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.
The proposals of 12 Caribbean journalists to investigate the climate crisis will become journalistic reports after being selected to receive scholarships from the Institute of Journalism Training, the educational arm of the Center for Investigative Journalism (CPI by its Spanish initials).
The scholarship proposals arose as a result of the first edition of the Caribe Fest, a three-day festival organized by the CPI that had an agenda full of workshops, conferences and panels on journalism and the climate crisis in which around 60 journalists and editors from the Caribbean participated.
“These are urgent stories for our Caribbean and the 40 million people who live on its islands and coasts at the mercy of climate change, told from the perspective of Caribbean journalists who are best prepared to do so,” said Omaya Sosa Pascual, special projects editor at the CPI. “Without our support, these stories could not be researched and told because they require time and production resources that are not available in their media.”
Isayen Herrera and Roberto Deniz (Venezuela), Hassel Fallas and Michelle Soto Méndez (Costa Rica), Mary Triny Zea (Panama), Eunice Bedminster and Suzanne Carlson (U.S. Virgin Islands), Krista Campbell (Jamaica), Dana Kampa and Freeman Rogers (British Virgin Islands), Olivia Losbar (Guadeloupe) and María Mónica Monsalve Sánchez (Colombia) are the winners of the fellowships and will work for several months on their respective collaborative investigations.
With the support of the Open Society Foundations, this round of scholarships entails a historic investment of $20,000, which will allow the largest representation of Caribbean countries to have joined in collaborative projects with the CPI.
The CPI Institute annually opens several calls to participate in workshops offered by important figures in journalism and experts in the fields of health, economics and the environment, among others, and invites journalists and students who participate to present their proposals for reports and chronicles that have an investigative angle.
“The Caribbean is one of the regions most impacted in the world by the climate crisis, but rarely are our problems and challenges heard in the international scenarios from where decisions are made to mitigate and allocate funds that allow us to adapt to these new climate realities,” said Víctor Rodríguez Velázquez, manager of the Institute. “Working on cross-border and collaborative journalistic investigations allows us to see as a region what the indispensable changes are for the survival of our Caribbean communities.”
As part of the fellowships, the CPI will offer editorial mentoring, support in data management and visualization, requests for information and audiovisual production for the reports, which will then be published in media throughout the Caribbean.
Likewise, Fallas and Soto Méndez of the Costa Rican data journalism and information visualization platform La Data Cuenta and Ojo al Clima, and Zea Cornejo of the Panamanian international media outlet Bloomberg Línea, received a grant to work on a collaborative investigation of the framework of funds for the climate crisis in the region.
In addition, Bedminster and Carlson of The Virgin Islands Daily News, Campbell of Television Jamaica, Olivia Losbar of RCI Group, Monsalve Sánchez of América Futura (El País), and Kampa and Rogers of The BVI Beacon received a scholarship to investigate the impact of sargassum in the region.
The scholarship proposals arose as a result of the first edition of the Caribe Fest, a three-day festival organized by the Center for Investigative Journalism that had an agenda full of workshops, conferences and panels on journalism and the climate crisis.
The plant operators of the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA) declared a 24-hour strike on Monday in protest of the austerity policy of the Financial Oversight and Management Board.
“This is a demonstration of repudiation of the Fiscal Control Board [sic] that interrupts our salary improvements and benefits,” Independent Authentic Union (UIA by its Spanish initials) President Luis de Jesús Rivera said in a written statement.
In a communication with PRASA Executive President Doriel Pagán Crespo, de Jesús Rivera stressed that the action does not seek to interrupt basic services, instead allowing the tasks to be assumed by management personnel. He insisted that the plant operators are exercising their right to strike, in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution.
The strike was to culminate Monday night, allowing union members to celebrate Labor Day with their families, he said, adding that the stoppage is part of the continuation of a series of demonstrations seeking respect and improvements in labor negotiations.
The relationship between the UIA and management has been tense, marked by disagreements over the austerity
policies implemented by the oversight board, which the union says are hindering salary improvements and fringe benefits for its members.
“Our intention is not to cause major disruptions, but rather to exercise our constitutional right to protest,” de Jesús Rivera said.
Later on Monday, Pagán Crespo, the PRASA executive director, stated her willingness to talk with the UIA with the aim of addressing her claims.
Pagán Crespo stressed the collaborative attitude that PRASA has maintained.
“We reiterate our commitment to dialogue with the UIA to address their claims,” she said in a written statement, pointing out that PRASA has already agreed to mediation and is awaiting the union’s response. “It is important to emphasize that we are already subject to mediation. PRASA acted and signed the established agreement, we are still waiting for the Union.”
“The intransigence of some cannot go above the common good,” the PRASA chief added.
As a preventive measure, PRASA has implemented contingency plans to guarantee the continuity of basic services to citizens, Pagán Crespo said.
“Meanwhile, and with the goal of not harming Puerto Ricans, PRASA has activated its contingency plan, which includes, but is not limited to, the use of management personnel to operate the plants,” she said.
Two whistleblowers have asked the federal Title III court that oversees the government’s bankruptcy in a recent motion to remand their $50 million lawsuit against UBS Bank to the commonwealth court.
On May 24 of this year, the plaintiffs Francisco Pujol Meneses and Harold D. Vicente González filed a complaint against UBS Bank, USA and UBS Financial Services Inc. in the Commonwealth Court of Puerto Rico on the commonwealth’s behalf and in their capacity as informants of a fiscal fraud they say was perpetrated against the Puerto Rico government.
On July 13 of this year, the defendants asked that the case be removed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, purportedly based on the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), as a proceeding allegedly “related to” the commonwealth bankruptcy. The plaintiffs said removal should be denied, and immediate remand should be ordered for several reasons. First, they argued the defendants cannot meet the burden of establishing federal jurisdiction. Second, the government’s action is clearly a police power action to deter illegal acts such as tax evasion and tax fraud; and third, the action is not related to any remaining Title III matter pending under PROMESA.
The two Puerto Rico residents brought the suit in what is known as a ‘qui tam’ action, which allows private citizens, known as relators, to sue on behalf of a government to recover money that was fraudulently obtained. In return, they receive a portion of the amount recovered.
UBS argued that the case relates to Puerto Rico’s Title III bankruptcy because it can potentially affect distributions under the commonwealth’s plan of adjustment. In this case, the relators or whistleblowers allege that UBS issued thousands of loans, provided other banking services in Puerto Rico without proper licenses, and failed to pay income taxes.
The fraudulent scheme, more specifically, consisted of the failure by the defendant UBS Bank to file income tax returns and the evasion of the payment of income tax to the Treasury Department of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as well as municipal taxes (“patentes”) to four municipalities of Puerto Rico for interests earned and collected by UBS relating to loans granted in Puerto Rico, to borrowers residing in Puerto Rico, which were used mainly to finance the purchase or holding of shares of stock of closed end Puerto Rican mutual funds, the suit says.
Those loans were collateralized or guaranteed with liens encumbering the shares of the funds. The shares were maintained in accounts in Puerto Rico with their affiliate UBS Financial Services Incorporated of Puerto Rico.
The relators are seeking the $48.5 million in allegedly unpaid taxes in the decade leading up to 2013 and $1.5 million in outstanding municipal license fees, which can be tripled, in addition to penalties,
and interest.
The Financial Oversight and Management Board has given the University of Puerto Rico Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCC) until the end of the month to file a corrective action plan stating how it will start operating within the limits of its assigned budget.
For the past two years, the CCC has been using non-budgeted funds in the Special Revenue Fund (SRF)
without obtaining prior approval from the oversight board, noted a letter addressed to Marcia Cruz Correa, executive director of the CCC.
“Such non-authorized reprogramming violates the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) and is directly contrary to the Fiscal Year 2023 Certified Budget for the Commonwealth,” noted the Aug. 30 letter sent by the oversight board’s executive director, Robert Mujica.
The CCC’s budget for the current fiscal year is about $46.5 million, government documents show.
In a written response, Cruz Correa said the operation of a hospital is complex and active and “we keep identifying additional sources of income to finance initiatives currently supported by the general fund to achieve long-term budget stability and guarantee the best use of resources.”
“Our priority is to rely on all the needed resources to deal responsibly with the medical attention needs of all oncological patients in Puerto Rico while making sure we comply with” PROMESA, she said, while assuring that the CCC is in direct communication with the oversight board and the Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority to facilitate and move forward on its priorities.
The oversight board’s letter noted that in April 2022, the CCC requested, through PP2022-53804, a fiscal year 2022 SRF budget increase of $9 million to cover operating expenses. By then, the board had brought to
the attention of the chief financial officer that the CCC must request approval prior to using additional funds not considered within the certified budget.
“Nevertheless, based on reports provided by the Puerto Rico Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority, the Cancer Center spent a portion of the requested funds even though the budget increase had not been approved by the Oversight Board,” Mujica said in the letter. “The fact that this is yet another year where the Cancer Center utilizes non-budgeted funds without the Oversight Board’s review and approval raises serious concerns.”
Over the years the oversight board has continued to allocate additional resources to the CCC as a result of an evolving business plan.
“However, the inability to adhere to this requirement by PROMESA raises concerns regarding overarching financial management and compliance matters,” Mujica said. “If the Cancer Center seeks to use SRF surplus funds, it must first submit a budgetary request to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). If OMB reviews the request and finds it to be in order, OMB will then submit it to the Oversight Board for its review and approval.”
The letter to the CCC comes at a time when hospitals in Puerto Rico have been having problems maintaining operations. Two private hospital systems, the HIMA Group and San Jorge Children’s Hospital, have filed for bankruptcy.
Gov. Pedro Pierluisi announced on Monday the issuance of $103 million in benefits through the Nutrition Assistance Program (PAN by its Spanish acronym) for September, available as of yesterday, as part of a redistribution of resources before a potential Oct. 1 federal fiscal shutdown.
“This assistance is an essential part of our public policy, significantly helping in the health and well-being of families,” Pierluisi said in a written statement.
Seniors and residents of the offshore island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra will see an increase in their benefits. For example, families will receive about 55% more in monthly benefits during this month.
The PAN program currently benefits more than 755,000 families, including seniors, people who report income from work and people with disabilities.
Designated Family Secretary Ciení Rodríguez Troche emphasized the advantage of the redistribution of funds in administrative or programmatic areas, which are then redistributed directly to program participants.
Alberto Fradera, who heads the Family Socioeconomic Development Administration (ADSEF by its
Spanish initials), stressed the importance of families carrying out the review process through ADSEF Digital to remain enrolled as PAN beneficiaries.
For more information, citizens can call the PAN helpline on their Family Card, or contact 311 or the nearest local ADSEF office.
With the 2024 elections getting closer every day, the discussion of the current status of the island is becoming more pitched. Many islanders believe statehood will give Puerto Rico more benefits and will help relieve the local economic situation in the short and long terms.
That perspective pits the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (NPP) against the pro-commonwealth Popular Democratic Party (PDP), which believes Puerto Rico should keep the same relationship it has with the United States, as a territory. Lately the PDP hasn’t been successful in its campaigns for governor, having come up short in the past two elections.
The PDP does currently control both chambers of the Legislature, and NPP candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate have had some very particular comments to make in reference to the majority party. Take Javier Molina Pagán, the NPP candidate for the Ponce District seat in the island Senate, for instance.
“When we look at the comments made by [PDP stalwart and political commentator] Adolfo Krans this week, it makes us think and reaffirm that we become more and more convinced that different sectors of Puerto Rico treasure and value their American citizenship,” Molina Pagán said in a press release issued Monday.
The candidate went on to quote Krans in his mention of “the ideological disparity that has taken the PDP to the sad situation in which it finds itself.” Molina Pagán was referring to the various internal controversies that have arisen in the PDP.
“Krans also illustrated history, like the founder of the PDP and ELA [Estado Libre Asociado] Luis Muñoz Marín [Puerto Rico’s first elected governor], was able to distance himself from his ideological beliefs directed toward independence to put Puerto Rico first,” Molina Pagán said. “Today we can notice
how the PDP and its colonial status has been demolished, because even though it was originally created to speed up at a certain time the causes of progress we can’t leave aside how leaders of this battered colonial party have not been able to define a clear and precise objective where we direct ourselves toward the people.”
The Senate candidate also made a call to the people of Puerto Rico.
“I invite all of you to continue reading and studying the content in Mr. Krans’ words,” he said. “In a nutshell, we Puerto Ricans treasure and want [to keep] our American citizenship. The last three plebiscites held on the island have indicated that statehood is the proper formula that Puerto Ricans want for their government and for Puerto Rico. That is the truth, and that has been the cause of why the PDP doesn’t project itself with any triumph, considering that in the 2020 elections, they only obtained 32% of all votes, which is obviously not enough to win.”
“Now, this electoral giant of the 1950s in Puerto Rico finds itself at its weakest point,” Molina Pagán continued. “However, this doesn’t mean that new movements that have wanted to put themselves out there, those being [electoral] minorities, will be in constant growth, because their voting numbers have been [supplemented] from the sovereign wing of the PDP. The faction that led to a drift of an electoral giant, it is not enough, and it won’t be enough to achieve or feed the separatist agenda of a small group of people who call themselves leaders and don’t treasure the will for citizenship that excludes the fear of a permanent and guaranteed union with the United States of America.”
In short, the candidate said, the people of the island have moved on and are not afraid of being part of the mainland U.S. as a state, which in turn leads to more people no longer voting for the pro-commonwealth party and the rise of many other parties, which have not helped the state of the PDP.
The NPP, meanwhile, hasn’t been without its fair share of controversies, as former Gov. Ricardo Rosselló Nevares was
Javier Molina Pagánkicked out of office by a public uprising in summer of 2019, an event that many islanders will never forget. However, as Molina Pagán sees it, the 2020 elections showed that even though Puerto Rico residents were not happy with Rosselló Nevares as a governor, they still want statehood.
He appealed to all islanders who value statehood to vote for the right candidates.
“I urge all Puerto Ricans who treasure American citizenship at the time of going to the polls in the primaries and later in the 2024 elections, to choose candidates capable of speaking about, defending and taking the legislative and executive actions and processes that are binding with assimilation, so that we not only present before Congress the results of plebiscites, but also measures that sustain that we ourselves as a people are headed for true assimilation and therefore a transition that leaves out the governmental system we currently possess,” Molina Pagán said.
“The time has come to start seeing the world this way: democratic or autocratic governments,” he said. “The discourse must change. Democracy is the true system of government that allows people to be governed by rules protected by the power of the people and executed by the government. That security is offered to us by permanent union and not by separatist groups [that] seek to concentrate power in a few and power is not distributed, as happens in those countries that are ruled by autocratic governments that on the one hand are capitalist for the rulers, but socialist and communist for the people.”
The majority leader in the island House of Representatives, Rep. Ángel Matos García, called on the Senate on Sunday not to carry out a confirmation vote on the nominee for secretary of education, Yanira Raíces Vega, “given the insufficient and improvised plan of emergency measures in the face of the heat wave that has hit the country and is affecting public schools.”
“It is a shame that, with a purchase order of $33 million for replacement and installation of air conditioners, the Department can only think of installing water fountains, giving Friday off and buying fans,” Matos García said in a written statement.
In the past few weeks, dozens of demonstrations have been held in every school on the island, the lawmaker said, “in the face of the chaos of the start of classes that
included the delay of air conditioner replacements by the Public Buildings Authority, which awaits air conditioners purchased by the Department of Education at a cost of $33 million and which have not arrived.”
“At the Gilberto Concepción de Gracia school in my district, 30 air conditioners have to be replaced and the secretariat is still waiting to coordinate the effort,” Matos García said. “But instead of speeding up the process of installing or replacing air conditioners, they can only think of days off and fresh clothes. Students want classrooms not saunas, and [the school] has been waiting for six years for the roof of the court damaged by Hurricane Maria.”
“I invite you to turn off the air [conditioning] in the secretary’s office so that you may suffer firsthand the abuse of your negligence,” the majority leader added. “I ask the Senate not to confirm [the appointment. Who can not do the least, can not do more.”
Asymphony of sorts echoed through the sprawling shipyard on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi — banging, hissing, beeping, horns, bells and whistles — as more than 7,000 workers hustled to fill orders fueled by the largest shipbuilding budget in the Navy’s history.
The surge in spending, $32 billion for this year alone, has allowed the Huntington Ingalls shipyard to hire thousands of additional people to assemble guided missile destroyers and amphibious transport ships. “More ships are always better,” said Kari Wilkinson, the president of the shipyard, pointing to the efficiencies that come with a steady flow of contracts and the jobs they create.
But the focus from Washington on producing a stream of new warships is also creating a fleet that some inside the Pentagon think is too wedded to outdated military strategies and that the Navy might not be able to afford to keep running in decades to come.
Half a world away, at a U.S. Navy outpost in Bahrain, a much smaller team was testing out a very different approach to the service’s 21st-century warfighting needs.
Bobbing in a small bay off the Persian Gulf was a collection of tiny unmanned vessels, prototypes for the kind of cheaper, easier-to-build and more mobile force that some officers and analysts of naval warfare said was already helping to contain Iran and could be essential to fighting a war in the Pacific.
Operating on a budget that was less than the cost of fuel for one of the Navy’s big ships, Navy personnel and contractors had pieced together drone boats, unmanned submersible vessels and aerial vehicles capable of monitoring and intercepting threats over hundreds of miles of the Persian Gulf, like Iranian fast boats looking to hijack oil tankers.
Now they are pleading for more money to help build on what they have learned.
“It’s an unbelievable capability — we have already tested it for something like 35,000 hours,” said Michael Brown, who was the director of the Defense Innovation Unit, which helped set up the unmanned drone tests in Bahrain. “So why are we not fielding that as fast as possible?”
The contrast between the approaches in Pascagoula and Bahrain helps to illustrate one of the biggest challenges facing the Navy.
At no moment since World War II has the service faced a more urgent demand to embrace new technologies and weapons systems, given the rising threat from a now formidable Chinese military.
The Navy’s top brass talks frequently about the need to innovate to address the threat presented by China. The Defense Department’s own war games show that the Navy’s big-ship platforms are increasingly vulnerable to attack.
But the Navy, analysts and current and former officials say, remains lashed to political and economic forces that have produced jobs-driven procurement policies that yield powerful but cumbersome warships that may not be ideally suited for the mission it is facing.
An aversion to risk-taking — and the breaking of tradi-
tions — mixed with a bravado and confidence in the power of the traditional fleet has severely hampered the Navy’s progress, several recently departed high-ranking Navy and Pentagon officials told The New York Times.
“The U.S. Navy is arrogant,” said Lorin Selby, who retired this summer as a rear admiral and the chief of naval research after a 36-year career in which he helped run many of the Navy’s major acquisition units. “We have an arrogance about, we’ve got these aircraft carriers, we’ve got these amazing submarines. We don’t know anything else. And that is just wrong.”
Resistance to risk-taking and change for the military can also be found among members of Congress.
Leadership on Pentagon budgets on Capitol Hill is dominated by lawmakers from shipbuilding communities like Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss. The industry directs tens of millions of dollars of campaign contributions to key lawmakers and mounts lobbying campaigns pushing the Navy to build more ships.
In just the past eight years, Congress has added $24 billion in extra money to build ships, more than any other part of the Pentagon budget, even as lawmakers have cut spending on repairs to the fleet, according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Congress has also balked at efforts to retire older ships that the Navy says provide only marginal warfighting capacity, leaving the service at risk of not being able to afford basic maintenance and staffing costs.
The result, officials acknowledge, has been to bring into focus how slow the Navy has been to provide the funding and attention to the rapid innovation that many analysts say is necessary — even as money pours into conventional shipbuilding programs.
Capt. Alex Campbell of the Navy, whose job this year has been to find ways to buy cheaper, faster, more innovative technology, said the amount of money that had been allocated to the effort so far was minuscule.
“It’s the dust particle on the pocket lint of the budget,” he said.
No one is arguing that the Navy no longer needs traditional warships; in fact, a large fleet of fast-attack submarines would be particularly vital in any conflict with China.
To many analysts, industry executives and current and former military officials, the open question is how quickly the Navy can embrace the tactical opportunities by also arming itself with a new generation of weapons that are more maneuverable, cheaper to build and less devastating to lose. Even as the big shipyards are booming, companies that make unmanned platforms like those being evaluated in Bahrain are struggling to remain afloat.
“Right now, they are still building a largely 20th-century Navy,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy budget planner who serves as a consultant to the service.
Navy leaders have said they are committed to shifting to a new operational approach they are calling “distributed maritime operations,” a combination of traditional ships and unmanned drones that will allow them to spread out their forces.
In a statement to the Times, Carlos Del Toro, the secretary of the Navy, said the service had made “profound progress” over the past two years in starting to modernize its fleet. It is preparing to take additional steps soon, he said, including the creation of a unit called the Disruptive Capabilities Office.
“I am doing everything in my power to ensure that we stay at the forefront of building the warfighting capabilities and industries of the future,” said Del Toro, a former commander of a guided missile destroyer built in Pascagoula. “We are committed to innovation and advancing technological advances to maintain our strategic edge as a nation.”
But Adm. Michael M. Gilday, who until last month served as the chief of naval operations, conceded that the Navy had been taking only cautiously measured steps.
“Revolutionary change is really hard, and we’ve learned sometimes the hard way when we move too fast, we make big mistakes,” Gilday said in a speech this year. “And so our path really has been more evolutionary. It’s been more deliberate, but it has been focused.”
Thousands of workers in hard hats pour through the gates at the Huntington Ingalls shipyard in Pascagoula before the pre-dawn horn sounds at the start of a shift, offering a regular reminder of what an enormous operation the shipbuilding effort is here — the largest manufacturing employer in Mississippi.
The most prominent of the four classes of ships the shipyard produces are the Arleigh Burke guided-missile destroyers, 509-foot vessels that are considered the workhorses of the Navy.
The destroyers can handle a range of missions, including hunting down and destroying enemy submarines, attacking other ships in nearby waters and firing precision missiles to strike faroff targets on land. The Navy already has 73 of them and has deals to build 16 more, at a price tag of about $2 billion apiece.
The problem is that despite their awesome power, these types of destroyers, like certain other traditional warships, are increasingly vulnerable — especially in a conflict with China over Taiwan, according to repeated war game exercises conducted by the Pentagon, its contractors and outside consultants.
“Imagine a hallucinogenic state fair,” reporter Rick Marin wrote about Burning Man in The New York Times in 2000.
The article described an environment of countercultural revelry, where hippies and Silicon Valley types cut loose in surroundings reminiscent of both “Mad Max” and Cirque du Soleil.
But this year’s festival, held in a remote desert in Nevada, has been a very different scene. The event was pummeled by rain that began Friday night, leaving thousands of attendees trapped and dealing with thick sludge. With limited access to the site, attendees have been told to conserve food and water. Police are investigating the death of one participant.
The extreme conditions have challenged the freespirited atmosphere that has long been central to Burning Man’s allure. Below is a look at the origins and development of the festival.
What is Burning Man?
Burning Man is a nine-day celebration of art and selfexpression held in Black Rock City, a temporary community about 120 miles north of Reno, Nevada. The festival, which has drawn around 70,000 people in recent years, is held at the end of each summer and culminates in the burning of a towering wooden sculpture shaped like a man — hence its name.
What is the festival usually like?
Attendees, who call themselves Burners, describe the festival as an exercise in creativity and community building. Organizers have also described it as “an excuse to party in the desert.”
The event takes place on the playa, a dusty minicity whose streets splay out like a clock’s face with the wooden figure at its center. Unlike Coachella, Burning Man has no headliner or scheduled bill of performers. Burners do their own construction, including lodging and colossal art installations. They use a system based on gifts, rather than money, to exchange goods.
“It’s an experiment in participatory, decommodified, selfexpressive culture,” said Benjamin Wachs, who wrote “The Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach
Us About Building Better Communities” under the pen name Caveat Magister. “All the booze is free, except maybe you have to sing a song or offer up a poem or something.”
The freewheeling attitude of the festival is also associated with nudity, sex and drug use. Most of the 16 arrests at the event last year were for drug possession, according to The Reno Gazette Journal.
How did Burning Man begin?
Burning Man began as a more modest gathering in June 1986, when founders Larry Harvey and Jerry James held a bonfire with friends on Baker Beach in San Francisco. They burned an 8-foot-tall wooden figure, the legend goes, to mark the end of a romantic relationship. A crowd of roughly 35 people gathered to watch it burn.
The event was held annually at Baker Beach until fire marshals intervened in 1990. That year it moved to Black Rock Desert, where 350 revelers gathered to burn a 40-foot effigy, according to the Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that organizes the festival. By the 2000s, the event had grown into a dayslong desert rave that regularly drew more than 50,000 attendees including tech
From page 7
On a bay just off the Persian Gulf, two very unusual Navy vessels moved about: one built for speed, the other endurance, but both unmanned. They were there to help track and intercept threats from Iran, which has been seizing oil tankers and harassing ships passing through a vital choke point of international commerce.
One, the T-38 Devil Ray, which can reach speeds of up to 90 mph — faster than just about any other vessel in the Navy — was awaiting its next assignment. Alongside it was the Ocean Aero Triton, whose solar-power system allows it to operate for three months at a time without any need to refuel.
The experiment behind the Devil Ray and the Triton, nicknamed Task Force 59, has become a fulcrum for the debate
over whether the military is moving fast enough to embrace new and more flexible ways of adapting to a changing threat environment.
The effort in Bahrain took off with the support of Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of Navy forces in the region. But it was a shoestring effort, led by Capt. Michael D. Brasseur, who had worked on a similar project for NATO.
The Navy had already contracted with traditional suppliers like Boeing and L3Harris to develop unmanned vessels with names like Orca, Snakehead and Sea Hunter. But several of those projects were already years behind schedule and tremendously over budget — or had such severe problems they were quietly canceled.
The team in Bahrain took a very different approach, turning to smaller, more entrepreneurial companies and sidestepping
moguls and celebrities.
The modern festival is organized around the “10 Principles,” a series of guidelines that were introduced by Harvey in 2004. They include “radical inclusion,” which says there are no prerequisites for joining the community, and “leaving no trace,” which requires the participants to leave the desert clean.
Who attends?
The festival attracts a mix of dedicated Burners and new revelers each year, with a curious blend of tech moguls, influencers and celebrities.
Paris Hilton was a DJ there in 2017. Mark Zuckerberg has attended, as has Elon Musk, who has shown up almost every year for the past two decades (though there were no signs of him at this year’s festival). Music producer Diplo posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that he had escaped this year’s festival by walking 5 miles in the mud.
How much does it cost?
Tickets to Burning Man cost $575, although CNBC estimated that the entire experience can end up costing about $1,500 with lodging, travel and attire.
How has the festival changed over time?
According to a survey completed annually by festival volunteers, the average Burner is getting older (the average age last year was 37, compared with 32 in 2013) and wealthier. Attendees are still mostly white, according to the survey, with 13% identifying themselves as people of color.
The influx of wealthy attendees — some of whom have brought in chefs and air conditioning — has caused some longtime Burners to bemoan a loss of the festival’s DIY ethos.
The festival had encountered hurdles before this year. It was held virtually in 2020 and 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic. The festival last year took place amid extreme heat and dust, and environmental activists blockaded the entrance to this year’s gathering.
Burners are usually prepared for difficult conditions, Wachs said, but not to this degree. “I do think that climate change is creating an environment where this is going to become unpredictably harder,” he added.
the bureaucracy that slows and complicates big weapons programs. It found partners in companies like Saildrone, Anduril, Shield AI and Martac, which had never built a major Navy ship.
Given that war games had demonstrated the need for thousands of unmanned devices for surveillance, interdiction and attack purposes to prepare for any conflict with China, Selby pushed colleagues at the Pentagon to figure out a way to rapidly buy thousands of similar devices for the Navy to use worldwide.
But again and again, he said, he ran into roadblocks.
“You now run up against the machine — the people who just want to kind of continue to do what we’ve always done,” Selby said. “The budgeting process, the congressional process, the industrial lobbying efforts. It is all designed to continue to produce what we’ve already got and make it a little better. But that is not good enough.”
At the site of this year’s Burning Man festival, a rainbow appeared in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
By PETER BAKER
Just before 8 p.m. last Thursday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a video of herself at a town hall in her Georgia district declaring that she “will not vote to fund the government” unless the House holds a vote to open an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.
It took just 68 minutes for the White House to fire back with a blistering statement that such a vote would mean that House Republicans had “caved to the hard-core fringe of their party in prioritizing a baseless impeachment stunt over high-stakes needs Americans care about deeply” like drug enforcement and disaster relief.
The White House, as it turns out, is not waiting for a formal inquiry to wage war against impeachment. With a team of two dozen lawyers, legislative liaisons, communications specialists and others, the president has begun moving to counter any effort to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors with a best-defense-is-a-good-offense campaign aimed at dividing Republicans and taking his case to the public.
The president’s team has been mapping out messaging, legal and parliamentary strategies for different scenarios. Officials have been reading books about past impeachments, studying law journal articles and pulling up old court decisions. They have even dug out correspondence between previous presidential advisers and congressional investigators to determine what standards and precedents have been established.
At the same time, recognizing that any impeachment fight would be a political showdown heading into an election season, outside allies have been going after Republicans like Greene and Speaker Kevin McCarthy. A group called the Congressional Integrity Project has been collecting polling data, blitzing out statements, fact sheets and memos and producing ads targeting 18 House Republicans representing districts that voted for Biden in 2020.
“As the Republicans ramp up their impeachment efforts, they’re certainly making this a political exercise and we’re responding in kind,” said Kyle Herrig, the executive director of the Congressional Integrity Project. “This is a moment of offense for Democrats. They have no basis for impeachment. They have no evidence. They have nothing.”
The White House preparations do not indicate that Biden’s advisers believe an impeachment inquiry is inevitable. But advisers who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal thinking said it was important to take on the prospect aggressively and expressed hope that the situation could be turned to their advantage.
Republican congressional investigations have turned up evidence that Hunter Biden traded on his family name to generate multimillion-dollar deals and a former partner, Devon Archer, testified that Hunter Biden would put his father on speakerphone with potential business clients to impress them.
But Archer testified that the elder Biden only engaged
in idle chitchat during such calls, not business, and no evidence has emerged that the president directly profited from his son’s deals or used his power inappropriately while vice president to benefit his son’s financial interests.
Republicans have not identified any specific impeachable offenses, and some have privately made clear that they do not see any at the moment. The momentum toward an impeachment inquiry appears driven in large part by opposition to Biden’s policies and is fueled by former President Donald Trump, who is eager to tarnish his potential rival in next year’s election and openly frames the issue as a matter of revenge. “Either IMPEACH the BUM, or fade into OBLIVION,” he demanded of Republicans on his social media site this past week. “THEY DID IT TO US!”
That stands in sharp contrast to other modern impeachment efforts. When impeachment inquiries were initiated against Trump and Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, there were clear allegations of specific misconduct, whether or not they necessarily warranted removal from office. In Biden’s case, it is not clear what actions he has taken that would be defined as a high crime or misdemeanor.
McCarthy, R-Calif., cited “a culture of corruption” within the Biden family in explaining on Fox News last weekend why he might push ahead with an impeachment inquiry. “If you look at all the information we’ve been able to gather so far, it is a natural step forward that you would
have to go to an impeachment inquiry,” he said.
Even if Republican investigators turned up evidence that Biden had done something as vice president to help his son’s business, it would be the first time a president was targeted for impeachment for actions taken before he became president, raising novel constitutional issues.
For now, though, it is hardly certain that Republicans would authorize an inquiry. McCarthy told Breitbart News on Friday that if they pursued such an inquiry, “it would occur through a vote on the floor,” not through a decree by him, and veteran strategists in both parties doubt he could muster the 218 votes needed to proceed.
The speaker’s flirtation with holding such a vote may be simply a way of catering to Greene and others on his right flank. He has used the thirst to investigate Biden as an argument against a government shutdown, suggesting that a budgetary impasse would stall House inquiries.
But some Republicans have warned that a formal impeachment drive could be a mistake. Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., has said that “impeachment theater” was a distraction from spending issues and that it was not “responsible for us to talk about impeachment.” Ari Fleischer, a White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, said impeachment could “unleash an internal Republican civil war” and if unsuccessful could lead to “the worst, biggest backfire for Republicans.”
President Joe Biden has openly celebrated recent inflation reports, and Federal Reserve officials have also breathed a sigh of relief as rapid price gains show signs of losing steam.
But the pressing question now is whether that pace of progress toward slower price increases — one that was long-awaited and very welcome — can persist.
The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the Personal Consumption Expenditures index, was expected to tick up to 4.2% or 4.3% in a report late last week, after volatile food and fuel costs were stripped out. That would be an increase from 4.1% for the core measure in June. And while it would still be down considerably from a peak of 5.4% last summer, such a reading would underscore that inflation remains stubbornly above the Fed’s 2% goal and that its path back to normal is proving bumpy.
Most economists are not hugely concerned. They still expect inflation to ease later this year and into 2024 as pandemic disruptions fade and as consumers become less willing to accept ever-higher prices for goods and services. U.S. shoppers are feeling the squeeze of both shrinking savings and higher Fed interest rates.
But as price increases slow in fits and starts, they are keeping economic officials wary. Big uncertainties loom, including a few that could help inflation to fade faster and several that could keep it elevated.
The base case: Inflation is expected to cool
Price increases have slowed across a range of measures this summer. The overall Consumer Price Index — which feeds into the PCE numbers and is released earlier each month, making it a focal point for both analysts and the media — has slowed to 3.2% from a 9.1% peak in June 2022.
And as consumers have experienced less drastic price jumps, their expectations for future inflation have come down. That’s good news for the Fed. Inflation expectations can be a self-fulfilling prophecy: If consumers expect prices to climb, they may both accept cost increases more easily and demand higher pay, making inflation harder to stamp out.
Still, the moderation has not been enough for policymakers to declare victory. Fed officials have been trying to slow the economy and contain inflation since early 2022. Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, vowed during a speech last week at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming, symposium that they will “keep at it” until they are positive inflation is coming under control.
“Inflation is going the right way,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, a rates strategist at TD Securities. But it is like a fire, he said: “You want to kill its very last ember, because if you don’t, it can flare back up in an instant.”
The good news: Rents and China
There are reasons to believe that inflation is in the process of being sustainably doused.
Slower rent increases should help to weigh down overall inflation for at least the next year, several economists said. Rents for newly leased apartments spiked in the pandemic as people moved cities and ditched their roommates. Market-based rents began to cool last year, a shift that is only now feeding its way into official inflation data as people renew their leases or move.
The slowdown in inflation is also getting a helping hand from an unexpected source: China. The world’s second-largest
economy is growing much more slowly than expected after reopening from pandemic lockdowns. That means that fewer people are competing globally for the same commodities, weighing on prices. And if Chinese officials respond to the slump by trying to ramp up exports, it could make for cheaper goods in the global marketplace.
And more generally, Fed policy should help to pull down inflation in the months to come. The central bank has raised interest rates to a range of 5.25% to 5.5% over the past year and a half. Those higher borrowing costs are still trickling through the economy, reducing demand for big purchases made on credit and making it harder for companies to charge more.
The bad news: Gas, travel prices, health care
But a few key products could spell trouble for the inflation outlook. Gas is one.
AAA data shows gas prices have popped to more than $3.80 per gallon, up from about $3.70 a month ago, amid refinery shutdowns and global production cuts.
Fed officials mostly ignore gas when they are thinking about inflation, because it jumps around thanks to factors that policymakers can’t do much about. But gas prices matter a lot to consumers, and their inflation
expectations tend to increase when they pop — so central bankers can’t look past them entirely. Beyond that, gas prices can feed other prices, like airfares.
Nor is it just gas and travel costs that could stop pulling inflation down so quickly. Economists at Goldman Sachs expect health care prices to pick up as hospitals try to make up for a recent pop in their labor costs, propping up services inflation.
The uncertain news: Cars and growth
Used cars have also been helping to subtract from inflation, but it is increasingly uncertain how much they will help to pull it down going forward.
Many economists think the trend toward cheaper used automobiles has more room to run. Dealers have been paying a lot less for used cars at auction this year, and that trend may have yet to fully reach consumers. Plus, some new car producers have rebuilt inventories after years of shortages, which could relieve pressure in the auto market as a whole. (Electric vehicles in particular are piling up on dealer lots.)
But, surprisingly, wholesale used car costs ticked up very slightly in the latest data.
“The used car market is turning, and the reason for that is pretty simple: Demand has been way higher than dealers had expected,” said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights. Add to that the possibility of a United Auto Workers strike — the union’s contract expires in mid-September — and risks lie ahead for car inventories and prices, he said.
In fact, sustained demand in the used car market is symptomatic of a broader trend. The economy seems to be holding up even in the face of much-higher interest rates. Home prices have climbed since the start of the year in spite of hefty mortgage rates, and data released Thursday is expected to show that consumer spending remains strong.
That more general risk — the possibility of an economic acceleration — is perhaps the biggest wild card facing policymakers. If Americans remain willing to open their wallets despite swollen price tags and higher borrowing costs, it could make it difficult to tamp down inflation completely.
“We are attentive to signs that the economy may not be cooling as expected,” Powell said last week.
European shares ended flat on Monday as gains driven by optimism around China’s stimulus measures to revitalise its economy fizzled out, while Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk’s shares touched record highs.
The pan-European STOXX 600 index held steady at 457.96 points at close after touching near four-week highs earlier in the day.
Europe’s technology sector gained 0.5% as shares of Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML rose 0.8%.
Miners finished up 0.6% after rising nearly 2% intraday, as iron ore futures rallied on optimism over top steel producer China’s policy support for its struggling property sector. [IRONORE/]
China stepped up measures to boost the country’s faltering economy, with top banks paving the way for further cuts in lending rates and sources saying Beijing plans further action, including relaxing restrictions on home purchases.
“The slowdown that we’ve seen in China and this redirection away from consumer stimulation and to a more technical and high added value economy is taking a lot more time than people anticipated,” said Michael Browne, chief investment officer at Martin Currie, part of Franklin Templeton.
Further contractions in the labor market are likely to be a double-edged sword for investors as they ease some inflationary pressures while weighing on consumer spending.
Total consumer spending rose slightly more-than-expected in August, while the savings rate fell to its lowest level since November 2022, the Commerce Department said on Thursday.
Consumers will use up their excess savings accumulated during the pandemic “very soon,” said Jake Jolly, senior investment strategist at BNY Mellon (NYSE:) Investment Management, which is underweight equities and expects the U.S. economy to be headed for a recession .
“The real question is how long can consumer spending surprise on the upside,” he said, adding that bonds continue to look more attractive amid yield growth that has risen to over 4%.
Overall, consumer spending growth will slow to 0.9% in 2024 from 2.3% in 2023, said Gregory Daco, chief economist at accounting giant Ernst & Young, due to higher interest charges, fewer available savings and student loan payments. He said the economy will see below-trend growth for several quarters.
Separately, according to sources and a document seen by Reuters, embattled Chinese developer Country Garden has won approval from its creditors to extend payments for an onshore private bond, in a major relief for the firm and the crisis-hit property sector.
China-exposed industrials rose 0.1%, while automakers gained 0.3%.
Luxury heavyweight LVMH slipped 0.4%, paring initial gains and weighing on the STOXX 600.
Novo Nordisk rose 0.7% to hit a record high intraday after the Danish drugmaker launched its weight-loss injection Wegovy in Britain. Novo, with a market capitalisation of $424.7 billion, unseated LVMH as Europe’s most-valuable listed company on Friday.
Rising European bond yields also kept a lid on gains German inflation and euro zone gross domestic product
numbers due later in the week will act as major tests of the European economy’s health ahead of the European Central Bank’s policy meeting on Sept. 14.
European stocks ended the last week of August higher, erasing some losses during the month as recent economic data fuelled expectations that major central banks were nearly done with their interest rate hikes.
Friday’s data showing a jump in U.S. unemployment rate cemented bets that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates unchanged at its policy meeting later this month. U.S. markets are closed on Monday for Labor Day. Telecom Italia (TIM) advanced 3.5% after Barclays upgraded the stock to “equal-weight” from “underweight”.
On a recent morning, Ángel Ortiz Rodríguez was slumped on a sofa in his apartment in Granada, in southern Spain, a tangle of breathing tubes protruding from his nose. Since Ortiz had a heart attack a few years ago, his life has depended on an electronic breathing machine.
But his neighborhood regularly loses power several times a day, forcing his wife, Rosa Martin Piñedo, to keep an oxygen cylinder as a backup. “We can’t really rely on electricity here,” she said.
Daily blackouts plague the 25,000 inhabitants in this poor district of northern Granada. Food rots in refrigerators and phone batteries die. Medical devices stop working, resulting in major health complications, doctors say.
The blackouts have been a part of life here for more than a decade, but they have grown markedly worse in recent years. And Endesa, Spain’s largest electric company, is blaming a surprising culprit: an increase in illegal marijuana farms. Marijuana growers, the company says, illegally connect to the grid and overwhelm it because of the powerful lights and air conditioning the plants need.
A top manager at Endesa said that in Granada’s northern district alone, about one-third of the volume of electricity stolen last year was linked to illegal farms.
Police attribute the rise in the number of farms partly to drug laws that they say are ambiguous. Spain allows small-scale, private growing and use of the drug, and it has relatively short sentences for those who break the law by running big plantations and engaging in drug trafficking.
Residents acknowledge the number of illegal pot farms. But they say that the harping on marijuana’s role — including in the news media — has given authorities and the electric company the perfect excuse to avoid expensive repairs to a power grid that has been wobbly for years.
The idea of marijuana’s role in the
blackouts has taken hold across Spain, where the largest newspaper, El País, ran a headline this year saying, “Marijuana Imposes Its Law on Granada’s Northern District.” Another, from the newspaper El Confidencial, read, “Marijuana Turns Granada Into a Paradise for Illegal Hookups.”
Several residents, frustrated that the focus on marijuana seems to have supplanted their larger concerns, have sued Endesa for failing to provide them with the electricity they need.
“People are dying here because they don’t have light,” said Manuel Martín García, Granada’s ombudsman. “We can’t just point to the marijuana and say, ‘Here’s the culprit.’”
At least a dozen other poor districts across Spain have also been affected by the double scourge of failing electrical grids and illegal marijuana production, according to local rights organizations.
After a two-month blackout in 2020 in a poverty-ravaged neighborhood in Madrid, United Nations human rights experts called on the Spanish government to fix the problem and criticized authorities for blaming “the power outages on illegal marijuana plantations.”
But the debate over electricity shortfalls seems to be especially pronounced in Granada, where Endesa reports that the number of blackouts last year was three times as high as in 2017.
Just a 15-minute drive from the
famed Alhambra palace, Granada’s northern district is the city’s poorest, with half of the population living on less than $8,000 a year. It is a collection of cramped quarters where decrepit tangles of electric cables stretch across the streets — a far cry from the fancy, cobbled neighborhoods of the city center.
In the quarter of La Paz, Joséfa Manzano Melgra recounted how she once slept on her living room floor after falling during a blackout while trying to reach the bathroom. At older than 100, she can barely move and uses remote controls for nearly everything, including opening the door of her house.
“If there’s no electricity, they take my life away,” said Manzano, who was seated in an armchair surrounded by extension cords.
Data collected by local residents’ organizations show that power cuts occur on average nearly 100 times a month in Granada’s northern district. Sometimes they last more than 10 hours, as was the case in La Paz in early February.
“People come to my office and say, ‘We can’t take it anymore,’” said Dr. Marta García Caballos, a family physician. She said diabetic patients were sometimes unable to take their insulin because their blood sugar monitors had run out of power.
A study that García co-wrote in
2021 noted that blackouts had led to increased mortality, including because of a higher risk of accidents and poisoning.
Although hardly visible, the presence of indoor marijuana farms is evident in the area. The distinctive smell of cannabis pervades many streets. Several run-down buildings have brickedup windows and air conditioning units that purr all day, even when it is not that hot outside. (The plant grows best under controlled temperatures and with artificial light.)
Spanish officials say that besides drug laws that they consider lax, rising poverty after the financial crisis of the 2010s has led some to turn to growing marijuana.
“Marijuana drug trafficking extends like a green stain through almost all the municipalities of the province of Granada,” read a recent report by regional authorities that singled out Granada’s northern neighborhood as a production hub. Some 430,000 marijuana plants were seized in Granada in 2021, nearly three times as many as the year before.
José Manuel Revuelta, the head of infrastructure and networks at Endesa, said pot growers were illegally connecting to the grid, sometimes causing transformers to blow fuses up to 15 times a day.
Endesa employees regularly take part in police raids — 18 so far this year — to cut off illegal connections. But a company report notes that the farms can often be up and running again within hours.
For now, residents await the verdict in their court case against Endesa, which they accuse of violating their right to health, which is protected by the European Union’s charter of fundamental rights.
No matter the outcome, some fear it may already be too late to put the focus on the people instead of the pot. At the trial, Marta García Caballos said she gave the judges a presentation on how blackouts harmed people’s health, expecting questions on the subject. Instead, she said, “they asked me about marijuana.”
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that he was replacing his minister of defense, the biggest shake-up in the leadership of Ukraine’s war effort since Russia’s full-scale invasion began, citing the need for “new approaches” after more than 18 months of conflict.
The fate of the defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, had been the subject of increasing speculation in Ukraine as financial improprieties in the ministry came to light and the government started several investigations into official corruption.
Zelenskyy said in a statement that Reznikov, who has not been personally implicated in the widening investigations into mishandling of military contracts, would be replaced by Rustem Umerov, the chair of Ukraine’s State Property Fund. Zelenskyy said he expected Ukraine’s parliament, which must approve the change, to sign off on his request.
“Oleksii Reznikov has gone through more than 550 days of full-scale war,” Zelenskyy said in a statement announcing his decision Sunday night. “I believe that the ministry needs new approaches and other formats of interaction with both the military and society at large.”
The decision to replace Reznikov atop the Defense Ministry comes as Ukraine is in the midst of a major counteroffensive, slowly gaining territory in the south and the east. Last week, Ukrainian officials said they had captured the southern village of Robotyne, suggesting that the offensive had penetrated the first layer of minefields, tank traps, trenches and bunkers that Moscow has deployed between Ukraine’s forces and Russian-occupied Crimea.
The shake-up arose from several factors, according to an official in the president’s office, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the dismissal. Those included an understanding that Ukraine will need new leadership as the war drags on, the din of criticism from Ukrainian civil society groups and media over the contracting scandals, and Reznikov’s own requests to step down.
Though a member of an opposition political party, Umerov, a former investment banker, has taken on several critical roles for the Zelenskyy government since the war began. He was the chief Ukrainian negotiator of the Black Sea Grain Initiative and a prominent negotiator on prisoner exchanges.
He is a Crimean Tatar, a member of the ethnic group persecuted under Russia’s occupation of the Crimean Peninsula.
There was no immediate comment from Reznikov, who has repeatedly faced questions about his future in recent weeks, including about whether he would move to a diplomatic role, as ambassador to Britain. Zelenskyy’s announcement made no mention of any new assignment for Reznikov.
Since the start of the war, Reznikov has become a public face for Ukraine on the world stage. He was among a handful of Zelenskyy’s top security officials who remained in Kyiv, the capital, as it was partially surrounded by Russian forces after the start of the invasion in February 2022.
The decision to replace Reznikov notwithstanding, Ukraine has experienced far more stability over the course of the invasion than Russia.
Moscow has undergone several military leadership changes amid criticism of its battlefield tactics, and in June, there was a brief rebellion by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who marched members of his Wagner private military company toward Moscow. He was declared dead after a fiery plane crash last month that some Western officials have suggested had been orchestrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In October 2022, the Kremlin appointed Gen. Sergei Surovikin to command its forces in Ukraine. He lasted just three months before he was replaced by Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s highest-ranking military officer. U.S. officials have said Surovikin had advance knowledge of the rebellion plans of Prigozhin.
Reznikov had won praise for negotiating the transfer of vast quantities of donated Western weaponry, and he oversaw the expansion of the army and its transition from an arsenal of Soviet-legacy armaments to Western systems even as his country was under attack.
In the first month of the war, Ukraine’s army rebuffed Russia’s invasion with foreign military assistance limited mostly to shoulderfired anti-tank weapons, but it has since incorporated a wide-ranging arsenal of Western heavy weaponry. In its counteroffensive in the Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions in the country’s south, Ukraine has relied on U.S. and European armored vehicles, tanks, artillery and guided rockets.
But the Ministry of Defense has been buffeted this year by a string of allegations of mishandling military contracting and corruption as its budget ballooned. At one point, $986 million worth of weaponry the ministry had contracted for was undelivered by dates specified in contracts, according to government figures. Some deliveries are months late.
Ukrainian investigative journalists have found other woes with military contracting, seeming to show huge overpayments for basic supplies for the army such as eggs, canned beans and winter coats.
Reznikov had said the ministry was suing to recoup money lost in the weapons contracts. Government officials have said many of the problems had arisen in the early, chaotic days of the war in Ukraine’s frantic scramble to buy weapons and ammunition and have since been fixed. Two ministry officials — a deputy minister and head of procurement — were arrested over the winter after the reports of over-
priced eggs.
With some U.S. critics of the war citing graft as an argument for limiting military aid to Ukraine, the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, last week met with three high-ranking Ukrainian officials to discuss efforts to stamp out wartime corruption.
The contracting scandals prompted some calls for Reznikov’s resignation, but it appears that the change was not anticipated in Washington.
As of Friday, Reznikov was scheduled to visit the Pentagon this week to meet with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The two men had regular contact and spoke “relatively frequently,” according to a U.S. official who spoke on background as the news was breaking Sunday. It is believed that they last met in person at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July.
Corruption has plagued Ukraine for most of its post-independence history but the situation improved over the past decade, according to assessments by Transparency International, a global anti-corruption group. Zelenskyy campaigned on an anti-corruption platform before winning the presidency in 2019, and efforts to fight graft have been widely acknowledged as crucial to Ukraine’s efforts to move closer to its Western allies, including its hopes of joining the European Union.
In recent weeks, Zelenskyy has stepped up measures against wartime graft, firing all the country’s recruitment officers after bribery scandals and proposing a law that would punish corruption as treason under martial law.
In May, the head of Ukraine’s Supreme Court was detained in a bribery investigation. And on Friday, Ukrainian media reported that a court had set bail at more than $25,000 for a former deputy minister of economy accused of embezzling humanitarian aid.
The allegations dogging the ministry are not related to Western weapons transfers but to domestic weapons procurement, which is not directly financed by aid from allies. These countries transfer weapons and ammunition directly to the Ukrainian army, while financial aid is directed to nonmilitary spending. Ukrainian tax revenues fund defense procurement, where the accusations of mismanagement arose.
In an earlier shake-up last summer, Zelenskyy dismissed the director of his domestic intelligence agency and prosecutor general, also in the wake of allegations of corruption and mismanagement.
ASwedish citizen working for the European Union diplomatic corps has been imprisoned in Iran for more than 500 days, making him an important bargaining chip for Tehran as it tries to wring concessions from the West.
The arrest, which has been kept under wraps for over a year by Swedish and EU authorities, appears to be part of an expanding pattern of what has become known as Iran’s “hostage diplomacy.”
Tehran has been opportunistically scooping up dual Iranian nationals and foreigners on spurious charges, seeking to trade them for Iranians held in Europe or the United States, or to use them as leverage to extract money and other concessions.
Last month the United States concluded a deal with Iran to free five Americans held there in exchange for $6 billion in withheld Iranian oil revenues as well as the release of Iranian prisoners in America.
Still, this latest case, the details of which have not been previously reported, stands out for the prisoner’s professional background as a European official. The man, Johan Floderus, 33, a native of Sweden, has held several positions in the EU’s institutions, coming up through its civil service traineeship program. He was even featured in an advertising campaign to attract young Swedes to EU careers.
Floderus visited Iran last spring on what people familiar with the case described as a private tourist trip, together with several Swedish friends. As he prepared to take his flight out of Tehran on April 17, 2022, he was detained at the airport.
In July of last year, the Iranian government released a statement announcing that it had apprehended a Swedish national for espionage. He is now being held in the notorious Evin prison in the Iranian capital.
The New York Times spoke to six people with firsthand knowledge of the case. All requested anonymity, fearing a backlash for speaking about it. They denied that Floderus had been involved in espionage.
The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs said it would not comment on the details of the case, citing a need for secrecy. “A Swedish citizen — a man in his 30s — was detained in Iran in April 2022,” its press department said in an email. “The Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of Sweden in Tehran are working on the case intensively.”
“We understand that there is interest in this matter, but in our assessment it would complicate the handling of the case if the ministry were to publicly discuss its actions,” it
added.
Floderus most recently served as an aide to the European commissioner for migration, Ylva Johansson, starting in 2019. In 2021, he joined the European External Action Service, the bloc’s diplomatic corps.
He had visited Iran previously, without incident, while on official EU business, when he worked for the bloc’s development program, people familiar with his background said.
The Iranian statement announcing the arrest of a Swedish national in 2022 made note that the person had visited the country before, citing those visits as evidence of nefarious activity.
The European External Action Service said that it was “following very closely the case of a Swedish national detained in Iran,” but did not acknowledge that the person in question worked for the service or that Floderus had previously visited Iran on official EU business.
“This case has also to be seen in the context of the growing number of arbitrary detentions involving EU citizens,” added Nabila Massrali, a spokesperson for the bloc’s diplomatic body. “We have used and will continue to use every opportunity to raise the issue with the Iranian authorities to obtain the release of all arbitrarily detained EU citizens.”
Reached by telephone, Floderus’ father declined to comment.
Floderus was a member of the Afghanis-
tan delegation for the diplomatic corps, but never made it to Kabul because of the Taliban takeover in August 2021. He did his job from headquarters in Brussels, where he had lived for several years, people familiar with his background said.
“This arrest in 2022 was a real escalation,” said Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker who was held in Iran for six years on false charges of espionage. “It is shocking for me that the Swedish government and the EEAS have sat on it.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released last year in exchange for Britain’s settling a long-standing financial debt with Iran.
A Belgian aid worker, Olivier Vandecasteele, who was similarly imprisoned in Tehran on espionage charges for 455 days, recently appeared to pay homage to Floderus without naming him.
After Vandecasteele was freed in a prisoner swap in May, he referred to a Swedish cellmate in the Evin prison at a concert held in his honor in Brussels in June.
“We became like brothers,” Vandecasteele said at the time. “We promised each other that we would do everything for each other and whoever came out first would help each other’s family and loved ones.”
Relations between Iran and Sweden are at a nadir. In July last year, a Swedish court sen-
tenced a former senior Iranian judicial official, Hamid Noury, to life in prison over war crimes committed in 1988 in Iran. He is appealing.
The landmark case against Noury, who was found to have played a key role in the execution of thousands of Iranians, was a rare example of “universal jurisdiction,” under which countries can arrest foreign nationals on their soil and prosecute them for atrocities, irrespective of where the crimes were committed.
Just before Noury’s conviction in July 2022, Iran began escalating pressure on Sweden.
Floderus was arrested in April 2022. That May, Iran said it planned to execute an Iranian-Swedish scientist, Ahmadreza Djalali, on murky charges of spying and aiding Israel in assassinating nuclear scientists, accusations that he denies.
That same month, Iran also executed another Swedish-Iranian, Habib Chaab, a dissident who had been living in Sweden for more than a decade and was abducted during a visit to Turkey in 2020 and smuggled to Iran.
“My view is that the European governments keeping their new hostage cases quiet last year inevitably led to other escalations by Iran,” Ratcliffe said. “It is not a coincidence that they then started executing foreign nationals. Hostage diplomacy has shifted into execution diplomacy.”
Governments handling negotiations with Iranian authorities often push for secrecy while they work out what to do, in part to avoid public scrutiny and pressures. Critics say the secrecy also allows them to pursue other policy priorities in talks with Iran without being held accountable.
“In our family’s experience, publicity keeps hostages safe because it limits the abuse that gets done to them, and it alerts everyone to the games being played,” Ratcliffe said.“When Western governments try to suppress these cases and keep families quiet, they are prioritizing other agendas than the welfare of their citizens,” he said.
The EU is pursuing talks to revitalize a nuclear deal with Iran, with a goal of limiting Tehran’s advances in enriching uranium to a level very close to bomb grade.
Despite Western efforts to isolate Iran through sanctions and Tehran’s continued policy of arresting Westerners and executing and imprisoning activists at home, Tehran’s isolation has been increasingly pierced.
Last month, Iran was invited to join BRICS, the club of major developing-world powers led by China and Russia. It has also been helping Russia fight its war in Ukraine by providing it with armed drones, among other things.
The news that thousands of Burning Man festivalgoers were told to conserve food and water after torrential rains left them trapped by impassable mud in the Nevada desert led some to chortle about a “Lord of the Flies” scenario for the annual gathering popular with tech lords and moguls. Alas, I have to spoil the hate-the-tech-rich revelries. No matter how this mess is resolved — and many there seem to be coping — the common belief that civilization is but a thin veneer that will fall apart when authority disappears is not only false, the false belief itself is harmful.
Rutger Bregman, who wrote a book called “Humankind: A Hopeful History,” had read “Lord of the Flies” as a teenager like many, and didn’t doubt its terrible implication about human nature. However, Bregman got curious about whether there were any real-life cases of boys of that age getting stranded on an island.
Bregman learned of one that played out differently,
In 1965, six boys ages 13-16, bored in their school in Tonga, Polynesia, impulsively stole a boat and sailed out, but became helplessly adrift after their sail and rudder broke. They were stranded on an island for more
than a year. Instead of descending into cruel anarchy, though, they stayed alive through cooperation. When one of them broke his leg, they took care of him.
Some of the most memorable weeks of my life were spent helping with rescues and aid after the 1999 earthquake in Turkey that killed thousands of people. The epicenter was my childhood hometown, so I was familiar with the place, and I rushed to help, unsure of what I would find. Instead of the chaos and looting that was rumored, the people had been mostly sharing everything with one another. Intrigued, I dived into the sociology of disasters and found that this was the common trajectory after similar misfortune.
Rebecca Solnit’s book “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster” documents many such experiences — people altruistically cooperating after earthquakes, hurricanes and other catastrophes — and how authorities often assume the opposite, and go in to restore law and order, but end up doing real harm.
One of the most egregious recent examples of this involved rumors of conditions after Hurricane Katrina in the Superdome in New Orleans — where tens of thousands of people unable to evacuate earlier had gathered. The police chief told Oprah Winfrey that babies were being raped. The mayor said, “They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.” There were reports that rescue helicopters were being shot at.
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The reality was that even as the situation deteriorated in the Superdome, as Rebecca Solnit’s book documents, many people kept each other alive, especially taking care of the elderly and the frail under stressful conditions.
But the demonization of the overwhelmingly Black population of New Orleans fueled true ugliness: Some aid was delayed and resources diverted to prevent “looting,” and refugees from the city trying to escape on foot were shot at by residents in the mostly white suburbs.
What about the terrible side of humanity: the wars, the genocides? And what about survival of the fittest?
This is not a rosy-eyed view that ignores the terrible aspects of human behavior. Groups can also be organized politically and socially against each other. That’s the basis of wars and genocides. But far from being elements of true human nature that are revealed once the thin veneer of civilization is worn off, such atrocities are organized through the institutions of civilization: through politics and culture and militaries and sustained political campaigns of dehumanization.
The institutions of civilization can also be enlisted to resist this dehumanization. The European Union may not be perfect, but it has helped to largely suppress the sorts of conflicts that wracked the continent for centuries.
I would venture that many of the thousands trapped in the Nevada mud are mostly banding together, sharing shelter, food and water.
If tech luminaries and rich folks are among those suffering in the mire, instead of gloating about their travail, let’s hope this experience reinforces for them the importance of pulling together as a society.
Sharon
Ramírez Legal Notices Graphics ManagerAaron Christiana Editor
In his book “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society,” Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist as well as a physician, explains that people are cooperative and social animals, not lone wolves. Humans have survived not because they were the animals with the sharpest claws and strongest muscles, but because they had smarts and they had one another.
Christakis looked at shipwrecks from 1500 to 1900 and found that survivors often managed by cooperation and that violence and ugliness were far from the norm.
We can help them along by passing laws that make tax havens illegal, create a more equitable tax structure and a strong international framework for stopping the laundering of gains of corruption, force technology and other companies to deal with the harms of their inventions and overcome the current situation where profits are private but the fallout can be societal.
Human nature isn’t an obstacle to a good society, but it needs help from laws and institutions, not thick mud, to let the better angels have a chance.
EL CAPITOLIO – La Comisión de Educación de la Cámara, presidida por Deborah Soto Arroyo, anunció este lunes que intentarán superar el veto gubernamental al proyecto de la Cámara 1040 sobre la instalación de aires acondicionados en escuelas públicas.
“El gobernador vetó el proyecto que aprobaron tanto la Cámara como el Senado en mayo del 2022, un proyecto vital dado los altos niveles de calor que he observado en mis visitas a las escuelas al inicio de clases”, expresó Soto Arroyo en declaraciones escritas.
Además, instó a la delegación del Partido Nuevo Progresista a unir fuerzas para superar el veto del gobernador, requiriendo un total de 34 votos. “Conozco de primera mano las dificultades que enfrentan los estudiantes con estos niveles de calor. Invito al gobernador y al secretario de educación a experimentar estas condiciones por sí mismos”, afirmó la representante del distrito 10.
Como trasfondo, el proyecto surgió ante la necesidad identificada de mejorar las condiciones de las aulas para facilitar un ambiente de aprendizaje más
cómodo y propicio. La negativa del gobernador a firmar el proyecto ha generado preocupaciones adicionales sobre el bienestar de los estudiantes en las escuelas públicas.
Por otro lado, Soto Arroyo, junto con otros representantes, exige incentivos y alivios fiscales para la clase docente, garantizando que la reforma contributiva recientemente propuesta asegure los salarios de los maestros más allá de septiembre de 2024. “Es imperativo mantener una base de ingresos sólida para honrar el salario base de nuestros maestros”, subrayó Soto Arroyo.
Joel Sánchez Ayala destacó la importancia de reconocer y apoyar a los maestros, mencionando que “no solo traerá mejoras en la educación, sino que también influirá positivamente en el desarrollo socioeconómico de la isla”. Jesús Hernández Arroyo enfatizó el compromiso de la Cámara de trabajar en una legislación consensuada que valore el esfuerzo de la clase docente en la educación de la juventud.
Los representantes expresan confianza en la dirección del gobernador hacia un futuro más prometedor, y muestran optimismo sobre la colaboración mutua en este esfuerzo, según se indica en la misiva enviada.
SAN JUAN – La Alianza de Empleados y Jubilados de la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica asegura que el nuevo Plan de Ajuste de la Deuda de la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica (AEE) sometido por la Junta de Control Fiscal (JCF) el pasado 25 de agosto con un enfoque atractivo “es un gran engaño” en perjuicio del pueblo de Puerto Rico y “tenemos la evidencia para probarlo”.
“Gracias a la Ley Promesa, el respaldo del gobernador Pedro Pierluisi y el gobierno federal, la JCF hace y deshace en contra del pueblo, pero cuando leemos pausadamente las letras pequeñas, vemos cómo engañan al Pueblo, ya que el plan es peor que el anterior”, confirmó la Alianza integrada por miembros de la Asociación de Jubilados de la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica (AJAEE), la Unión de Trabajadores de la Industria Eléctrica y Riego (UTIER), la Asociación de Gerenciales de la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica (AEG-AEE) y el Distrito Autónomo Antonio Lucchetti (DAAL).
De acuerdo con las proyecciones de recaudos de la AEE provistos por LUMA, la Junta de Control Fiscal presentó un Plan de Ajuste de la Deuda, en el cual
propone un recorte de $5.68 mil millones a $2.3 mil millones. De entrada, puede parecer atractivo, pero cuando analizamos el lenguaje y las letras pequeñas, “es una estafa a nuestro bolsillo. Terminaremos pagando aproximadamente $6.6 mil millones durante los próximos 35 años con una emisión de bonos al 6 ó 7 por ciento de interés. De no pagarlos en 35 años, continuaremos pagando y se podría extender hasta 70 años”.
El PAD incluye un aumento de 4 centavos por KVH a los abonados para el pago de la deuda. Éste se divide en 1.6 centavos para el pago a los bonistas no asegurados y 2.4 centavos para el pago de las pensiones a los jubilados, lo que equivale .4 centavos por KVH o un 20% de aumento.
Como resultado de dicho plan, pretenden imponernos un cargo fijo mensual entre $1.00 (residenciales) y $112.50 (industriales) por 35 años, más un cargo por consumo volumétrico. La Alianza resumió que “el cargo volumétrico significa que mientras más electricidad consuma, mayor será el costo por KVH. Es como ir a la estación de gasolina y si echa 10 litros le cuesta a 95.7 centavos y si echa 15 litros le costaría a $1.00 y si echa 20 litros el costo será de $1.10 y así sucesivamente”.
El PAD propone pagos significativos en efectivo entre $500 millones y $1,000 millones para el pago de honorarios de abogados, consultores y asesores. Proponen, además, pagarles a los bonistas el 25% de los ahorros operacionales y de combustible realizados por Genera en los próximos diez años.
Lo peor y lo más trágico es que, con este nuevo acuerdo, se obligaría al pueblo a pagarle a los acreedores buitres que consintieron a no cobrar su dinero, si no hubiese fondos conforme con el Contrato de Fideicomiso de 1974. “Se debe tomar en cuenta que la Junta de Control Fiscal obtuvo dos victorias jurídicas, cuando la jueza Laura Taylor Swain determinó que los bonos de la AEE no son asegurados y que, en caso de una quiebra, los bonistas no asegurados cobrarían si sobraba dinero”. A su vez, fijó la reclamación de los bonistas en $2,388 millones. Esto es una cuarta parte de la deuda que los bonistas buitres reclaman.
La Alianza denunció que este desastroso plan “crea un nuevo derecho legal para los bonistas, convirtiendo los bonos no asegurados a bonos asegurados.
Denunció además que, para el pago de las pensiones, “no se establece guía alguna para la implantación o manejo de ese dinero ni por quien”.
Eléctrica: La JCF se junta con los bonistas para robarnos
Cámara busca superar veto a proyecto de acondicionamiento de aulas
By JOSHUA BARONE
Ailyn Pérez didn’t get a chance to see the billboards in New York: the Metropolitan Opera’s advertisements for its coming season, featuring a portrait of her in spectral whites, her eyes closed as she comes face to face with a butterfly.
She had been too busy appearing at San Francisco Opera’s centennial concert, rushing to Munich to sing Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” and flying to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to star in Dvorak’s “Rusalka.” On the outdoor stage there, she didn’t encounter any butterflies, but she did swallow an insect.
“I started coughing,” Pérez, 44, said with a laugh during an interview last month on the grounds of Santa Fe Opera. “But this is my third opera here, and I’ve learned that you deal with the elements.”
Friends have sent her photos of the New York billboards, which are a first for her. She has been performing at the Met since 2015 — blossoming into a soprano of lush vocal beauty, dramatic acuity and commanding presence — but there hasn’t been a new production built around her until this season, when Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” receives its company premiere.
“I haven’t posted any of the photos, because I don’t want to post something and then it’s gone,” Pérez said. “But I see it, and I just think, Wow, I’ve always wanted this, and I didn’t know it would be this role. It blows my mind.”
She is excited not only by the career milestone, but also by what “Florencia” means for the Met. Catán’s 1996 opera — a Gabriel García Márquez-inspired story of a diva’s homecoming, opening Nov. 16 — is part of a wave of contemporary works joining the repertory there. More remarkably, it is the house’s first Spanish-language show in nearly a century. And at its heart is Pérez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants.
Ushering in this era of the Met’s history is, she said, “such an honor.” To her colleagues, though, especially Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, who is conducting “Florencia,” this moment is well-deserved for one of the house’s leading sopranos.
“We go back to the Salzburg Festival over a decade ago,” Nézet-Séguin said of his relationship with Pérez. “And we’ve been regularly making music together. The generosity of the person comes through in every vocal performance that she gives. The refinement, the quality of the voice, the generosity of the heart — it’s what makes her exceptional.”
Pérez grew up in Chicago, where her parents, both from towns near Guadalajara, Mexico, met. She started school on the South Side, but at 6 moved to the suburb of Elk Grove Village. There, she made a point of speaking English in the classroom despite Spanish being the default language at home.
Her Elk Grove elementary school was where she first took music classes. The instructor was playful, teaching rhythm and tempo with a wink and farting noises. “This is meant to be fun,” Pérez remembered thinking. She rented a recorder, then took up the cello to join the orchestra and flute to be in the band.
In high school, she started voice lessons because they were required for her to take part in the musical. At her first session, the teacher handed her some sheet music and asked her to sing. She felt confident about breathing because of her experience on flute, and was able to sightread the score. “He looked at me like, ‘Who are you?’” Pérez recalled. She knew virtually nothing about opera but was breezing through the famous Puccini aria “O mio babbino caro.”
In the end, she got to perform in musicals — as Sarah in “Guys and Dolls,” and as Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes” — but her interest was quickly overtaken by opera. Pérez checked out CDs from the library and made her way through the classic recordings of Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Mirella Freni and Montserrat Caballé. She brought a recording of “La Traviata” to her teacher and asked why the music made her cry.
She adored Renée Fleming, whom she got to meet after a recital in Chicago. The great soprano told her that she had “nice cheekbones,” to which she replied, “Oh my God, thank you.” But, more important, that concert was the moment, Pérez said, that she “saw someone do the thing” of singing.
Pérez had still not been to an opera. That wouldn’t happen until she saw Gounod’s “Faust” — starring a student Lawrence Brownlee — at Indiana University Bloomington. She studied there because, she was told, Met singers were on the faculty. Her teachers included sopranos Martina Arroyo and Virginia Zeani, who originated the role of Blanche in Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmélites,” which Pérez would go on to perform at the Met.
She continued her studies at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, finishing there in 2006. Two years later, she was onstage in Salzburg, performing alongside tenor Rolando Villazón, under Nézet-Séguin’s baton, in Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette.” After that prestigious debut,
her arrival at the Met didn’t come until 2015, when she sang Micaëla in a revival of “Carmen.”
“A confident, forthright presence in a role that can fade into merely demure, Ms. Pérez has a penetrating, settled voice,” Zachary Woolfe wrote of that night in The New York Times. “Her tone may not be sumptuous, but it’s clear and articulate, and she uses it with intelligence and a sense of purpose.”
Pérez could hardly be accused of not having a sumptuous voice today. Her sound has become richer, while remaining nimble enough for a spinto repertoire encompassing both lyric and dramatic roles; she can inspire awe as the Contessa in “Le Nozze di Figaro” one night and as the doomed nymph of “Rusalka” the next.
Her career at the Met has been representative of that range, in part because she is a favorite of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “Each season, she has grown and developed, and quite frankly gotten better and better,” he said. “She very convincingly becomes the characters whom she’s portraying, but above all her voice is absolutely beautiful.”
In spring 2020, Pérez was set to sing in “Simon Boccanegra” at the Met, but the season was cut short by the pandemic. “The closure really knocked me out,” she said. It helped — a lot — that by then she had met Soloman Howard.
They had been introduced in Santa Fe. In
2016, Pérez starred as Juliette in “Roméo,” and her colleagues included Howard, a bass-baritone, as the duke. “He took my breath away,” she said. “He’s such a brilliant artist and connector. Whether speaking or singing, the presence brings something that draws people in but also delivers this power. I knew that his calling in life would be big.”
It wasn’t until 2019, though, that they began dating. They attended the Vienna Opera Ball together, and traveled to see each other perform. Once the pandemic hit, they sheltered together in Chicago. Where she was despondent, he was resourceful. He rounded up equipment for them to start recording music at home.
When live opera resumed, Pérez reopened the Met’s auditorium as the soprano soloist in Verdi’s Requiem, to observe the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. She doesn’t really remember that night — “I was out of my body” — but others do. Gelb, who said, “You can’t fake Verdi,” remembered her sounding “absolutely magnificent.” Nézet-Séguin called it “a performance for the ages.”
Howard, Pérez said, gave her something to hope for in the months leading up to that Requiem. She referred to him as “mi vida” — “my life.” Out and about in the opera world, they are something of a power couple, beloved and difficult to miss in their red-carpet-ready style. (“That’s all Soloman.”) Days after the opening night of “Rusalka” in Santa Fe, they got married.
The ceremony was small and private. A larger celebration will come, to be planned in the spaces between two peripatetic careers — which will soon bring Pérez back to the Met for “Florencia” rehearsals.
It’s an opera that Gelb has long wanted to bring to the house; he was just waiting, he said, for the right star. And he knew his hope for Pérez had paid off last season when, during the run of “Carmélites,” he asked her to sing Florencia’s final aria for the Met board on only a day’s notice. She delivered it, he added, “with so much beauty and conviction, she had the board sort of swooning along with her.”
In Santa Fe, Pérez spoke about the role with the depth of a literary thinker, but acknowledged that she will have to see what the director, Mary Zimmerman, comes up with for the production. She is certain, at least, of the confidence she is bringing to “Florencia,” a product of the years leading up to this moment.
“I don’t feel like a beginner anymore,” Pérez said. “I’m not wondering what happens next. Now, I can really look back and see it all.”
of the story — but this utter predictability is a feature, not a bug, and is embraced as such by the film. Young viewers are likely to clamor for a toy version of the adorable bot, while their parents are more likely to be interested in the movie’s awfully believable near-future, in which delivery drones crisscross the sky and robots are absolutely everywhere in our daily life. (Stream it on Amazon.)
become human,” he informs his creation. To that end, Vetro has been endowed with the ability to generate “new expansions.” In other words, he is sentient and can upgrade himself. One of his first moves is to give himself a new “multilayered emotional matrix,” and it doesn’t take long for Vetro to exhibit somewhat cunning traits — he can be both obsequious and creepy.
By ELISABETH VINCENTELLIThis month’s picks include cute-robot charm and alien abduction angst.
‘Shin Ultraman’
From the start, it’s obvious that this is not a regular Kaiju movie. The genre, in which gigantic beasts à la Godzilla lay waste to cities and swaths of countryside, is not known for restraint, but “Shin Ultraman” is completely, unpredictably off the wall.
Captain Tamura (Hidetoshi Nishijima, from the radically different “Drive My Car”) leads a task force dedicated to fighting the big monsters that turn up with clockwork regularity. “For some reason, Kaiju only appear in Japan,” someone quips about the creatures’s absence elsewhere in the world. But even this elite squad is flabbergasted when a mysterious helmeted giant clad in a superhero-like red and silver bodysuit shows up. Called Ultraman (a popular character who has been the subject of many iterations since its introduction in 1966), the newcomer helps the overwhelmed team battle aliens like Mefilas (Koji Yamamoto).
Both a reboot and a riff, “Shin Ultraman,” which was directed by Shinji Higuchi and written by Hideaki Anno (the pair also collaborated on “Shin Godzilla” in 2016), is a surreal trip. It’s hard to oversell the eyepopping invention and droll humor on display here, but it’s Higuchi’s mise en scène that stands out, packed with odd angles and
seemingly arbitrary shots, as when a character opens a computer file and the movie cuts to her feet under her desk. Shiro Sagisu’s score is equally bonkers and disruptive, incorporating 1960s pop, thrash riffs, chamber suites and jazzy noodlings. It all amounts to pure joy. (Rent or buy it on most major platforms.)
‘Tang and Me’
Chances are you haven’t heard of Deborah Install’s “A Robot in the Garden” (2015), unless you live in Japan, where the novel has been adapted into a radio play, a stage musical and now this charming kidfriendly movie.
Ken (Kazunari Ninomiya) has a terminal case of arrested development, whiling away his days playing elaborate virtual-reality games and avoiding any hint of household work. One day, a rusty, taped-up robot turns up in the garden, offering its name as Tang. Shortly thereafter, Ken’s fed-up wife, Emi (Hikari Mitsushima), kicks him out of their house. So he sets out for Atobit Systems, the company that manufactured Tang, to trade that old model for a brand-new one, which he will then give to Emi to get back in her graces.
The latest from prolific director Takahiro Miki (“The Door Into Summer”) does not revolutionize the cute-robot genre, but it is very effective. Naturally, Ken will change for the best, thanks to Tang — whose mysterious origin and initial purpose are at the heart
When the Levan family moves to a quaint Western town, the teenage Itsy (the excellent Emma Tremblay) is not especially pleased: She is now living in the middle of nowhere, plus being singled out as the new kid is never fun. Maybe that’s why she immediately connects with her new classmate Calvin (Jacob Buster, a charmer bound to resurface in bigger-budget projects), who is ostracized as the local weirdo. Calvin is a heartthrob in nerd clothing — more specifically in a spacesuit, which he is prone to wear to school — and is on a quest to find the parents (Will Forte and Elizabeth Mitchell) he hasn’t seen in 10 years. He is convinced they were taken by aliens one fateful night and has been searching the skies ever since. Itsy pretends to befriend him for a journalism project, though it’s clear she’s actually taken by Calvin’s quirky sincerity, and perhaps even by his far-fetched story about extraterrestrial creatures secretly visiting Earth whenever a certain comet gets close.
Jake Van Wagoner’s film is a throwback to 1980s family-friendly fare, and it nicely captures the formula’s basic elements, down to the presence of a smart-aleck little boy (Itsy’s brother, Evan, played by Kenneth Cummins), an unironic embrace of the cutesy and the cheesy in equal proportions and, perhaps most important, a general good nature. (Rent or buy it on most major platforms.)
‘Life Cycle’
Carl (Adam Weber) lives in his grandparents’ rec-room-like basement, seems to survive on power bars and takeout, and watches old black-and-white movies on an ancient-looking TV set. The only other living presence in that den is Vetro (voiced by Kory Karam), an animatronic head with enormous blue eyes sitting on Carl’s desk. A computer programmer, Carl is ambitious: “You are to
Writer-director Christopher Morvant’s most distinctive spin on the thriving AI genre was to make Vetro a cartoonish animatronic/ puppet character that looks goofy yet comes across as unsettling, especially since Morvant often shows him in startling close-ups. The movie is, admittedly, overlong, especially since it’s essentially a talkathon between Carl and Vetro, and the writing is not quite strong enough to sustain the more complex philosophical issues it raises. But “Life Cycle” does have a few surprises in store, and Morvant’s sui generis world nimbly juxtaposes technologies that feel pulled from completely different eras. Pretty good for a movie shot in a garage in a month. (Rent or buy it on most major platforms.)
Set in an impoverished Sol Nascente, in Brazil, Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’s film is tough to categorize. “Dry Ground Burning” follows the activities of a women’s gang, led by Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), that steals oil and resells it as gas to groups of bikers. Add to that mix the reentry into society of Chitara’s half sister, Léa (Léa Alves da Silva), who is newly released from prison. In conventional hands, these could be an action-packed thriller’s starting point. Pimenta and Queirós go down a completely different road, both in form and in content.
We are in a dystopian pamphlet targeting the far-right policies of Brazil’s authoritarian former president Jair Bolsonaro, which were devastating for the poor, the minorities and the outcasts at the movie’s heart. All of this is put together with a documentarylike matter-of-factness, increased by the fact that the cast is made up of non- or semiprofessional actors. When scenes set during, say, a raucous bus trip or a religious ceremony hypnotically go on and on as if in real time, you might wonder if Frederick Wiseman had suddenly gone to Brazil. Tip: Go with the flow — you can’t rush life, politics or this film. (Rent or buy it on Amazon.)
tention and playfully jumping on a reporter.
“I think that it’s a great idea because nowadays pets are part of the family,” she said of the theater’s new screenings. “They are not just pets anymore. It’s like your little baby.”
For other dog owners, the screenings provide a new freedom. Ziad Dajani said he and his partner had not been to the movies together in four years because of Tarçin, their 8-year-old Australian labradoodle, who suffers from separation anxiety. “We’re his hostages, basically,” Dajani said. “So we can’t leave him alone for a minute. Someone has to be with him all the time.”
Standing in line to purchase snacks for the screening were a few other dog owners, including Rebecca Minty and her daughter. With them was Lottie, who was lying on the floor and not particularly bothered by anything or anyone. Minty said Lottie, a 7-year-old working cocker spaniel who does not work, was taken on a long run before coming to the theater in an effort to keep her calm.
Inside, the screening was like any other, except for the rustling of collars and the occasional bark. The movie’s sound level was also dialed back.
“It’s vital that cinemas reduce the sound at dogfriendly screenings, otherwise the volume could cause them distress and even pain,” Dr. Katherine Polak, a veterinarian and a vice president at Humane Society International, said in a statement. “In principle, it’s similar to cinemas that offer baby-friendly screenings that also reduce sound and accept that some level of disruption is likely.”
By DERRICK BRYSON TAYLORKab, a 2-year-old Doberman wearing a blue bandanna, is noticeably anxious.
Sometimes called “cupcake,” he is roughly the size and weight of a teenage boy and has the energy to match. At the moment, he is being led around the courtyard of a cinema in East London by one of his owners, Luisa Fulcher, to walk off his jitters and allow for one last bathroom break before he and a handful of other dogs settle in for something unusual: their first moviegoing experience.
Last weekend, Curzon Cinemas, a chain with 16 locations in Britain, began allowing dogs to attend select movie screenings with their owners, starting with “Strays,” an expletive-laden, live-action comedy that follows a group of dogs (voiced by actors including Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx) that unite to seek revenge on an owner.
London is a paradise for pooches, which are regularly found at the feet of their owners at restaurants, pubs, on trains and in many other public places. Movie theaters may be next to welcome dogs, thanks in part to the pandemic. In Britain, which has a population of about 67 million people, there are an estimated 11 million pet dogs,
according to a report this year by the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, a veterinary charity. Pet ownership surged during the pandemic, and now that workers are being encouraged to return to the office, some pets and their owners are struggling with the transition.
“A lot of people got dogs during the pandemic, and they want to come and see a film with their dog,” said Jake Garriock, head of publicity at Curzon. He said the new screenings were part of a larger program designed to let customers watch films in ways that best suit them, such as screenings for infants that feature reduced volume and increased lighting.
For now, Curzon is allowing dogs of any breed at only one screening a week, at only one of the chain’s London locations, Garriock said. (And no, separate tickets are not required for dogs.) They’re not allowed on the seats, and their owners must clean up any accidents.
Curzon is not alone in welcoming dogs. Picturehouse Cinemas, another British chain, has offered pupfriendly screenings since 2015, and there are numerous independent movie theaters in Britain that do so. (Most cinemas, however, allow only service dogs.)
Back outside the theater, Fulcher said she had brought a bone for Kab, who was now whimpering for at-
Paget Fulcher, Kab’s other owner, said after the screening that Kab had behaved well despite the challenges. “Most of the time, he was laying down on the ground, playing with a toy that we brought for him,” he said. “It was all good. Nothing bad happened. I think we’re very happy with how it went.”
A dog’s behavior at home offers clues as to how the animal might handle a movie screening, according to Graeme Hall, a British dog trainer known as “The Dogfather” who hosts the Netflix show “Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly.”
“Some dogs seem to like watching the television, and some dogs don’t notice,” said Hall, who advised monitoring a dog for signs of stress, including making sounds, yawning, licking their lips and pinning back their ears.
He also said dogs take their cues from their owners. “We know for a fact that dogs are constantly looking at our facial expressions and body language, the little sounds we make, even our breathing patterns,” he said. “If you’re having a good time, there’s a very good chance that your dog will pick up on that.”
Garriock acknowledged that not everyone might enjoy going to a movie with dogs in the audience.
“Obviously, there’s plenty of screenings where they won’t be interrupted by dogs,” he said. “If you like cats, then you can head to one of the other screenings.”
Damian and Catriona Spandley, with their dogs Lucky and Jeff, attend a screening of the movie “Strays” at the Curzon Aldgate cinema in London on Saturday, Aug. 19, 2023. A cinema chain in Britain is welcoming dogs to select screenings. They don’t need their own tickets, and they don’t need to turn off their cellphones.About 1 in 4 adults in the United States develops symptoms of insomnia each year. In most cases, these are shortlived, caused by things such as stress or illness. But 1 in 10 adults is estimated to have chronic insomnia, which means difficulty falling or staying asleep at least three times a week for three months or longer.
Sleep deprivation doesn’t just create physical health problems, it can also harm our minds. A recent poll from the National Sleep Foundation, for example, found a link between poor sleep health and depressive symptoms. In addition, studies have shown that a lack of sleep can lead otherwise healthy people to experience anxiety and distress. Fortunately, there is a well-studied and proven treatment for insomnia that generally works in eight sessions or less: cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I.
If you cannot find a provider, CBTI instruction is easy to access online. Yet it is rarely the first thing people try, said Aric Prather, a sleep researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who treats patients with insomnia.
Instead, they often turn to medication.
According to a 2020 survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 8% of adults reported taking sleep medication every day or most days to help them fall or stay asleep.
Studies have found that CBT-I is as effective as using sleep medications in the short term and more effective in the long term. Clinical trial data suggests that as many as 80% of the people who try CBT-I see improvements in their sleep and most patients find relief in four to eight sessions, even if they have had insomnia for decades, said Philip Gehrman, the director of the Sleep, Neurobiology and
A woman in bed in New York, June 9, 2023. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is considered the most effective treatment for people who continually struggle to fall or stay asleep.
Psychopathology lab at the University of Pennsylvania.
Sleep aids can carry risks, especially for older people, who may experience problems such as falls, memory issues or confusion as a result of using the medication. CBT-I, on the other hand, is considered safe for adults of any age. It can even be adapted for use in children.
What is CBT-I?
Many people mistakenly assume that CBT-I is entirely focused on sleep hygiene — the routines and environment that are conducive to good sleep, said Shelby Harris, a psychologist with a private practice in the New York City area who specializes in CBT-I.
CBT-I does use a series of treatments to target behaviors that are inhibiting sleep, such as daytime naps or using digital devices
before bed, and replaces them with more effective ones, like sticking to a consistent wake time. But it also aims to address anxieties and negative beliefs about sleep.
Much of the time, insomnia can lead to the feeling that sleep has become “unpredictable and broken,” Prather said. “Every day people with chronic insomnia are thinking about ‘How am I going to sleep tonight?’ ”
CBT-I teaches people different ways to relax, such as deep breathing and mindfulness meditation, and helps patients develop realistic expectations about their sleep habits.
It is especially important that people with insomnia learn to view their bed as a place for restful sleep rather than associating it with tossing and turning. Patients undergoing CBT-I are asked to get out of bed if they are not asleep after around 20 or 30 minutes and do a quiet activity in dim lighting that doesn’t involve electronics. In addition, they are told to stay in bed only while drowsy or sleeping.
“CBT-I leads to more consolidated sleep and shorter time to fall asleep, which is a major gain for many,” Harris said.
How do you find a provider?
If you’re having problems sleeping, first visit your health care provider to rule out any physical problems (such as a thyroid imbalance, chronic pain or sleep apnea) or a psychological issue such as depression that might require separate treatment, the experts said.
You can search for a provider who is a member of the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine or use the Penn International CBT-I Provider Directory. Your primary care doctor may also provide a referral. If you’re using a general online therapist directory like Psychology Today, be wary of those who claim to offer insomnia treatment but do not have
specific training in CBT-I, Harris warned.
Finding someone who specializes in CBT-I may prove difficult — especially one who takes insurance — because there are fewer than 700 clinicians trained in behavioral sleep medicine in the United States. And one 2016 study found they are unevenly distributed: 58% of these providers practicing in 12 states. The clinic where Prather works, for example, has hundreds of people on its waiting list.
Can you try CBT-I without a provider?
A review of clinical trials found that self-directed online CBT-I programs were just as effective as face-to-face CBT-I counseling. If you are self-motivated, there are several low-cost or free resources that can teach you the main principles.
One option is the five-week program Conquering Insomnia, which ranges in price from about $50 for a PDF guide to $70 for a version that includes audio relaxation techniques and feedback about your sleep diary from Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs, the sleep and insomnia expert who developed the program.
You can also check out Insomnia Coach, a free app created by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that can be used by anyone. It offers a guided, weekly training plan to help you track and improve sleep; tips for sleeping; an interactive sleep diary; and personal feedback.
Sleepio is another reputable app, Harris said. There are also free online resources from the AASM and educational handouts from the National Institutes of Health, which include a sample sleep diary and a guide to healthy sleep.
And for those who prefer to avoid technology entirely, more than one expert recommended the workbook “Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep” by Colleen E. Carney and Rachel Manber.
For the past few summers, numerous surfers in Santa Cruz have been victims of a crime at sea: boardjacking. The culprit is a female sea otter, who accosts the wave riders, seizing and even damaging their surfboards in the process.
After a weekend during which the otter’s behavior seemed to grow more aggressive, wildlife officials in the area said in July that they had decided to put a stop to these acts of otter larceny.
“Due to the increasing public safety risk, a team from CDFW and the Monterey Bay Aquarium trained in the capture and handling of sea otters has been deployed to attempt to capture and rehome her,” a representative for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said in a statement.
Local officials call the animal Otter 841. The 5-year-old female is well known, for her bold behavior and her ability to hang 10. And she has a tragic back story, with officials now forced to take steps that illustrate the ways human desire to get close to wild animals can cost the animals their freedom, or worse, their lives.
California sea otters, also known as southern sea otters, are an endangered species found only along California’s central coast. Hundreds of thousands of these otters once roamed the state’s coastal waters, helping to keep the kelp forests healthy as they consumed sea urchins. But when colonists moved in on the West Coast, the species was hunted to nearextinction until a ban was put in place in 1911.
Today, around 3,000 remain, many in areas frequented by kayakers, surfers and paddleboarders.
Despite these close quarters, interactions between sea otters and humans remain rare. The animals have an innate fear of humans and usually go to great lengths to avoid them, said Tim Tinker, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has spent decades studying the marine mammals. A sea otter approaching a human “isn’t normal,” he said, adding “but just because it’s not normal doesn’t mean it never happens.”
Otters have been known to approach humans during hormonal surges that coincide with a pregnancy, or as a result of being fed or repeatedly approached by people. That is likely what occurred with Otter 841’s mother.
She was orphaned and raised in captivity. But after she was released into the wild, humans started offering her squid and she quickly became habituated. She was removed again when she started climbing aboard kayaks in search of handouts, ending up at the Marine Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center in Santa Cruz, where researchers quickly realized she was pregnant. It was while back in captivity that she gave birth to 841.
The pup was raised by her mother until she was weaned, then moved to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. To bolster her chances for success upon release, 841’s caretakers took measures to prevent the otter from forming positive associations
with humans, including wearing masks and ponchos that obscured their appearance when they were around her.
Yet 841 quickly lost her fear of humans, although local experts cannot explain precisely why.
“After one year of being in the wild without issue, we started receiving reports of her interactions with surfers, kayakers and paddle boarders,” said Jessica Fujii, sea otter program manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “We do not know why this started. We have no evidence that she was fed. But it has persisted in the summers for the last couple of years.”
Otter 841 was first observed climbing aboard watercraft in Santa Cruz in 2021. At first, the behavior was a rarity, but over time the otter grew more bold. Last weekend, the otter was observed stealing surfboards on three separate occasions.
On Monday, Joon Lee, 40, a software engineer, was surfing at Steamer Lane, a popular surf spot in Santa Cruz, when 841 approached his board.
“I tried to paddle away, but I wasn’t able to get far before it bit off my leash,” he said.
Lee abandoned his board and watched in horror as the otter climbed atop it and proceeded to rip chunks out of it with her powerful jaws.
“I tried to get it off by flipping the board over and pushing it away, but it was so fixated on my surfboard for whatever reason, it just kept attacking,” he said.
While Lee immediately recognized the danger he was in, not everyone in the water is so aware. Last month, Noah Wormhoudt, 16, was catching some waves with a friend off Cowell’s Beach in Santa Cruz when 841 swam up.
“I started paddling away trying to avoid it, but it kept getting closer and closer. I jumped off my board and then it jumped onto my board,” he recalled. “It seemed friendly, so we got comfortable with it. It was a pretty cool experience.”
Caught up in the excitement of the moment, Wormhoudt said he “wasn’t really like thinking about how it could bite my finger off.”
The young surfer watched from the water while the otter stayed atop his board as the swell rolled in. “The otter was shredding, caught a couple of nice waves,” Wormhoudt said.
Such situations are extremely dangerous, said Gena Bentall, director and senior scientist with Sea Otter Savvy, an organization that works to reduce human-caused disturbances to sea otters and promote responsible wildlife viewing. “Otters have sharp teeth and jaws strong enough to crush clams,” she said.
Contact with humans is also dangerous for the otters. If a human should be bitten, the state has no choice but to euthanize the otter. And with so few sea otters left, the loss of even one individual is a hindrance to the species’ recovery.
If authorities succeed in capturing 841, she will return to the Monterey Bay Aquarium before being transferred to a different one, where she will live out her days. The capture team has its work cut out for it. Multiple attempts to catch her have been made, none successful.
“She’s been quite talented at evading us,” Fujii said. Until the otter can be captured, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is asking surfers to avoid her at all costs.
Experts also had a message for people who share their close encounters with a sea otter on social media.
“Reporting these interactions to the appropriate personnel, and not sharing them on social media — where it can be misinterpreted as a fun, positive interaction where that may not be the case — is really important,” Fujii said. “I know that’s hard to do. It gets lots of likes and attention, but in the long run, it can be detrimental to the animal.”
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-
NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA
SALA SUPERIOR DE VEGA
BAJA
BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO
DEMANDANTE V.
SUCESION DE MILAGROS
LOZADAMELENDEZ
COMPUESTA POR
SUS MIEMBROS LUIZ
LOZADA MELENDEZ, VICTOR ANGEL LOZADA
MELENDEZ, ANGEL LUIS
LOZADA MELENDEZ, HECTOR LUIS LOZADA
MELENDEZ, SARA
LOZADA MELENDEZ, ADELAIDA LOZADA
MELENDEZ, VICENTE
LOZADA MELENDEZ, NELIDA LOZADA
MELENDEZ, OLGA IRIS
LOZADA MELENDEZ, EDWIN LOZADA
MELENDEZ, DAVID
LOZADA MELENDEZ, Y LA SUCESION DE HERIBERTO LOZADA
MELENDEZ COMPUESTA
POR SUS MIEMBROS
HERIBERTO LOZADA
ALLENDE, EDIRIS
LOZADA GUZMAN, Y MARIA LOZADA GUZMAN
DEMANDADOS
Civil Núm.: VB2019CV00259. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA
POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. AVISO DE VENTA EN PÚBLICA
SUBASTA. Yo, LUIS F. ORTIZ ROSA, Alguacil Supervisor de la División de Subastas del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Vega Baja a los demandados y al público en general les notifico que, cumpliendo con un Mandamiento que se ha librado en el presente caso por el Secretario del Tribunal de epígrafe con fecha 15 de diciembre de 2021 y para satisfacer la cantidad adeudada de $38,015.02 de principal mediante Sentencia dictada en el caso de autos el 5 de marzo de 2020 y enmendada el 29 de septiembre de 2021, notificada y archivada en autos el 30 de septiembre de 2021 y publicada mediante edicto en el Periódico
“The San Juan Daily Star” el 7 de octubre de 2021, procederé a vender en pública subasta, al mejor postor en pago de contado y en moneda del curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América, mediante efectivo, giro o cheque certificado a nombre del Alguacil de este Tribunal
todo derecho, título e interés que hayan tenido tengan o puedan tener los deudores demandados en cuanto a la propiedad localizada en el Municipio de Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, el bien inmueble se describe a continuación: URB EL ROSARIO, E-31 CALLE OSCAR COLLAZO, VEGA BAJA, PUERTO RICO, 00693. Urbana: Solar marcado con el número Treinta y Uno del bloque E (E-31), en el plano de inscripción de Residencial El Rosario, radicado en el Barrio Pugnado Afuera de Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de trescientos veinticinco (325) metros cuadrados, en lindes por el Norte, en trece (13) metros, con el solar número dieciséis (16) del mismo bloque E; por el Sur, en trece (13) metros, con la Calle A; por el Este, en veinticinco (25) metros con el solar número treinta del mismo bloque E (E30) y por el Oeste en veinticinco (25) metros, con el solar número treinta y dos (32) del mismo bloque E. Afectado en toda su colindancia Norte por una servidumbre de uno punto cinco (1.5) metros de ancho a favor de la Puerto Rico Telephone Company. El Inmueble antes descrito contiene una casa de cemento, diseñada para una familia construida de acuerdo con los planos y especificaciones aprobadas por la Junta de Planificación de Puerto Rico y otras Agencias Gubernamentales. FINCA: Número nueve mil seiscientos quince (9615) inscrita al folio noventa y nueve (99) del tomo ciento setenta (170) del Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección IV. Con el importe de dicha venta se habrá de satisfacer a la parte demandante las cantidades adeudadas, en el caso de epígrafe, que se desglosan de la siguiente forma: $38,015.02 por concepto de principal, más intereses al 7.5% anual, más 4% de todo pago en atraso, más $6,490.00 como cantidad estipulada para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogados, así como cualquier otra suma que contenga el contrato de préstamo. El tipo mínimo para la subasta será la suma de tasación pactada, la cual es $64,900.00 para la propiedad antes descrita. De declarase la subasta desierta y tener que celebrarse una segunda subasta el tipo mínimo serán dos terceras partes (2/3) del precio mínimo antes mencionado; $43,266.67.
Si tampoco hubiere remate ni adjudicación en la segunda subasta, regirá como tipo de la tercera subasta la mitad (1/2) del precio pactado; $32,450.00.
La PRIMERA SUBASTA se llevará a cabo el 14 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 2023 A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA. De no comparecer postor alguno se llevará a efecto una SEGUNDA SUBASTA el 21 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA. De no comparecer postor alguno se llevará a cabo una TERCERA SUBASTA el 28 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA. La subasta o subastas antes indicadas se llevarán a efecto en mi oficina, localizada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Vega Baja. Del Estudio de Título realizado surgen los siguientes gravámenes: Servidumbres a favor de la Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados de Puerto Rico, Autoridad de las Fuentes Fluviales de Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico Telephone Company, servidumbre a favor de Alturas de Vega Baja Corp. Se advierte a los licitadores que la adjudicación se hará al mejor postor, quien deberá consignar el importe de su oferta en el mismo acto de la adjudicación en moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica y para conocimiento de la parte demandada y de toda(s) aquella(s) persona(s) que tengan interés inscrito con posterioridad a la inscripción del gravamen que se está ejecutando, y para conocimiento de los licitadores y el público en general y para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general, una vez por semana durante el término de dos (2) semanas consecutivas con un intervalo de por lo menos siete (7) días entre ambas publicaciones, y para su fijación en tres (3) lugares públicos del municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta, tales como, la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía y se le notificará además a la parte demandada vía correo certificado con acuse de recibo a la última dirección conocida. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores, previa orden judicial dirigida al Registrador de la Propiedad de la sección correspondiente para la cancelación de aquellos posteriores. Se les advierte a todos los interesados que todos los documentos relacionados con la presente acción de ejecución de hipoteca, así como la de la subasta, estarán disponibles para ser examinados, durante horas laborables, en la Secretaría del Tribunal. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hu-
biere, al crédito del ejecutante, continuarán subsistentes; entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. Y para conocimiento de los demandados, de los acreedores posteriores, de los licitadores, partes interesadas y público en general, expido el presente Aviso para su publicación en los lugares públicos correspondientes. Librado en la Sala de Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, a 25 agosto de 2023. LUIS F. ORTIZ ROSA, ALGUACIL #888.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA
SALA DE QUEBRADILLAS
BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO
Demandante V. ELÍAS DE JESÚS
JIMÉNEZ ROMÁN T/C/C
ELÍAS DE JESÚS ROMÁN
T/C/C ELÍAS JIMÉNEZ
ROMÁN T/C/C ELÍAS D. JIMÉNEZ ROMÁN, AIDA MARGARITA RODRÍGUEZ
RODRÍGUEZ T/C/C
AIDA M. RODRÍGUEZ
RODRÍGUEZ T/C/C
AIDA RODRÍGUEZ
RODRÍGUEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE BIENES GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR
AMBOS; ANA
MARGARITA JIMÉNEZ
RODRÍGUEZ T/C/C ANA
M. JIMÉNEZ RODR!GUEZ
T/C/C ANA JIMÉNEZ
RODRIGUEZ
Demandados
Civil Núm.: CICD2017-0004. (101). Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. AVISO DE VENTA EN PÚBLICA SUBASTA. YO, LUIS E. ROMÁN CARRERO, Subastas del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Camuy a los demandados y al público en general les notifico que, cumpliendo con un Mandamiento que se ha librado en el presente caso por el Secretario del Tribunal de epígrafe· con fecha 8 de mayo de 2019 y para satisfacer la cantidad adeudada de $130,430.22 de principal mediante Sentencia dictada en el caso de autos el 19 de febrero de 2019, notificada y archivada en autos el 21 de febrero de 2019, y debidamente publicada mediante edicto en el periódico
“The San Juan Daily Star” el 28 de febrero de 2019, procederé
Tuesday, September 5, 2023
a vender en pública subasta, al mejor postor en pago de contado y en moneda del curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América, mediante efectivo, giro o cheque certificado a nombre del Alguacil de este Tribunal todo derecho, título e interés que hayan tenido tengan o puedan tener los deudores demandados en cuanto a la propiedad localizada en el Municipio de Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, el bien inmueble se describe a continuación: SR 485, KM 1.5 #10, Quebradillas, PR 00678.
RÚSTICA: Parcela de terreno ubicada en el Barrio San José del término Municipal de Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, marcado con el número diez (10) en el plano de inscripción, con una cabida superficial de dos mil noventa y nueve punto novecientos cuarenta metros cuadrados (2,099.940 m/c) equivalentes a cero punto cinco mil trescientos cuarenta y tres cuerdas (0.5343 cdas.). En lindes por el Norte, en treinta punto (30.00) metros, con el remanente de la finca principal de donde se segrega, perteneciente a Cándido Molinari; por el Sur, en treinta punto (30.00) metros, con camino dedicado a uso público; por el Este, en (75.917) metros, con el remanente de la finca principal de Cándido Molinari; y por el Oeste, en setenta y cinco punto novecientos diecisiete (75.917) metros, con el solar número nueve (9) del plano de inscripción. Inscrita al folio 80 del tomo 93 de Quebradillas, finca número 4,739, Registro de la Propiedad de Arecibo, Sección II. El tipo mínimo para la subasta será la suma de tasación pactada, la cual será la cantidad de $108,800.00 para la propiedad antes descrita. De declararse la subasta desierta, se procederá a una segunda subasta y servirá de tipo mínimo de 2/3 del precio mínimo antes mencionado; $72,533.33. Si tampoco hubiere remate ni adjudicación en esta segunda subasta, se procederá a una tercera subasta, en la cual regirá como tipo mínimo ésta la 1/2 del precio pactado; $54,400.00. Si se declarase desierta la tercera subasta se dará por terminado el procedimiento, pudiendo adjudicarse a opción del demandante. Art. 104 de la Ley de Registro de la Propiedad Inmobiliaria del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, 30 L.P. R. A. sec. 2721. La cantidad adeudada según la sentencia asciende a la suma $130,430.22 de principal, 9.45% de intereses, los cuales continúan acumulándose hasta el saldo total de la deuda, $826.32 de gastos por mora,
los cuales continúan acumulándose hasta el saldo total de la deuda, $113.42 de reserva “escrow”, más costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado. La PRIMERA SUBASTA se llevará a cabo el 13 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA. De no comparecer postor alguno se llevará a efecto una SEGUNDA SUBASTA el 20 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA. De no comparecer postor alguno se llevará a cabo una tercera SUBASTA el 27 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 2023, A LAS 9:30 DE LA MAÑANA. La subasta o subastas antes indicadas se llevarán a efecto en mi oficina, localizada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Camuy. Del Estudio de Título realizado surge el siguiente gravamen: Servidumbre a favor de la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica de Puerto Rico. Del Estudio de Título realizado surge el siguiente gravamen posterior el cual podrá ser cancelado: Aviso de Demanda dictado el 20 de marzo de 2009 en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala de Arecibo caso civil #CICD09-26 sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca seguido por Banco Popular de Puerto Rico antes Popular Finance, lnc. Vs. Elias De Jesús Jiménez Román y su esposa Aida Margarita Rodríguez Rodríguez donde se solicita el pago de la deuda garantizada con la hipoteca de la inscripción 5ta de $108,800.00 o la venta en pública subasta, anotada al folio 184vto del tomo 227 de Quebradillas, finca #4739 el 31 de octubre de 2011 anotación “A”. Se advierte a los licitadores que la adjudicación se hará al mejor postor, quien deberá consignar el importe de su oferta en el mismo acto de la adjudicación en moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica y para conocimiento de la parte demandada y de toda(s) aquella(s) persona(s) que tengan interés inscrito con posterioridad a la inscripción del gravamen que se está ejecutando, y para conocimiento de los licitadores y el público en general y para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general, una vez por semana durante el término de dos (2) semanas consecutivas con un intervalo de por lo menos siete (7) días entre ambas publicaciones, y para su fijación en tres (3) lugares públicos del municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta, tales como, la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía y se le notificará además a la parte demandada· vía correo certificado con acuse de recibo
a la última dirección conocida. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores, previa orden judicial dirigida al Registrador de la Propiedad de la sección correspondiente para la cancelación de aquellos posteriores. Se les advierte a todos los interesados que todos los documentos relacionados con la presente acción de ejecución de hipoteca, así como la de la subasta, estarán disponibles para ser examinados, durante horas laborables, en la Secretaría del Tribunal. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titularidad y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante, continuarán subsistentes; entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate.
Y para conocimiento de los demandados, de los acreedores posteriores, de los licitadores, partes interesadas y público en general, expido el presente Aviso para su publicación en los lugares públicos correspondientes. Librado en la Sala de Camuy, Puerto Rico, a 25 de agosto de 2023. LUIS E. ROMÁN CARRERO, ALGUACIL.
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE MAYAGÜEZ
ORIENTAL BANK
Parte Demandante V. MELINA RUIZ PEREZ
Parte Demandada
Civil Núm.: MZ2022CV00153. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA. LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU., EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R., SS. AVISO DE PÚBLICA SUBASTA. El que suscribe, Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de MAYAGÜEZ, hago saber a la parte demandada, MELINA RUIZ PÉREZ y al PÚBLICO EN GENERAL; que en cumplimiento del Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia expedido el 30 de MAYO de 2023, por Ia Secretaría del Tribunal, procederé a vender y venderé en pública subasta y al mejor postor pagadero en efectivo, cheque de gerente o giro postal, a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal, la siguiente propiedad con dirección física: 7 E Urb. Mirador del Sol, Cabo Rojo, PR 00623 y que se describe como sigue: URBANA: Solar marcado con el número
E-7 de Ia Urbanización Mirador del Sol radicado en el Barrio Miradero del término municipal de Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, con una cabida de 740.822 metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE 43.996 metros lineales, colindando con ci solar E-8; por el SUR, en 29.996 metros lineales colindando con el Solar E-6; por el ESTE 24.432 metros lineales colindando con William Soltero y por el OESTE en 20.000 metros lineales colindando con la calle 10 de la Urbanización. Enclava una estructura de dos niveles para fines residenciales, diseñada para vivienda de una familia. Inscrita al folio 7 del tomo 978 de Cabo Rojo, finca 33470 del Registro de la Propiedad de San Germán. La finca antes descrita se encuentra afecta a los siguientes gravámenes: (i) HIPOTECA en garantía de pagaré a favor del Oriental Bank and Trust o a su orden por Ia suma principal de $251,000.00 con intereses a razón del 4.00% anual y vencimiento el 1 de septiembre de 2041. Constituida por la Escritura 192 otorgada en Mayagüez el 29 de agosto de 2011 ante el notario Joaquín Torres Colón, al folio 7 vuelto del Tomo 978 de Cabo Rojo, finca 33470, inscripción 4a. (ii) DOCUMENTO PENDIENTE al Asiento 2023-074671SG01, el 16 de junio de 2023 se presentó Demanda del 7 de febrero de 2022, radiada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Mayagüez, en el caso civil MZ2022CV00153, sobre Cobro de Dinero y Ejecución de Hipoteca, seguido por Oriental Bank vs. Melina Ruiz Perez por $210,659.87. La hipoteca objeto de esta ejecución es la que ha quedado descrita en el inciso (i). Será celebrada la subasta para con el importe de Ia misma satisfacer la sentencia dictada el 6 de septiembre de 2022, mediante Ia cual se condenó a la parte demandada pagar a la parte demandante Ia cantidad adeudada y vencida desde el 1 de agosto de 2019 ascendiente a $210,659.87 de principal, más $20,323.63 a intereses acumulados que continuarán acumulándose al 4% anual hasta el saldo total de Ia deuda, más $1,383.63 a otros cargos, más $25,100.00 en costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado, según pactado, más cualquier otro desembolso que haya efectuado o efectúe la parte demandante durante Ia tramitación de este caso para otros adelantos de conformidad con el Contrato Hipotecario. La PRIMERA SUBASTA será celebrada el 3 DE OCTUBRE
antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, otros cargos y las costas y honorarios de abogado asegurados quedando subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante. Entiéndase: Hipoteca en garantía de un pagaré a favor de Secretario de la Vivienda y Desarrollo Urbano de Estados Unidos de América, o a su orden, por la suma principal de $153,000.00, con intereses al 5.060% anual, vencedero el día 22 de abril de 2069, constituida por la escritura número 13, otorgada en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, el dia 14 de diciembre de 2012, ante la notario Dinorah Collazo Ortiz, e inscrito al tomo Karibe de Arecibo, finca número 14,836, inscripción 5ta. Que la cantidad mínima de licitación en la primera subasta del inmueble antes descrito será la suma de $153,000.00 según se establece en la escritura de hipoteca antes relacionada. En caso de que el inmueble a ser subastado no fuera adjudicado en su primera subasta se ordena la celebración de una segunda subasta de dicho inmueble, en la cual, la cantidad mínima será una equivalente a 2/3 parte de aquella, o sea la suma de $102,000.00; desierta también la segunda subasta de dicho inmueble, se ordena la celebración de una tercera subasta en la cual, la cantidad mínima será la mitad del precio pactado para la primera subasta, es decir la suma de $76,500.00. La propiedad se adjudicará al mejor postor, quien deberá satisfacer el importe de su oferta en moneda legal y corriente de los Estados Unidos de América en el momento de la adjudicación, entiéndase efectivo, giro postal o cheque certificado a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, y que las cargas y gravámenes preferentes, si los hubiese, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes, entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. La propiedad no está sujeta a gravámenes anteriores y/o preferentes según surge de las constancias del Registro de la Propiedad en un estudio de título efectuado a la finca antes descrita. Una vez efectuada la venta de dicha propiedad, el Alguacil procederá a otorgar la escritura de traspaso al licitador victorioso en subasta, quien podrá ser la parte demandante, cuya oferta podrá aplicarse a la extinción parcial o total de la obligación reconocida por la sentencia dictada en este caso. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores. Si el producto de la venta fuere insuficiente
para satisfacer la cantidad reclamada, se procederá a la ejecución de la sentencia en contra de la parte demandada por el remanente de las sumas no satisfechas, mediante embargo y venta en ejecución de cualesquiera otros bienes propiedad de la parte demandada en cantidad suficiente para dejar cubierta y totalmente satisfecha a la parte demandante cualquier deficiencia o parte insoluta de la sentencia dictada a su favor según dispuesto en la sentencia dictada en este caso. Se dispone, conforme con la sentencia dictada en este caso que, una vez efectuada la subasta y vendido el bien inmueble, los adjudicatarios sean puestos en posesión del mismo dentro del término de veinte (20) días por el Alguacil de este Honorable Tribunal y los actuales poseedores lanzados del referido inmueble. Y para la concurrencia de licitadores y para el público en general, se publicará este Edicto de acuerdo con la ley, mediante edicto, en un periódico de circulación general en el Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, una vez por semana, por espacio de dos (2) semanas consecutivas con un intervalo de por lo menos siete (7) días entre ambas publicaciones, y para su fijación en tres (3) lugares públicos del municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta, tales como la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía, y se le notificará además a la parte demandada vía correo certificado con acuse de recibo a la última dirección conocida. EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto de Subasta para conocimiento y comparecencia de los licitadores, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en Arecibo, Puerto Rico, a 9 de agosto de 2023. Luangy Viera Romero, ALGUACIL, TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA, SALA DE ARECIBO.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO
DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE PONCE
LIME HOMES, LTD.
Demandante Vs. SUCESION DE FELÍCITA
NATAL CARDONA COMPUESTA POR
FULANO DE TAL, FULANA DE TAL, ZUTANO DE TAL, ZUTANA DE TAL, A, B Y
C COMO HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN; JUANITA VELAZQUEZ
NATAL POR SÍ Y COMO HEREDERA CONOCIDA
SANTIAGO JORGE Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS; HONORABLE SECRETARIO DEL DEPARTAMENTO DE JUSTICIA Y HONORABLE SECRETARIO DE HACIENDA DEL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO
Demandados
Civil Núm.: PO2019CV00725. (406). Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y DE EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA POR LA VÍA ORDINARIA. AVISO DE VENTA EN PÚBLICA SUBASTA. Yo, MIGUEL A. TORRES AYALA, Alguacil de la División de Subastas del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Ponce, a la demandada y al público en general, les notifico que, cumpliendo con un Mandamiento que se ha librado en el presente caso, por el Secretario del Tribunal, con fecha 17 de julio de 2023 y para satisfacer la Sentencia por la cantidad de $69,184.11 de principal; dictada en el caso de epígrafe el 13 de abril de 2023 y notificada por edicto el 18 de abril de 2023, publicada mediante edicto el 24 de abril de 2023, en el periódico “The San Juan Daily Star” y notificada por correo certificado el 25 de abril de 2023; procederé a vender en pública subasta, al mejor postor en pago de contado y en moneda del curso legal de los Estados Unidos de América, todo derecho, título e interés que haya tenido, tenga o pueda tener la deudora demandada en cuanto a la propiedad localizada en el: Municipio de Ponce, Puerto Rico, los bienes inmuebles se describen a continuación: 3830 Global St., Baldorioty, Ponce, PR 00731. URBANA: Solar marcado con el número 309, según el plano de inscripción de la Urbanización Solares y Servicios Baldorioty de Ponce, Puerto Rico, con una cabida de 236.72 metros cuadrados. En linderos NORTE, con la calle denominada Calle M; SUR, sola 311; ESTE, solar 298 y OESTE, con la calle denominada Calle W de dicho plano de inscripción. Enclava en este solar una casa destinada a vivienda. Consta inscrita al folio 207 del tomo 329 de Ponce, finca número 18,791 en el Registro de Propiedad de Ponce, Sección Segunda. Con el importe de dicha venta se habrá de satisfacer a la parte demandante las cantidades adeudadas, según la Sentencia dictada en el caso de epígrafe, por el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala de Ponce, cuyas cantidades ascienden a $69,184.11, de principal, intere-
ses sobre el principal adeudado al 11.96760% desde el 6 de junio de 2016, los cuales continúan acumulándose hasta el saldo total de la deuda; un balance diferido de $468.00 que no acumula intereses; recargos a razón del 5% de cada pago vencido no recibido dentro de los quince (15) días después de la fecha de vencimiento; más el 10% del principal o $7,650.00 para costas, gastos y honorarios de abogados pactado. El tipo mínimo para la subasta será la suma de tasación pactada, la cual es $76,500.00 para la propiedad descrita. Si no produjere remate o adjudicación la primera subasta, se procederá a una segunda subasta y servirá de tipo mínimo la cantidad de $51,000.00. Si tampoco hubiere remate ni adjudicación en esta segunda subasta, se procederá a una tercera subasta, en ésta el tipo mínimo será la cantidad de $38,250.00. Si se declarase desierta la tercera subasta se dará por terminado el procedimiento, pudiendo adjudicarse a opción del demandante. Para el lote descrito, la PRIMERA SUBASTA se llevará a cabo el día 10 DE OCTUBRE DE 2023, A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA. De no comparecer postor alguno se llevará a efecto una SEGUNDA SUBASTA el día 17 DE OCTUBRE DE 2023, A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA. De no comparecer postor alguno se llevará a cabo una TERCERA SUBASTA el día 24 DE OCTUBRE DE 2023, A LAS 10:30 DE LA MAÑANA. La subasta o subastas antes indicadas se llevarán a efecto en mi oficina, localizada en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Ponce. De Estudio de Título realizado no surgen gravámenes preferentes ni posteriores que deban ser cancelados. Se le advierte a los licitadores que la adjudicación se hará al mejor postor, quien deberá consignar el importe de su oferta en el mismo acto de la adjudicación en moneda de curso legal de los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica, giro postal o cheque de gerente a nombre del Alguacil del Tribunal y para conocimiento de la parte demandada y de toda(s) aquella(s) persona(s) que tengan interés inscrito con posterioridad a la inscripción del gravamen que se está ejecutando, y para conocimiento de los licitadores y el público en general y para su publicación en un periódico de circulación general, una vez por semana durante el término de dos (2) semanas consecutivas con un intervalo de por lo menos siete (7) días entre ambas publicaciones, y para su fijación en tres (3) lugares públicos del municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta, tales como, la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía y se le notificará además a la parte de-
mandada vi a correo certificado con acuse de recibo a la última dirección conocida. Se les advierte a todos los interesados que todos los documentos relacionados con la presente acción de ejecución de hipoteca, así como la de la subasta, estarán disponibles para ser examinados en la Secretaría del Tribunal. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titulación y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere al crédito de ejecutante, continuarán subsiguientes entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio del remate. La propiedad a ser ejecutada se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores, previa orden judicial dirigida al Registrador de la Propiedad de la sección correspondiente para la cancelación de aquellos posteriores. Y para conocimiento de la demandada, de los acreedores posteriores, de los licitadores, partes interesadas y público en general, expido el presente Aviso para su publicación en los lugares públicos correspondientes. Librado en Ponce, Puerto Rico, a 16 de agosto de 2023. MIGUEL
A. TORRES AYALA, ALGUACIL AUXILIAR PLACA #560.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA
SALA SUPERIOR DE AIBONITO CARRINGTON
MORTGAGE SERVICES LLC
Demandante Vs. SUCESIÓN FLORENTINA
PAGAN TAÑON
T/C/C FLORENTINA
PAGAN TAÑÓN T/C/C
FLORENTINA PAGAN
TAÑON COMPUESTA POR
ANA HILDA FIGUEROA
PAGAN, MARIA CRISTINA
FIGUEROA PAGAN, JULIAN FIGUEROA
PAGAN, JOSE LUIS
FIGUEROA PAGAN, YOLANDA FIGUEROA
PAGAN; JOHN DOE Y JANE DOE COMO POSIBLES MIEMBROS DESCONOCIDOS; ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA; CENTRO DE RECAUDACION DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES
Demandados
CIVIL NUM. AI2023CV00357
SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA. EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS. EL ESTADO LI-
BRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.
A: JULIAN FIGUEROA
PAGAN; JOHN DOE
Y JANE DOE COMO
POSIBLES MIEMBROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESIÓN FLORENTINA
PAGAN TAÑON
T/C/C FLORENTINA
PAGAN TAÑÓN T/C/C FLORENTINA PAGAN TAÑON.
POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al Tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días a partir de la publicación de este edicto.
Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: http://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por cuyo caso deberé presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaria del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.
Greenpoon 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 Comerío, Puerto Rico, hoy día 21 de agosto de 2023. Elizabeth González Rivera, Secretaria Regional. Carmen L. Aponte Flores, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal I. LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA
SALA SUPERIOR DE ARECIBO
FIRST AMERICAN TITLE INSURANCE COMPANY
Demandante Vs. DORAL MORTGAGE LLC, ANTES CONOCIDA COMO DORAL MORTGAGE CORPORATION; DORAL BANK, HOY FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION; FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC); SENIOR MORTGAGE BANKERS, INC; FULANO DE TAL Y MENGANO MÁS CUAL
SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE HIPOTECA REPRESENTADA POR PAGARE HIPOTECARIO EXTRAVIADO. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA. EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. SS.
Se emplaza y notifica a ustedes que se ha presentado una demanda en este caso, en la cual en síntesis, la parte demandante alega que se extravió un pagare hipotecario que estaba en poder de “Senior Mortgage Bankers, Inc.”, y solicita que se ordene la cancelación de la hipoteca que lo garantiza. El pagare fue librado por la Sra. Francisca Calderas Ríos, también conocida como Francisca Carderas Ríos, Francisca Caldera Ríos, y como Francisca Calderas, a favor de “Doral Mortgage Corporation”, o a su orden, por la suma de $44,000.00, más intereses y créditos accesorios, vencedero el 1 de agosto del 2013, según surge de la escritura #216, otorgada en Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, el día 15 de julio de 1998, ante el Notario Público Miguel A. Arroyo Díaz. La referida escritura consta inscrita al folio 99 del tomo 295 de Ciales, del Registro de la Propiedad de Puerto Rico, Sección de Manatí, finca #6,328, inscripción 5ta. Pueden ver la demanda en su totalidad en este Tribunal. Los abogados de la Parte Demandante lo son: Sandra De L. Tous-Chevres y Raúl J. Tous Bobonis, Urb. San Francisco, 1789 Calle Diamela, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00927-6330, teléfonos 751-8834, a quien deberá notificar la contestación de la demanda dentro de los próximos 30 días siguientes a la publicación de este edicto. Por la presente se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de ,los próximos 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: https:// unired.ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Se le apercibe que 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. Dado bajo mi firma y sello del
Tribunal y por Orden del mismo hoy 29 de agosto de 2023. Vivian Y. Fresse González, Secretaria Regional. Madeline GarcíabPérez, Sec Auxiliar.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA SUPERIOR DE ARECIBO
CASCADE FUNDING MORTGAGE TRUST HB5 Demandante, V. FLORENCIA PÉREZ MORALES; TAMBIÉN CONOCIDA COMO FLORENCIA PÉREZ; POR SÍ Y EN LA CUOTA VIUDAL USUFRUCTUARIA; LA SUCESIÓN DE ÁNGEL ORTÍZ LÓPEZ, TAMBIÉN CONOCIDO COMO ÁNGEL ESTEBAN ORTÍZ LÓPEZ, COMPUESTA POR FULANO DE TAL Y FULANA DE TAL COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS CON INTERÉS EN LA SUCESIÓN; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIÓN DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA, Demandados CIVIL NUM. QU2023CV00023
SOBRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA POR LA VIA ORDINARIA. EDICTO DE INTERPELACIÓN. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA. PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS. ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO. S.S. A: LA SUCESIÓN DE ÁNGEL ORTÍZ LÓPEZ, TAMBIÉN CONOCIDO COMO ÁNGEL ESTEBAN ORTÍZ LÓPEZ COMPUESTA POR FLORENCIA PÉREZ MORALES, FULANO DE TAL Y FULANA DE TAL COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS CON INTERÉS EN LA SUCESIÓN.
El Artículo 1578 del Código Civil de 2020, dispone: “Transcurridos treinta (30) días desde que se haya producido la delación, cualquier persona interesada puede solicitar al tribunal que le señale al llamado un plazo, para que manifieste si acepta la herencia o si la repudia. Este plazo no excederá de treinta (30) días. El tribunal apercibirá al llamado de que, si transcurrido el plazo señalado no ha manifestado su voluntad de aceptar la herencia o de repudiarla, se dará por
NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA
aceptada.” Por la presente el Tribunal de Primera Instancia, conforme al Art. 1578 supra, y el caso Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria vs. Latinoamericana de Exportación, Inc., 164 DPR 689 (2005), les ordena que el término de treinta (30) días, hagan declaración aceptado o repudiando la herencia del causante, ÁNGEL ORTÍZ LÓPEZ, también conocido como ÁNGEL ESTEBAN ORTÍZ LÓPEZ. Se les apercibe a los herederos antes mencionados que de no expresarse dentro de ese término de treinta (30) días en torno a la aceptación o repudiación de herencia, la misma se tendrá por aceptada. Los abogados de la parte demandante son:
Lcdo. Andrés Sáez Marrero
T.S.P.R. Núm. 18074
TROMBERG, MORRIS & POULIN, LLC
1541 Calle J. Ponce de León San Juan, PR 00926 Tel. 877-338-4101 / Fax: 561-338-4077 prservice@tmppllc.com / asaez@tmppllc.com
Expido este edicto bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, hoy 24 de agosto de 2023. Vivian Y. Fresse González, Secretaria Regional. Suhail Serrano Moya, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA
CENTRO JUDICIAL DE AGUA-
DILLA SALA SUPERIOR DE AGUADILLA SALÓN DE SESIONES SALÓN 601.
BANCO POPULAR DE PUERTO RICO
Demandante v.
SUCESION DE CARLOS
ANTONIO RODRIGUEZ
SALAS, COMPUESTA
POR ANGEL MIGUEL
RODRIGUEZ SALAS Y OTROS
Demandado(a)
Caso Núm. : IS2023CV00111.
Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA; PROPIEDAD RESIDENCIAL. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.
JOSÉ A LAMAS BURGOS
JLAMAS@LVPRLA WCOM
A: ANGEL MIGUEL
RODRIGUEZ SALAS, COMO MIEMBRO DE LA SUCESIÓN DE CARLOS ANTONIO
RODRIGUEZ SALAS
HC 3 PO BOX ITT57 MOCA, PUERTO RICO 00676
HC 3 PO BOX ITT67 MOCA, PUERTO RICO 00676
810 WOODFIELD CT
KISSIMMEE, FL 34744-4649
820 WOODFIELD CT
KISSIMMEE, FL 34744-4649
1001 COSTA MESA LN, KISSIMMEE FL 34772
LOTE 74 URBANIZACIÓN BRISAS DEL MAR
(Nombre de las partes que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto)
EL SECRET ARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 22 DE AGOSTO DE 2023, 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 29 de AGOSTO de 2023. En AGUADILLA, Puerto Rico, el 29 de agosto de 2023.
SARAHIREYES PEREZ, Secretaria. F/ ARLENE GUZMAN PABON, Secretaria Auxiliar del Tribunal.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE SUPERIOR PATILLAS
AGUSTIN
FIGUEROA CRUZ
Demandante Vs SUCESIÓN SANTA VELÁZQUEZ LÓPEZ
Demandados
CIVIL NÚMERO: PA2023CV00150 SOBRE: ACCION DECLARATIVA PRESCRIPCIÓN ADQUISITIVA. EDICTO.
A: SUCESIÓN DE ZACARIAS PAGÁN DE JESÚS
Siendo usted poseedor de un predio de terreno colindante del inmueble objeto de la acción de epígrafe, el cual se describe a continuación, o un titular anterior o descendiente de uno de ellos, de acuerdo a la Ley del Registro de la Propiedad Inmobiliaria del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, se le notifica por este medio de que, si tuviere algo que alegar al respecto, puede y debe comparecer por escrito a exponer lo que a bien tenga que expresar sobre el asunto en consideración del Tribunal. RUSTICA: Parcela marcada con el número ciento diecisiete (117) en el plano de parcelación de la comunidad rural Providencia del Barrio Pollos del término municipal
de Patillas, con una cabida superficial de CERO CUERDAS CON OCHO CIENTOS SETENTA Y SEIS DIEZMILESIMAS DE OTRA (0.0876 cdas.), equivalentes a TRESCIENTOS CUARENTA Y CUATRO PUNTO DIEZ Y OCHO METROS CUADRADOS (344.18 m.c.), en lindes por el NORTE con camino municipal, por el SUR con uso público, por el ESTE con la parcela número ciento dieciséis de la comunidad y por el OESTE con la parcela número ciento dieciocho de la comunidad. POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 20 días de haber sido diligenciado esta Notificación, excluyéndose el día del diligenciamiento. Usted deberá presentar su alegación responsiva a través del Sistema Unificado de Manejo y Administración de Casos (SUMAC), al cual puede acceder utilizando la siguiente dirección electrónica: https://unired.ramajudicial. pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Si compareciere a hacer alguna alegación, notificará copia de la misma a:
EMPHATIA NOTARY & LEGAL
ADVISORS, P.S.C.
RUA Núm.: 17415
Lcdo. Pedro A Crespo Claudia Urb. Villa Criollos Calle Corazón A-6 Caguas, PR 00726.
Tel. (939) 337-5550 pcrespo@emphatialaw.com
En Patillas, Puerto Rico a 29 de agosto de 2023. Marisol Rosado Rodríguez, Secretaria Regional. Luz M. Guzmán Santiago, Sec Auxiliar del Tribunal.
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBU-
NAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA
SALA SUPERIOR DE CAGUAS. NILDA
HERNÁNDEZ RAMOS
DEMANDANTE VS. SUCESIÓN DE CANTALICIO RAMOS COTTO DEMANDADO
Núm. Caso: AB2023CV00084.
SALA: Sobre: USUCAPIÓN. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDIC-
TO.
A: ROSA RAMOS RIVERA
125 Newfield Ave. Hartford, CT 06106
Se le notifica a usted que se ha radicado en el Tribunal de Primera Instancia Sala de Caguas, el Caso Civil Núm.
AB2023CV00084 sobre USUCAPIÓN. Se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los treinta (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: https://unired. ramajudicial.pr, salvo que se represente por derecho propio, en cuyo caso deberá presentar su alegación responsiva en la secretaría del tribunal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá dictar sentencia en rebeldía en su contra y conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, sin más citarle ni oírle, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente. Se requiere que notifique a la LCDA. IVETTE ROSSANA GARCÍA CRUZ, a la siguiente dirección: PO BOX 373151, CAYEY, PR 0000737-3151. Teléfono 787-286-9900 Email: garciacruzlawgmail.com, Abogada de la Parte Demandante, copia de sus alegaciones y/o contestación a la demanda. Extendido bajo firma y sello de este Tribunal. En Caguas, Puerto Rico, a 27 de junio de 2023. Lisilda Martinez Agosto, Sec Regional Interina. Jannette Espinosa Castillo, Sec Auxiliar.
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE PONCE SALA SUPERIOR DE PONCE SALÓN DE SESIONES SALÓN 406 - CIVIL SUPERIOR LUNA RESIDENTIAL II, LLC
Demandante V. FULANO DE TAL COMO POSIBLE HEREDERO DESCONOCIDO DE LA SUCESION DE LEONIDES CEDEÑO RUIZ Y OTROS
Demandado(a)
GABRIEL ESTEFAN CANCEL PÉREZ PRSERVICE@RASLG.COM
KRYSTAL SANTIAGO SÁNCHEZ PRSERVICE@RASLG.COM
MARJALIISA COLÓN VILLANUEV A MCOLON@WWCLAW.COM
Caso Núm.: PO2022CV02031
Sobre: EJECUCIÓN DE HIPOTECA: PROPIEDAD RESIDENCIAL, COBRO DE DINERO ORDINARIO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR
EDICTO
A: FULANO DE TAL Y FULANA DE TAL COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS CON lNTERES EN LA SUCESION DE LEONIDES CEDEÑO
SUTANA DE TAL COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS CON lNTERES EN LA SUCESION DE ESTHER MENDEZ ROMERO
(Nombre de las partes que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto)
EL SECRET ARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 16 DE AGOSTO DE 2023, 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 30 de AGOSTO de 2023, En PONCE, Puerto Rico, el 30 de AGOSTO de 2023. CARMEN G. TIRU QUIÑONES, Secretaria. f/EREINA AGRONT LEON, Secretaria Auxiliar.
LEGAL NOTICE
ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE BAYAMON SALA SUPERIOR . E.M.I. EQUITY MORTGAGE, INC.
DEMANDANTE VS. LA SUCESION DE ROSENDO CASTRO NIEVES COMPUESTA POR FULANO Y FULANA DE TAL COMO POSIBLES HEREDEROS DESCONOCIDOS DE LA SUCESION; CENTRO DE RECAUDACIONES DE INGRESOS MUNICIPALES (CRIM)
DEMANDADOS
CIVIL NUM.: BY2023CV01314. SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA (VÍA ORDINARIA). EDICTO DE SUBASTA. El Alguacil que suscribe por la presente CERTIFICA, ANUNCIA y hace CONSTAR: Que en cumplimiento de un Mandamiento de Ejecución de Sentencia que le ha sido dirigido al Alguacil que suscribe por la Secretaría del TRIBU-
CENTRO JUDICIAL DE BAYAMON, SALA SUPERIOR, , en el caso de epígrafe procederá a vender en pública subasta al mejor postor en efectivo, cheque certificado en moneda legal de los Estados Unidos de América el 26 DE SEPTIEMBRE DE 2023, A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA, en la Oficina del Alguacil de Subastas, sita en el cuarto piso del Tribunal de Primera Instancia, Sala Superior de Bayamón, todo derecho, título e interés que tenga la parte demandada de epígrafe en el inmueble de su propiedad que ubica en: URBANIZACION VILLA RICA, 2DA EXTENSION C-41 CALLE 3, BAYAMON, PUERTO RICO 00959 y que se describe a continuación: URBANA: Solar cuarentiuno, Bloque “C”, Segunda Extensión de la Urbanización Villa Rica en Hato Tejas, Bayamón, Puerto Rico, compuesto de trescientos ochentitrés punto ochentiséis metros cuadrados, en lindes por el NORTE, en catorce punto sesenta metros con Calle tres; por el SUR, en catorce punto noventitrés metros con Solares trece y doce; por el ESTE, en veinte y seis metros con Solar cuarenta; y por el OESTE, en igual medida con Solar cuarentidós. La propiedad antes relacionada consta inscrita al Folio 106 del Tomo 541 de Bayamón Sur, finca número 24,593, en el Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón, Sección Primera. El tipo mínimo para la primera subasta del inmueble antes relacionado, será el dispuesto en la Escritura de Hipoteca, es decir la suma de $122,735.00. Si no hubiere remate ni adjudicación en la primera subasta del inmueble mencionado, se celebrará una segunda subasta en las oficinas del Alguacil que suscribe el día 3 DE OCTUBRE DE 2023, A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA. En la segunda subasta que se celebre servirá de tipo mínimo las dos terceras partes (2/3) del precio pactado en la primera subasta, o sea la suma de $81,823.33. Si tampoco hubiere remate ni adjudicación en la segunda subasta se celebrará una tercera subasta en las oficinas del Alguacil que suscribe el día 10 DE OCTUBRE DE 2023, A LAS 10:00 DE LA MAÑANA. Para la tercera subasta servirá de tipo mínimo la mitad (1/2) del precio pactado para el caso de ejecución, o sea, la suma de $61,367.50. La hipoteca a ejecutarse en el caso de epígrafe fue constituida mediante la escritura de hipoteca número 324 otorgada en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 24 de agosto de 2018, ante el Notario David Cardona Dinguí, inscrita al Tomo Karibe de Bayamón Sur, finca número 24,593, inscripción 5ta, en el Registro de la Propiedad
de Bayamón, Sección Primera. Dicha subasta se llevará a cabo para con su producto satisfacer al Demandante total o parcialmente según sea el caso el importe de la Sentencia que ha obtenido contra la parte demandada ascendente a la suma de $114,403.30 por concepto de principal, desde el 1ro de noviembre de2022, más intereses al tipo pactado de 4.75% anual que continúan acumulándose hasta el pago total de la obligación. Además, la parte co-demandada La Sucesión de Rosendo Castro Nieves adeuda a la parte demandante los cargos por demora equivalentes a 4.00% de la suma de aquellos pagos con atrasos en exceso de 15 días calendarios de la fecha de vencimiento; los créditos accesorios y adelantos hechos en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca; y las costas, gastos y honorarios de abogado equivalentes a $12,273.50. Además, la parte co-demandada La Sucesión de Rosendo Castro Nieves se comprometió a pagar una suma equivalente a $12,273.50 para cubrir cualquier otro adelanto que se haga en virtud de la escritura de hipoteca y una suma equivalente a $12,273.50 para cubrir intereses en adición a los garantizados por ley. Que los autos y todos los documentos correspondientes al Procedimiento incoado estarán de manifiesto en la SECRETARIA DEL TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE BAYAMON, SALA SUPERIOR durante las horas laborables. Se entenderá que todo licitador acepta como bastante la titulación del inmueble y que las cargas y gravámenes anteriores y los preferentes, si los hubiere, al crédito del ejecutante continuarán subsistentes entendiéndose que el rematante los acepta y queda subrogado en la responsabilidad de los mismos, sin destinarse a su extinción el precio de remate. La propiedad no está sujeta a gravámenes anteriores y/o preferentes según surge de las constancias del Registro de la Propiedad en un estudio de título efectuado a la finca antes descrita. Por la presente se notifica a los acreedores conocidos y desconocidos que tengan inscritos, no inscritos, presentados y/o anotados sus derechos sobre los bienes hipotecados con posterioridad a la inscripción del crédito del ejecutante o acreedores de cargas o derechos reales que los hubiesen pospuesto a la hipoteca del actor y a los dueños, poseedores, tenedores de o interesados en títulos transmisibles por endoso o al portador garantizados hipotecariamente con posterioridad al crédito del actor que se celebrarán las subastas en las fechas, horas
y sitios señalados para que puedan concurrir a la subasta si les conviniere o se les invita a satisfacer antes del remate el importe del crédito, de sus intereses, otros cargos y las costas y honorarios de abogado asegurados quedando subrogados en los derechos del acreedor ejecutante. La propiedad objeto de ejecución y descrita anteriormente se adquirirá libre de cargas y gravámenes posteriores una vez el Honorable Tribunal expida la correspondiente Orden de Confirmación de Venta Judicial. Y para conocimiento de licitadores del público en general se publicará este Edicto de acuerdo con la ley por espacio de dos semanas en tres sitios públicos del municipio en que ha de celebrarse la venta, tales como la Alcaldía, el Tribunal y la Colecturía. Este Edicto será publicado dos veces en un diario de circulación general en el Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, por espacio de dos semanas consecutivas. Expido el presente Edicto de subasta bajo mi firma en el Tribunal en Bayamón, Puerto Rico, hoy día 30 de agosto de 2023. EDGARDO ELIAS VARGAS SANTANA, ALGUACIL DE SUBASTAS TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA CENTRO JUDICIAL DE BAYAMON SALA SUPERIOR.
“Blue Sky Towers, LLC would like to place on notice the acquisition of two existing telecommunication installations consisting of the following: 1.) a 160’ lattice tower known as Anones located at 18°15’19.82” north latitude and -66°14’10.38” west longitude near State Road PR 813, Km 01, Barrio Anones Ward, Naranjito. 2.) a 157’ monopole tower known as Leguisamo located at 18°14’56.62” north latitude and -67°05’38.55” west longitude near PR—108, Km 10.7, Mayaguez. If you have any concerns regarding historic properties that may be affected by this proposed undertaking, please contact: Miles Walz-Salvador, Lotis Environmental, LLC, at Legals@thelotisgroup. com or (314) 913-0505. In your response, please include the proposed undertaking’s location and a list of the historic resources that you believe to be affected along with their respective addresses or approximate locations.”
Bill Pinkney, the first Black sailor to circumnavigate the globe alone by the arduous southern route — rounding the five great capes of Earth’s southernmost points of land, most notably the fearsome Cape Horn — died last Thursday in Atlanta. He was 87. His death, in a hospital on a visit to Atlanta, was announced by Ina Pinkney, his former wife, who said he sustained a head injury in a fall this week. He lived in Puerto Rico.
Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America, is where the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans meet in a treacherous scrum of churning waves battered by capricious winds called williwaws. It is known as the Mount Everest of sailing, “a mystical, mythical way point,” as Herb McCormick, former editor of Cruising World magazine, put it in a phone interview. Those who round the cape become members of an elite club.
Pinkney, aboard his 47-foot cutter, Commitment, joined that club on Valentine’s Day in 1992 in a driving rain and with bare masts: He had dropped his sails because the wind was so ferocious, yet the waves and current were so powerful, he still bucketed along, on course, at 5 knots. He had been at the helm for 48 straight hours, but he made sure to clamber down below to don a gold earring — a tradition followed by those who make the passage — pop the cork of a bottle of Champagne, toss a few streamers and videotape his solitary celebration to send to the 30,000 children back in the United States who had been following his journey.
About 18 months earlier, in August 1990, Pinkney was a month shy of his 55th birthday when he set sail out of Boston Harbor. He would cover 32,000 miles before his return in June 1992, having endured all the frustrations and outright perils of the solo blue-water sailor — lack of sleep, broken gear, ripped sails, terrifying storms and piercing loneliness — as well as its quiet and oftenprofound joys. (He took up needlepoint to pass the time.)
Sailing into Cape Town after a month
at sea, and leery of what he might find in a country still ruled by racist “color” laws despite Nelson Mandela’s release from prison the year before, he raised a spinnaker he had designed in the colors of African American pride: red, black and green.
“I wanted all to see who I was,” he wrote in his 2006 memoir, “As Long as It Takes: Meeting the Challenge,” “and where I came from.”
Pinkney had grown up on the South Side of Chicago, raised by his mother, who worked as a maid. They moved often and, for a time, were on public assistance for dependent children. Pinkney hated being sent to the welfare office to pick up the monthly ration of potatoes, powdered milk and so-called government cheese. He thought he might be an artist, but his mother, by his account, warned him off: “The only people who make money in art are dead white men,” she told him.
He graduated from a technical high school, having pivoted his ambitions to architecture, but ended up joining the Naval Reserve hoping to travel and see the world. He encountered racism from the get-go: He wanted to specialize as a hospital corpsman, but he was encour-
aged to be a “steward’s mate,” essentially a valet to the officers, where he “could be with his own kind,” he recalled a personnel officer telling him. Pinkney prevailed, went on to train as an X-ray technician and served on various ships.
After he left the service, Pinkney, a gregarious, curious and restless man, worked as an elevator mechanic, a limbo dancer (at which he excelled), a conga player, a makeup artist on soft-porn films and then on more conventional fare, a cosmetics executive at Revlon and other companies, and a public information officer for the city of Chicago. He had fallen in love with sailing while living in Puerto Rico after his Navy service, a bittersweet period, he wrote in his book, because he had moved there after fleeing an early marriage, leaving his young daughter behind.
“I became what too many Black men became,” he wrote in his book, “‘a deserter.’ I ran then and in some ways am still running.”
He lived for a time in New York City and crewed on friends’ boats in the Northeast; he was always the only Black man on board. (He also sailed model yachts in a Central Park pond.) And while in New York, he converted
to Judaism, the culmination of a spiritual quest that he had embarked on after his divorce and that sustained him on his journey years later.
Pinkney began sailing in earnest on Lake Michigan when a job took him back to Chicago. His first sailboat was a 28-foot Pearson Triton that he named Assagai, for an African spear. When he turned 50, having climbed the corporate ladder, he asked Ina Pinkney, whom he had married in 1965, if she would be unhappy if he went to sea. “I’d be unhappy if you didn’t go,” she told him.
He conceived of a solo circumnavigation as a way to inspire his two grandchildren — he had reconnected with his daughter when she was an adult — and began to develop an educational program, Project Commitment, for schoolchildren in Chicago and Boston to follow his journey. But it would take years to raise the funds for the mission, although he had seed money from Armand Hammer, an oil magnate and philanthropist. Pinkney’s appeals for support were rejected by a who’s who of industry, from Eastman Kodak to Procter & Gamble, as well as a slew of Black-owned businesses, whose rejections stung the most. Oprah Winfrey, too, politely declined.
When The New York Times reported on his plight in 1989, however, the head of an investment firm in Boston named Tom Eastman and his colleagues signed on to fully bankroll the journey. (As part of the arrangement, the boat, Commitment, would be sold at the end of the voyage.)
Pinkney originally planned to circumnavigate the globe along its middle, using the Panama and Suez canals. Ted Seymour, of Newport Beach, California, had been the first Black man to sail that route, in 1987. Yet, at the encouragement of Hammer, he flew to England to meet Robin Knox-Johnston, the first man to complete a nonstop solo circumnavigation, in 1969.
Knox-Johnston urged him to reconsider his “kiddie cruise,” as he called the passage through the canals, and travel the southern capes, the old-fashioned
Continues on page 28
From page 27
way, as he had done in a sturdy 32-foot-long boat and as the great clipper ships had done. And, he emphasized, Pinkney would be the first Black man to do so.
William Deltoris Pinkney III was born Sept. 15, 1935, in Chicago. He was named after both his father, who worked as a handyman, and paternal grandfather. His mother, Marion (Henderson) Pinkney, divorced his father when Bill was 6 and raised Bill and his sister, Naomi, by herself.
Bill was a reluctant student — the racism of his teachers and fellow students were not a goad to learning — but an avid reader, and in seventh grade, he became enthralled by “Call It Courage,” a 1941 Newbery Medal-winning story by Armstrong Sperry about the legend of a bullied Polynesian boy who is terrified of the ocean before setting off in a canoe to conquer his fear. It sparked something in young Bill.
After his historic trip, Pinkney went on to become a trustee of the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, where he oversaw the building of a replica of the Amistad, a Cuban schooner that West African slaves commandeered in 1839 as they were being transported to the Caribbean. In a landmark case that reached the Supreme Court, dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 movie “Amistad,” they were allowed to return to their home country.
Pinkney was the replica’s captain for a few years, overseeing its use for sail training and education. He also led a group of teachers and schoolchildren on an 85-foot ketch to retrace the Middle Passage route that slave ships took from Africa to the Americas, and created a program for middle school children on the African slave trade.
In recent years, Pinkney ran a charter boat business in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, on the island’s eastern tip, with his wife of nearly two decades, Migdalia Vachier Pinkney, whom he met salsa dancing. She
survives him, along with his sister, Naomi Pinkney; his daughter, Angela Walton; and two grandchildren.
He and Ina Pinkney divorced in 2001, but they remained close. “My life was the sea, and hers was on land,” he told the Times in 2019 in an article headlined “The Perfect Divorce.”
In 2021, Pinkney was inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame, which honored him with a lifetime achievement award.
Sailing is about escape, Pinkney wrote in his book, “escape from the bonds of conformity, racism and lack of respect because of one’s background. It can be the means of achieving a goal, but sometimes it can be a source of discovering alternatives to your conventional path.”
He added: “This is because the sea does not care who you are, what your race or gender is, how much wealth or power you have, or even what flag or political system you embrace. The sea treats everyone the same.”
When Iga Swiatek, the No. 1 women’s player in the world, took the first set against Jelena Ostapenko on Sunday night, it seemed like business as usual.
Swiatek, a four-time Grand Slam champion at 22, after all, was the reigning U.S. Open champion, and going into her match against Ostapenko, she had not dropped a set at this tournament.
But although Swiatek is often able to cruise through matches, Ostapenko has been a bit of a thorn in her side. Ostapenko has been undefeated against Swiatek, and extended that to four wins with a victory Sunday night 3-6, 6-3, 6-1.
In the second set, the match shifted. Ostapenko began to take control. When Ostapenko evened things up at a set apiece, Swiatek seemed to be out of her comfort zone.
As she struggled, Swiatek looked up at her box, appearing to ask for some sort of advice to contend with Ostapenko’s surge. Her coach, Tomasz Wiktorowski, didn’t seem to have an answer for her, and Swiatek sarcastically clapped toward her box, as if to convey thank you for nothing.
Throughout the third set, Ostapenko was unrelenting. “I had to be aggressive because that’s what she doesn’t really like,” Ostapenko said in an oncourt interview after the match. “I was just fighting until the very last point.”
Ostapenko will face Coco Gauff, the American seeded No. 6, in a quarterfinal today. Gauff also recently figured out how to defeat Swiatek after beating her in the semifinals of the
Western and Southern Open in Ohio last month.
Ostapenko and Gauff have faced each other twice, most recently at the Australian Open, where Ostapenko defeated Gauff in straight sets in the round of 16. Gauff won their previous match in 2019.
“It was a tough match,” Ostapenko said about her Australian Open match against Gauff earlier this year.
“Of course, it’s going be another tough match. I don’t expect any easy matches here in a Grand Slam, so I’m ready for another battle.”
But now, without Swiatek in the way, the U.S. Open women’s singles draw opens up much more widely. Suddenly, the path to the final has become easier for Ostapenko, Gauff, Jessica Pegula, Ons Jabeur and Aryna Sabalenka.
Gauff is ready for Ostapenko, whom she described Sunday as a hard hitter before Ostapenko’s victory.
“With Jelena, she’s a striker, ballstriker. I lost to her in Australian Open this year. She’s hot or cold, to be honest,” Gauff said.
The winner of Ostapenko and Gauff will take on the winner of a quarterfinal match between Sorana Cirstea and Karolina Muchova in the semifinals. Cirstea, of Romania, reached the quarterfinals after upsetting Belinda Bencic, the 15th seed, on Sunday. Muchova, a finalist at this year’s French Open, made it to the quarterfinals having only dropped one set in four matches.
For now, Ostapenko is focused on Gauff, whom she expects to pose a difficult challenge.
“I will try to focus on myself and enjoy it,” Ostapenko said. “It’s great to be in quarterfinals, especially here in New York.”
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
Answers on page 30
Aries (Mar 21-April 20)
Kindheartedness is wonderful, but being taken advantage of can be a danger. You really need to trust your instincts to keep this from happening. If what you hear doesn’t match what you feel, trust your feeling. In the event that you get used, move past it. It would be a shame if resentment permanently dampened your giving nature.
Taurus (April 21-May 21)
You have an intense nature. You probably feel things deeply and spend time lost in thought. Too much intensity can take a toll on your well-being. It might be time you got out and enjoyed yourself. Get up from your chair and take a walk. Meet someone for lunch or do a little shopping. Find something active to do to break the monotony of your routine.
Gemini (May 22-June 21)
You have an intense nature. You probably feel things deeply and spend time lost in thought. Too much intensity can take a toll on your wellbeing. It might be time you got out and enjoyed yourself. Get up from your chair and take a walk. Meet someone for lunch or do a little shopping. Find something active to do to break the monotony of your routine.
Cancer (June 22-July 23)
You have an intense nature. You probably feel things deeply and spend time lost in thought. Too much intensity can take a toll on your wellbeing. It might be time you got out and enjoyed yourself. Get up from your chair and take a walk. Meet someone for lunch or do a little shopping. Find something active to do to break the monotony of your routine.
Leo (July 24-Aug 23)
Consider putting your problem-solving skills to the test today, Leo. You have a real flair for investigating situations and figuring out what happened. If something comes your way that seems mysterious, deal with the problem directly and wrestle out the truth. If you’re baffled, use the process of elimination. Stick with it and you’ll learn what’s what in no time.
Virgo (Aug 24-Sep 23)
Consider putting your problem-solving skills to the test today, Leo. You have a real flair for investigating situations and figuring out what happened. If something comes your way that seems mysterious, deal with the problem directly and wrestle out the truth. If you’re baffled, use the process of elimination. Stick with it and you’ll learn what’s what in no time.
Libra (Sep 24-Oct 23)
It can be very easy to get carried away today, Libra. You might get caught up in some excitement. You need to use your head on a day like this. Double-check everything and moderate your activities. Keep your limitations in mind. There’s nothing saying you can’t do whatever it is that catches your eye. Just use caution and keep yourself safe.
Scorpio (Oct 24-Nov 22)
The energy you feel today may have you so jittery that others don’t know what to do. The day’s aspects can really bring a boost and you’d be wise to plan to do things so you have an avenue to spend it all. Get busy with physical chores. Pull things out, organize, move furniture around - whatever it takes. It’s better to be productive than drive everyone crazy.
Sagittarius (Nov 23-Dec 21)
Venturing into something completely new and different may be what you need, Sagittarius. You have a solid practical side, but the need for excitement and adventure is likely just as strong. If you’ve been putting your nose to the grindstone a lot lately, take time off for some fun. Visit a friend or drive to a place you haven’t been to before and explore.
Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 20)
Learning about things that interest you most is something you may want to do today. At work and home, there’s a schedule to tend to. On your own time, you’re free to learn about anything your heart desires. Intellectual growth is something you enjoy. Whether you delve into cooking, astrophysics, or genealogy, you’ll find something new.
Aquarius (Jan 21-Feb 19)
If you meet new people today, Aquarius, be careful. Some can appear interesting because they’re bold or dangerous. Perhaps they do things you’d never dream of doing. While this may be intriguing, it can lead to trouble and hurt you if you aren’t careful. Stick to your usual standards and ethics. If danger excites you too much, it may be time to make some changes in your life.
Pisces (Feb 20-Mar 20)
You might have to make a choice between telling the truth and a lie. Sometimes this can be a difficult choice, especially if you’re afraid you’ll hurt someone’s feelings. However, a lie can take far more energy than the truth. Consider what you’d want the other person to do in your place. Stick to your ethics, even of it’s tough.
