antonin Scalia, a solidly conservative presence on the court for decades.

But for many conservative Christian women, the thrill of the nomination is more personal. Barrett, for them, is a new kind of icon — one they have not seen before in American cultural and political life: a woman who is both unabashedly ambitious and deeply religious, who has excelled at

President Trump with Judge Amy Coney Barrett and her family at the White House after he announced on Saturday that he was nominating her for a seat on the Supreme Court. the heights of a demanding profession even as she speaks openly about prioritizing her conservative Catholic faith and family. Barrett has seven children, including two children adopted from Haiti and a young son with Down syndrome.

“I found some personal inspiration in Ginsburg — you couldn’t not,” said Mary Hallan FioRito, a conservative Catholic lawyer who graduated from law school in the early 1990s, referring to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“She made me know this is possible. It won’t be

easy, but it’s possible. Amy Barrett is the perfect replacement for Ginsburg because she, too, in a different way, is saying, ‘This is possible.’”

Though Barrett’s nomination has inspired pride in Catholic circles, it has also generated enthusiasm among conservative evangelical Protestants. Barrett belongs to an ecumenical Christian community in South Bend, Indiana, whose worship practices draw from some Protestant traditions.

“Representation matters very, very much,” said Chelsea Patterson Sobolik, a 29-year-old evangelical who works as policy director for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. The fact that Barrett is an adoptive parent feels significant to Sobolik, an adoptee herself who is now pursuing an international adoption with her husband.

Malhotra, who has been following Barrett’s career for several years, said she saw in Barrett the attributes of women she admired in different spheres of her own life, but had not seen displayed on such a big stage before.

“She represented the women I go church with, while also representing the professors I had in graduate school,” she said. “She seemed to be the whole package.”

Although Trump is notably more popular with men than women, conservative women are a critical voting bloc for the president as he faces a challenging election in November. The president’s advisers hope the selection of Barrett will energize his base; while it is unclear yet how much diffe-

rence the nomination will make to voters who are already inclined to vote for him, it has added a jolt of energy in some circles.

Several women reported participating in enthusiastic group text chains about Barrett, who they sometimes refer to as “ACB”; her name comes up in video calls with friends, in the preschool pickup line, and in their own prayers. And some reported a feeling of protectiveness as the judge and her family enter what will probably be a bruising confirmation battle and sprawling culture-war skirmish.

To Barrett’s fans, she is proof that women can be as ambitious maternally as they are professionally.

“She’s someone who is challenging a mainstream consensus that there’s a certain way that women need to live their lives in order to succeed,” said Gabrielle Girgis, 30, who recently completed a doctorate in politics at Princeton University, is Catholic and has two young daughters. “She represents the fact that not all women need to think the same way about the raising of children and family planning.”

Girgis, who has a hearing disability, said she had a special fondness for professional women like Barrett who “make space in their lives for children with disabilities.”

Barrett first came to national attention in 2017, when Trump nominated her to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Several senators directly questioned her in her confirmation hearing about whether her Catholic faith would influence her decisions from the bench. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told her.

That moment was galvanizing for women who saw themselves in Barrett.

“Among Catholic professional women who are moms, it just instantly resonated,” said FioRito, who lives in Chicago. “There’s such a groundswell for Amy, and a lot of it came out that anger and resentment for how she was treated.”

After the 2017 hearings, T-shirts and tchotchkes emblazoned with the slogan, “The dogma lives loudly within me,” proliferated on customization websites. A friend sent FioRito a mug that featured the phrase and Barrett’s portrait.

For women with large families, Barrett’s appearance in the Rose Garden on Saturday with her seven children, whom she called “my greatest joy,” was especially poignant.

“She shows that it’s possible for a woman to rise to the top of her profession while having many children,” said Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, a Catholic mother of 10 who graduated from Stanford Law School and now serves as director for a conservative legal advocacy group focusing on religious liberty.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

11

TikTok wins reprieve from U.S. ban

By MIKE ISAAC and DAVE McCABE

A

federal judge on Sunday granted a preliminary injunction against a Trump administration order to ban the viral video app TikTok from U.S. app stores, in a reprieve for the Chinese-owned service.

The injunction halts only the element of the ban that was scheduled to take effect Sunday at midnight, which would have forced TikTok off app stores run by companies like Apple and Google. It does not cover a broader set of restrictions set to take effect in November “at this time,” the judge, Carl Nichols of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said in his order.

The government had argued that the measures were responding to fears that the app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, could send data back to authorities in Beijing. A Justice Department official, Daniel Schwei, said that TikTok’s “First Amendment rights are not implicated” by the ban.

Lawyers for the app told Nichols in a hearing Sunday morning that forcing online stores to remove the app weeks before an election — and at a time of increased isolation because of the pandemic — would impinge on the rights of potential new users to share their views. TikTok had sought the preliminary injunction to temporarily halt the ban.

A ban would “be no different from the government locking the doors to a public forum,” said John Hall, a lawyer for TikTok. “We’re pleased that the court agreed with our legal arguments and issued an injunction preventing the implementation of the TikTok app ban,” a spokesman for TikTok said Sunday after the judge’s decision. “We will continue defending our rights for the benefit of our community and employees. At the same time, we will also maintain our ongoing dialogue with the government to turn our proposal, which the president gave his preliminary approval to last weekend, into an agreement.”

The Commerce Department said in a statement that it would “comply with the injunction and has taken immediate steps to do so, but intends to vigorously defend the E.O. and the secretary’s implementation efforts from legal challenges.”

TikTok is fighting to continue operating in the United States. Trump has been hawkish on Chinese technology for the last few years and has said that Chinese-backed apps like TikTok and the messaging service WeChat, owned by Tencent, pose national security threats because they could offer data about Americans to Beijing.

In early August, Trump issued executive orders to effectively ban TikTok and WeChat in the United States.

Citing those orders, the Commerce Department said this month that it would bar WeChat and TikTok from

President Trump issued executive orders in early August that effectively banned TikTok and WeChat in the United States.

U.S. app stores, including those run by Apple and Google. TikTok is used by more than 120 million Americans, according to the company.

The measures set to take effect Sunday would have forced companies like Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, making it difficult for new users to download the app. More restrictions are set to take effect on Nov. 12 that would make it more difficult for the app to operate for its existing users.

To avoid a ban, TikTok has been in talks for months to strike a deal with an American technology company to defuse national security concerns. Earlier this month, TikTok hammered out an agreement with Oracle and Walmart to create a new entity, TikTok Global, in which the American companies would jointly own a 20% stake. ByteDance would initially own the other 80%.

The companies did not detail how they would deal with national security questions.

Oracle and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday evening.

President Donald Trump gave his preliminary blessing to the deal. But the companies have publicly disagreed over how much of TikTok Global will be owned

by American entities. That led Trump to say he might

not approve the deal if Oracle did not have control over TikTok. “If we find that they don’t have total control, then we’re not going to approve the deal,” Trump said in an interview Sept. 21 on “Fox & Friends.”

Any deal may still be disrupted by Beijing. China Daily, the official English-language newspaper of the Chinese government, recently called the TikTok deal “dirty and unfair and based on bullying and extortion.”

On Wednesday, TikTok asked for a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration to prevent a ban from taking effect Sept. 27. In its request, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the company said it had “made extraordinary efforts to try to satisfy the government’s ever-shifting demands and purported national security concerns.”

A ban could be devastating to TikTok’s business.

In court filings, TikTok executives have said that the company’s growth had soared over the last few years, with the app downloaded more than 2 billion times.

Since the push for an app ban in the United States began to circulate, advertisers have pulled campaigns from TikTok, denting the company’s revenue, according to court filings.

12

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

From cars to jewelry, China’s shoppers are spending again

The creators of the HBO series “Our Boys,” from left: Joseph Cedar, Tawfik Abu Wael and Hagai Levi. Some Israelis say the series unfairly focuses on the killing of a Palestinian teen by Jews when Palestinian terrorism is more common.

By KEITH BRADSHER

R

ight before executives and car enthusiasts could gather in Geneva for the big auto show there in early March, the organizers called it off. As the coronavirus spread, other shows followed suit: Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Paris and São Paulo.

So after a long lull, the first major auto show since the pandemic hit opened this weekend in Beijing, giving automakers a chance to showcase new models and big ideas for the future. Under the pulsating lights, executives and car fans admired new rides from big Western companies like Ford and Volkswagen, and from Chinese rivals. The gleaming sport utility vehicles, sedans and other cars were aimed at China’s consumers, who have emerged from COVID-19 lockdowns with a yearning to spend.

The automakers are chasing people like Ben Cao. Cao, a 33-year-old Shanghai consultant, and his wife bought a dark blue Porsche Panamera sedan in May to replace their Range Rover Sport, then bought a chalk gray Porsche Cayenne in July to replace their Audi TT Roadster. When cinemas reopened this summer with social distancing, they went to see Christopher

Nolan’s “Tenet” and “Eight Hundred,” a Chinese war movie.

When he went shopping a few days ago at elite jewelry stores for a new ring for his wife, Cao found that other customers had already been there.

“For a lot of extremely expensive jewelry, they were out of stock,” he said.

The Chinese economy shrank in the first quarter, its first contraction of the modern era, but now has resumed its surging ways. The nation’s factories are once again churning out goods for the world. Plentiful government lending is fueling big construction projects. Chinese officials are expected to report next month that growth accelerated during the July-to-September quarter, even while the rest of the world limps along.

The recovery in spending started with the affluent after coronavirus lockdowns last spring and has begun spreading to middle-class families, but many low-income workers are still struggling.

Retail sales grew 0.5% last month compared with a year earlier, the first increase this year. Xibei, a national chain of midpriced restaurants that were mostly empty last spring, said that its sales from Sept. 18 through 24 were up 4.5% compared with the same days last year.

China’s wealthy are willing to shop.

Restaurants, hotels and airports are crowded again. Business hotels in Beijing have nearly doubled room rates by eliminating pandemic discounts and filled up anyway.

And while practically all international travel is still suspended, big airports in cities like Guangzhou and Chongqing have almost as many domestic travelers as last year.

Spending by customers like Cao has lifted sales for luxury carmakers like Porsche, which has even flown electric Porsche Taycans from Germany for sale, and NIO, a Chinese electric car competitor to Tesla. “Life continues without any big impact from the pandemic,” said William Li, NIO’s founder and chief executive.

A big question, when China’s middle class would join in, seems also to have been answered. While sales of large and luxury cars recovered swiftly in April, compact car sales stayed weak through much of the spring and summer despite heavy price discounting by automakers.

Now they have almost caught up to last year’s pace. Public concerns about catching the virus on mass transit helped car sales in the spring, but sales have stayed strong in recent weeks even as those concerns faded.

“The cheaper vehicles are coming back,” said Yale Zhang, the managing director of Automotive Foresight, a Shanghai consulting firm.

Edward Cai, a 26-year-old Beijing consultant, spent little in the spring. Now he is going to movies — he liked a just-released remake of “The Invisible Guest” but not “Mulan,” the China-centric epic from Disney. He even splurged on a vacation a month ago to southernmost China.

“Much of my spending was put on hold during the epidemic,” he said, “but it’s coming back.”

Not all of China’s spenders can say the same. Many low-income workers and recent college graduates have not yet found new jobs after coronavirus lockdowns or are laboring at reduced hours with lower pay. Businesses and consumers in many inland cities are struggling.

“The richest regions are outperforming across the board,” particularly export regions along the coast, while the rest of the country lags, said Derek Scissors, the chief economist of the China Beige Book

economic analysis.

It helps that China has tamed the coronavirus within its borders. By contrast, European nations are closing bars and restaurants in response to an autumn wave of infections. In the United States, layoffs remain widespread and many businesses have closed.

The Beijing auto show, held every other year in alternation with the Shanghai auto show, has proved a fairly good lens through the years for focusing the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese economy.

It has become more and more dominated by luxury brands, by vehicles tailored to Chinese tastes and by increasingly sophisticated Chinese manufacturers with ambitions of creating global brands.

The show has also showcased China’s transformation from a technological laggard to the world’s largest market for electric cars, which customers have been snapping up in recent months. Ford unveiled on Saturday a Chinese version of its new electric Mustang. NIO announced an upgrade to the self-driving software on its electric cars to allow them to merge with highway traffic and exit by themselves.

Polestar, a joint venture of Volvo Cars and its Chinese parent, Zhejiang Geely, announced plans for mass manufacture of electric cars next year in Chengdu, China. Thomas Ingenlath, Polestar’s chief executive, said the company was building a factory that it intends to run only on renewable energy.

Ingenlath was one of a handful of top auto executives who flew to China for the show. Just released from the hotel where he served two weeks in isolation after his arrival, he expressed amazement at the differences in daily life between China and Europe because of China’s unusual success in suppressing the coronavirus.

“In Europe, you would very much avoid handshaking, even though it is the home of the handshake — I’m surprised it is not an issue here,” he said. “People are less worried.”

Liu Xiaozhi, a former car engineer who now serves on corporate boards, said that the country’s success against the coronavirus had allowed consumers to resume spending money freely once again.

“In China,” she said, “it is actually quite back to the way it was before.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

13 Stocks

Tech, bank shares drive Wall Street higher

U

.S. stocks jumped on Monday, bouncing back from the longest weekly losing streak in a year for the S&P 500 and the Dow, with technology, banks and travel-related shares leading the advance.

All 11 major S&P 500 sectors rose, with the S&P 500 financials index’s .SPSY 3% jump putting it on track for its best day in two and a half months.

Analysts said the gains could also be attributed to quarter-end rebalancing of investor portfolios as cyclical sectors including financials, industrials .SLPRCI, materials .SPLRCM and energy .SPNY added more than 2% by midday trading.

“There is a lack of negative news out there, we are going through a reflex rally,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA in New York.

“Traders tend to gravitate toward those groups that are most oversold because they have the greatest upside potential,” he said, referring to banks and travel-related stocks.

Delta Air Lines DAL.N, United Airlines UAL.O and American Airlines Group Inc AAL.O, rose between 5.7% and 6.2%.

Monday’s bounce also put the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 on course for their biggest two-quarter gains since 2000 and 2009, respectively.

Tech-related shares including Alphabet Inc GOOGL.O, Amazon.com Inc AMZN.O, Apple Inc AAPL.O Netflix Inc NFLX.O and Tesla Inc TSLA.O have surged over this period due to their perceived stability at a time of economic uncertainty.

Still, Wall Street’s three main indexes were on track for their first monthly decline since the coronavirus-led crash in March, and analysts expect trading to remain choppy in the run-up to the Nov. 3 presidential election.

“We don’t see this as the beginning of another big leg up. Between now and the election, you’re going to see a lot of turmoil,” John Traynor, chief investment officer at People’s United Advisors, said.

At 12:52 p.m. ET the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI was up 543.47 points, or 2.00%, at 27,717.43, the S&P 500 .SPX was up 54.40 points, or 1.65%, at 3,352.86 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC was up 144.94 points, or 1.33%, at 11,058.50.

Boeing BA.N shares jumped 7.3% after Federal Aviation Administration Chief Steve Dickson said the agency was set to conduct a 737 MAX evaluation flight this week, a key milestone as the planemaker aims for approval to resume flight.

Devon Energy Corp DVN.N jumped 11.9% after the oil and gas producer said it would buy peer WPX Energy Inc WPX.N for $2.56 billion. WPX Energy shares surged 16.9%.

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14

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Futures in peril: Takeaways from rise of child labor in pandemic

Shahnawaz, left, 10, and his 12-year-old brother, Mumtaz, have been working at a construction site in Gaya, India.

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

T

he coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of the world’s poorest children to halt their educations and go to work to help support their families, as schools have closed and parents’ incomes have fallen or vanished.

The children do work that is arduous, dirty and often dangerous: hauling bricks or gravel, scavenging for recyclables, begging or chopping weeds on plantations. Much of their employment is illegal.

It is a catastrophic shift for some of the world’s most vulnerable people, undoing years of gains for education and against child labor, and undermining their prospects of climbing out of poverty. Countless promising students have had their educations cut short, and it remains unclear when schools will reopen. But even when they do, many of the children are unlikely to go back to the classroom.

Here are some key findings of a New York Times report on conditions for these poor children.

The work is often dangerous and illegal.

Former pupils have been forced into heavy manual labor on construction or demolition sites, picking

through garbage, doing sex work, mining for sand or working in factories making cigarettes or fireworks.

The jobs carry risks of injury, or worse, and the hazards are especially acute for children — more so when they lack protective equipment, or even shoes.

In the Indian city of Tumakuru, an 11-year-old boy, Rahul, set out barefoot with his father on a recent morning to scavenge for recyclables at a waste dump.

India has the world’s largest school-age population and the fastest-growing number of coronavirus cases. The country’s laws prohibit anyone under 14 from working in most circumstances, but its poverty means that it had a large market in illegal child labor even before the pandemic.

With the problem growing and the government disrupted by the virus, enforcement is even less able to keep up.

The rise in child labor also compounds other threats to children resulting from the global recession. Hunger now threatens far more people in many parts of the world than it did a year ago. There have also been increases in forced marriages, teenage pregnancy and child trafficking.

Millions of children are unlikely to return to school.

The longer children stay out of school, and the more desperate their family circumstances, the less likely they are to go back. The United Nations estimates that 24 million children have dropped out for good because of the pandemic.

With school closings around the world affecting well over one billion children, many of them can continue to learn online or at home.

But hundreds of millions come from the poorest families, with no access to computers, the internet or tutors.

It grows harder to return to school as the children age and their families become dependent on their earnings — and no one knows yet if that dependence will last for months or years.

“I fear that even if school reopens, I will have to keep doing this, because of the family’s debt,” said Mumtaz, a 12-year-old boy in Bihar state in India, who now works carrying heavy loads of gravel.

Families are desperate, and wages are falling.

Reluctant parents say the only alternative to putting their children to work is for the families to go hungry.

With hundreds of millions of people worldwide out of work, the law of supply and demand makes for some cruel math. Struggling businesses take advantage of the glut of labor, driving down wages for those who still have jobs.

As families grow poorer, children enter the workforce, magnifying the labor surplus. And unscrupulous employers flout labor laws, hiring children who often work for pennies.

A labor contractor in West Bengal in India said parents had asked him to find work for children as young as 8, who looked “like they were being prepared to be thrown into a fire.”

Decades of progress are threatened.

Around the world, poverty had been declining for decades, particularly in Asia, allowing more and more children to remain in school. The pandemic has reversed those trends.

Many of the students forced from the classroom and into work were doing well academically, fueling dreams of better futures. Those dreams are now in peril.

Rahul, the 11-year-old boy in Tumakuru, wants to be a doctor, and his teacher says he is bright enough to attain that goal. But the longer he is out of school, the more remote it becomes.

The focus in India and many other countries has been on reopening businesses to restart the economy, but children’s advocates say it is shortsighted to open bars, restaurants and transit systems while keeping schools closed.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

15

At trial, Jewish victims of 2015 Paris attack ask: Why the hatred?

By AURELIEN BREEDEN

I

t was a Friday afternoon, time for last-minute Shabbat shopping, and the Hyper Cacher — a kosher supermarket on the eastern edge of Paris — was busy.

Yohan Cohen, 20, an employee, was working in the aisles. Philippe Braham, 45, was running errands from a list made by his wife. Yoav Hattab, 21, was looking for a bottle of wine. And François-Michel Saada, 63, was about to drop in for some bread.

Hours later, on Jan. 9, 2015, all four were dead.

They were killed by Amedy Coulibaly, a heavily armed Islamist extremist who took 17 other people hostage in the supermarket and claimed he had carried out the attack in the name of the Islamic State group.

“You are the two things I hate the most in the world,” Coulibaly told the hostages after bursting in, according to witnesses. “You are Jewish and French.”

More than five years later, at a courthouse in northern Paris last week, survivors and families of the victims offered heart-wrenching testimony about the attack, which hit France just days after two brothers who had coordinated with Coulibaly massacred cartoonists and journalists at the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

On Friday, two people were stabbed by a man with a knife near Charlie Hebdo’s former building. While the government has not stated publicly what motivated the suspect, an 18-year-old Pakistani, a French judicial official said Saturday that the man had blamed Charlie Hebdo and its publication of cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad.

Tensions have resurfaced lately, with more than a dozen people on trial in the 2015 violence, many facing charges of aiding Coulibaly, who was killed after security forces stormed the grocery.

Much like the survivors of the 2015 rampage at Charlie Hebdo, which the trial focused on earlier this month, the witnesses last week told a breathless courtroom about their memories of the terrifying assault and how it left their personal lives in tatters.

But Charlie Hebdo was targeted specifically over its printing of the satirical cartoons, and its staff members were wearily accustomed to menacing threats. Last week’s witnesses were grappling with a very different question: Why us?

“Why the gratuitous malice?” Eric Cohen, Yohan Cohen’s father, asked the court. “Why this hatred of the Jew? I will never understand it.”

Several of the former hostages or their family members did not testify, still fearful for their lives or unwilling to recount their trauma. Some now live in the United States or Israel, where all four of Coulibaly’s victims are buried.

Most of the 14 people on trial in Paris, three of them in absentia, are charged with participation in a

terrorist conspiracy, while a few face the more serious charge of direct complicity in the crimes. They are accused of providing varying degrees of logistical aid to the January 2015 attackers, mainly Coulibaly.

Some of the accused are former prison mates or childhood friends of his. But none are accused of being present at the scenes of the crimes, and all have denied any knowledge of a terrorist plot.

Zarie Sibony, 28, who at the time was a cashier at the supermarket, gave one of the most vivid accounts in her court appearance. She recounted that she was scanning a pack of frozen chicken when a shot startled her.

Cohen, another employee, was hit, and Sibony dropped to the floor. She heard heavy footsteps, and a man’s voice asking someone his name before shooting the person dead. She would later learn that it was Braham, the shopper running errands for his wife.

Thinking the store was being robbed, she offered the contents of her cash register. But Coulibaly just laughed. “‘You think I came here for money?’” Sibony recalled him saying. He was after Jews.

Sibony, who trained as a nurse after the attack and now lives in Israel, told the court that when she lowered the store’s metal shutter on the assailant’s orders, “I said to myself that I was burying us alive.”

When Saada rushed in, thinking he had made it just before closing time to buy bread, Sibony urged him to leave, and then he turned around and Coulibaly shot

him in the back. And when Hattab — the customer who came in for a bottle of wine — tried to fire at Coulibaly with an assault rifle that was left on a pallet of flour bags, Sibony said she watched with horror as Coulibaly killed him with a bullet to the head.

Some hostages, helped by Lassana Bathily, a Muslim employee from Mali who was praised as a hero and later became a French citizen, hid in the basement.

Those who remained upstairs were told by Coulibaly to sit in the aisles and to give their names, ages, jobs — and religions.

Almost all were Jewish. One 3-year-old boy, who had witnessed the whole attack, started vomiting.

The attack ended when police stormed in and killed Coulibaly.

“The only motive for these crimes is the origin, real or presumed, of these people; their Judaism,” Galina Elbaz, a lawyer representing the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, said at the trial.

“It’s the conspiracy-minded idea that originated with the far right, the idea that Jews have a grip on power,” she said.

Some lawyers for the former hostages have complained that the prosecution has not done enough to convey the extent of Coulibaly’s anti-Semitic motives.

His frightening arsenal — two handguns, two assault rifles and enough explosives to bring the building down — show that he never intended to let any hostages out alive, they say.

A memorial at the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris after the 2015 attack.

16

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

There’s gold in them thar Braes

Marshall Badza, left, the manager of the Cononish mine, speaks to workers at the site near Tyndrum, Scotland, Sept.

8, 2020. With prices for gold surging, amateur prospectors are fanning out over the Scottish countryside, while the nation’s first commercial mine is set to start production.

By STEPHEN CASTLE

A

s a late afternoon mist rolled in over hills carpeted with purple heather, Alan Popovich stood knee-deep in a fast-flowing river, weary but undaunted despite searching all day in the water without success.

“I guarantee there is gold here,” Popovich said as he used a hand pump to siphon water and gravel from a ditch in the riverbed, sift it in a sluice, and then pan for a metal that has been sought in Scotland for more than 4,000 years.

A few minutes later, in a green pan tilted slightly to one side, a few shiny specks of gold glinted in the fading sunlight from a mix of drab fragments of rock. “There’s gold, you can see it, right there,” he exclaimed with a mixture of elation and relief.

In this beautiful and remote valley about an hour south of Glasgow, Scotland, a sprawling medley of tents, trailer vehicles and campfires is testament to a surge in interest in the age-old quest for gold.

Not only do many Britons have more free time because they are on furlough, but the coronavirus pandemic has also made outdoor pastimes more attractive.

At the same time, the price of gold has surged close to $2,000 an ounce, and interest in it has also been propelled by the news that Scotland’s first commercial gold mine plans to start production in November.

“I never thought in a million years I would be in a river

in Scotland panning for gold,” said Popovich, 52, who works for a pharmaceutical distribution company. He is originally from Detroit but has lived for 19 years in Scotland.

But now on furlough and with time on his hands, it seemed the obvious thing to do.

“What else am I going to do? Go to the pub? I don’t think so. I don’t even want to go to a restaurant because of COVID,” he said, as he reflected on how he came to pitch a small tent in a stretch of countryside where getting a cellphone signal requires climbing to the top of a hill.

Along the river bank, Suzie McGraw, who is from Glasgow and who has been a regular visitor to the area since childhood, said she had never seen as many people there as she had this year. Sitting next to her around a campfire, Mat White, from Leeds in England, said 33 people had joined a Facebook page about gold panning in one evening.

“There’s a gold rush,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

If so, it wouldn’t be the first. Scotland experienced at least two documented 19th-century gold rushes after news of discoveries in California caused a global sensation. But rather than riches, those bursts of interest mostly delivered disappointment.

One, the Sutherland rush in 1868 and 1869 in the Scottish Highlands, yielded modest quantities of gold. But during a stampede to Kinnesswood, in eastern Scotland, from May to July 1852, around 2,000 people hoping to find a life-changing fortune discovered only “fool’s gold” — valueless iron pyrites.

Nobody in the hills near Wanlockhead is expecting to get rich, however. While 1 gram of gold is worth around 50 pounds, or about $65, that would be a good find for a day.

The ambition of most is to collect enough tiny fragments — or “pickers,” in panning jargon — to create a ring for a loved one.

Serious money may well be made around 100 miles to the north, near the village of Tyndrum, where there really is gold in the imposing hills — or braes, as they are called in Scottish. The metal comes from the Dalradian rock formation that runs east from Scandinavia beneath Scotland and Northern Ireland and on to Newfoundland.

“People have been out panning in the streams and burns and glens for centuries, and there have always been nuggets found, and every year or two, someone pops up with a massive nugget of gold,” said Richard Gray, chief executive of Scotgold Resources, which is developing the Cononish mine near Tyndrum. “But it’s down to the likes of us to get this particular deposit well defined.”

Although by international standards this is a tiny mine, Gray, who has worked in much bigger ventures around the world, still thinks he has, literally, struck gold. He said his aim is to produce small quantities — 12,000 ounces a year initially, then double that — but of a very high grade. And because it is Scottish, and so in short supply, it sells at a premium.

“We are a niche player, and we are going to make very good money out of it,” he said, adding that, after he produced a small quantity as a prototype in 2016, jewelers lined up to take more.

To reach the mine, visitors have to dodge grazing cattle and navigate a narrow road that cuts through an imposing glen skirting a lively river. A processing facility is being built near a tunnel that has been drilled and blasted almost 2,300 feet into the hillside.

The mine manager, Marshall Badza, who has worked on many bigger mines, including in his native Zimbabwe, leads the way through the mine, wading through muddy puddles, the pitch dark illuminated by torches and the lights of mine vehicles ferrying rock to the exit.

The mine, which is in a national park, won approval only after a tussle with environmental groups. The upshot is that production of gold here will not involve cyanide, which is widely used elsewhere in processing but raises environmental concerns.

Instead, the gold will be extracted through a technology known as gravity separation, but this technique will work on only around one-quarter of the gold mined from Cononish, while the rest will be processed outside Scotland.

After their work is done, the engineers must leave the national park in pretty much the same environmental condition in which they found it. Badza pointed his torch to an area that will eventually be turned into a bat colony.

“It’s not just a gold project. It is breaking ground in many ways. It’s actually making history,” he said. “If we don’t get it right, it could be the end of gold mining in Scotland, the first and last commercial gold mine.”

The hope, however, is that it will instead prompt other mining ventures, bolstering the economy.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

17

Spanish court upholds ban on Catalan leader

By RAPHAEL MINDER

T

he Supreme Court of Spain on Monday upheld a ruling barring the separatist leader of Catalonia from public office, a decision that could renew tensions in the restive northeastern region.

The Catalan police force had put officers on high alert for possible protests before the decision, which confirmed a December ruling against the separatist leader, Quim Torra, president of the regional government of Catalonia.

The verdict Monday threw Catalan politics once more into turmoil. Torra is expected to be replaced in office by his deputy, Pere Aragonès, who represents a different separatist party. Torra had intended to hold an early election to shore up support for the separatist movement this year, but that plan was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic that has hit Spain particularly hard. Catalans are now expected to instead elect a new parliament early next year.

Torra’s case is part of a long series of clashes pitting Spain’s central government and its judiciary against Catalan leaders who favor independence. Politicians have failed for years to resolve the secessionist deadlock, and it has increasingly been left to judges to handle, while continuing to split Catalan society down the middle.

Quim Torra was selected as president of Catalonia’s regional government by separatist lawmakers after his predecessor was ousted over an illegal attempt to declare independence from Spain.

The case against Torra is centered on his refusal last year to take down yellow ribbons and other signs display-

ing solidarity with the separatist movement, in defiance of an order by the electoral commission in Madrid. The commission had instructed that all partisan symbols should be removed from public buildings during the political campaign leading up to a Spanish election in April 2019.

The ribbons had become a way of showing support for separatist leaders who were sentenced later in 2019 for having made an unsuccessful attempt to declare independence two years earlier. A court in Barcelona ruled in December that his refusal to clear the ribbons and other symbols amounted to civil disobedience, barring him from office for 18 months and prompting Torra to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Torra was selected in 2018 as the replacement leader of Catalonia by the separatist majority of lawmakers that controls the regional parliament. The previous office holder, Carles Puigdemont, was ousted by the Spanish government in October 2017 over the illegal attempt to secede.

Since then, Puigdemont has been fighting efforts to extradite him from Belgium to stand trial for his part in the failed independence effort. Although sidelined abroad, he has continued to wield influence over Catalan politics, as well as winning a seat in the European Parliament last year, which he was barred from taking.

Ex-president of Pakistan is indicted on money laundering charges

By SALMAN MASOOD

A

former president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, was indicted Monday in a money laundering case, the latest legal action against him and one that his supporters say is part of a wider trend against politicians opposed to Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Zardari is the widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007. He served as president from 2008-13, and is currently a member of parliament. He is also facing a raft of court cases.

He was arrested in June 2019 by anti-corruption officials in a separate money laundering case and released on bail on medical grounds in December.

During the court hearing Monday, a sister of Zardari, Faryal Talpur, and 13 other people were also indicted. Zardari and his sister denied the charges.

The charges against Zardari are related to money laundering through suspicious bank accounts and companies.

He and other opposition politicians have accused the Khan government of political victimization. Khan, who won the 2018 election on a strong anti-corruption platform, denies the accusation. But critics say that

Khan’s government, in collusion with Pakistan’s powerful military, is targeting the opposition in the guise of accountability.

When asked by court reporters for his comments on Monday’s indictment, Zardari replied with a verse in Urdu: “We have passed through such junctures earlier also.”

Before becoming president in 2008, Zardari spent 11 years in jail on corruption and murder charges. He was never convicted and has maintained his innocence, but allegations of corruption have followed him in his political career. The former president has remained active in politics, and his son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, is chairman of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party.

Chaudhry Manzoor Ahmed, another senior Pakistan Peoples Party figure, said the indictment was a routine process in court proceedings and that the real issue was a lack of evidence.

“Where is the evidence?” he said. “There is no evidence against Mr. Zardari.”

“He has spent several years in jail on trumped-up charges,” Ahmed added. “So, it’s nothing for him. But for us the biggest concern is his ailing health.”

Ahmed aid the government had been increasing the pressure on opposition parties since Sept. 20, after

a meeting of opposition groups that have called for, among other things, an end to military interference in Pakistan’s politics. Opposition parties have also warned of countrywide protests against the Khan government and the military next month.

“These court cases are the usual tactics to intimidate and threaten the political leadership,” Ahmed said.

“But we are not bothered by such tactics.”

Also Monday, anti-corruption officials arrested the leader of the opposition in parliament, Shehbaz Sharif, president of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, after a high court rejected his bail plea in a money laundering case in the eastern city of Lahore.

Sharif is the younger brother of the ousted prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who is in London for medical treatment.

The arrest was widely expected. Sharif, who has served as chief minister of Punjab province, said last week that Khan, the prime minister, personally wanted to see him behind bars.

Marriyum Aurangzeb, spokeswoman of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, said Monday that, “Shehbaz Sharif was arrested on the orders of Prime Minister Imran Khan.”

She said the arrest was politically motivated.

18

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

We don’t need debates

By CHARLES M. BLOW

T

he first column I ever wrote was about the April 2008 Democratic presidential debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It took place in the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

The debate was a mess. As I wrote at the time: “The moderators spent about 40 minutes on a trite list of recriminations apparently intended to bait the candidates into a ‘Jerry Springer’-like brawl. Barack Obama was again asked to address the kerfuffle he caused by labeling rural voters ‘bitter’ and to explain his relationship with the frightening Reverend Wright, and Hillary Clinton was again pushed back on her heels for saying that she had ducked bullets in Bosnia.”

I focused that column on the lack of discussion of environmental issues.

Since then, I have covered many more presidential debates — sometimes writing about them, sometimes discussing them on television or social media.

At one time, I was into the spectacle of it all as much as anyone else. I waited for the defining moments and the slip-ups, the best zingers and the worst flubs.

But debates have come to be about sport and

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There is nothing President Trump can say or do during a debate to redeem himself. sparring rather than a true comparison of the relative readiness of the candidates. They are too much theater, too little substance.

The debates test the performative aspect of leadership: stamina, mental agility, wit. Policy is discussed, but rarely if ever in greater depth than what the candidates have already published in some way. Times have changed. Candidates post their policy positions on their websites, readily accessible from voters’ phones.

Furthermore, it’s not clear to what degree debates alter the trajectory of a race anyway. As John Sides wrote in Washington Monthly magazine in 2012: “That presidential debates can be ‘game changers’ is a belief almost universally held by political pundits and strategists. Political scientists, however, aren’t so sure. Indeed, scholars who have looked most carefully at the data have found that, when it comes to shifting enough votes to decide the outcome of the election, presidential debates have rarely, if ever, mattered.”

Plus, nearly 900,000 Americans have already voted. And, according to CNN, there are “28 million ballots already requested and another 43 million set to be automatically mailed to voters.”

Maybe there are true undecided voters who will use debate performance to make up their minds, but I simply do not believe this is a significant constituency.

This election is already underway. People are already voting. Minds are already made up.

For this reason, I’m not necessarily looking forward to Tuesday’s debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Will it be entertaining? Likely. Will it change the contours of the race? Unlikely.

These regular presidential debates are a relatively recent occurrence in American presidential politics. According to the Commission on Presidential Debates, “1948 and 1956 were the only public debates among presidential candidates prior to 1960.”

Furthermore, there were no moderators in the 1948 debate. In fact, one of the most famous series of debates in history, the 1858 exchanges between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas that set the stage for Lincoln’s presidential run, had no moderator.

In some ways, it is the moderators who complicate the debates, who add an extra element that is not always useful. One could argue that today’s candidates lack the decorum to pull off a no-moderator debate, but in some ways that would be the only way that they could engage each other on the topics they want to discuss, rather than those the moderators want them to discuss.

For all these reasons, I’m not looking forward to Trump making a scene and telling lies. I’m not looking forward to the assessments of the moderators. I’m not looking forward to hype. We may learn things. We often do. And those things are worth learning. But, what is most important is policy and character.

Indeed, we don’t need a debate.

What will it really tell us that we don’t already know? What will it truly reveal? The debate will show us how the candidates converse and clash. It will show how they respond when attacked and how they recover — or not — when bruised.

But none of this, at this late date, should be the determinant of how one votes.

Trump is actively threatening to assault our democracy by refusing to say that he will accept the results of an election if he loses, by refusing to say that he would ensure a peaceful transfer of power from him to Biden. He is assaulting our democracy by undermining confidence in the election and by lying about mail-in voting, a necessity for many during a pandemic.

Trump has done so much to degrade this country, to divide it, to destroy it, that there is nothing he can say or do during a debate to redeem himself.

Debates are simply a formality, a modern ritual, one with far less meaning than people think. And this one will be even more useless. The choice is already clear.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

19

Solicitan a la gobernadora declaración de emergencia para comunidad en Utuado Por THE STAR

E

l representante del Partido Nuevo Progresista (PNP), Michael Abid Quiñones Irizarry, solicitó el lunes, a la gobernadora, Wanda Vázquez Garced, que declare inmediatamente un estado de emergencia en la comunidad sector La Mula para que así se viabilice la asignación de fondos para la reparación, urgente, de un tramo de la carretera municipal que sirve como conector hacia la carretera estatal PR553 para sobre 100 familias en un área de Utuado.El legislador por el Distrito 22, el cual comprende los municipios de Utuado, Lares, Adjuntas y Jayuya,

hizo hincapié en la necesidad apremiante que tienen sobre 200 ciudadanos en contar con una vía de rodaje viable y transitable.

“Hago un llamado a la Gobernadora para que nos ayude en Utuado.

Las familias que residen en el sector La Mula están desesperadas porque no cuentan con una vía de rodaje que les brinde acceso seguro y esto ha causado grandes dificultades de movilidad, más ahora en tiempos de la pandemia del COVID-19. Sabemos que el camino en cuestión pertenece al Municipio. Pero no podemos esperar por acción de la administración municipal, los residentes necesitan la ayuda ya”,

señaló Quiñones Irizarry en comunicación escrita.

“El Municipio nunca la reparó (la carretera) luego del impacto del huracán María en el 2017, fue la comunidad que hizo el trabajo con mucha dificultad, con tensores para postes de electricidad, entre otros equipos.

Hace varios días, el Municipio solo echó asfalto, no reparó los cimientos para garantizar una carretera segura.

Para complicar el asunto, los camiones del propio municipio transitaron por la vía de rodaje, terminándose de destruir. La misma colapsó con las fuertes lluvias de este fin de semana”, agregó.

Inspeccionan protocolos de COVID-19 en los casinos Por THE STAR

L

a Comisión cameral de Turismo y Bienestar Social llevó a cabo una inspección ocular el lunes, en el Casino del Mar del hotel La Concha Renaissance San Juan Resort, en el Condado, para constatar y revisar los protocolos de COVID-19; así como atender reclamos de la industria dirigidos a ampliar el horario de cierre para generar más ingresos y preservar los empleos de los trabajadores en los casinos.

El presidente de la Comisión, Néstor Alonso Vega, recalcó que la prioridad es mantener la seguridad de los empleados y visitantes, por lo que era necesario revisar los protocolos y asegurarse de que están cumpliendo con todas las medidas de protección y con las disposiciones de la Orden Ejecutiva vigente.

“La industria hotelera y los casinos es una de las más afectadas económicamente por la pandemia, por eso es necesario buscar alternativas que ayuden a fortalecer este sector y preservar los empleos. Pudimos constatar que están siguiendo todos los protocolos, y han adoptado otras medidas adicionales como colocar acrílicos entre las máquinas para la protección de las personas que van a utilizar las máquinas de juegos. Además, cada vez que

una persona se levanta de una mesa o máquina, desinfectan el área con un equipo especial para ello”, indicó el representante en comunicación escrita.

“La gerencia de este casino nos indica que en este momento ante la falta de una vacuna se debe continuar limitando la capacidad de personas permitidas en el interior de los casinos por seguridad, pero a cambio piden que se extienda la hora de cierre. Es

algo que se tiene que evaluar por la Gobernadora y el Ejecutivo y se tendría que tomar en cuenta en la próxima revisión de la Orden Ejecutiva”, señaló el representante Alonso Vega.

Varios funcionarios del Departamento de Salud participaron en la vista ocular, entre ellos el director de la Oficina de Investigaciones, Jesús Hernández; la directora de Salud de la Región Metro, Joed Laboy;

y el director de Salud de la Región de Bayamón, Moisés Ramírez. También participó el director ejecutivo de la Comisión de Juegos de Puerto Rico, José Maymó Azize.

El gerente del Casino, Sigfrido De Jesús, hizo la petición oficial a la Comisión cameral de que se extienda los horarios de cierre de los casinos y sugirió se podría prohibir la venta de bebidas alcohólicas desde cierta hora. “Yo me alegro que hayan venido, nosotros estamos enfocados en la protección de nuestros clientes. Tenemos que ver los casinos como un facilitador de la industria de turismo”, dijo De Jesús.

Actualmente el horario de los casinos es de 6:00 de la mañana a 9:00 de la noche, y sugieren que el horario de cierre se extienda hasta las 12:00 de la medianoche.

El director de la Comisión de Juegos de Puerto Rico, José Maymó, aseguró que en los 15 casinos que hay en la isla se siguen las mismas medidas y protocolos de COVID-19.

Los funcionarios de Salud se expresaron satisfechos con las medidas de protección establecidas en el Casino del Mar y destacaron que han fortalecido los protocolos en comparación con el verano a esta fecha.

20

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Technical stars help pull off a Christopher Nolan narrative

Kenneth Branagh in a scene from “Tenet,” directed by Christopher Nolan, who prefers practical effects over digital ones.

By NICOLAS RAPOLD

“T

enet” is only the latest film by Christopher Nolan to play with time and complicated action.

“Inception,” “Dunkirk” and the Dark Knight installments all aimed for new heights in tightly coordinated suspense and spectacle. But how do the makers of these mind-boggling films pull it all together?

The mastermind is unquestionably Nolan, but he is not alone. The multiple narratives, the military-grade action set pieces, the unforgiving studio production schedules all demand masterminds in addition to the director.

I spoke with a few of the filmmaker’s collaborators, past and present, to understand what it takes to make his visions a reality — or an unreality, as the case may be.

The Editing Twenty years ago, “Memento” made Nolan a director to watch and introduced his penchant for slicing and dicing narrative. Dody Dorn was the Academy Awardnominated editor of the hit, which recounted in reverse the story of an amnesiac caught up in murderous intrigue.

Dorn had to assemble Nolan’s clockwork mystery for audiences who didn’t know what to expect.

Her work in “Memento” underlined the importance of psychological purpose behind Nolan’s approach. “The

point of view and the lack of information that you get by telling a story out of chronological order allows you to empathize with the main character, Leonard,” Dorn said.

Not knowing the extent of Leonard’s violent actions and motives leaves us open to understanding this conflicted figure. When his vigilantism is revealed, the puzzle carries an emotional payload beyond the frisson of a mere twist.

The pause-and-rewind premise of “Memento” bears a definite family resemblance to the forward-and-backward conceit of “Tenet,” not to mention the nested storytelling of “Inception” and “The Prestige.” All of these movies require careful calibration. It’s a matter of withholding just enough to keep things interesting.

In “Memento,” that meant replaying a few seconds of the previous scene, but not a second too much.

The Action Dorn edited one more Nolan feature, “Insomnia,” but longer collaborations are more typical. Lee Smith has been the editor on many Nolan projects, orchestrating their multilevel crosscutting. Wally Pfister was the cinematographer on seven of his films, including “Memento” and “Inception” (2010), for which he won an Academy Award.

But also key to these action-heavy movies is the stunt coordinator, George Cottle.

Cottle began as a stuntman and drove the Batmobile

through all manner of chaos in the Dark Knight movies.

His role as coordinator is critical because Nolan prizes practical effects and in-camera stunts over computer-generated imagery to create the sense of physical bodies moving through actual space.

Nolan’s most eye-opening sequences have a bravura quality along with rising and converging tensions, and Cottle maintains the energy on the ground. He presents the filmmaker with ideas for particular moves and choreography in fight sequences, and receives step-by-step guidance from the director.

“For a fight in ‘Tenet,’ he might say, ‘Look, in this part of the movie, John David is really coming into his own. So I just want to see full-on aggression, but I want a moment of weakness here, and then I want him to come back strong at the end. Maybe 20 to 25 seconds,’ ” Cottle said, referring to the main character played by John David Washington. He singled out the film’s Mumbai buildingjumping sequence as especially nerve-wracking.

Because these elaborate scenes can end up on huge Imax screens, the team also learns to adjust shots for audience comprehension.

“With that size of screen, we had to hold on shots for a little longer,” Pfister, the cinematographer, said. “When you’re watching this in such an immersive fashion, you need time to scan the screen.”

“And if it was going to be a really quick cut,” he said, “I needed a little more light to see things better because it’s only going to be on the screen for a fleeting moment.”

The System A Hollywood veteran, Nilo Otero has been first assistant director for Nolan’s movies since “The Dark Knight” (2008). It’s a behind-the-scenes role that doesn’t receive much attention, but its existence frees up the filmmaker to do his job.

Otero breaks down the script for Nolan’s review, and that can entail working out shooting days, wrangling actors and even scheduling around the ocean tides.

Otero views Nolan as a rarity when it comes to blockbusters: an old-school filmmaker who can attend to all facets of production rather than specializing and who still prefers shooting with a single camera.

Nolan is not the only studio-friendly filmmaker who can keep to a schedule, but there is a notable intensity to his focus and pace. “Chris would shoot a $200-millionplus movie like ‘Tenet’ at the same speed they would shoot an episode of TV,” Cottle said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Cottle has worked on other franchises that rely more heavily on digital effects. For him, both approaches have value, but Nolan’s has a grounded energy that’s distinct.

“The CGI is incredible, but it ultimately ends up that it’s some guy sitting in front of a computer, generating it like a cartoon,” he said. “And there’s a big difference between that and what we do.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

21

JLo and Maluma’s romantic duel, and 9 more new songs

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

La Dame Blanche, ‘La Maltratada’ The cheery tone of “La Maltradada” is a pointed act of defiance from La Dame Blanche, a cigar-puffing Cuban singer and rapper (Yaite Ramos Rodriguez) who lives in Paris, juggles traditional and current rhythms, and releases her new album, “Ella” (“Her”), on Friday. A stripped-down Latin beat and pithy flute and trombone riffs accompany her as she sings about surviving physical abuse: “Body broken, head held high.”

— JON PARELES

P

op critics weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos.

Jennifer Lopez and Maluma, ‘Pa Ti’ and ‘Lonely’ A pair of effective new songs from Jennifer Lopez and Maluma, well-matched singers more interested in rhythm than power, more invested in melodrama than depth. “Pa Ti” is the ascent, a crisp flirtation that’s hard to argue with — both sing with sass and swing. And then “Lonely” is the collapse, a slightly more morose thumper with less steady vocals. Both songs will be included in “Marry Me,” a film due in February that stars both singers.

— JON CARAMANICA Wizkid featuring H.E.R., ‘Smile’ Wizkid, an Afrobeats luminary from Nigeria, offers buoyant benevolence in “Smile,” a love song riding a reggae beat that has been repatriated to modern Africa. The track rises further when H.E.R. adds vocals that sound sultry, thoughtful and satisfied.

— JON PARELES Oneohtrix Point Never, ‘Drive Time Suite’ With deliberate obscurity, Daniel Lopatin named his long-running electronic studio project, Oneohtrix Point Never, after a Boston soft-rock radio station that promotes itself as Magic 106.7. So the three-part online preview of his new album, “Magic,” as it mixes quasi-baroque keyboard filigree and string-section support, is also in a way a homecoming, though one that leads into the expensive, possibly illusory comforts of soft-rock. It starts with blurred radio station audio logos, and offers both refuge — “I know a place to go,” Lopatin sings through computers in “Auto & Allo” — and a drift into disorientation in “Long Road Home.”

— JON PARELES Rare Essence featuring Snoop Dogg, ‘Hit the Floor’ Snoop Dogg has always rapped as if he’s slithering around a corner, seeping into whatever spaces present themselves. That strutting approach

Maluma and Jennifer Lopez released a pair of tracks that will be featured in the film “Marry Me.” would be a natural fit for the loping funk of Washington, D.C., go-go music, a sound that has remained fiercely regional for decades. This collaboration with long-running band Rare Essence is apt proof of the thin line separating go-go from the low-endthick funk that formed the foundation of early 1990s rap music in Los Angeles, where Snoop got his start. The band nods to the silky whine of “Gin & Juice,” and Snoop somehow both melts and bops his syllables, a happy fish with a new ocean to swim in.

— JON CARAMANICA The Shins, ‘The Great Divide’ The Shins have traded their indierock guitars for grandiose synthesizers, and they unabashedly feed James Mercer’s earnest vocals through assorted effects in “The Great Divide,” a gleaming, adamantly optimistic processional that promises unity after division: “A stitch in time/Then we recombine.” The song needs every bit of sonic armor to stay so positive right now.

— JON PARELES

Bryson Tiller, ‘Always Forever’ Bryson Tiller just released the deluxe edition of his stellar debut album, “Trapsoul,” five years after its initial release. That’s one way to signal to fans that you’re revisiting the way you used to do things in advance of a new album. “Always Forever” is from Tiller’s forthcoming third album, and it may as well have appeared on “Trapsoul.” All the components are there: lithe singing in the shape of rapping, aspirated and digitally baked syllables, the angst of the lonely.

— JON CARAMANICA Carla Morrison, ‘Ansiedad’ The music is a march, with crisply programmed drums, ascending major chords, and backup vocals that gather and multiply in support, harmonizing and repeating “mi ansiedad” like a triumphal refrain. But “Ansiedad” means “anxiety,” and that’s what Latin Grammy-winning Mexican songwriter Carla Morrison is singing about in her not-so-diffident soprano, describing all the ways her troubled mind is holding her back. It finds its strength in confessing to weakness.

— JON PARELES

Logan Richardson, ‘Black Wallstreet’ Logan Richardson manages a mix of keening and complexity on “Black Wallstreet,” as his reverb-soused alto sax slides across a moving bed of cello harmonies overdubbed by Ezgi Karakus. The track is a highlight from Richardson’s latest album, “Afrofuturism,” which has the experimental drift of a mixtape: Performances like this are crushed up against full-band thrashers, with spoken interludes mixed in throughout.

— GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Christian McBride Big Band, ‘Road Song’ When he emulates the brushy thumb-strokes and smooth octave playing of Wes Montgomery here, guitarist Mark Whitfield is really helping Christian McBride live out a childhood fantasy. When he was a high school student in 1980s Philadelphia, the bassist and Joey DeFrancesco, then a budding organist, shared a love for the big-band albums that Montgomery had made two decades earlier with organist Jimmy Smith and arranger Oliver Nelson. On his latest album with his own big band, “For Jimmy, Wes and Oliver,” McBride decided to emulate the format and style of those 1966 recordings, letting DeFrancesco fill Smith’s chair and enlisting Whitfield for Montgomery’s. The result is a fond tribute that includes repertoire from those original recording sessions, plus some selections written by the contemporary band members.

— GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

22

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Millions of wild animals imported from hot spots of emerging disease, risking new pandemics

Creatures legally brought in to be sold as pets — including bats and rats — may carry viruses that can jump to humans, researchers say

By JANE DALTON

M

illions of live wild animals are being legally imported into the US from hot spots of emerging diseases, risking the spread of lethal viruses, researchers have discovered.

Creatures from bats and parrots to snakes, lizards and rats are brought into the country mostly to be sold as exotic pets, but with some sent to zoos, a study found.

Between 2014 and 2018, more than 3 million wild animals were flown or shipped in from 90 countries, many in regions considered “hot spots” for new diseases, such as Indonesia, El Salvador, Cameroon, Nicaragua, Singapore, Ghana and Madagascar.

The study, which used figures from the government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), found that

2,492,156 amphibians, 578,772 reptiles, 150,638 mammals and 99,111 birds were imported in the five years studied.

Nearly 70 bats were imported from Madagascar and a dozen others from the Czech Republic and Guyana. The species is suspected of being a source of Covid-19 and carries rabies viruses.

Animals including African pygmy hedgehogs, frogs and tortoises are transported to the UK to fuel the “cruel” trade in exotic pets, according to the report, from charity World Animal Protection.

At least 150,638 mammals, mostly rodents, were brought in from 51 countries. The Czech Republic, Italy and Spain were “of particular concern” for exporting large numbers to the UK. The report warns: “Unless the nature of wildlife trade shifts considerably, the increasing rate of biotic [organisms] exchange indicates there will be greater opportunities for pathogens to proliferate across the globe.”

Wildlife trade is “a lethal hotbed of disease”, the charity says, because it brings wild animals with immune systems weakened by the stress of captivity

and transport into unnatural proximity to other animals and into close contact with people, often in insanitary conditions.

The World Health Organisation says that globally, about a billion cases of illness and millions of deaths occur every year from zoonoses – diseases that spread from animals to humans – and that 75 per cent of emerging zoonotic infectious diseases originate in wild animals.

Diseases may be caused when viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites that wild animals are carrying are introduced into new environments, the researchers said.

Scientists say outbreaks of new diseases with the potential to become pandemics are on the rise, and have become four times as frequent in the past half-century.

Since the 1970s, it is estimated at least three dozen infectious diseases have emerged from human interference with animals, including Sars, Mers, Ebola, bird flu, swine flu and the Zika virus.

The Covid-19 pandemic is widely believed to have originated in these

conditions in a market in Wuhan, China, selling wildlife species that would not mix in the wild.

Peter Kemple Hardy, of World Animal Protection, said: “This evidence shows that the legal wildlife trade into the UK is causing suffering to millions of animals and risking another public health crisis.

“We must not overlook the dangers this poses; harmful and deadly pathogens can be transmitted to humans regardless of a wild animal’s legal status.

“In a post-Covid world, we should demand nothing less than a global and permanent ban on the commercial wildlife trade, to protect wild animals, human health and the planet.”

The organisation says the legal wildlife trade dwarfs the illegal trade despite the public health risk.

Other imports included at least 74,829 parrots. Several diseases in humans are linked to birds including histoplasmosis and campylobacteriosis.

The five report authors, three of whom are scientists at Manchester University’s ecology and environment research centre, highlight how rats may spread leptospirosis and plague, and how a recent case of bubonic plague in Mongolia was thought to have originated from contact with a dead marmot.

The peer-reviewed study was published in the journal Animals.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

23

Does wearing glasses protect you from Coronavirus?

A volunteer wearing glasses and a mask at a polling location in Des Moines, Iowa, June 2, 2020. After researchers noticed fewer nearsighted patients in a hospital ward in China, they speculated that wearing glasses might offer some protection against Covid-19.

By TARA PARKER-POPE

W

hen researchers in China were analyzing hospital data of patients with COVID-19, they noticed an odd trend: Very few of the sick patients regularly wore glasses.

In one hospital in Suizhou, China, 276 patients were admitted over a 47-day period, but only 16 patients — less than 6% — had myopia or nearsightedness that required them to wear glasses for more than eight hours a day. By comparison, more than 30% of similarly aged people in the region needed glasses for nearsightedness, earlier research had shown.

Given that the rate of nearsightedness appeared to be so much higher in the general population than in the COVID ward, the scientists wondered: Could wearing glasses protect a person from becoming infected with coronavirus?

“Wearing of eyeglasses is common among Chinese individuals of all ages,” the study authors wrote. “However, since the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan in December 2019, we observed that few patients with eyeglasses were admitted in the hospital ward.”

The observation “could be preliminary evidence that daily wearers of eyeglasses are less susceptible to COVID-19,” the authors speculated.

Experts say it’s too soon to draw conclusions from the re-

search — or recommend that people start wearing eye protection in addition to masks in hopes of lowering their risk for infection.

It may be that eyeglasses act as a partial barrier, protecting eyes from the splatter of a cough or sneeze. Another explanation for the finding could be that people who wear glasses are less likely to rub their eyes with contaminated hands. A 2015 report on face touching found that over the course of an hour, students watching a lecture touched their eyes, nose or mouth, on average, about 10 times, though the researchers did not look into whether wearing glasses made a difference.

The current study, published in JAMA Ophthalmology, was accompanied by a commentary from Dr. Lisa Maragakis, an infectious disease specialist and associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who urged caution in interpreting the results.

The study was small, involving fewer than 300 cases of COVID-19, a tiny fraction of the nearly 30 million reported cases of coronavirus infection around the world. Another concern is that the data on nearsightedness in the comparison group were gleaned from a study that took place decades earlier.

And Maragakis noted that any number of factors could confound the data, and it may be that wearing glasses is simply associated with another variable that affects risk for COVID-19.

For example, it could be that people who wear glasses tend to

be older, and more careful and more likely to stay home during a viral outbreak, than those who do not wear glasses. Or perhaps people who can afford glasses are less likely to contract the virus for other reasons, like having the means to live in less crowded spaces.

“It’s one study,” Maragakis said. “It does have some biological plausibility, given that in health care facilities, we use eye protection,” such as face shields or goggles. “But what remains to be investigated is whether eye protection in a public setting would add any protection over and above masks and physical distancing. I think it’s still unclear.”

Health care workers wear protective equipment over their eyes to protect them from droplets that can fly from coughs and sneezes, as well as aerosolized particles that form when patients undergo medical procedures, such as intubation. But for a vast majority of people, that extra level of protection probably isn’t needed if a person is wearing a mask and keeping physical distance in public spaces. There’s also the possibility of introducing risk by wearing glasses — some people might touch their faces more when they put on glasses, rather than less, Maragakis noted.

That said, more study is needed to see if the trend holds up in other study populations, said Dr. Thomas Steinemann, a spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology and professor of ophthalmology at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland.

“I think it’s provocative, and it’s extremely interesting,” Steinemann said.

But Steinemann noted that the study shouldn’t cause worry among people who don’t wear glasses. “It probably can’t hurt to wear glasses, but does everybody need to do that? Probably not,” he said. “I think you have to consider the practicality of wearing eye protection or a face shield. People in certain occupations, first responders, caregivers for someone who is ill, those are people who should maybe take special notice.”

The findings also raise interesting questions about how often the eyes might be the entry portal for the virus. It’s long been established that viruses and other germs can enter the body through facial mucous membranes in the eyes, nose and mouth.

But the nose seems to be a main entry point for coronavirus, because it has a high number of receptors that create a friendly environment in which the virus can replicate and move down the respiratory tract.

But doctors are seeing a small percentage of patients with eye symptoms, including conjunctivitis or pink eye, which suggests the virus may also be entering the body through the eyes.

Although eye symptoms are less common than other symptoms like cough or fever, various studies have reported that eye complaints can be a sign of COVID-19 infection.

Last month, researchers reported a study of 216 children hospitalized with COVID-19 in Wuhan. Among those patients, 49 children, or nearly 23% of the cases, had eye symptoms, including conjunctival discharge, eye rubbing and conjunctival congestion. In addition to pink eye, itchy eyes, excessive tearing, blurred vision and feeling like something is in the eye have all been described by patients with COVID-19.

24 LEGAL NOTICE

LEGAL NOTICE

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE AGUADILLA.

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

BANCO SANTANDER PUERTO RICO

YADIRA VILLANUEVA Demandante Vs. CABRERA BRAYNT John Doe y Richard Roe DAVID ARROYO como posibles tenedores VILLANUEVA, RYANT con interes.

DAVID ARROYO Demandados VILLANUEVA, KAMILA CIVIL NIJM. SJ2020CV04407 NADIRA ARROYO (602). SOBRE: CANCELAVILLANUEVA, TANIA CION DE PAGARE HIPOTELORAINE ROMÁN PEREZ, CARIO EXTRAVIADO. EMJUSTIN DAVID ARROYO PLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. A: JOHN DOE Y ROMÁN, RICHARD ROE Vs. (personas desconocidas YANLICK DAVID con posible interes) ARROYO LICIAGA

CIVIL NÚM.: AG2020CV00268.

SOBRE: PARTICIÓN DE HERENCIA/ AUTORIZACIÓN VENTA DE INMUEBLE. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: Yanlick David Arroyo Liciaga 314 W King St. Apt. 1 Philadelphia PA 17603

POR LA PRESENTE se le notifica que contra usted se ha presentado una demanda. Se le emplaza y requiere que presente su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los 30 días siguientes a 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.rama judicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la Secretaría del Tribunal. Deberá notificar copia de la misma a: Lcdo. Carlos R. Arroyo Serrano a la siguiente dirección: HC-6 Box 17114, San Sebastián P.R. 00685, teléfono (787) 247-0483. Correo electrónico: lcdo.carroyo@ gmail.com. Se le apercibe que si dejare de presentar 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, entiende que procede.

Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 28 de julio de 2020. SARAHI REYES PEREZ, Secretaria Regional. Arlene Guzman Pabon, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

@

En este caso la parte demandante ha radicado Demanda para que se decrete judicialmente el saldo de un pagare hipotecario a favor de Banco Santander Puerto Rico, por la suma principal de CUATRO MIL NOVECIENTOS CINCUENTA DOLARES ($4,950.00), sin intereses, vencedero el veintinueve (29) de Julio de dos mil doce (2012) constituida mediante la escritura numero 245, otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 30 de julio de 2007, bajo el testimonio numero 2,890, ante el Notario publicó Rafael A. Malave Lebrón, e inscrita al folio 37 del tomo 1149 de Santurce Norte finca 18,885 inscripción 7ma., Registro de la Propiedad Sección de Primera de San Juan, y esta garantizado por hipoteca sobre la propiedad sita en el 7 F APT. MAGDALENA TOWER, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO 00915, que se describe como sigue: ---URBANA: PROPIEDAD HORIZONTAL: Apartamento Siete guion Fl (7F) del Condominio Magdalena Towers, localizado en el séptimo piso, de forma rectangular irregular midiendo siete punto cincuenta metros (7.50 m) en su mayor longitud, por seis punto cero cuatro metros (6.04 m) en su mayor ancho, teniendo un area de cuarenta y cinco punto veintiocho metros cuadrados (45.28 mc). Su puerta de entrada principal mira hacia el Oeste y se comunica con el corredor comOn limitado de salida al elevador y escaleras que conduce al exterior. Colindando por el Norte, en una extension de cinco punto cuarenta y tres metros (5.43 m) con muro de carga que se separa de corredor comUn limitado y escalera comunes; por el Sur, en una extension de tres punto setenta y seis metros (3.76 m) con muro que to separa del apartamento privado E en una extension de uno punto cuarenta y siete metros (1.47 m) con pozo de

ventilación común y closet de metros de agua; por el Este, en una extension de siete punto cincuenta metros (7.50 m) con muro y ventanas que miran hacia el patio de fondo y por el Oeste, en una extension de siete punto veintidós metros (7.22 m) con muro que lo separa de corredor común de ventilación.

Este apartamento contiene un vestíbulo, sala, corredor, cocina, vestidor, baño, habitación, closet y terraza. En los elementos comunes generales corresponde este apartamento una participadOn equivalente a dos punto uno setenta y cinco por ciento (2.175%). En los elementos comunes limitados corresponde a este apartamento una participación equivalente a dieciséis punto doscientos tres por ciento (16.203%). Corresponde a este apartamento un área de estacionamiento en el área de estacionamiento del edificio. ---Inscrita al folio 185 del tomo 523 de Santurce Norte, finca numero 18,885, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, sección Primera. La parte demandante alega que dicho Pagare se ha extraviado, según mas detalladamente consta en la Demanda radicada que puede examinarse en la Secretaría de este Tribunal. Por tratarse de una obligación hipotecaria, y pudiendo usted tener interés en este caso o quedar afectado por el remedio solicitado, se les emplaza por este Edicto que se publicara una vez y se les requiere para que radique en este Tribunal sus contestaciones y notifiquen con copia de ellas al Lcdo. Jorge Garcia Rondon al 267 Sierra Morena San Juan, PR 00926, abogados de la parte demandante, dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto, apercibiéndosele que de no hacerlo así dentro del termino indicado, el Tribunal podrá anotar su rebeldía, dictar Sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin mas citarle ni Oírle. EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto por Orden del Tribunal, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoy 11 de septiembre de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Sec Regional.

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

ANGELA CINTRON ORTIZ Demandante vs.

ALBERTO RONDON REYES

Demandado CIVIL NÚM. SJ2020RF00861.

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

SALÓN: SOBRE: DIVORCIO (RUPTURA IRREPARABLE).

EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. DEL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: ALBERTO RONDON REYES RESIDENCIAL VISTA HERMOSA, EDIF 36, APT 381, SAN JUAN, PR 00921

PORL A PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva a la Demanda que se acompaña con este Emplazamiento dentro de los treinta (30) días de haber sido diligenciado este Emplazamiento, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento, notificando copia de la misma al abogado (a) de la parte Demandante o a ésta, de no tener representación legal. 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 electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial. pr/sumac/, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

VAZQUEZ & ASSOCIATES LAW OFFICES LCDA. NICOLE MARIE PEÑA CARTAGENA RUA 20300 379 Calle Cesar González Hato Rey, San Juan, PR 00918 Tel (787) 766-0949 Fax (787) 771-2425 Email: vazguezyasociadospr@ gmail.com EXTENDIDO BAJO MI FIRMA Y EL SELLO DEL TRIBUNAL, en SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, hoy día 18 de septiembre de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Sec del Tribunal. Luz O Rivera Benites, Sec Auxiliar.

Tuesday, September 29, 2020 Doe y Richard Roe como miembros desconocidos; ADMINISTRACIÓN PARA EL SUSTENTO DE MENORES, Y CENTRO DE RECAUDACIÓN SOBRE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES

Parte Demandada CASO CIVIL NUM: FA2020CV00024.

SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA POR LA VIA ORDINARIA Y COBRO DE DINERO. EMPLAZAMIENTO Y NOTIFICACION DE INTERPELACION POR EDICTO. Estados Unidos de América Presidente de los Estados Unidos de América Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico.

A: John Doe y Richard Roe como posibles herederos desconocidos de la Sucesión de Ramón Luis Nieves Guzmán

POR LA PRESENTE se les emplaza y requiere para que conteste la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto. Usted deberá radicar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired.ramajudicial.pr/ sumac/, salvo que se presente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá radicar el original de su contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente y notifique con copia a los abogados de la parte demandante, Lcda.

Marjaliisa Colon Villanueva, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-8434168. En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cobro de dinero y ejecución de hipoteca bajo el número mencionado en el epígrafe. Se alega en dicho procedimiento que la parte Demandada incurrió en el incumplimiento del Contrato de Hipoteca, al no poder pagar las mensualidades vencidas correspondientes a los meses de agosto de 2017 hasta el presente, más los cargos LEGAL NOTICE por demora correspondientes.

ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO Además, adeuda a la parte deDE PUERTO RICO TRIBU- mandante las costas, gastos y NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA honorarios de abogado en que incurra el tenedor del pagaré SALA DE FAJARDO. MTGLQ INVESTORS, L.P. en este litigio. De acuerdo con dicho Contrato de Garantía HiParte Demandante Vs. potecaria la parte Demandante MICHELLE NIEVES declaró vencida la totalidad de CINTRON también la deuda ascendente a la suma conocida como Mitchelle de $276,072.98, más intereses Nieves Cintrón ALBA IRIS a razón del 5.00% anual, así CINTRON SERRANO; LA como todos aquellos créditos que surjan de la faz SUCESION DE RAMON ydesumas la obligación hipotecaria y LUIS NIEVES GUZMAN de la hipoteca que la garantiza, compuesta por Michelle incluyendo $29,500.00, pacNieves Cintrón, Viviana tado para costas, gastos y hoNieves Cintrón; John norarios de abogado. La parte

(787) 743-3346

Demandante presentó para su inscripción en el Registro de la Propiedad correspondiente, un A VISO DE PLEITO PENDIENTE (“Lis Pendcnsº) sobre la propiedad objeto de esta acción cuya propiedad es la siguiente: RUSTICA: Parcela de terreno compuesta de 10.0398 cuerdas, equivalentes a 39460.43 metros cuadrados, radicado en el Barrio Sector Pitahaya de Fajardo, Puerto Rico y que colinda por el NORTE, con Edwin Aldarondo y Felipe Arana Román; por el SUR, antes, con la Carretera Número 988, ahora con la parcela segregada de una cuerda de Armando Arana Carrero, con Vfctor Quiñones, Benjamín Alicea, José Cima de Villa y con Arcadio Cruz; por el OESTE, con Felipe Arana Román y por el ESTE, con la Carretera Estatal Número 984. Inscrita al folio ciento ocho (108) del tomo ciento cuarenta (140) de Fajardo, finca número cuatro mil quinientos treinta y nueve (4539). Registro de Fajardo SE LES APERCIBE que de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aquí dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle. Además, como miembro de la Sucesión de Ramón Luis Nieves Guzmán, se ha presentado una solicitud de interpelación judicial para que sirva en el término de treinta (30) días aceptar o repudiar la herencia.

Se le apercibe que si no compareciera usted a expresarse dentro del término de treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto en torno a la aceptación o repudiación de la herencia, se presumirá que han aceptado a beneficio de inventario la herencia del causante Ramón Luis Nieves Guzmán.

En Fajardo, Puerto Rico, a 4 de septiembre de 2020. Wanda 1. Seguí Reyes, Sec Regional.

Ivelisse Serrano Garcia, Sec Aux Tribunal I.

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

BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO Demandante

ABRAHAM GARCIA SANTIAGO

Demandado(a) Civil: AB2019CV00212. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: ABRAHAM GARCIA SANTIAGO

EL SECRETARIO(A) que sus-

The San Juan Daily Star cribe le notifica a usted que 21 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020, , este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 22 de septiembre de 2020. En CAGUAS, , Puerto Rico, el 22 de septiembre de 2020. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, Secretaria Regional. F/ YARITZA ROSARIO PLACERES, Sec Auxiliar.

, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 23 de septiembre de 2020.

En CAGUAS, , Puerto Rico, el 23 de septiembre de 2020.

CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, Secretaria Regional. LILI RODRIGUEZ RODRIGUEZ , Sec Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

Estado Libre Asociado de PuerLEGAL NOTICE to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL Estado Libre Asociado de DE JUSTICIA TribunaI de PriPuerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENE- mera Instancia Sala Superior RAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de de San Juan.

Primera Instancia Sala Superior REVERSE MORTGAGE de CAGUAS.

ONEMAIN FINANCIAL SERVICES, INC. Demandante

ROBERTO GERARDO RIVERA CÉSPEDES t/c/c ROBERTO G. RIVERA CÉSPEDES t/c/c ROBERTO RIVERA CÉSPEDES; DIOSELINA ORTÍZ RIVERA y la SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES compuesta por ambos

Demandado(a) Civil: AB2019CV00158. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA POR LA VIA ORDINARIA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

FUNDING, LLC

Parte Demandante VS.

ADAN VÁZQUEZ MARCANO T/C/C ADAM VÁZQUEZ MARCANO; Y A LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA

Parte Demandada CIVIL NUM: SJ2019CV11452 (604). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: ADAN VÁZQUEZ MARCANO T/C/C ADAM VÁZQUEZ MARCANO

LA SECRETARIA que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 20 de agosto de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este A: ROBERTO GERARDO caso, que ha sido debidamente RIVERA CÉSPEDES registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse t/c/c ROBERTO G. detalladamente de los términos RIVERA CÉSPEDES la misma. Esta notificación t/c/c ROBERTO RIVERA de se publicará una sola vez en un CÉSPEDES; DIOSELINA periódico de circulación general ORTÍZ RIVERA y la en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su SOCIEDAD LEGAL notificación. Y, siendo o repreDE GANANCIALES usted una parte en el compuesta por ambos sentando procedimiento sujeta a los térEL SECRETARIO(A) que susminos de la Sentencia, Sentencribe le notifica a usted que cia Parcial o Resolución, de la 17 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020,

The San Juan Daily Star cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 60 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha 24 de septiembre de 2020. En San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 24 de septiembre de 2020. Griselda Rodríguez Collado, Secretaria Regional. Elsa Candelario Cabrera, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal I.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIM ERA INSTANCIA SALA DE VEGA BAJA.

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante V.

IVAN HERIBERTO GONZALEZ GERENA, ILKA JESSETTE HERNANDEZ SALVA Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES POR ESTOS COMPUESTA;

JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE; Demandados CIVIL NUM. VB2020CV00292.

SOBRE: SUSTITUCION DE PAGARE HIPOTECARIO. EMPLAZAMIENTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE. UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS.

A: JOHN DOE V RICHARD ROE, personas desconocidas que se designan con estos nombres ficticios, que puedan ser tenedor o tenedores, o puedan tener algún interés en el pagaré hipotecario a que se hace referencia más adelante en el presente edicto, que se publicará una sola vez.

Se les notifica que en Ia Demanda radicada en el caso de epígrafe se alega que un pagaré hipotecario otorgado el 29 de septiembre de 2004, Ivan Heriberto Gonzalez Gerena y llka Jessette Hernández Salva otorgó en Manatí, Puerto Rico un pagaré hipotecario por Ia suma principal de $216,000.00, con intereses a razón del 6.00% anual, a favor de Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria Puerto Rico (hoy Oriental Bank), con vencimiento el 1 de octubre de 2034, ante el Notario Andrés J. Garcia Arreguí, mediante el afidávit número 15309, se extravió. sin embargo Ia deuda evidenciada y garantizada por dicho pagaré hipotecario no ha sido salda, por lo que Ia parte demandante solicita que se ordene Ia sustitución del mismo.

En garantía de dicho pagaré el

29 de septiembre de 2004, Ivan Heriberto Gonzalez Gerena y Ilka Jessette Hernández Salva constituyeron hipoteca nUmero 147 ante el Notario Andrés J. Garcia Arregui en garantía del pago del pagaré antes descrito, inscrita al folio 12 del tomo 414 de Vega Baja, finca 28899, inscripción 3ra, Registro de La Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección IV. La hipoteca que garantiza dicho pagaré grava La propiedad inmueble que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar identificado como lote #A-3 de Ia urbanización Extensión Estancias de Tortuguero, también conocida por Estancias de Tortuguero II, sita en ci Barrio Algarrobo del Municipio de Vega Baja, con una cabida superficial de 900.00 metros cuadrados. Colindando por el NORTE, en una distancia de 3 .262 metros, con Ia Carretera Municipal Algarrobo; por el SUR, en una distancia de 3 1.262 metros, con Ia Calle #2 de Ia urbanización; por ci ESTE; en una distancia de 28.784 metros, con ci lote A-4 de Estancias de Tortuguero II; y por el OESTE, en una distancia de 28.8 12 metros, con ci lote A-2 de Estancias de Tortuguero II. Enclava una casa dedicada a uso residencial. Finca 28899 inscrita al folio 12 del tomo 414 de Vega Baja, Registro de Ia Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección IV. POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente a! tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, excluyéndose ci dIa del diligenciamiento.

Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando Ia siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired. ramajudiciai.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en Ia 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 Ia demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

LCDO. JAVIER MONTALVO CINTRON RUA NUM. 17682 DELGADO & FERNANDEZ, LLC P0 Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 009 10-1750, Tel. (787) 274-1414 / Fax (787) 764-8241 E-mail: jmontalvo@ delgadofernandez.com Expedido bajo ml firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 17 de septiembre de 2020. LCDA UAURA I SANTA SANCHEZ, Sec Regional. KAREN CASTRO MELDENDEZ, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal.

Tuesday, September 29, 2020 LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE CAROLINA.

REVERSE MORTGAGE FUNDING, LLC. Demandante vs.

SUCESION LUIS E. PABON MEDIAVILLA T/C/C LUIS ENRIQUE PABON T/C/C LUIS ENRIQUE PABON MEDIAVILLA T/C/C LUIS PABON MEDIAVILLA T/C/C LOIS PABON T/C/C LOIS B. PABON COMPUESTA POR JORGE LUIS PABON ROMERO; LOIS ENRIQUE PABON COCA; JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES

el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

Greenspoon Marder, LLP Lcda. Frances L. Asencio-Guido R.U.A. 15,622 TRADE CENTRE SOUTH, SUITE 700 100 WEST CYPRESS CREEK ROAD FORT LAUDERDALE, FL 33309 Telephone: (954) 343 6273 Frances . Asencio@gmlaw. com Expedido bajo mi firma, y sello del Tribunal, en Carolina, Puerto Rico, hoy 10 de agosto de 2020. Lcda. Marilyn Aponte Rodriguez, Sec Regional. Ida Fernandez Rodriguez, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal. .

LIZANDRO PÉREZ MARTÍNEZ; LUIS VELEZ ROSARIO DEMANDANTE vs .

SANTA ANETTE CRUZ VELEZ, ELIEZER CRUZ CRUZ, YAZMIN MICHELLE CRUZ CRUZ

VELEZ, ELIEZER CRUZ CRUZ, YAZMIN MICHELLE CRUZ CRUZ

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: AR2020CV01077.

SOBRE: ACCIÓN CIVIL. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EEUU EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PR.

DEMANDADOS CIVIL NUM.: AR2020CV01077.

A: Eliezer Cruz Cruz SOBRE: ACCIÓN CIVIL. EM1233 Floating Fountain PLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. Circle, Apt. 204 ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMETampa, FL 33612 RICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EEUU EL ESTADO LIBRE Se ha radicado una Demanda LEGAL NOTICE en el Tribunal de Primera InsASOCIADO DE PR. Estado Libre Asociado de tancia, Sala Superior de AreciA: Yasmin M. Cruz Cruz Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENE1233 Floating Fountain bo sobre Acción Civil. La aboRAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de gada de la demandante es la Circle, Apt. 204 Primera Instancia Sala Superior de TOA ALTA. Tampa, FL 33612

SOCORRO CANALES BERRIOS Demandante

EDDY ADALBERTO REYES

Demandado(a) Civil: BY2020RF00697. Sobre: DIVORCIO (RI). NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: EDDY ADALBERTO Demandados REYES - CALLE CIVIL NUM. CA2019CV03658.

SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HILUIS TOMENS #10, POTECA. EMPLAZNIENTO ENRIQUILLO, SABANA POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIPERDIDA, REPUBLICA DOS DE AMRICA EL PRESIDOMINICANA DENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE EL SECRETARIO(A) que susASOCIADO DE PUERTO cribe le notifica a usted que 16 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020, RICO. SS. A: JORGE LUIS PABON , este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o ReROMERO; LUIS ENRIQUE solución en este caso, que ha PABON COCA; JOHN sido debidamente registrada DOE Y JANE DOE COMO y archivada en autos donde POSIBLES MIEMBROS podrá usted enterarse detade los términos de DE LA SUCESION LUIS lladamente la misma. Esta notificación se E. PABON MEDIAVILLA publicará una sola vez en un TIC/C LUIS ENRIQUE periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro PABON T/C/C LUIS de los 10 días siguientes a su ENRIQUE PABON Y, siendo o repreMEDIAVILLA T/C/C LUIS notificación. sentando usted una parte en el PABON MEDIAVILLA procedimiento sujeta a los térTIC/C LUIS PABON T/C/C minos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la LUIS E. PABON POR LA PRESENTE se le cual puede establecerse recuremplaza para que presente al so de revisión o apelación denTribunal su alegación respon- tro del término de 30 días consiva a la demanda dentro de tados a partir de la publicación los treinta (30) días a partir de por edicto de esta notificación, la publicación de este edicto. dirijo a usted esta notificación Usted deberá presentar su ale- que se considerará hecha en la gación responsiva a través del fecha de la publicación de este Sistema Unificado de Manejo y edicto. Copia de esta notificaAdministración de Casos (SU- ción ha sido archivada en los MAC), al cual puede acceder autos de este caso, con fecha utilizando la siguiente direc- de 21 de septiembre de 2020. ción electrónica: http://unired. En TOA ALTA, , Puerto Rico, rarnajudicial.pr, salvo que se el 21 de septiembre de 2020. represente por derecho propio, LCDA. LAURA I SANTA SANen cuyo caso deberé presentar CHEZ, Secretaria Regional. su alegación responsiva en la Gloribell Vazquez Maysonet, secretaria del tribunal. Si usted Sec del Tribunal Conf I. 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

ARECIBO.

25

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE

Se ha radicado una Demanda en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Arecibo sobre Acción Civil. La abogada de la demandante es la LCDA. CARMEN N. HERMINA GONZALEZ, TS NÚM. 8950, cuya dirección es la siguiente: PO BOX 1065, CAMUY PR 00627, TEL: (787) 262-2439 y, correo electrónico soto.hermina1065@yahoo.com. Por la presente SE LE EMPLAZA y requiere presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), la cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramacjudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal y remitir copia a la Abogada de la parte demandante dentro de un plazo de treinta( 30) días de haberse publicado este Edicto. De usted no presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC) si está por derecho propio presentar original de la contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente con copia a la Abogada de la parte demandante en dicho término se le podrá anotarla rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, sin más citarle ni oírle, concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda. Extiendo bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en Arecibo, Puerto Rico a 24 de septiembre de 2020. Vivian Y Fresse Gonzalez, Secretaria Regional.

Brunilda Hernandez Mendez, Secretaria Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE ARECIBO.

LIZANDRO PÉREZ MARTÍNEZ; LUIS VELEZ ROSARIO DEMANDANTE vs .

SANTA ANETTE CRUZ

LCDA. CARMEN N. HERMINA GONZALEZ, TS NÚM. 8950, cuya dirección es la siguiente: PO BOX 1065, CAMUY PR 00627, TEL: (787) 262-2439 y, correo electrónico soto.hermina1065@yahoo.com. Por la presente SE LE EMPLAZA y requiere presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), la cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramacjudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal y remitir copia a la Abogada de la parte demandante dentro de un plazo de treinta(

30) días de haberse publicado este Edicto. De usted no presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC) si está por derecho propio presentar original de la contestación ante el Tribunal correspondiente con copia a la Abogada de la parte demandante en dicho término se le podrá anotarla rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, sin más citarle ni oírle, concediendo el remedio solicitado en la demanda. Extiendo bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en Arecibo, Puerto Rico a 24 de septiembre de 2020. Vivian Y Fresse Gonzalez, Secretaria Regional.

Brunilda Hernandez Mendez, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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26

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Wet, windy first day at French Open pushes players to win ugly

By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY and KAREN CROUSE

S

unday’s first-round match was certainly not the French Open debut that Coco Gauff envisaged when she won the junior girls title in the sunshine here in 2018 at age 14.

Instead of playing to a full house and springtime breezes, Gauff faced Johanna Konta in late September on a 10,000-seat show court that was all but empty of spectators amid a persistent drizzle and chilly winds.

But despite the nasty weather and her 12 double faults, Gauff found a way to stay upbeat and get the better of yet another elder, defeating the ninth-seeded Konta 6-3, 6-3 in Gauff’s first maindraw match at Roland Garros.

“Being a Floridian, basically we have one week of winter, and this is what it is,” Gauff said.

At 16, Gauff, the phenom from Delray Beach, has already won a singles match at all four of the Grand Slam tournaments, and her resilience Sunday was an apt metaphor for the French Open as a whole.

Postponed for four months because of the coronavirus pandemic, it was a struggle to make this event happen at all. Although temperatures were genuinely balmy last week in Paris, they were more suited to the deck of a North Atlantic fishing trawler on opening day.

Tights and long sleeves were de rigueur and some stars opted for even sturdier gear.

Venus Williams, the 40-year-old American veteran, entered the Simonne Mathieu Court wearing a puffy winter jacket with the hood pulled up.

She proceeded to play — and lose — her first-round match to Anna Karolina Schmiedlova while wearing a visor when a wool watch cap might have been more appropriate.

Victoria Azarenka, a finalist at the U.S. Open just two weeks ago, walked on court to face Danka Kovinic and then insisted on walking off with her opponent less than 30 minutes later.

With Azarenka leading 2-1, she and Kovinic were initially asked to wait out a rain delay on court.

“I’m not sitting here because I’m going to get frozen,” Azarenka said from

Coco Gauff won her first-round match at the French Open on Sunday, but struggled with her serve. under her umbrella to an official.

Azarenka then approached Kovinic, who agreed it was better to seek shelter elsewhere.

“It’s ridiculous,” Azarenka said. “It’s too cold. What’s the point? Sitting here like ducks.”

But they eventually paddled their way back to the sodden clay, with Azarenka winning 10 of the next 12 games to finish off a 6-1, 6-2 victory.

“It’s all about adjustment these two weeks,” the 10th-seeded Azarenka said. “Some shots that I hit today, I don’t know if it was good tennis or just great adjustments because they weren’t really pretty shots sometimes.”

Tour-level tennis can be played in light rain on clay courts, which is not the case on grass or slick hardcourts, and the French Open should have plenty of opportunities to test the limits in the days ahead.

Rain and temperatures in the 50s and low 60s are forecast throughout the tournament. Although the French Open finally has a new retractable roof in its main Philippe Chatrier Court, it is the only covered court, and there are more than 200 matches scheduled during the first week.

A recent spike in coronavirus cases in the Paris region has restricted spectators on the grounds to 1,000 per day, and on Sunday, most of them chose to stay under cover on the Chatrier court.

Was Roland Garros in fall a bad idea? Would the organizers have been wiser to cancel their Grand Slam tournament, as Wimbledon did this year?

“It’s a complicated question, it really is,” Azarenka said.

One complication is that the French Open moved to its new dates unilaterally without consulting with the men’s and women’s tours — a land grab that raised plenty of hackles.

“The unfortunate part with the French Open is that there is no communication with players or player council,” Azarenka said. “I hope this actually will kind of change in the future.”

But the French Open, unlike Wimbledon, did not have cancellation insurance that would have paid out during a pandemic. Calling off the tournament would have meant a massive financial loss and also no payday for the players.

“Lower-ranked players and doubles players have been hit pretty hard financially with the situation,” Azarenka acknowledged, “so it’s definitely a great opportunity to be able to have the tournament.”

Paris weather can be soggy in the spring, as well. The 2016 edition of the tournament was aptly called The Drench Open. And it was not just drizzly that year — it was often chilly, too.

“You know, most years it’s pretty cold and rainy here, whether it’s in May or right now,” Williams said.

In truth, it’s a mix most years but it is perhaps worth remembering that Novak Djokovic and Garbiñe Muguruza won their only French Open singles titles in 2016.

Both are top contenders again, as is Simona Halep, the No. 1 women’s seed and 2018 French Open champion, who defeated Sara Sorribes Tormo 6-4, 6-0 in the first round Sunday. Stan Wawrinka, the 2015 French Open champion, also sent a message by routing former No. 1 Andy Murray 6-1, 6-3, 6-2. Their match was much more compelling on paper than it was on clay as the powerful Wawrinka clubbed winners even in the heavy conditions.

Benoit Paire also returned to Grand Slam competition with a 7-5, 6-4, 6-4 victory over Kwon Soon-woo. Paire, a flashy French shotmaker with a hipster’s beard, was forced to withdraw from the U.S. Open after testing positive for the coronavirus, isolating in his Long Island hotel room for 10 days before returning to Europe. He tested positive again

at an event in Hamburg, Germany, last week but was given permission to play

by German health officials who deemed him less of a risk.

He then tested negative in Paris, allowing him to take the court Sunday.

“I was scared about the test,” Paire said. “Because you know, when you’re negative, positive, negative, positive, you never know. So not easy mentally when you know there is a possibility you don’t play at home.”

The opening match on the Chatrier court, the first at Roland Garros under a closed roof, was between Jannik Sinner and David Goffin.

It was the main-draw French Open debut for Sinner, a 19-year-old Italian with a cherub’s visage and an assassin’s groundstrokes. He coolly defeated the 11th-seeded Goffin 7-5, 6-0, 6-3, several hours before Gauff, another French Open rookie, held firm to defeat Konta, a French Open semifinalist last year.

Remarkably, neither teen’s victory felt much like an upset. Sinner, a former competitive Alpine skier who trains under veteran coach Riccardo Piatti, has long been considered a future star.

Gauff already is a show-court regular after reaching the fourth round at Wimbledon last year and the Australian Open this year before turning 16.

Along the way, she has beaten four top 20 players: Kiki Bertens, Naomi Osaka, Aryna Sabalenka and now Konta in the same stadium where she won her junior title in 2018.

Gauff’s French, which she is studying, remains a work in progress, as does her game. Her second serve continues to be a liability. In her past three tour matches, she has had more than a dozen double faults. She also relies too heavily on the same second-serve patterns.

But she is a sparkling talent, great mover and precociously gritty competitor: committed to all-court tennis and capable of prevailing even when far from her best, something former top 10 player Brad Gilbert long ago labeled “winning ugly.”

It was that sort of opening day at Roland Garros.

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

27

Yankees’ regular season ends with a loss and two individual titles

By JAMES WAGNER

T

he New York Yankees ended their pandemic-shortened season with a 5-0 loss to the Miami Marlins in the Bronx, but the result wasn’t nearly as meaningful as three other matters that were resolved on Sunday.

Most important, the Yankees found out where they were flying on Sunday night for the first round of the playoffs: Cleveland.

The other two issues involved personal accolades for Yankees stalwarts that carried the team through its many seesaws this year: Infielder D.J. LeMahieu won the American League batting title with a majorleague-leading .364 average, becoming the first person to claim undisputed batting titles in both leagues. And first baseman Luke Voit won the home run title, finishing with a major-league-best 22.

“The goal is to keep it going in the playoffs,” Voit said.

To that point, Voit and the Yankees (3327) learned on Sunday evening that they would be facing the fourth-seeded Indians (35-25) in the best-of-three playoff round added for this unique season.

Game 1 on Tuesday will be a matchup of two of the best pitchers in baseball: The Yankees’ Gerrit Cole (2.84 earned run average) and Cleveland’s Shane Bieber, the presumptive AL Cy Young Award winner who led the majors in wins (eight), ERA (1.63) and strikeouts (122).

By dropping six of their final eight regular-season games, the Yankees lost their chance to host the first round at Yankee Stadium, where they were 22-9 this season.

The Yankees did avoid dropping to the AL’s eighth seed, which would have pitted them against the top-seeded Tampa Bay Rays, when the Toronto Blue Jays lost their regular-season finale to the Baltimore Orioles.

Instead, the Blue Jays will get that honor, while the Yankees secured the fifth seed.

Because this year’s regular-season schedule featured only regional play, the Yankees and the Indians, an AL Central team, did not play each other as they usually would have. The last time the two teams faced off in October was in a 2017 AL division series, when the Yankees prevailed, 5-2, in a winner-take-all Game 5.

So much has changed with both teams

D.J. LeMahieu, who had two hits on Sunday, became the first Yankee to win a batting title since Bernie Williams in 1998. since then: Yankees manager Aaron Boone was an ESPN broadcaster; Gio Urshela, now a Yankees standout, was on Cleveland’s roster as a light-hitting, defensive-minded third baseman; Cole was a Pittsburgh Pirate and LeMahieu was with the Colorado Rockies.

“I’m honestly not really concerned who we’re playing or where we’re going,” LeMahieu said after Sunday’s game. “I have a lot of confidence in us. If we’re playing the way we should be, it shouldn’t matter who we’re playing.”

The Yankees, though, haven’t played the way they should of late. This season, they looked like a juggernaut in some stretches but like a car with a few flat tires in others.

In the final week, they looked more like the latter, with sound defense and trademark power largely absent.

“We have the best team in the league still,” the normally soft-spoken LeMahieu, 32, said. “We’re definitely the most talented. I don’t know why it was so up and

down. I’ll chalk it up to 2020, and I know in the playoffs we’re going to be extremely focused and ready to go.”

The Yankees will need LeMahieu to be just that against the Indians, who finished the season with the best ERA (3.29) in the AL. Last year, he hit .325 during the Yankees’ playoff run, which ended two wins away from the World Series.

During his two seasons with the Yankees, LeMahieu has been perhaps their most irreplaceable player because of his defense, versatility and hitting. On Sunday, he became the first Yankee to win a batting title since Bernie Williams in 1998. LeMahieu won the National League batting title with the Rockies by hitting .348 in 2016.

There is some debate over whether LeMahieu is the first or second to claim batting titles in each league. The Elias Sports Bureau, the official statistician of Major League Baseball, credits Ed Delahanty as the 1899 National League batting champion

for his .410 average with the Philadelphia Phillies and the American League winner in 1902 for his .376 mark with the Washington Senators. But some researchers consider Nap Lajoie as the 1902 winner with a .378 average because of a different standard at the time regarding at-bats needed to qualify for the award.

Voit, 29, who produced at the plate despite a nagging foot injury all season, is the eighth Yankee to lead the major leagues in home runs, and first since Alex Rodríguez did so in 2007 with 54. Among the others: Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth — all Hall of Famers.

“Our neighbor growing up had a huge, life-size poster of Babe Ruth that we had in our basement that he gave to us,” said Voit, who grew up outside St. Louis and was acquired by the Yankees from the Cardinals in 2018. “So I’ve always admired the Babe.

I love ‘The Sandlot,’ the great Bambino, so it’s just awesome company. That guy hit, like, 700 home runs, so that means I’ve got to start hitting 150 a year to catch up to him.”

Even though it was only over 60 games, LeMahieu and Voit were clearly proud of their accomplishments. LeMahieu said he wished he had gotten to do it over 162 games, and with fans in the stands.

Boone said the Yankees wouldn’t even be boarding a plane on Sunday evening to play in the postseason without the performances of LeMahieu and Voit this season.

“We’ve had a week where we haven’t played our best baseball and we’re struggling a little bit, but I know what we’re capable of,” Boone said. He added later: “We’ve got an amazing opportunity. We hold the bat, we hold the ball and we hold the pen, so we can write the story.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

The best 60-game stretch of the century still belongs to Ichiro Suzuki

Ichiro Suzuki during the final game of the 2004 regular season, in which he broke the season hits record and hit .460 across a 60-game stretch.

By BRAD LEFTON

A

fter Charlie Blackmon of the Colorado Rockies completed a stretch of six multiple-hit games in August, his batting average ballooned to .500 after 17 games. Nolan Arenado marveled at his teammate’s otherworldliness.

“The zone you dream of,” Arenado said at the time, “is the one he’s in right now.”

Blackmon’s blistering start this season — and a similar streak by D.J. LeMahieu of the New York Yankees — spurred excited speculation as to whether this pandemicshortened season could produce the first .400 batting average since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941.

Ultimately, it did not. LeMahieu led the majors with a .356 average entering the season’s final weekend, while Blackmon had slid to .308 — apparently unable to stay in “the zone,” that state of mystifying excellence that players like Arenado often use to explain a hot streak.

The drop-off, though, cast a renewed appreciation for Williams’ performance over more than twice as many games. It also underscored the brilliance of the best 60-game stretch in this century — a feat accomplished by a player who rejected the entire concept of being in any “zone.”

“I can’t relate to that,” Ichiro Suzuki said when asked about “the zone” in Au-

gust 2004, as he was on his way to breaking George Sisler’s single-season hits record from 1920. “That sounds like a cop-out or something I might have said early in my career when I didn’t understand why my swing produced certain results. Now, I feel I always understand the reason, and if I don’t, I have the means to search until I do.”

Suzuki’s performance for the Seattle Mariners that year at age 30 produced 262 hits — still the record for a season — and a .372 batting average, the best mark this century.

The 2004 season was a standard 162 games, of course, but it was a 60-game stretch from June 30 to Sept. 4 that largely defined Suzuki’s run. He played in 59 of those games, producing 120 hits and batting .460, the highest average over 60 games since Rogers Hornsby’s .466 across 60 games in 1924, a year he batted .424.

Suzuki’s astounding stretch started innocuously enough, with two singles in a ho-hum, 9-6 loss to the Texas Rangers on the last day of June. It wasn’t until two lateJuly series against the Anaheim Angels, his division nemesis, that it became obvious something special was brewing.

The Angels, despite mediocre pitching, had managed to contain Suzuki for years.

Manager Mike Scioscia and his coaching staff of future managers — Joe Maddon, Ron Roenicke and Bud Black — strategized

specifically to subdue Suzuki.

But this time, the tactics were of no use: He tormented the Angels with 15 hits and 10 runs.

“We identified some spots where we had to throw the ball to him, and over the years of playing him, we set our infield to where we thought he would hit the ball,” said Black, the Colorado Rockies’ manager, who was the Angels’ pitching coach at the time. “We had some overall success against him, except for the summer of 2004.”

Unlike Blackmon and LeMahieu, though, Suzuki did not start the season on a tear. He was dissatisfied with his first-half performance and later revealed that his search for answers produced a eureka moment during that Texas series in late June.

While awaiting his turn at the batting cage before a game, he experimented, slightly repositioning his front foot and gently narrowing his stance. Intrigued, he carried the changes into the game and liked the feeling even more.

“I’m the kind of batter who tracks the ball on a line, so how quickly I can enter that plane is crucial,” he said after the season. “As the ball comes toward me, first my eyes and then my entire body enter the line.

My bat is the last to enter it. By tweaking my stance, I was able to get my bat into the line quicker and more accurately.”

Adjustments like the one Suzuki made midseason, Black said, are a big factor in making a player great instead of just good.

Those hoping LeMahieu or Blackmon could maintain .400 for this unusual 60-game season were discounting how the truncated schedule would make those in-season tweaks more difficult.

“When you’re talking a 60-game season as opposed to a 60-game stretch in a season, there’s a difference,” Black said.

“Players are conditioned to play 162 games, and there’s a rhythm to that. Here, the atbats become more critical because of the importance of the games, and that can have a tendency to take you out of rhythm.”

Indeed, Suzuki had the opposite challenge in 2004: fighting off indifference. By the time his tinkering was complete, the Mariners were out of the postseason race.

As apathy settled in the clubhouse, Suzuki had to lean on internal motivation.

He went 6 for 6 in a doubleheader at Baltimore on Aug. 3, putting him atop the batting race for the first time with a .355

average. Across the field, Orioles third baseman Melvin Mora was fighting for the American League batting title with a career year. He seemed to concede the race after watching Suzuki’s perfect day.

“What can I tell you?” Mora said at the time. “He’s smart, he can hit, run, throw, defend, everything. He’s the best. How can you compete with this guy?”

A home run on Aug. 26 gave Suzuki 200 hits for the season and left him 58 hits from surpassing Sisler’s hallowed record with 36 games to go. Suzuki remained steadfast as international attention swirled around him.

“Go ahead,” he told the Japanese news media. “I can’t stop you from anticipating it, but I’m going to approach it by setting short-term goals. 257? I look forward to it becoming tangible.”

Suzuki’s most memorable performance of the stretch that had begun at the end of June came in Game No. 60, against the White Sox in Chicago on Sept. 4. He stepped to the plate in the seventh inning, already 3 for 3 against Mark Buehrle. Chicago’s ace left-hander started him off by lofting a 66-mph eephus pitch.

Suzuki took it with a smile and then drove the third pitch to center for a runscoring single. Buehrle playfully turned to first base and doffed his cap as a sign of surrender. Suzuki laughed sheepishly.

In the ninth inning, a single to right field capped a 5-for-5 night and drew a standing ovation from the opposing crowd of 24,191. Suzuki stood at 223 hits through 135 games, 120 of them coming over the last 60 games.

Suzuki collected 39 more hits in the Mariners’ remaining 27 games to establish the single-season record of 262. His finish was still torrid but not quite as scorching as those 60 games in which he had three five-hit games and went hitless for a game just six times, never in consecutive games.

For a player who refutes the notion that he entered some kind of extraterrestrial zone to achieve his record-setting performance, Suzuki also had a unique explanation for the challenges of maintaining his peak condition.

“Batting is like a living thing,” he once explained. “It continually evolves in response to changes in your body and your surroundings, and you must always stay attuned to feeding the needs those changes require.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 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)

Romantic ideals clash with reality when you at last get to meet someone you met online. Now you have got together in person, it doesn’t feel the same. You thought the pair of you would make a great couple but there’s no chemistry between you. It’s disappointing but it’ not the end of the world.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

You’re making good progress with an important assignment and some boasting is not out of line. A colleague will admit they’re learning a lot from watching how you work.

Plans you’re making with friends will inject an extra burst of energy into relationships.

This will give your social life a much-needed boost.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

Getting mixed up in a friend or neighbour’s troubles could inhibit your freedom. Once you show an interest, they will expect you to continue this support even if you have other commitments. Think carefully before taking on anything that could be costly or time consuming. As much as you want to help others, you can’t do everything for them.

Cancer

(June 22-July 23)

Talk to your family or housemates about new domestic arrangements. You would like to put new routines in place as soon as possible. You may have expected objections so it will surprise you to receive an enthusiastic response. Admit it if you have made a wrong decision. You are entitled to pull out of a commitment if it isn’t working for you.

Leo

(July 24-Aug 23)

Someone you meet will have all the qualities you’ve been looking for in a partner. This excites you as you anticipate a happy future together. Don’t get carried away by the intensity of your emotions. Give yourself time to develop this relationship. Are you in a romantic partnership? A special treat is in store.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

The San Juan Daily Star

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

New propositions open up new inequalities.

Some people are generous, some more demanding. Some are optimistic, some pessimistic and all this has to be taken into account when making new rules and regulations. If you’re dealing with a small group it will be easier but in larger teams, there will be one challenge after another.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

It could lead to a big disappointment if you make a long-term commitment with someone for all the wrong reasons. Your desire for companionship could make you imagine you and a new partner are compatible when there is still a lot you have to learn about each other.

Enjoy the getting to know you stage.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

You won’t ever know if an idea is going to work if you don’t give it a try. Ignore friends who are telling you that the changes you’re about to make are foolish. You aren’t crazy just because you’re about to try something new and different. Go ahead and have some fun.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

A cautious partner is nervous about getting involved in your adventurous plans.

Your love of taking risks can seem daunting to people who are careful and methodical.

Even so, there’s something you really want to do and nothing will stop you from getting on with this. You will understand why they don’t want to get involved.

You have never seen yourself as being judgemental. You could be surprised by how wrong you have been about someone. Your first impressions have led you to make a wrong assumption. Now you recognise this mistake you will put it right. A well-groomed person you are introduced to will not be as intelligent or as experienced as they appear.

Aquarius

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

All the signs suggest a close friend is about to get their heart broken. You can see how a relationship they are in is going to end but love is blind. You also know they won’t want to listen to advice. It’s their life and there isn’t a lot you can do to save them from future disappointment.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

You’re tired of restrictions and you wish you could have the freedom to do what you wanted to do, when and where. There are plenty of others in the same boat. Your partner and family won’t be happy if you make changes just because you need something different especially if this causes them some inconvenience.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Tuesday, September 29, 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

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

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