Monday Sep 7, 2020

Monday, September 7, 2020

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‘Mulan’ 1998: A Moment of Joy and Anxiety for Asian American Viewers

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Domestic Violence Shelters Forgotten Amid Pandemic Oversight Board ‘to Take Actions’ if Gov’t Proceeds with Pension Laws

Organizations Do What They Can, Have Been Waiting Since Early April for Gov’t Guidance on Serving Victims with COVID-19 Proposals Were Presented, No Reply

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

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September 7, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star, the only paper with News Service in English in Puerto Rico, publishes 7 days a week, with a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday edition, along with a Weekend Edition to cover Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Fiscal board warns gov’t it will take action if pension laws that violate PROMESA are executed

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he Financial Oversight and Management Board has warned the island government that it would take actions deemed necessary to stop any execution of three pension-related laws before the board can ascertain if they go against the commonwealth fiscal plan in violation of the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA).

“Should you plan to implement these Acts or accept applications prior to our determinations that the Acts do not impair or defeat the purposes of PROMESA, or otherwise violate PROMESA, the Oversight Board further reserves the right to take such actions as it deems necessary, consistent with PROMESA sections 108(a), 204, and 207, including seeking remedies to prevent the implementation and enforcement of the Acts and for any wrongful implementation of them,” the oversight board’s executive director Natalie Jaresko said in a letter last week to Omar Marrero, head of the Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority (AAFAF by its Spanish initials). The letter was in response to a missive sent by Marrero on Sept. 1.

The three laws, signed in August, are Act 80, Act 81 and Act 82. Act 80 would create an incentivized early retirement program, Act 81 would create a “dignified” retirement plan for police officers, firemen, emergency service personnel and prison guards, while Act 82 would allow teachers to have their excess vacation time and sick leave be considered time worked for the purposes of determining their retirement package.

After enacting the three laws, the government failed to certify that the laws complied with the fiscal plan and provide an estimate of their impact.

“Your letter does not dispute that your submissions were late, that your ‘formal estimates’ for Acts 80 and 81 were not based on the Acts as signed into law, or that you have not provided an estimate -- formal or otherwise -- of Act 82’s increased expenditures,” Jaresko said. “Although you contend we did not provide sufficient time to prepare the analysis requested in our August 28, 2020 letter, we find this statement deeply troubling, as it contradicts the framework established by PROMESA, prudent fiscal practices, and your own contentions in numerous Title III filings and letters. The Government was supposed to have performed this analysis weeks ago, and best practices would normally dictate this analysis be done before adopting legislation.”

The governor must submit the required certification under PROMESA Section 204 for a new law not later than seven business days after the law is enacted. The oversight board noted that the government cannot as a matter of pru-

dent fiscal responsibility wait until after the law is passed to perform the necessary financial and budgetary analysis.

“In addition to frustrating the collaborative process required by PROMESA, that practice places severe time pressure on the Government and the Oversight Board to evaluate whether the law thwarts the purposes of PROMESA while the law remains on the books and is being implemented,” Jaresko said. “Such delay is especially irresponsible here because the Acts affect the careers and lives of thousands of public employees and have a multi-billion-dollar impact on the finances and budget of the Commonwealth. Simply put, the Legislature should not pass, and the Governor should not sign into law, any legislation without first understanding its financial consequences and concluding it is not inconsistent with the applicable fiscal plan.”

“Furthermore, the current circumstances -- which the Government has created -- are at odds with statements made to the Title III court. In the Law 29 action, the Governor and AAFAF proffered Executive Order 2019-057 as a response to the Oversight Board’s claim that the Government had a policy of noncompliance with section 204(a),” she added, referring to a suit in which the court nullified Act 29, which exempted municipalities from paying pensions and health insurance and transferred those responsibilities to the general fund.

“Implementation of the Acts could result in irreparable harm, so it is imperative these Acts not be implemented unless and until the Oversight Board has reviewed all relevant materials and determined whether the Acts impair or defeat the purposes of PROMESA,” Jaresko said.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

Domestic violence shelters still wait for public entities to provide safe spaces for survivors with COVID-19

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

T

he Puerto Rico DomesticViolence Shelter Network has remained committed to providing help to domestic violence victims since the coronavirus pandemic emergency began on March 16, addressing concerns over how to take care of survivors who were symptomatic of or diagnosed positive for COVID-19 to La Fortaleza’s Medical Task Force on April 6, and since April 26 presenting a prevention protocol proposal to the Health and Family departments and the Women’s Advocate Office (OPM by its Spanish initials).

Since that time, both the network and its members have been waiting for the entities to provide safe spaces for COVID-19 positive survivors, Julia de Burgos Shelter Executive Director Coraly León Morales told the Star on Sunday.

León Morales said that because domestic violence shelters are common use spaces, concerns were raised as operators of those facilities feared survivors would be victims of a COVID-19 outbreak and didn’t have the physical space, or specialized resources such as nurses and in-house doctors, to address the needs of suspected and diagnosed victims.

The Network determined therefore, that since they were not getting a response from the aforementioned entities, to develop a uniform prevention protocol proposal that was put into action at every shelter to guarantee medical services and protection to survivors.

“A Shelter Network member identified a space that was not being used and it’s apart from the other spaces that are being occupied by other survivors,” León Morales said. “In order to make that space work and receive domestic violence survivors who were diagnosed with COVID-19, we need funds to be allocated because nurses, doctors, personal protective equipment, and disinfection procedures are required to comply with every need not only for personal security but also medical security.”

León Morales also said Shelter Network members met with OPM’s deputy advocate, Marilyn Bermúdez, to speak about the protocol, of which they sent her a copy in July and, as recently as last week, they provided a copy to Family Department personnel.

“As a shelter, we identified that it was a great challenge as we haven’t gotten recurring access to COVID-19 diagnostic tests for

Since April, both the Puerto Rico Domestic Violence Shelter Network and its members have been waiting for the Gov’t to provide safe spaces for COVID-19 positive survivors. either survivors or personnel. At the moment, personal protective equipment and disinfection products have been covered with our money, donations from sympathetic companies or non-profit organizations that have supported us so much so we can continue providing our services. This represents a great risk for both our employees and the survivors who are being sheltered,” she said. “From the moment the pandemic began, we raised our voices with our concerns, but we haven’t received a response or access to screening devices and other resources that could help our shelters perform better.”

Meanwhile, Women’s Peace Coordinator Executive Director Vilma González Castro said although the government has embraced recognizing services provided to gender violence survivors as essential, it has yet to reply to the petitions included in a letter sent to Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced on March 16 to, among other things, identify an employee from the Health Department to serve as a link between the entity and the shelters.

“We have lived through this since the passage of Hurricane Maria and [have learned] how important it is to have that link so our issues won’t dissolve in a sea of bureaucracy.

We are talking about the lives of people here, and it’s important to address this because we must ensure their safety,” González Castro said. “We haven’t received answers from the Department of Health, we have gotten no

answers about the tests for either employees or the sheltered; we have not received answers from many of the petitions we made.

The organizations have been the only ones that have moved to respond to those needs, despite having far fewer resources.”

González Castro also said she can’t accept that the delayed response from the public entities such as the Health Department or OPM is due to a shortage of resources or time, and instead considers it to be more an “unwillingness” to perform their ministerial duties. Meanwhile, she said that even a year after women’s organizations met with the government to declare a state of emergency in Puerto Rico due to femicides, they are still waiting for answers.

“If they were actually willing [to work], this would have been resolved,” González Castro said. “We would have campaigns that would permanently be disbursed at every outlet. I don’t know why OPM is not taking on this sort of initiative; in fact, how many times have we heard about the OPM during this pandemic?

Very few times, to be exact, and when she [the women’s advocate] appears, she ends up saying questionable things.”

León Morales: Police numbers on domestic violence incidents during COVID-19 pandemic ‘are far from our experiences’ From March 15 to Sept. 4, the Puerto Rico Police Bureau (PRPB) has reported 3,028 domestic violence incidents, which is 621 fewer

cases than were reported during the same time period in 2019. León Morales, those numbers “are far from our experiences.” The executive director of the Julia de Burgos Shelter told The Star that an emergency line from community organization Proyecto Matria, where her organization and six others offer a 24/7 network that provides aid to gender violence victims, received 831 phone calls from April 23 to Aug. 18 that lasted an average of 15 minutes.

“These consist of almost 4,000 minutes of providing attention to survivors or informing family members about the available services,” she said. “If Matria sums up the calls that they received from their main phone line, it surpasses 1,000. This might have not resulted in protection order requests yet, but it shows you that survivors and their family members are looking for help, getting information and searching for services.”

Moreover, González Castro said she questions the PRPB numbers on domestic violence incidents given that a number of events have kept survivors from reporting their cases to authorities, Likewise, the head of the Women’s Peace Coordinator has always been concerned that statistics from public entities tend to be “delayed” and gaining access to recent data is “complicated.” She said further that variants like the earthquakes, the temporary closure of police precincts due to COVID-19 and confinement limited the number of survivors reporting their cases.

“When the Police report that they have seen a reduction of 621 [domestic violence] cases, I ask myself, are women capable of making a call to [report an incident] now as they could when things were ‘normal’? My answer is no,” she said. “We’re under a situation that we have talked about for a long time with other organizations that provide help to gender violence survivors -- that the pandemic has created a scenario that makes it more difficult for them to get any services. Throughout the pandemic, we have received more social media consultations than ever before.”

When the Star asked González Castro if the reduction represents an improvement in the battle against gender violence, she said no.

“In the world, gender violence cases have increased due to the confinement that COVID-19 brought about,” she said. “I can’t believe that things run differently in Puerto Rico from the rest of the world. Even data from the OPM has proven otherwise, as they have gotten more phone calls than before.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

5

PREPA’s appointed executive director summoned to House hearing

By THE STAR STAFF

H

ouse Energy Committee Chairman Víctor Parés Otero has summoned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) Executive Director Efran Paredes Maisonet to a hearing where he’ll be asked to explain the utility’s plans for carrying out PREPA’s transformation and increasing the use of renewable energy sources as well as answer questions about the contract with LUMA Energy and the utility’s retirement system.

The hearing comes after Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced threw her support to Paredes in a letter to PREPA’s board, and amid controversy around the contract with LUMA Energy to operate the utility’s transmission and distribution (T&D) system. PREPA, which has been in bankruptcy since 2017, has asked the U.S. District Court to give administrative priority over other debt to the $135 million yearly fee that will be paid to the consortium.

LUMA, meanwhile, has not provided employment guarantees to the utility’s workers.

It also comes after the Financial Oversight and Management Board rejected 16 contracts for renewable energy that had been renegotiated and after the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau approved a new integrated resource

plan, which is the blueprint for the island’s long-term energy needs.

Parés Otero said the hearing is slated for Thursday at 2 p.m. at the Capitol.

“It is urgent to know the execution plans of the official at this crucial stage for the Authority, but more importantly, that all the provisions established in Law 17 of 2019 are complied with, which includes employment guarantees for all employees of the Authority during the transition process toward the public-private partnership with LUMA Energy,” Parés Otero said in a statement.

Ottmar Chávez, director of the Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resilience, was also summoned to the hearing.

Parés Otero specified that among the challenges and pending issues Paredes faces at PREPA are continuing the transition with the LUMA Energy consortium, which starting in May 2021 will be in charge of the administration and operation of PREPA’s T&D system, and the restoration of the electrical grid after the passage of Hurricane Maria.

He added that the execution of an aggressive work plan for the untangling and pruning of trees around power lines throughout the island is urgent.

“It is necessary to know the execution

plans that the new executive director has in all these areas, so that the transformation of PREPA, which is essential for Puerto Rico to

have a more stable and safe energy system, not only in hurricane season but at all times, is achieved,” Parés Otero said.

Island Health Insurance Administration finalizes transition deal with Molina Healthcare

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

P

uerto Rico Health Insurance Administration (ASES by its Spanish acronym) Executive Director Jorge Galva announced this past weekend that the signing of the transition contract with Molina Healthcare was finally achieved to protect the continuity of services to the approximately 100,000 subscribers of the Puerto Rico government health plan, known as “Plan Vital.”

“The agreement makes the Molina corporation at the central level headquartered in the United States an unlimited guarantor of the contracted commitments,” Galva said in a written statement. “It is established that by September 15,

a restricted reserve equivalent to 125% of pending claims will be established to protect suppliers. Furthermore, ASES reserves the right to audit the reserve and demand additional capital if the settlement of claims requires it.”

On May 14, Molina reported that it would be leaving the Vital Plan on Oct. 31, 2020.

Galva announced that none of the Molina Healthcare subscribers would have interruptions or changes in their benefits and health coverage services, including their previously coordinated medications and clinical procedures.

In addition, by Sept. 14, ASES will assign an insurer where the primary doctor is hired, so that beneficiaries will keep the same primary doctor and medical group.

“Now with the signatures by both parties for this transition contract, which was reviewed and has the approval of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, we increase our guarantees of continuity of care for beneficiaries of [Plan] Vital, and as chairman of the ASES Board of Directors, I thank the board members for their support, and the Molina executives and the ASES team for this achievement,” said island Health Secretary Lorenzo González Feliciano.

Regarding the pending invoices to service providers, Galva showed where in the agreement it says that “Molina is committed to maintaining the personnel and resources for the draw out period” that ends on August 31, 2021 in order to reconcile and pay pending claims.

“We also achieved that 70 percent of all clean claims -- as defined in Article 16 of the Contract -- will be paid before October 31, 2020,” Galva said.

“We must also remember that the selection and change of insurer is a right of the beneficiary, which should not be directed in any way by a provider or an insurer,” added the ASES chief added.

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Monday, September 7, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Gubernatorial candidate Delgado presents proposal for animal overpopulation

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

P

opular Democratic Party (PDP) candidate for governor Carlos “Charlie” Delgado Altieri presented a series of proposals over the weekend to address the overpopulation of animals in Puerto Rico and enforce the current law to prosecute animal abusers.

“Mahatma Gandhi used to say that ‘the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.’ Those words are a great truth and in Puerto Rico we have a problem that has been latent for decades and has not been addressed with a responsible, effective and direct public policy,” Delgado Altieri said. “That thousands of animals live on the streets every day is an ordeal and that must be stopped. The measures to be established for a problem that has caused a crisis must be strong.”

The PDP president said that as part of his public policy he will seek to prohibit the sale of animals on the island until the situation of the thousands who wander and live in the streets is controlled. He added that he will promote mass sterilizations of animals throughout the island. He said his public policy covers all animals, including the situation with horses and Vietnamese pigs.

“It is more than established by expert organizations on the subject that sterilization is the most effective way to curb the overpopulation of animals. So my objective is to pass a bill that works in conjunction with organizations that promote animal welfare, municipalities and the veterinary class of the country so that the government assumes the costs of mass spaying and neutering,” Delgado Altieri said. “This is

a measure adopted, for example, in the Netherlands, which has made it possible to control the overpopulation of street animals. This initiative would be accompanied by an educational campaign to generate a change of mentality so that it is understood that, like people, animals feel and suffer, so they deserve to be respected and treated with dignity. This campaign will be extended to the country’s schools.”

In this context, the Isabela mayor pointed out that he supports the Spayathon that has been taking place since 2017 in Puerto Rico.

Another of Delgado Altieri’s proposals is to create an animal abuse unit, attached to the municipal police, to address complaints of animal abuse seriously, as provided by Law 154 of 2008. Likewise, he will propose that the unit be rebuilt from the Puerto Rico Police Bureau’s animal abuse unit.

“Through the municipalities, we will be able to address

this situation more promptly and efficiently,” the candidate said. “For example, the municipality of San Juan has an animal abuse unit and this can be replicated in other towns.

We have a fairly comprehensive law, but we need it to be enforced so that abusers pay for their actions and are brought to justice. For this reason, we will also establish a communication channel with the Judicial Branch so that the courts can take the cases that come before them and promote the judges taking courses on animal welfare, Law 154 of 2008 and the new provisions of the Civil Code to sensitize them to the situation and to have first-hand knowledge about the problem of abuse that exists in Puerto Rico.”

Delgado Altieri also proposes to temper the regulations of the island Housing Department so that they comply with the PETS ACT of 2006 and allow the entry of people with their pets to government shelters in times of emergencies.

Likewise, he will promote legislation to provide exemptions in the payment of utility fees such as for water and electricity to duly registered animal welfare organizations with more than 50 animals in their main facility, in compliance with the regulations established by the government.

“We know that working with the street animal crisis and the lack of responsibility on the part of the state and of the people is not an easy thing,” Delgado Altieri said. “But the government has to establish a public policy on this and as a candidate for governor I cannot avoid this issue. Animals have to be protected and controlling overpopulation is a matter that has to do with public health and safety for all.

There are various organizations doing an extraordinary job and in collaboration I am convinced that we will be able to achieve a common goal of animal welfare in Puerto Rico.”

Governor signs allocation of $20 million to social welfare agencies

By JOHN McPHAUL jpmcphaul@gmail.com

G

ov. Wanda Vázquez Garced signed House Joint Resolution 737 over the weekend to allocate $20 million to semi-public, public and private entities and institutions whose activities or services promote the development of social welfare, health, educational and cultural programs and improve the quality of life of the citizens of Puerto Rico.

The funds come from the Joint Budget Resolution for fiscal year 2020-2021.

Centros Sor Isolina Ferre, Go Go Go Foundation, Make-A-Wish Foundation of Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican Anti-Cancer League, SER of Puerto Rico, the Society for Deaf Children of Puerto Rico, the Ruth Home for Battered Women and the Julia De Burgos Shelter are just some of the 511 entities that receive financial aid as part of the $20 million approved in the measure signed by the governor.

Vázquez also clarified that other amounts that were included as reallocations, which were not part of the

original $20 million, received a line-item veto.

“Regarding the reallocations of funds from previous fiscal years that were included as amendments during the legislative process of the Joint Resolution, I have been forced to issue a line-item veto. Although I support such reallocations in principle, they are contrary to the pronouncements of the Federal Court when interpreting the PROMESA law on this type of reallocation of funds from previous years,” the governor said. “Unfortunately, they have said on more than one occasion that it is necessary to obtain the endorsement of the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) in advance. For that reason, and with the objective of safeguarding the $20 million in donations from the original measure, which would be at risk if the entire measure is paralyzed in court as part of a judicial process, I have vetoed the line items that would create the controversy for not having used the proper process. This would have been disastrous for the more than 500 organizations that can now receive non-controversial funds.”

“Despite this, I have instructed the Office of Management and Budget to immediately present a Budgetary

Approach to the [oversight] Board for that body to evaluate and authorize the items that I was forced to veto, so that they can work without risking the disbursement of the assigned $20 million,” Vázquez added. “I trust that the request will be evaluated and approved promptly and sensitively by the Board for the benefit of non-profit entities, which provide so many services to our communities in Puerto Rico.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

7

Flat polls. Weak ratings. Do political conventions have a future?

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

A

fter 18 hours of speeches by the candidates, testimonials from former presidents and generals, poignant appeals from voters, a cross-country nominating roll call, opera on a White House balcony and fireworks over the Washington Monument, the verdict is in on the national political conventions.

Ratings were down. Polls barely budged.

And all of that costly, patriotic pageantry and Hollywood-style production were eclipsed within a day by the next lurch in the relentless news cycle — in this case, protests in Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Political conventions had been on life support for a while. But this year may well be remembered as the end of conventions as we know them.

The four-day ritual of the past — droning speeches in front of an arena of partisans — finally seems ready to surrender to shorter attention spans, Twitter, the fading influence of television networks and voter skepticism of politicians and the people who cover them.

If this year is any indication, future political conventions will move beyond the traditional, dusty productions anchored to a single stage in a single city, dominated by a parade of elected officials and party elders.

Think fewer and shorter speeches, notwithstanding what President Donald Trump did this year.

And is that so bad?

“I don’t think conventions will ever go back to the way they were,” said Stuart Stevens, a media adviser and strategist for Republican presidential candidates for more than 20 years.

“It’s an example of an acceleration of trends that were in place already. It is highly problematic to get people together like that. It costs a lot of money.”

And by 2024, it’s highly possible that the broadcast networks — which have already cut back to an hour of coverage each night from the days of gavel-to-gavel coverage — may trim even more given the drop in ratings and long stretches of what were, in effect, highly produced political advertisements that filled the space between speakers.

“I don’t think anything is going to convince the money managers at the broadcast networks that it’s worth the money to go back to the old ways,” said Ted Koppel, the longtime anchor of ABC “Nightline” who covered his first convention in 1964 and has long been skeptical about

Joe Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris, and their spouses look at monitors showing virtual attendees during the Democratic National Convention, at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., August 20, 2020. the news value of these scripted gatherings. He added: “I don’t think things will ever return to the way they were.”

The death of the American political convention has been a persistent — though overstated — story line for years. In truth, it is difficult to imagine them ever disappearing completely.

They help fire up the party’s most fervent voters (though perhaps not so much this year) and can gin up contributions from viewers.

Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, had one of his best nights of fundraising the night he gave his acceptance speech. And they can be fun for attendees: There is a deep attachment by delegates and the news media to these four-day, expense account-paid extravaganzas of politicking, networking, celebrity-spotting, parties and open bars.

“There’s still the political business to take care of, there’s still the yearning to celebrate the nominee, there’s still the wanting to be there for the launch of the campaign,” said Mary Beth Cahill, chief executive officer of the Democratic National Committee. “That will come back. But there will be a demand that the convention be more inclusive. It took it from being in a room to being staged across the country in a way that I thought was illuminating.”

But there’s a new and younger audience of voters, more partisan and less patient, who are not about to drop their phones and sit in front

of televisions to watch networks cover an event where the outcome is largely predetermined.

And it seems that Democrats and Republicans are taking a lesson from the positive reviews that greeted changes forced by staging a convention in the middle of a pandemic.

These just completed conventions, in their best moments, showed the power of a fast-paced speaker lineup, visually arresting and ever-changing backdrops and emotionally powerful stories — like Brayden Harrington, a teenager with a stutter, for the Democrats, and the parents of Kayla Mueller, who was kidnapped and killed by the Islamic State in Syria in 2015, for Republicans. It is no small matter that audiences watched those heartbreaking speeches without the distracting noise of a restless audience. And no television station, it appeared, dared switch away from these speeches to some skirmish on the convention floor — since there was no convention floor.

“The most recent format was exponentially better in terms of reaching people with a disciplined message,” said Stephanie Cutter, who ran the Democratic convention. “People pay attention more if you’re speaking directly to them, rather than a cheering crowd in front of you. The nature of the remarks are much more intimate and focused if you’re trying to reach someone sitting on their couch at home versus playing to a crowd in front of you.”

While Trump’s decision to appropriate the White House as a backdrop for his acceptance speech was ethically dubious and legally suspect, the setting was certainly memorable, as was the tailgate parking lot celebration that awaited Biden after he gave his own acceptance speech. So were the varied celebrity hosts that led the Democrats every night — and their picture-postcard roll call that allowed housebound Americans an opportunity to travel the country, if virtually. Roll calls are notoriously deadly during conventions but may be better if they are always done virtually.

Given that, who would want to return to tedious eight-minute speeches by dozens of political candidates and down-ballot officeholders, ignoring the “time’s up” flashing red warning light? Officials in both parties are already talking about plucking out what works from the old school — the grand acceptance speeches in front of a cheering crowd — and packaging them with the sleek new-school successes of 2020.

“My guess is four years from now, it will be some sort of hybrid,” said Russell J. Schriefer, who was the program manager for the Republican conventions of 2004 and 2012. “The story line has been the death of conventions. What we may have seen this year is the rebirth of the conventions.”

Yet while it might be possible now to refashion something that is more visually interesting, that does not solve a more basic question of whether they still matter.

Television viewership this time was down roughly 25% from 2016, which is striking, even taking into account the imprecision of measuring audiences as more people have the option of watching it on streaming video.

Joel Benenson, a Democratic pollster who was a senior strategist for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, argued that conventions were an opportunity to reach out beyond supporters. “It’s really your last chance to influence the swing voters you are trying to reach,” said Benenson, who himself barely watched the Republican convention.

Schriefer said one thing that he thought would stick around was the climactic acceptance speech — and, yes, in front of a crowd.

“There’s an energy, an enthusiasm that you can’t replicate when you’re doing something in front of a camera by yourself in a room,” he said. “Everybody believed that Biden gave a good speech, that Harris gave a good speech.

But we don’t know if they would have been better speeches in front of a large audience.”

8

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

The Trump docket: A look at the fights fueling Trump’s big legal bills

An excerpt from legal documents filed by President Donald Trump’s lawyers, claiming that an article in the Washington Post was false and defamatory. Trump has found a variety of new ways to fund his legal fights, often without having to personally cover the tab, by turning to money donated to his campaign committees.

By ERIC LIPTON

L

ong before he moved into the White House, Donald Trump had cemented his reputation as a lover of lawsuits, turning to federal and state courts for battles big and small. Trump once even boasted, “I like beating my enemies to the ground.”

Since becoming a public official, he has remained litigious. But he now has found a variety of new ways to fund his legal fights, often without having to personally cover the tab, by turning to money donated to his campaign committees.

Here are some of the highlights of what could be dubbed the Trump Docket, a dizzyingly diverse collection of lawsuits and other legal actions filed by Trump or against him since he began his bid for the president.

It helps explain why he and his political allies have spent nearly $60 million of donor money on legal and compliance bills since 2015, far more than any other president.

ATTEMPTING TO SILENCE CRITICS Trump has been particularly aggressive since he was elected in using the legal system to try to silence or challenge his critics — a tactic he also frequently turned to during his decades as a real estate executive. This has resulted in a series of claims against one-time campaign or White House aides, such as Jessica Denson, who worked as a phone bank supervisor and Hispanic outreach coordinator during the Trump campaign in 2016.

Denson alleged that she was the target of abusive treatment and sexual harassment by another campaign staff member. Trump

then filed an arbitration claim asserting that Denson had violated a confidential agreement she had signed. A lawyer for Trump, Lawrence Rosen, pushed a federal court judge in New York on the matter.

Initially, the American Arbitration Association ruled against Denson and ordered her to pay almost $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and other costs. But the payment demand was overturned by a New York state court in February, and more recently, Denson — with the help of a high-profile legal team led by David Bowles, a prominent New York lawyer — has taken on Trump as part of a class-action lawsuit that she hopes will nullify many of the nondisclosure agreements that other campaign workers signed.

Bowles and others on Denson’s legal team argue that these nondisclosure agreements are illegal.

Trump has used campaign funds, or the assistance of his Justice Department, to target other former aides who have been critical of him, including Sam Nunberg, a former political adviser to Trump; Omarosa Manigault Newman, a one-time White House aide, and Cliff Sims, another former White House aide.

Rosen’s firm, which works out of 40 Wall Street, an office building the Trump family owns, has handled several of these cases for the Trump campaign and has been paid $1.46 million in campaign funds, Federal Election Commission records show.

SUING THE “FAKE NEWS” Trump’s legal team, using campaign funds, has initiated a series of lawsuits against news organizations.The suits challenge certain

opinion articles, or in one case a television advertisement, that feature Trump, in litigation that First Amendment lawyers say is very unlikely to be successful, but which has brought Trump continued attention in his efforts to paint the news media as biased and inaccurate.

In one, theTrump campaign claimed that an article in The Washington Post — which is clearly marked as an opinion piece — was false and defamatory.

Other targeted news organizations are The New York Times and CNN. The Trump campaign has also sued an NBC affiliate in Wisconsin, accusing it of running an advertisement prepared by the liberal Priorities USA Action super PAC that made claims that Trump considered false about the administration’s efforts to respond to the coronavirus outbreak.

MUELLER, IMPEACHMENT AND OTHER INQUIRIES A long list of payments have been made to lawyers who represented aides to Trump who were called to testify during the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, into Russian interference in the 2016 election as well as the investigations last year

by Congress of Trump’s freeze on military aid to Ukraine.

Campaign funds were also used to help pay for the legal team that defended Trump during the impeachment proceedings in the House and Senate. Legal fees associated with other investigations or lawsuits that targeted members of Trump’s staff or family also were covered, including those for Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and Donald Trump Jr., campaign finance records show.

This includes $67,214 in payments

Trump has found a variety of new ways to fund his legal fights, often without having to personally cover the tab, by turning to money donated to his campaign committees.

through this year by the Donald J. Trump for President campaign to Robert Trout, a Washington lawyer who represented Hope Hicks, the White House aide to Trump.

A $196,439 payment in May from the Republican National Committee shows up for Alan Dershowitz, a lawyer who helped Trump during the Senate impeachment trial, even though he said he did not intend to accept any money. (Dershowitz said that the “fee was donated to charity.”) Payments from campaign accounts totaling $821,607 went to the law firm of Marc Kasowitz, $611,250 to a nonprofit group run by Jay Sekulow and $435,000 more to a law firm associated with Jane Raskin, all of whom played a role in representing Trump during the impeachment debate and other matters.

There is no record of any payment to Rudy Giuliani, a personal lawyer for Trump who has said he is offering his legal advice for free.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT LEGAL ASSIST One other entity that has provided extensive legal services that benefited Trump personally has not submitted bills to his campaign: the Justice Department, which has played a key role in defending or arguing in favor of positions held by Trump in cases that related to his personal finances.

The Justice Department routinely represents any president in many matters related to official duties or issues with constitutional implications. But in Trump’s case, the department has weighed in on cases in which Trump has a personal interest. The names of at least 20 Justice Department lawyers appear on court filings related to the fight over Trump’s tax returns and claims that he is violating the U.S. Constitution by accepting payments from foreign governments.

CHALLENGING MAIL-IN VOTING Another big focus of campaign legal spending has been the growing list of lawsuits that Trump and his political allies are pursuing to limit mail-in voting, in states including Nevada, California and Pennsylvania.

Among the law firms working on this include a recently created group called Elections LLC, which corporate records show was set up by Stefan Passantino, a former White House ethics lawyer for Trump. Elections LLC has been paid $430,000 in campaign funds, while a second firm that Passantino works at, named Michael Best, has been paid $231,495 by the Republican National Committee, records show.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

9

A growing number of catholic schools are shutting down forever

By GIULIA McDONELL NIETO DEL RIO

I

n more than four decades of coaching girls basketball at Lebanon Catholic High School in southeastern Pennsylvania, Patti Hower had led the team to three state championships and 20 district titles. This year, with four starting players returning, there were high hopes again.

But then in April came the news: the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg announced that the school, whose origins date to 1859, was permanently closing, citing insurmountable financial stress, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

“We played our last game in March and had a postgame talk saying, ‘We’re looking forward to this upcoming year,’” said Hower, 68, who attended the school, like her father and granddaughters. “We never thought, ‘Hey, we’re never going to get on that court together again as a team.’”

As schools around the country debate how to reopen safely, a growing number of Catholic schools — already facing declining enrollments and donations from before the pandemic — are shutting down for good.

About 150 Catholic schools have closed, said Kathy Mears, director of the National Catholic Educational Association, equal to about 2% of the 6,183 schools that were up and running last year. The number of closures is at least 50% higher this year than in previous years, Mears said.

In Boston, the archdiocese has had to close nine schools so far, and about two dozen others are on a “watch list,” said Thomas Carroll, superintendent of schools for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. In early July, the Archdiocese of New York announced that it would be closing 20 Catholic schools.

As parents and families lost their jobs during the pandemic, many could no longer pay tuition at Catholic schools, even though fees are generally much less than at other private schools. And when churches began shutting down to curb the spread of the virus, that also ended a major source for donations — some of which would normally be allotted for parish schools.

For many schools after years of declining enrollments, the coronavirus became the mortal strike. “If a school was financially vulnerable, the pandemic was the thing that

pushed them over the edge,” Mears said.

Enrollment at Catholic schools in the United States peaked at 5.2 million nationwide in the early 1960s, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.

But as the percentage of practicing Catholics has declined across the United States, so has the number of children enrolling in Catholic schools. Enrollment for the 2019-20 school year was down to about 1.7 million.

The closing of the parochial schools has etched a profound sense of loss among teachers and families, who face the abrupt disappearance of spaces that long served as focal points for personal relationships and family ties.

The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston reported the closure of four schools in April, saying that fallout from COVID-19 was the final blow for facilities long struggling to meet costs.

“The cataclysmic effects of this pandemic have left us with no options — which breaks out hearts,” Cardinal Daniel DiNardo said in a statement.

One of those schools, St. Francis of Assisi, had been severely damaged by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, but community members had worked hard to support rebuilding efforts and welcome students back in the fall of 2018, said Sharita Palmer Mayo, whose two sons attended the school. Less than two years later, the closure has forced families to look elsewhere for schooling once again.

“We had literally just like built a little family there,” Palmer Mayo said. “I was in love with the school.”

Among the best-known Catholic schools shutting its doors is the Institute of Notre Dame, a renowned all-girls facility founded in Baltimore in 1847. School leaders said that the school was deeply in debt and facing a 43% enrollment decline over the past five years. In a letter they noted that the coronavirus “caused significant, added financial hardship.”

Prominent alumni include House speaker Nancy Pelosi and a former Democratic senator for Maryland, Barbara A. Mikulski.

“It was painful for everybody,” said Sister Patricia Murphy, the chair of the board of trustees at the school. Murphy is part of the School Sisters of Notre Dame,

Charles Fabian, the facilities manager at Queen of the Rosary Catholic Academy in Brooklyn, sorted through classroom materials that would be donated after the school closed last month. a congregation of sisters who sponsor the Institute of Notre Dame. She added that she believed the decision to close the school was a necessary one.

Murphy graduated from the school in 1962 and said that the education and the friendships forged there would forever stay close to her heart. “My classmates Zoom every other week,” she noted in an interview.

After graduating, Murphy attended a public teachers college. When she told a male dean at the college that she wanted to be a high school history teacher, he responded: “‘What would a little thing like you want to do that for? Why wouldn’t you want to be an elementary schoolteacher?’”

But Murphy wouldn’t stand for that after her education at the Institute of Notre Dame, she said. “I was stunned,” she said, and she still went on to become a high school history teacher.

At Notre Dame, girls “got a really good sense of what women could do,” Murphy said.

Still, some alumni are fighting to keep the school open, upset that school leaders, including the School Sisters of Notre Dame, haven’t pushed harder to avoid closure.

Drena Fertetta, an alumnus who graduated from Notre Dame in 1983, began a group called Saving IND Inc., dedicated to

reopening the school next year, perhaps at a different site.

“There is just a sisterhood that happens to the girls who go to that school,” Fertetta said. “It’s not something we’re willing to just walk away from.”

Catholic education was once seen as “the surest ticket out of poverty for generations of low-income families, but in particular immigrants,” Carroll, the superintendent in Boston, said. “Schools that got hit the hardest were schools that were low-income and working-class populations.”

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles — which runs the largest Catholic school system in the country, serving about 73,000 students — has had to close two elementary schools, one that served predominantly Latino children, many of them with workingclass parents, said Paul Escala, superintendent and senior director of Catholic schools for the archdiocese.

At present, Escala said, the church is trying to “avoid at all costs” shutting down additional schools, but the economic challenges are daunting.

“You get to a tipping point where the school may not be able to sustain itself any longer,” he said. “The consequences are going to come, the only question is really when.”

10

Monday, September 7, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

100 Days of protest: A chasm grows between Portland and the rest of Oregon

Police officers detain a protester during a demonstration near the Portland Police Association building in Portland, Ore., on Sept. 4, 2020.

By THOMAS FULLER

T

rucks carrying bales of hay, horse paddocks and Christmas tree farms — drive a few miles out of Portland and the suburbs quickly give way to rural Oregon.

Barely a half hour from the Portland streets where racial justice protesters Saturday were marking 100 consecutive days of tempestuous, sometimes violent, demonstrations, there are plenty of communities where people dismiss the protesters as lawless hooligans.

“Portland is an island in Oregon,” said Stan Pulliam, the mayor of Sandy, a more conservative town of 10,000 people about 30 miles southeast of Portland that feeds off the economic dynamism of Oregon’s largest city but also strives to be separate from it. “We are scared to death that what’s happening in Portland will ever come out to where we live.”

The rural-urban divide is a reality writ large across much of the nation, a crucial dynamic as the Nov. 3 election approaches. But the proximity of left and right in Oregon, both moderates and extremists, has created a dynamic of fear, mistrust and anger that feeds the conflicts in the streets in ways that it has not in other states.

At Rapid Fire Arms, a gun shop along the main road in Sandy, owner Brian Coleman has sold 4.5 million rounds of ammunition since March, when the arrival of the pandemic drove up sales. Demand for guns and ammunition soared

even further, he said, when the protests in Portland turned violent in the weeks after George Floyd died in police custody in Minneapolis.

“There’s panic buying every once in a while but nowhere near like this,” Coleman said at the entrance of his shop, fortified with steel bars. “There’s such a massive rush, people are taking anything they can get.”

Coleman, who has sold thousands of guns this year, estimates that 70% of customers in recent months are firsttime gun buyers.

In the town of Gresham, 15 miles from the urban canyons of downtown Portland, Bonnie Johnson, a member of a Republican precinct committee, is on a waiting list for her first firearm, a Smith & Wesson revolver.

“I didn’t even want a gun,” said Johnson, who grew up in the neighboring town of Boring. “But when you see all that’s going on in Portland, it scares you.”

Johnson took part in a flag-waving demonstration Wednesday evening, joining a group of 50 or so people, many of them wearing hats and T-shirts in support of President Donald Trump. They gathered at the Gresham civic center to show their patriotism and mourn the death of Aaron J. Danielson, a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer who was shot Aug. 29 amid clashes between protesters from the right and left.

As a line of people beside Johnson waved American flags on a sidewalk, passing motorists honked in support, or

in some cases raised a middle finger and shouted insults.

The ideological divide between Portland and its environs can be stark. Conservative groups outside Portland have held demonstrations in support of the police. Protesters in Portland have called for police forces to be abolished altogether.

Pulliam, the Sandy mayor, whose post is nonpartisan but who is registered as a Republican, says he is dismayed that the clash between left and right, while highly emotionally charged, is vague in its prescriptions.

“Neither movement has asked our leaders for any kind of concrete action,” he said.

The Portland protests began in reaction to the killing of Floyd in May but came to represent a more general campaign for racial justice and opposition to the presence of federal agents in the city. Conservatives in the Portland area say authorities have allowed protesters to hijack the downtown. When they visit, they say, they feel unwelcome and have been harassed.

Rebecca Crymer moved to the Portland area two years ago and although she leans conservative she says she was never particularly interested in politics.

In late August she was walking through the protests in Portland wearing a Captain America T-shirt. She said she was called a Nazi and followed by a man who threatened to throw dog feces at her. On Wednesday, Crymer, who grew up in a military family, joined the flag-waving demonstration in Gresham.

“I’m a normal person and I don’t have extremist views,” Crymer said. “Normal people should be able to feel like they can fly an American flag and not get hunted down for it.”

Conservatives who have lived in the Portland area for decades say they increasingly feel like strangers in their own state when they visit the city.

Similar to the Far North of California, a conservative area where residents feel vastly outnumbered in that state’s legislature, communities outside Portland often complain that laws and regulations are drafted to suit the city and then imposed on the rest of the state.

Portland and its surrounding areas make up around 60% of the state’s population of 4 million people.

As the cost of living in Portland has soared in recent years city residents have moved to the suburbs, helping transform politically conservative areas into shades of purple.

In Clackamas County, southeast of Portland and which includes Sandy, Hillary Clinton won 50% of the vote in 2016, defeating Trump by 7 points.

Clinton carried Oregon because of her strength in Portland. But the state’s electoral map was a sea of red with blue blotches in Portland and the Willamette Valley.

Those conservatives near Portland are often in the awkward position of mistrusting the city but relying on it for their livelihoods. In Sandy, where Trump won 54% of the vote in 2016, around two-thirds of residents commute to the city for work, according to the mayor.

“The outer areas hate Portland,” said Coleman, the gun shop owner in Sandy. And sometimes, he added, “Portland hates Portland.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

11

Forget TikTok. China’s powerhouse app is WeChat, and its power is sweeping.

By PAUL MOZUR

J

ust after the 2016 presidential election in the United States, Joanne Li realized the app that connected her to fellow Chinese immigrants had disconnected her from reality.

Everything she saw on the Chinese app, WeChat, indicated Donald Trump was an admired leader and impressive businessman. She believed it was the unquestioned consensus on the newly elected U.S. president.

“But then I started talking to some foreigners about him, non-Chinese,” she said. “I was totally confused.”

She began to read more widely, and Li, who lived in Toronto at the time, increasingly found WeChat filled with gossip, conspiracy theories and outright lies.

One article claimed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada planned to legalize hard drugs. Another rumor purported that Canada had begun selling marijuana in grocery stores. A post from a news account in Shanghai warned Chinese people to take care lest they accidentally bring the drug back from Canada and get arrested.

She also questioned what was being said about China. When a top Huawei executive was arrested in Canada in 2018, articles from foreign news media were quickly censored on WeChat. Her Chinese friends both inside and outside China began to say that Canada had no justice, which contradicted her own experience. “All of a sudden I discovered talking to others about the issue didn’t make sense,” Li said. “It felt like if I only watched Chinese media, all of my thoughts would be different.”

Li had little choice but to take the bad with the good.

Built to be everything for everyone, WeChat is indispensable.

For most Chinese people in China, WeChat is a sort of all-in-one app: a way to swap stories, talk to old classmates, pay bills, coordinate with co-workers, post envy-inducing vacation photos, buy stuff and get news.

For the millions of members of China’s diaspora, it is the bridge that links them to the trappings of home, from family chatter to food photos.

Woven through it all is the ever more muscular surveillance and propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party. As WeChat has become ubiquitous, it has become a powerful tool of social control, a way for Chinese authorities to guide and police what people say, who they talk to and what they read. en extended Beijing’s reach beyond its borders.

When secret police issue threats abroad, they often do so on WeChat. When military researchers working undercover in the U.S. needed to talk to China’s embassies, they used WeChat, according to court documents. The party coordinates via WeChat with members studying overseas.

As a cornerstone of China’s surveillance state, WeChat is now considered a national security threat in the U.S. The Trump administration has proposed banning WeChat outright, along with the Chinese short video app

The WeChat app, a vital connection for the Chinese diaspora, has also become a global conduit of Chinese state propaganda, surveillance and intimidation.

The U.S. has proposed banning it.

TikTok. Overnight, two of China’s biggest internet innovations became a new front in the sprawling tech standoff between China and the U.S. While the two apps are lumped in the same category by the Trump administration, they represent two distinct approaches to the Great Firewall that blocks Chinese access to foreign websites.

The hipper, better-known TikTok was designed for the wild world outside of China’s cloistering censorship; it exists only beyond China’s borders. By hiving off an independent app to win over global users, TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, created the best bet any Chinese startup has had to compete with the internet giants in the West. The separation of TikTok from its cousin apps in China, along with deep popularity, has fed corporate campaigns in the U.S. to save it, even as Beijing potentially upended any deals by labeling its core technology a national security priority.

Though WeChat has different rules for users inside and outside of China, it remains a single, unified social network spanning China’s Great Firewall. In that sense, it has helped bring Chinese censorship to the world. A ban would cut dead millions of conversations between family and friends, a reason one group has filed a lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s efforts. It would also be an easy victory for U.S. policymakers seeking to push

back against China’s techno-authoritarian overreach.

Li felt the whipcrack of China’s internet controls firsthand when she returned to China in 2018 to take a real estate job. After her experience overseas, she sought to balance her news diet with groups that shared articles on world events. As the coronavirus spread in early 2020 and China’s relations with countries around the world strained, she posted an article on WeChat from the U.S. government-run Radio Free Asia about the deterioration of Chinese-Canadian diplomacy, a piece that would have been censored.

The next day, four police officers showed up at her family’s apartment. They carried guns and riot shields.

“My mother was terrified,” she said. “She turned white when she saw them.”

The police officers took Li, along with her phone and computer, to the local police station. She said they manacled her legs to a restraining device known as a tiger chair for questioning. They asked repeatedly about the article and her WeChat contacts overseas before locking her in a barred cell for the night.

Twice she was released, only to be dragged back to the station for fresh interrogation sessions. Li said an officer even insisted China had freedom of speech protections as he questioned her over what she had said online. “I didn’t say anything,” she said. “I just thought, what is your freedom of speech? Is it the freedom to drag me down to the police station and keep me night after sleepless night interrogating me?”

Finally, the police forced her to write out a confession and vow of support for China, then let her go.

‘The walls are getting higher’ WeChat started out as a simple copycat. Its parent, Chinese internet giant Tencent, had built an enormous user base on a chat app designed for personal computers. But a new generation of mobile chat apps threatened to upset its hold over the way young Chinese talked to one another.

Visionary Tencent engineer Allen Zhang fired off a message to the company founder, Pony Ma, concerned that they weren’t keeping up. The missive led to a new mandate, and Zhang fashioned a digital Swiss Army knife that became a necessity for daily life in China. WeChat piggybacked on the popularity of the other online platforms run by Tencent, combining payments, e-commerce and social media into a single service.

It became a hit, eventually eclipsing the apps that inspired WeChat. And Tencent, which made billions in profits from the online games piped into its disparate platforms, now had a way to make money off nearly every aspect of a person’s digital identity — by serving ads, selling stuff, processing payments and facilitating services like food delivery.

The tech world inside and outside of China marveled. Tencent rival Alibaba scrambled to come up with its

Continues on page 12

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Monday, September 7, 2020

From page 11 own product to compete. Silicon Valley studied the ways it mixed services and followed its cues.

Built for China’s closed world of internet services, WeChat’s only failure came outside the Great Firewall. Tencent made a big marketing push overseas, even hiring soccer player Lionel Messi as a spokesman in some markets.

For non-China users, it created a separate set of rules. International accounts would not face direct censorship and data would be stored on servers overseas.

But WeChat didn’t have the same appeal without the many services available only in China. It looked more prosaic outside the country, like any other chat app. The main overseas users, in the end, would be the Chinese diaspora.

Tencent did not respond to a request for comment.

Over time, the distinctions between the Chinese and international app have mattered less. Chinese people who create accounts within China, but then leave, carry with them a censored and monitored account. If international users chat with users inside China, their posts can be censored.

For news and gossip, most comes from WeChat users inside China and spreads out to the world. Whereas most social networks have myriad filter bubbles that reinforce different biases, WeChat is dominated by one super-filter bubble, and it hews closely to the official propaganda narratives.

“The filter bubbles on WeChat have nothing to do with algorithms — they come from China’s closed internet ecosystem and censorship. That makes them worse than other social media,” said Fang Kecheng, a professor in the School of Journalism and Communications at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Fang first noticed the limitations of WeChat in 2018 as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching an online course in media literacy to younger Chinese.

Soft-spoken and steeped in the media echo chambers of the U.S. and China, Fang expected to reach mostly curious Chinese inside China. An unexpected group dialed into the classes: Chinese immigrants and expatriates living in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere.

“It seemed obvious. Because they were all outside China, it should be easy for them to gain an understanding of foreign media. In their day-to-day life they would see it and read it,” Fang said. “I realized it wasn’t the case. They were outside of China, but their media environment was still entirely inside China, their channel for information was all from public accounts on WeChat.”

Fang’s six-week online courses were inspired by a WeChat account he ran called News Lab that sought to teach readers about journalism. With his courses, he assigned articles from media like Reuters along with worksheets that taught students to analyze the pieces — pushing them to draw distinctions between pundit commentary and primary sourcing.

In a class in 2019, he warned broadly about barriers to information flow.

“Now, the walls are getting higher and higher. The ability to see the outside has become ever harder,” he said.

“Not just in China, but in much of the world.”

‘What it’s like to lose contact’ When Ferkat Jawdat’s mother disappeared into China’s sprawling system of reeducation camps to indoctrinate Uighurs, his WeChat became a kind of memorial.

The app might have been used as evidence against her. But he, like many Uighurs, found himself opening WeChat again and again. It contained years of photos and conversations with his mother. It also held a remote hope he clung to, that one day she would again reach out.

When against all odds she did, the secret police followed.

If propaganda and censorship have found their way to WeChat users overseas, so too has China’s government.

For ethnic minority Uighurs, who have been targeted by draconian digital controls at home in China, the chat app has become a conduit for threats from Chinese security forces. In court documents, the FBI said China’s embassies communicated on WeChat with military researchers who had entered the U.S. to steal scientific research. The Chinese Communist Party has used it to keep up ties and organize overseas members, including foreign-exchange students.

Not all uses are nefarious. During the pandemic, local governments used the app to update residents traveling and living abroad about the virus. China’s embassies use it to issue travel warnings.

While the Chinese government could use any chat app, WeChat has advantages. Police know well its surveillance capabilities. Within China most accounts are linked to the real identity of users.

Jawdat’s mother, sick and worn, was released from the camps in the summer of 2019. Chinese police gave her a phone and signed her into WeChat. At the sound of his

The San Juan Daily Star mother’s voice Jawdat fought back a flood of emotions. He hadn’t been sure if she was even alive. Despite the relief, he noticed something was off. She offered stilted words of praise for the Chinese Communist Party.

Then the police reached out to him. They approached him with an anonymous friend request over WeChat. When he accepted, a man introduced himself as a high-ranking officer in China’s security forces in the Xinjiang region, the epicenter of reeducation camps. The man had a proposal.

If Jawdat, a U.S. citizen and Uighur activist, would quiet his attempts to raise awareness about the camps, then his mother might be given a passport and allowed to join her family in the U.S. “It was a kind of threat,” he said. “I stayed quiet for two or three weeks, just to see what he did.”

It all came to nothing. After turning down a media interview and skipping a speaking event, Jawdat grew impatient and confronted the man. “He started threatening me, saying, ‘You’re only one person going against the superpower. Compared to China, you are nothing.’”

The experience gave Jawdat little tolerance for the app that made the threats possible, even if it had been his only line to his mother. He said he knew two other Uighur Americans who had similar experiences. Accounts from others point to similar occurrences around the world.

“I don’t know if it’s karma or justice served, for the Chinese people to also feel the pain of what it’s like to lose contact with your family members,” Jawdat said of the proposed ban by the Trump administration. “There are many Chinese officials who have their kids in the U.S. WeChat must be one of the tools they use to keep in contact. If they feel this pain, maybe they can relate better to the Uighurs.”

An undated photo of Joanne Li, who was taken into custody by police in China, manacled, jailed overnight and interrogated repeatedly because she posted an article on WeChat from the U.S. government-run Radio Free Asia about the deterioration of Chinese-Canadian diplomacy.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

13 Stocks

Value bulls bang drum for cheap stock resurgence on Fed, vaccine hopes

A

s U.S. stocks hit record highs, some investors are betting the market’s future gains will be increasingly driven by some of its lesser-loved companies.

Value stocks - shares of economically sensitive companies trading at multiples that are usually below those found on growth names - have been among the laggards in the market’s blistering rally from its March lows.

Some investors believe the relative cheapness of value stocks, which include energy companies, banks and industrial conglomerates, will catapult them to leadership if the nascent U.S. economic revival gains momentum, shifting focus from the big technology-related stocks that have led markets during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Russell 1000 Value index trades at almost 18 times earnings, up from 14 a year ago, and is up some 45% since late March. By comparison, the Russell 1000 Growth index trades at a multiple of 31, up from 22, and has gained over 70% in the same period.

“It’s an important part of validating the market’s rise, to have cyclicals and value sectors move,” said Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research.

“At the end of the day I think value can outperform, but it’s going to be very episodic.”

Hopes of economic healing got a second wind Thursday, when Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell rolled out a sweeping policy rewrite that puts more focus on fighting unemployment than controlling inflation, sending shares of banks like Wells Fargo and Citigroup higher on the day.

Investors in the coming week will be keeping a close eye on Friday’s U.S. non-farm payrolls data, looking for a snapshot of how the country’s economic recovery is faring.

Other arguments for a value resurgence have been fueled by signs of progress on a vaccine against COVID-19, which some investors believe could accelerate business reopenings and a return to in-person schooling across the United States.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said a vaccine for the novel coronavirus could be available before the Nov. 3 presidential election, sooner than most experts anticipate.

Some analysts, including those at Goldman Sachs, believe a vaccine could be approved as early as the end of this year.

That could take the S&P 500 as high as 3,700 by yearend and spur a rotation to value names, especially if the news flow regarding a vaccine continues to be encouraging, Goldman’s analysts said earlier this month. The index recently hovered near 3,500.

Plenty of market participants doubt value will return anytime soon, or that such a move can be timed profitably.

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Monday, September 7, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Between the pandemic and the president: Mexico City mayor’s balancing act

By NATALIE KRITOEFF

I

t was a perfect portrait of the delicate relationship between the Mexican president and his protégée.

With the pandemic raging, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador drew his allies in for a photo op. Mask-free and eager to please, they all squeezed in tight — except one: Claudia Sheinbaum, one of his most trusted confidantes.

Sheinbaum, the mayor of Mexico City, was leery of getting too close. So she stood at the edge of the stage that day in April, a literal outlier, the only person in the room social distancing.

How much space — physical and political — to put between herself and the most powerful man in Mexico is a question that will define Sheinbaum’s legacy, her political future and the fates of millions of people living in the world’s fifth largest city.

López Obrador minimized the pandemic early on, questioning the science behind face masks and doing little testing. Seeking to avert economic pain, he has barely restricted travel.

Under his watch, Mexico has the fourth highest coronavirus death toll worldwide.

For Sheinbaum, a scientist with a doctorate in energy engineering, staying too close to the president would mean ignoring the practices she knows are in the best interest of public health.

Stray too far, and she risks losing the support of a political kingmaker who is said to be considering her — the first woman and first Jewish person elected to lead the nation’s capital — as the party’s next presidential candidate.

So far, her strategy has been to follow the science, while refusing to criticize the president.

“I will not allow this to become a political conflict,” said Sheinbaum, 58, sitting rigidly at her desk, her voice muffled by a cloth mask. “But I also believe I have a role here in the city, and I’m going to abide by what I believe in.”

When López Obrador was still kissing babies at rallies and comparing the virus to the flu, Sheinbaum was planning for a long pandemic.

She pushed an aggressive testing and contact tracing campaign. She set up testing kiosks where people get swabbed for free.

And she required that everyone in Mexico City use face coverings on public transportation, donning a mask every time she addressed the press.

She argues privately with Hugo LópezGatell, the health official tapped by the president to direct the nation’s coronavirus response. But her staff has been instructed to emphasize, in public, how aligned the city and federal governments are and how much they have in common.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the mayor of Mexico City and a protégée of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, at her office in Mexico City, Aug. 31, 2020. While López Obrador was still kissing babies at rallies and comparing the coronavirus to the flu, Sheinbaum -- an engineer by training -- was planning for a long pandemic.

“This is how we have always behaved, always respecting, always informing,” she said.

“Trying to coordinate as much as possible.”

The virus has thrived in the dense capital, home to 9 million people, half of them poor.

But while the toll has been horrific — more than 11,000 have died — analysts say it could have been worse without the mayor’s interventions.

Early on, Sheinbaum created a hotline where people could report coronavirus symptoms and receive a free package of masks, a thermometer, antibacterial gel and a pain reliever.

Doctors told her the N95 masks the federal government had imported from China were too narrow to fit Mexican faces, so she converted a local factory into a mask-making operation.

Only around 600 intensive care unit beds were equipped to treat coronavirus patients in the city, so she bought hundreds of ventilators from the United States, Germany and China. There are now more than 2,000 of those ICU beds.

To evaluate where things stand, Sheinbaum focuses on the number of people admitted to hospitals — and these days, she likes what she sees. When the capital reopened much of its economy on July 1, 6 in 10 hospital beds were occupied, compared with just 4 in 10 now.

“What matters to us is that hospitals aren’t overwhelmed,” she said.

The problem with her strategy, epidemiologists say, is that it offers little sense of the virus’

prevalence among young people, who are less likely to go to the hospital. By the time sickened people get to emergency rooms, it is often too late to break the chain of transmission.

“For the two weeks that they were infected prior to ending up in the hospital, they were exposing tens or possibly hundreds of people,” said Dr. Thomas Tsai, of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

The alternative is mass testing, which the city isn’t doing, even after throwing money at the problem and tripling testing rates. Mexico City now does an average of 40 tests daily per 100,000 residents, compared with just 9 per 100,000 in the country as a whole. But that’s still low compared with the 322 per 100,000 in New York, or 130 in Los Angeles.

The share of people who test positive in Mexico City has dropped, but remains around 30%, six times the rate considered safe enough by the World Health Organization to reopen the economy.

“This is not Stockholm. This is not Singapore. We have limited resources,” said José Merino, who directs the city agency that helps oversee the coronavirus task force. “And we don’t have a way to prevent people from going out on the street and trying to feed their families.”

The city would need to spend about a tenth of its annual budget on testing if it wanted to reach New York levels. And the federal government is

not helping much. López-Gatell has said he believes testing everyone is a “waste of time,” part of the reason Mexico’s national testing rates are among the lowest.

López-Gatell has been criticized for promising an imminent end to the pandemic and projecting only 6,000 deaths early on. There are now more than 65,000.

And yet, Mexico’s president trusts him completely. In meetings with the president, Sheinbaum said she had “presented scenarios for Mexico City,” and conveyed her belief in masks.

“He always told me to come to an agreement with Hugo.”

The mayor said she had engaged in “public, notorious differences” with López-Gatell, but refuses to question him.

“I will not contradict the Mexican government,” she said.

The daughter of two leftist Jews, Sheinbaum was raised as an atheist in a Catholic country ruled by the same party for seven decades.

She first met López Obrador when he visited her house to meet with her now ex-husband, Carlos Imaz, a leftist political leader, and other activists. “I prepared the coffee and the cookies,” she said.

In time, she became one of the country’s top climate researchers, and when López Obrador became mayor of Mexico City in 2000, he appointed Sheinbaum as his secretary of the environment.

When, in 2018, on his third attempt, López Obrador was elected to the highest office on the ticket of the party he had founded, Sheinbaum ran with his coalition and was voted mayor of Mexico City.

Several people said her relationship to López Obrador was like daughter and father. He “loves her and protects her,” said Marta Lamas, a feminist scholar who advised Sheinbaum’s campaign. “And she is totally loyal to him and his project.”

But those who have worked with López Obrador say he can become mistrustful, even of his closest allies.

“A paternal relationship is one where I protect you no matter what, and that’s not the case with Andrés Manuel,” said Paola Ojeda, who worked with López Obrador when he was mayor and on three of his presidential campaigns.

He won’t choose his successor until the last moment, she said.

“Claudia has earned his respect and support, day by day,” said Ojeda. “And she knows, like everyone close to him, that she could lose it the moment she does something she shouldn’t.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

15

When learning is really remote: Students climb trees and travel miles for a cell signal

Vincentia Orisa Ratih Prastiwir, a teacher, makes a home visit to students who have poor cellular service and cannot learn online, Magelang, Indonesia, Aug. 4, 2020.

By RICHARD C. PADDOCK and DERA MENRA SIJABAT

O

n school days, the three teenage students hop on a motorbike and ride to their personal study hall: a spot along a narrow road outside the Indonesian village of Kenalan where they can get a stable cellphone signal.

Sitting on the shoulder of the road, they do their lessons on smartphones and a single laptop as cars and motorbikes zip by. The three students — two sisters and their 15-year-old aunt — have been studying this way on the island of Java since March, when Indonesia closed its schools and universities to contain the coronavirus.

“When the school ordered us to study at home I was confused because we don’t have a signal at home,” said one of the girls, Siti Salma Putri Salsabila, 13.

The travails of these students, and others like them, have come to symbolize the hardships faced by millions of schoolchildren across the Indonesian archipelago. Officials have shuttered schools and implemented remote learning, but internet and cellphone service is limited and many students lack smartphones and computers.

In North Sumatra, students climb to the tops of tall trees a mile from their mountain village. Perched on branches high above the ground, they hope for a cell signal strong

enough to complete their assignments.

Around the globe, including in some of the world’s wealthiest countries, educators are struggling with how to best make distance learning viable during the pandemic. But in poorer countries like Indonesia, the challenge is particularly difficult.

More than a third of Indonesian students have limited or no internet access, according to the Education Ministry, and experts fear many students will fall far behind, especially in remote areas where online study remains a novelty.

Indonesia’s efforts to slow the spread of the virus have met with mixed results. As of Saturday, the country had 190,665 cases and 7,940 deaths. But testing has been limited and independent health experts say the actual number of cases is many times higher.

With the start of a new academic year in July, schools in virus-free zones were allowed to reopen, but these schools serve only a fraction of the nation’s students. As of August, communities in low-risk areas could decide whether to reopen schools, but few have done so.

Some dedicated teachers in remote areas travel long distances and give face-to-face lessons to small groups of students in their homes. And since April, Indonesia’s public television and radio networks have broadcast educational programming several hours a day.

But most students study online using cellphones, often buying packages that provide small amounts of data. Some families

have only one phone that is shared among several children, who often must wait for their parents to come home so they can download their assignments.

Teaching online is new for many teachers, especially in rural areas. Students are often confused by the lessons, and parents — who may have only an elementary school education themselves — can be unprepared for home tutoring.

“Students have no idea what to do and parents think it is just a holiday,” said Itje Chodidjah, an educator and teacher trainer in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. “We still have lots of areas where there is no internet access. In some areas, there is even difficulty getting electricity.”

The difficulties faced by rural students today will further contribute to inequality in Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country, said Luhur Bima, a senior researcher with the Smeru Research Institute, a Jakarta-based public policy center.

“Even without the pandemic, there is a big gap between the rural and the urban,” he said. “The students learn very little during normal times. When the pandemic came, they just stopped the teaching activities.”

The minister of education, Nadiem Makarim, who founded the tech company Go-Jek before entering politics, has wrestled with how to balance students’ health and education. Closing schools can set them back academically and lead to loneliness and depression.

“The question is how we make a tradeoff between health risks and permanent loss of learning for areas in Indonesia that simply cannot, or find it extremely hard, to do distance learning,” he said.

“What’s happening right now in Indonesia and in other countries is not just a loss of learning,” he added. “The level of stress, loneliness, and tension are felt by both parents and students, not to mention the teachers.

These are not small issues.”

The ministry, Nadiem said, has simplified curriculums, abandoned the standardized national exam and authorized school principals to use operating funds to pay for students’ internet access.

Today, about 13 million people across 12,500 remote villages have no access to the internet, said Setyanto Hantoro, president director of Telkomsel, the country’s largest telecommunications company, which is cooperating with the government to provide

service in far-flung areas.

Among the areas where Telkomsel is working to bring access are Kenalan, where the three girls study by the road, and the village of Bah Pasungsang, where as many as 20 students a day climb trees to study. But those efforts will not be completed until 2022, Setyanto said.

Kenalan is in a mountainous area about 15 miles northwest of the city of Yogyakarta and close to the world’s largest Buddhist temple, Borobudur.

Most of the villagers are farmers, growing corn and cassava, from which they produce slondok, a popular snack.

The three roadside students, sisters Siti and Teara Noviyani, 19, and their aunt, Fitri Zahrotul Mufidah, are unusually dedicated to their studies.

But working outdoors is particularly difficult, especially when it rains. On one recent day, Noviyani joined her class despite a steady drizzle.

“I used one hand to hold my mobile phone for Zoom and the other to hold my umbrella,” she said. “The lecturer and my friends could see the cars and people passing by, who all greeted me.”

After the girls’ difficulties received attention from the local news media, cell service was installed at the village community center.

But the signal was weak and they returned to their spot on the roadside, said Noviyani, a student at Muhammadiyah University of Magelang.

Hilarius Dwi Ari Setiawan, 11, a Kenalan sixth grader, did not own a device, so his father, Noor Cahya Dwiwandaru, a farmer, took out a loan to buy an $85 phone.

If Cahya stands in the right spot in the kitchen and holds the phone high, he can get a weak signal. To download Hilarius’ lessons, he stops work and rides his motorbike to the nearby village, where the signal is better.

“The children get stressed with this situation,” said Vincentia Orisa Ratih Prastiwi, Hilarius’ teacher. “Their parents get angry.

Their younger siblings disturb them. The teachers’ video explanation is not clear.”

One morning a week, Ratih, 27, meets Hilarius and four classmates for in-person lessons at one of their homes.

She sympathizes with their difficulties.

“It’s hard to demand help from the government because everyone faces this pandemic,” she said. “But, if possible, the signal problem here should be fixed.”

16

Monday, September 7, 2020

First famines of Coronavirus era are at world’s doorstep, U.N. warns T

By RICK GLADSTONE

he first famines of the coronavirus era could soon hit four chronically food-deprived conflict areas — Yemen, South Sudan, northeast Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the top humanitarian official of the United Nations has warned.

In a letter to members of the Security Council, the official, Mark Lowcock, said the risk of famines in these areas had been intensified by “natural disasters, economic shocks and publichealth crises, all compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic.” Together, he said, “these factors are endangering the lives of millions of women, men and children.”

The letter, which has not been made public, was conveyed by Lowcock’s office to the Security Council on Friday under its 2018 resolution requiring updates when “the risk of conflict-induced famine and widespread food insecurity” occurs. A copy of the letter was seen

by The New York Times.

U.N. officials have said before that all four

areas are vulnerable to acute food deprivation because of chronic armed conflicts and the inability of humanitarian relief providers to freely distribute aid.

In April, David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, the anti-hunger arm of the U.N., warned the Security Council that while the world was contending with the coronavirus pandemic, “we are also on the brink of a hunger pandemic.”

Lowcock, who is the U.N.’s undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, effectively escalated the warning, saying a lack of funding for

A child being treated for malnutrition in Yemen’s northern Hajjah province in July.

emergency relief and the complications created by the coronavirus scourge have now pushed some of the world’s neediest populations closer to famine conditions.

Under a monitoring system for assessing hunger emergencies known as the Integrated Food Security Classification or IPC scale, Phase 3 is a crisis, Phase 4 is an emergency, and Phase 5 is famine — the worst — marked by “starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels.”

In Yemen, where famine was averted two years ago, Lowcock said “the risk is slowly returning.” The country, the poorest in the Arab world, has been ravaged for more than five years by a civil war between Houthi rebels and a Saudi-backed military coalition that has left 80% of the country dependent on outside aid.

Lowcock said the Yemeni currency has basically collapsed, while food costs have surged and drinking water prices have more than doubled since April. In 16 districts of the country, nearly all in Houthi-controlled areas, he said, the hunger emergency is now at Phase 4 — one

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step from famine.

In the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where decades of conflict have worsened this year, Lowcock said 21 million people are living in “crisis or worse levels of food insecurity.”

In the northeast Nigeria states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe, which have been roiled for years by armed extremist militants, Lowcock said more than 10 million people — 4 of 5 — now require humanitarian assistance and protection.

He said more than 1.2 million people in northeast Nigeria “remain largely inaccessible to aid agencies due to conflict and deliberate obstruction by nonstate armed groups,” with more than 15 aid workers killed in the past year.

In South Sudan, which has been upended by seven years of civil war, a recent upsurge in violence has left more than 1.4 million people “facing crisis or worse levels of food insecurity,” Lowcock said. Two years after the threat of famine was narrowly averted in South Sudan, he said, “parts of the country are again deteriorating sharply.”

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

17

Rescue dog and hopes of a miracle captivate ravaged Beirut

By BEN HUBBARD and KAREEN CHEHAYEB

T

he sudden glimmer of hope in a devastated Beirut neighborhood came from a dog named Flash with a shaggy black coat, a white snout and red bootees to protect his paws from shattered glass.

One month after an enormous explosion in Beirut’s port killed 190 people and ravaged the Lebanese capital, the dog smelled something in the rubble of a destroyed historic building, and a technician working with a Chilean rescue team deployed a sensor that picked up a slow pulse underneath that could have been a heartbeat.

In the hours since the dog’s discovery Thursday evening, the Lebanese have been glued to their televisions, watching live coverage of rescue crews in yellow vests sifting through debris and wondering if, after a string of bruising traumas, they dared hope for a miracle.

Had someone survived under the rubble all this time?

But by Friday evening, the rescue crews had yet to find anything with a pulse, and the leader of the Chilean team declined to tell reporters when it had last picked up any sign of possible life. The Chilean rescuers suspended their search and said they would resume Saturday morning.

The Aug. 4 explosion, caused by the combustion of thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals stored improperly in the Beirut port since 2014, was the most recent in a series of crises that have fueled deep anger at the country’s political elite over decades of mismanagement and corruption.

Since last fall, the economy has been in free fall, the currency has been shedding value and frequent antigovernment protests have trashed much of downtown.

Many Lebanese are furious that their leaders let the country deteriorate to this point and that the politicians have failed to take any meaningful steps.

Across Lebanon, people observed a moment of silence at 6:08 p.m. to mark the one-month anniversary of the blast as the time it had shattered the capital.

A group of firefighters drove the route from their station toward the port in memory of 10 of their colleagues who had gone to fight the warehouse fire believed to have caused the blast and were all killed in the explosion.

Near the port, where a deep crater marks the blast spot next to towering grain silos shredded by the explosion, soldiers fired a salute and white roses were laid on a memorial — one for each of the blast’s known victims.

Anger at the country’s politicians coursed through the commemorations, and among the residents and volunteers who had gathered near the collapsed building on Friday to await updates on the search for the possible survivor.

Many blamed the government not only for having failed to prevent the blast but also for having failed to help people in the aftermath.

“What can we say other than shame on the government?” said Nour Hassan, a university student who came to the site with a volunteer cleaning crew. “This is so upsetting.”

She wondered, how could there even be a question

of whether anyone remained under the rubble from the Aug. 4 explosion?

“The state should have verified all this,” she said.

“Now we don’t know if there are other bodies in other buildings, alive or dead.”

It appeared extremely unlikely that anyone had survived under the rubble for a month, especially since daily temperatures in Beirut have been sweltering, with high humidity.

But on Thursday, after Flash drew rescue workers to the destroyed building, the rescue crew’s equipment picked up a pulse of 18 beats per minute. Suspecting that it could be a heartbeat, the crew started digging.

Francesco Lermonda, a Chilean volunteer, told The Associated Press that his team’s equipment identified breathing and heartbeats from humans, not animals. He said it was rare, but not unheard-of, for someone to survive in such conditions for a month.

Tensions flared overnight Thursday when volunteers accused the Lebanese Army of calling off the search. Hours later, a Civil Defense team brought heavy machinery to help clear the rubble, and work resumed.

The army released a statement saying it was the search teams who had stopped working, fearing that walls could collapse on them.

On Friday, teams of workers in hard hats and yellow vests dug carefully through the rubble with shovels and bare hands, so as not to wound any possible survivors or damage any remains found underneath.

The Chilean search team occasionally called for silence on the nearby street to allow the sensors to pick up sounds from under the wreckage, and rescuers created 3D images of the ruins to try to identify where survivors or bodies might be hidden.

On Friday morning, a member of the Chilean search team told a local television station that the latest test has detected only seven beats per minute.

After sunset Friday, another member of the Chilean team declined to say when the team had last picked up any sign of life and insisted they would keep searching as long as there was even a one percent chance of saving someone.

An artist, Ivan Debs, created an image of Flash bravely standing on a pile of rubble, his heart connecting with a heart underground.

“We have lot to learn from him,” the artist wrote on Twitter.

The area, in the predominantly Christian neighborhood of Gemmayze, was once home to some of the city’s most vibrant nightlife, its main street lined with restaurants and bars where patrons regularly spilled out on the sidewalk late into the night. The destroyed building where the crews searched had been part of a row containing a Chinese restaurant, a photo studio and a grocery story called Twenty-Four Seven.

Now, those businesses have been erased, most residents have left their damaged apartments and nearby shops and eateries are closed. At night, the area is almost entirely dark.

Bystanders gathered as rescue workers searched through the rubble.

18

Monday, September 7, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL

How many lives would a more normal president have saved?

By ROSS DOUTHAT

A

ll of the fears I nurtured in 2016 about Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency, and the dangers of putting him in the White House for the sake of judicial appointments or tax cuts or any other policy goal, have seemingly been vindicated so far in 2020. Combine Trump’s conduct throughout the COVID-19 pandemic — the month of denial, the veering messaging and policy, the rage-tweeting, the shrugging surrender to a summer spike — with the growing toll of American dead, and you have the strongest case for NeverTrumpism, distilled: Never mind his policy positions, never mind the perils of liberalism; the risk of a once-in-a-century catastrophe with this guy in charge is just too high.

It’s precisely when events seems to vindicate your deepest anxieties, though, that you should be careful about your conclusions. We can say, because we have eyes to see, that the president’s response to the coronavirus has thrown all his faults into relief. But has it been as horrific in its consequences as it has been dispiriting to watch? To put a sharper point on it: How many Americans are dead because Trump, rather than a normal politician, occupied the White House in 2020?

I’ve been thinking about this question because my colleague David Leonhardt suggested one possible answer. Right now, he noted, “the U.S. accounts for 4% of the world’s population, and for 22% of confirmed COVID-19 deaths.” But suppose that “the United States had done merely an average job of fighting the coronavirus,” meaning that our country “accounted

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President Donald Trump listens as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks about the response to the coronavirus pandemic in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, March 29, 2020. for the same share of virus deaths as it did global population.”

How many Americans would still be alive? “The answer: about 145,000” — which is to say, the large majority of the roughly 185,000 Americans reported to have died.

That’s an awful toll; to the extent that it can be laid at the current administration’s feet, it would emphatically prove the case that electing Trump enabled not just corruption but catastrophe.

But I’m not fully convinced by my colleague’s approach.

Consider that the patterns for COVID-19 fatalities often look more region-specific than country-specific: You’ll be more likely to predict a nation’s pandemic toll if you know where it’s located (Western Europe, the Pacific Rim, Africa) than if you know what kind of leader or government it has. Which suggests that some still-mysterious combination of region-specific factors — recent experience with pandemics, a population’s youth or age, preexisting immunity or genetic inheritance, the differing strains of the virus that show up in different places — establishes the baseline against which individual countries should be judged.

If so, then it probably makes more sense to compare the U.S. death toll to similarly positioned and sized countries — meaning the biggest countries in Western Europe and our major neighbors in the Americas — than to compare us to a global average. And when you compare deaths as a share of population within that group of peer countries, the U.S. starts to look more mediocre and less uniquely catastrophic.

Of the five most populous countries in Western Europe, only Germany has been a great success, with less than one-fifth our coronavirus death rate. Three of the remaining five, Spain and Italy and Britain, have higher death rates than the U.S., and the fourth, France, isn’t that far below. Likewise with the five largest countries in Latin America, where only Argentina stands out as a clear success, while Brazil and Peru have worse death rates than ours, Mexico is just below us and Colombia a little further down.

Overall, once you observe the general pattern where the

Western Hemisphere and Western Europe have been particularly hard hit, it’s hard to distinguish the big countries run by centrists or socialists from the country run by Trump. And the same is true if you look at overall excess death statistics (the number of deaths above normal levels), which fewer countries keep, but which are probably a more accurate measure than a COVID-19-specific count. Again, Germany looks great, but Britain, Spain and Italy all have worse numbers than the United States.

One obvious rejoinder is that many of these countries were hit harder than the U.S. at the outset, when we all were ill-prepared, but Trump’s blundering helped give the U.S. its summertime wave, which our peer countries have avoided. But actually both Spain and France have seen late-summer infection waves that have brought them above or close to our infection rate. (We also don’t know where herd immunity lies, and whether some initially hard-hit countries that haven’t seen a summer spike have already reached it: It’s notable that Sweden, which famously never tried a complete lockdown, has seen its rate of daily deaths collapse.)

And the effects of some specific Trumpian follies, like his palpable contempt for masking, are hard to discern in the data at all: The U.S. has rates of mask usage that fall, like our death rates, right in the middle of the pack for our peer nations.

Now there is an element of, “Who are you going to believe, my stats or your lying eyes?” to an argument like this. Having lived through the last six months, I am sure some lives would have been saved if Trump had encouraged his own voters to take COVID-19 seriously at the outset, or if he had prodded his bureaucracy during the lost month of February, or if he had discouraged early reopening in the Sun Belt, and so on. If those failures add up to 20,000 lives lost instead of 145,000 it’s still a tragic record of avoidable mass suffering. And it’s possible that when all the waves are done, we will end up looking worse relative to Western Europe than we do today.

But the peer-country evidence suggests that to take the preemptive, creative and draconian steps that might have actually suppressed the virus, and in the process saved that 100,000 or more extra lives, would have probably required presidential greatness — not merely replacement-level competence. We can say without a doubt that Trump whiffed when this call for greatness came. But distinguishing between Trump’s incompetence and what an average president might have managed is harder, so long as so many peer-country death tolls look like ours.

Then there is a final wrinkle, which is that we don’t yet know how the administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine push will end. If the United States ends up generating large quantities of a working vaccine, or more than one, on an unprecedented timetable — currently a real possibility, however much you worry about Trump’s preelection incentives — then that will also end up on the ledger when we assess this president’s COVID-19 response.

And if it comes to that, then the pre-2020 pattern of this presidency, where critics (like me) fear an only-under-Trump catastrophe but what actually happens is bad but also mixed and complicated, will not have been as decisively broken by the coronavirus as the headlines today make it seem.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

19

Alcalde de Yauco anuncia reducción del déficit municipal Por THE STAR

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l alcalde de Yauco, Ángel Luis Torres Ortiz, informó este domingo que los últimos tres estados financieros auditados del municipio reflejaron una reducción de $1,415,185 millones en el déficit acumulado, lo que le permitió mantener las finanzas estables aun con el impacto económico que representaron los huracanes Irma y María y los sismos de principio de año.

Asimismo el alcalde anunció que el año fiscal 2018-2019 cerró con un superávit de $1,213.264.

El Alcalde de Yauco recordó que cuando asumió el cargo de alcalde en enero de 2017, el déficit del municipio ascendía a $12,533,826.

Destacó que al finalizar el año fiscal 20172018 logró reducirlo en $424,217. Al concluir el año fiscal 2018-2019 la reducción fue de $990,968.

“Esto crea condiciones favorables en el municipio para impulsar el crecimiento económico del pueblo. Empezamos a estabilizar el presupuesto sin préstamos y tomando en cuenta los ingresos reales del año fiscal anterior. Logramos una administración sana que procuró aumentos en contribuciones por la propiedad, IVU y patentes municipales. Esto nos permitió ofrecer mejores servicios directos a nuestros ciudadanos y comenzar a sanar las finanzas del municipio”, sostuvo el ejecutivo municipal.

Torres Ortiz indicó que el municipio logró estabilizar el presupuesto al bajar la diferencia sustancial que existía entre ingresos recibidos y gastos reales. Este año el municipio operará con un presupuesto ascendente a $13,562.380.

DS ordena cierre de colegio de educación individualizada que daba clases presenciales Por THE STAR

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l director de la Oficina de Investigaciones del Departamento de Salud, Jesús Hernández, ordenó el cierre de varios establecimientos por supuesta violación a la orden ejecutiva 2020062 que establece medidas para evitar la propagación del COVID-19 en Puerto Rico.

“Recibimos confidencias de que el colegio Clagill, en Bayamón, estaba impartiendo clases presenciales a parte de su matrícula. A pesar de que orientamos al director, previamente, y lo instruimos de que estaba incumpliendo con la orden ejecutiva, este hizo caso omiso, por lo que procedimos a ordenar el cierre del lugar. La orden ejecutiva establece que las clases presenciales no están permitidas

y nosotros debemos hacer cumplir la ley”, explicó Hernández.

Clagill es un colegio de educación individualizada.

Hernández añadió que, tras el aviso de la orden de cierre, el director del colegio alegadamente impidió la entrada del personal de Salud a las instalaciones, lo que constituye obstrucción a la justicia.

El colegio Clagill tiene una matrícula de 130 estudiantes, de los cuales 28 estaban tomando clases presenciales. La matrícula de esta escuela es para niños que cursan de kínder a sexto grado. Debido a las infracciones, la administración del colegio se expone a multas y su licencia podría ser revocada.

Por otro lado, las autoridades intervinieron en los establecimientos

Ozzy’s Tacos y El Nuevo Trampolín, en el área de San Juan, debido a que estaban vendiendo bebidas alcohólicas después de las 7:00 de la noche e incumpliendo con el distanciamiento físico. Ambos negocios fueron cerrados y se exponen a multas.

“Continuaremos interviniendo en los establecimientos que incumplan

con la orden ejecutiva. Como he dicho anteriormente, nuestra filosofía es, además de hacer cumplir la ley, salvar vidas. Necesitamos la cooperación de toda la ciudadanía para evitar la propagación del COVID-19. Para minimizar los contagios y las muertes, necesitamos cumplir con las reglas y ser responsables”, concluyó Hernández.

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Monday, September 7, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

‘Mulan’ 1998: A moment of joy and anxiety for Asian American viewers

Yifei Liu plays the heroine in the live-action version.

By BRIAN X. CHEN

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isney’s new live-action “Mulan” is coming at a time when the entertainment world is still feeling tremors from the success of “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Parasite.”

It was a very different landscape when the animated “Mulan” debuted in 1998: U.S. audiences were far less used to the presence of Asians onscreen, and many Asian American moviegoers felt less comfortable with depictions of themselves.

In the 1990s, Asian representation in Hollywood was even more scarce than it is today. What’s more, by the time “Mulan” came out, Asian American activists were still reeling from the failure of “All-American Girl” (1994-95), the first sitcom to feature a Korean American family.

Some Asian Americans had been buzzing over the show, which starred the comedian Margaret Cho — there were even viewing parties for the premiere. But it was a spectacular disappointment, blending stereotypes about multiple Asian cultures, recalled Jeff Yang, one of the TV critics whose reviews contributed to its quick demise.

During that decade, Yang said, Asian Americans were treated as a genre. If one program prominently featured Asian faces, another couldn’t be made at the same time because it was seen as superfluous — that box had already been checked.

“Everything that had an Asian American face was dumped in the same bucket,” Yang said. “The problem with that is it meant we had a limited amount of stories.”

After the cancellation of the Cho sitcom, there was a dry spell of television and movies starring Asian Americans. So when Disney presented “Mulan,” a movie about a Chinese heroine featuring voice actors of Asian descent, it evoked a range of reactions from joy to anxiety.

Guy Aoki, an advocate for representation with the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, said that initially, when he heard about “Mulan,” he was both giddy and nervous. His organization emailed supporters, urging them to champion the movie.

“Every time a studio takes a chance on an ethnic project, we know, 1, we’re happy, but 2, we’re very worried because if this doesn’t do well, heaven help us, they’re not going to try anything like it again,” Aoki said.

He was relieved that the movie, directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook and starring Ming-Na Wen as the voice of the title character, was successful: It drew $304 million worldwide at the box office, ahead of “The Little Mermaid” with $184 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

The following year, Aoki’s organization held a ceremony in Chinatown in Los Angeles to present Disney an award for its inclusion of Asian American actors in “Mulan.”

Despite the animated movie’s success, “Mulan” had no immediate effect on representation in Hollywood; it didn’t open doors for its stars in the same way that “Crazy Rich Asians” would. Just a year after its release came the great “whiteout”: The 1999-2000 fall season lineup of 26 new TV shows with no actors of color in noteworthy roles, which led to protests.

Today, Asian Americans remain underrepresented on the big screen: Out of Hollywood’s top 100 movies of 2018, only two lead roles went to Asian and Asian American actors (one male and one female), according to a study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. The Census Bureau estimates that Asian Americans make up 5.4% of the U.S. population, but the number is probably higher because Asian Americans — the fastest-growing demographic — are the least likely to fill out the census.

Experts agree that in the 1990s Asian performers were still proving to Hollywood that audiences would be comfortable seeing them in major roles. Despite favorable reviews for the 1993 adaptation of “The Joy Luck Club,” martial arts films like “Rumble in the Bronx” (1995) with Jackie Chan remained the most prominent vehicle for Asian stars.

Renee Tajima-Peña, a filmmaker and professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, said the decade was also an important time for Asian American filmmakers, who were starting to make features. (Before then, they had focused on documentaries to fight racism.) Among others, Justin Lin, who would make his mark with “Better Luck Tomorrow” (2003) and the “Fast and the Furious” franchise, got his start in 1997 with the indie “Shopping for Fangs.”

Representation has also improved in terms of accurate portrayals of different cultures. Yang, the critic, noted that Hollywood had evolved to treat inclusion more holistically, hiring more people of color to write, produce and act in shows and movies about them.

That’s how we ended up with the 2018 adaptation of “Crazy Rich Asians” and TV shows like the recently concluded “Fresh Off the Boat” (which starred Yang’s son, Hudson). “Mulan” was just one of many successes that had to happen before representation got to where it is today, he said.

“Over the last 15 years we developed that pipeline and all those people were ready to spring,” Yang said.

The more significant effects of “Mulan” may have been social and psychological. Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociologist and author of the book “Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism,” said the movie had helped shift beauty standards: Its release was accompanied by a prolific amount of merchandise, including “Mulan” Barbie dolls, McDonald’s Happy Meal toys and Mattel figurines. Asian American girls who grew up with Barbies with blond hair and blue eyes now had versions that looked like them.

“Being able to say ‘Look at Mulan, she’s beautiful’ — for young Asian American girls, that was a big deal,” Yuen said.

Eleni Kapoulea, a graduate student of clinical psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was 6 when “Mulan” came out, said her mother and grandparents of Cambodian descent took her to the movie eight times, and she even dressed up as Mulan for several Halloweens. As a mixed-race girl growing up in San Diego, she remembers her classmates mocking her Asian looks relentlessly on the playground.

“Mulan gave me the chance to show my pride a little bit even though the culture wasn’t necessarily directly connected to me,” she said.

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

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Variations on a lead

By ADRIAN MATEJKA

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hadwick Boseman embodied a James Baldwin dictum: “History is not the past.

It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” Boseman carried our history insistently, imbuing titans of the real and imagined worlds with the best parts of himself.

He recognized that they, too, make metaphors out of history even as it is being rewritten with every breath. He understood how exhausting it is to be made accountable minute by minute, how small almost all of us become inside that kind of accounting.

What does it mean to be a cinematic citizen of the mind — cheekbones writ large, smiling like a big idea? There’s self-possession in that understanding, broad-shouldered chin to the sun. Restorer, re-historicizer of the Black backdrop in America and elsewhere. What about masculinity and isolation? What about the unrelenting gravity of community expectations and aspirations? Right in the nexus of need, trying to Mashed Potato between expression, obligation, light bills and wonder. How does history render the heavy load of itself unto itself?

In lead roles, Boseman mostly played the outlier: the one with conviction, the one with enough crust and wherewithal to understand that everybody from the high steppers to the low downs is made of antiquity, sunlight and iron. Actor Chadwick Boseman in Los Angeles, Nov. 18, 2018. In lead roles, Boseman mostly played the outlier: the one with What happens with that mix is the real alchemy, conviction, the one with enough crust and wherewithal to understand that everybody from the high steppers to the low and he used it to re-dimension their largess and downs is made of antiquity, sunlight and iron. redefine their rough multitudes. The human capacity to harm other humans is as inexhaustible tion of it, the abandonment of it. Undo the body, There’s a chaotic scene in “Get On Up” that of Blackness: color as signifier, color as artifact, as gravity but not as inevitable. takes place right after the assassination of Mar- color as stone cold fact. and the brain will follow.

During the week I’m writing this, Jacob It’s hard not to think about unbuckled his- tin Luther King Jr., in which Boseman as James We can never know the authentic verBlake was paralyzed when Kenosha, Wisconsin, tory while watching Boseman’s Stormin’ Nor- Brown admonishes the crowd for trying to get sion of a person, whether it’s Jackie Robinson or police officers shot him in the back seven times man in “Da 5 Bloods.” He’s complicit in vio- onstage to dance with him. “Let’s represent our- Thurgood Marshall or Chadwick Boseman cosin front of his three children. And in the after- lence even as he tries to free himself of it. He selves,” he says. “You make me look bad. We tumed as T’Challa. Whatever we think we know math the WNBA and the NBA and the MLS and sees the long history of it being revisited bullet are Black. Don’t make us all look bad.” As if about the actor, one thing is for real: He shared even the MLB all refused to practice or play. And by bullet and can’t figure out how to stop it. The history needs a kind of veneer, even in the mo- his characters’ nuances like gentle libations — on the same day Jacob Blake was shot, Chad- persistent conundrum of masculinity, whether ment. Liberation’s opposite from James Brown, and by “share” I mean that physically, what wick Boseman was dying from an illness that in a ballpark in Brooklyn, a courtroom in Con- who loosened up almost everybody who camel he held them out to us with both hands. Here, was nobody else’s business. walked with him. necticut or a Hollywood premiere. take this, he says, and in his cupped palms is a It’s not a metaphor that Chadwick BoseSometimes a country dislikes its meta- memory of a first at-bat or a thunderclap from a There’s no possible way that you can man died on Jackie Robinson Day 2020. It’s show it exactly how it happened. But you feel phor so much that it covers up in a brocade of distant Tuesday or a bright morning in Wakanda only not enough and gone too soon, the same responsible for things being as authentic as they sycophancy. Sometimes language misshapes when the sun, just cresting the infinite skyline, way you might catch the tasseled edge of some- can be. You don’t want to show the sugarcoated because of insistent violence: decorum forgot- blink against the mirrored windows. This is for one rounding a winter corner just as the flurries version of the person. You’re not free unless ten, referendums ignored, and the racism flags you, he says, and we get to see all the possisettle on your forehead and cheeks. you can show the good and the bad, all sides are everywhere with their snakes and stars and bility he wants us to know. https://www.google.

Like all of us Black men born in the 1970s, of them. So to me, when I play a character it’s mismatched colors twisting over the local hous- com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.

Boseman was part of the generation directly or important that I can show every aspect of them. es. On the marquee at the theater across the cnet.com%2Fnews%2Ftweet-honoring-actorindirectly bequeathed PTSD by the conscripts — Chadwick Boseman, from an interview with street: a poster for “Black Panther” with Chad- chadwick-boseman-becomes-most-liked-tweetreturning from the Vietnam War. Fathers, uncles, Shadow & Act wick Boseman’s unmasked face looking down, ever%2F&psig=AOvVaw1-n08BF6D1qp4H_80 older cousins, neighbors — they all came back As distractingly beautiful as he was, clawed gloves curled inward toward him. In xPXW8&ust=1599493985235000&source=im with language that could only be syncopated Boseman still managed to let the characters he the unrepentant shadows it’s hard to tell if he’s ages&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCLCJ5t_ through the body — the meat of it, the destruc- played be seen fully with all their rips and scuffs. studying or mediating, but it’s still a beatitude x1OsCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAG

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Monday, September 7, 2020

The San Juan Daily Star

Move over, sustainable travel. Regenerative travel has arrived.

Tourists overlooking the old town of Dubrovnik, Croatia, June 21, 2018. The city has struggled with overtourism.

By ELAINE GLUSAC

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ourism, which grew faster than the global gross domestic product for the past nine years, has been decimated by the pandemic. Once accounting for 10% of employment worldwide, the sector is poised to shed 121 million jobs, with losses projected at a minimum of $3.4 trillion, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council.

But in the lull, some in the tourism industry are planning for a post-vaccine return to travel that’s better than it was before March 2020 — greener, smarter and less crowded. If sustainable tourism, which aims to counterbalance the social and environmental impacts associated with travel, was the aspirational outer limit of ecotourism before the pandemic, the new frontier is “regenerative travel,” or leaving a place better than you found it.

“Sustainable tourism is sort of a low bar. At the end of the day, it’s just not making a mess of the place,” said Jonathon Day, an associate professor focused on sustainable tourism at Purdue University. “Regenerative tourism says, let’s make it better for future generations.”

Defining Regeneration Regenerative travel has its roots in regenerative development and design, which includes buildings that meet the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy

and Environmental Design or LEED standards. The concept has applications across many fields, including regenerative agriculture, which aims to restore soils and sequester carbon.

“Generally, sustainability, as practiced today, is about slowing down the degradation,” said Bill Reed, an architect and principal of Regenesis Group, a design firm based in Massachusetts and New Mexico that has been practicing regenerative design, including tourism projects, since 1995. He described efforts like fuel efficiency and reduced energy use as “a slower way to die.”

“Regeneration is about restoring and then regenerating the capability to live in a new relationship in an ongoing way,” he added.

With most travel suspended during the pandemic, regenerative travel remains at the starting gate. But in the lull, it’s the new buzz. Six nonprofit organizations, including the Center for Responsible Travel and Sustainable Travel International, have joined together as the Future of Tourism coalition, which aims to “build a better tomorrow.”

Twenty-two travel groups, including tour operators like G Adventures, destination marketers such as the Slovenian Tourist Board, and organizations like the Adventure Travel Trade Association, have signed on to the coalition’s 13 guiding principles, including “demand fair income distribution” and “choose quality over quantity.”

Tourism New Zealand, the country’s tourism organization, is talking about measuring its success not solely in economic terms, but against the well-being of the country, considering nature, human health and community identities. And travel leaders in Hawaii are discussing repositioning the state as a cultural destination in hopes of reengaging islanders, many of whom are fed up with overtourism, in the vitality of tourism.

To flesh out these broad strokes, Day, the associate professor, points to the concept of a circular economy, which aims to design waste out of the system, keep materials in use through reuse, repair and upcycling, and regenerate natural systems.

“Tourism is just at the beginning of this process of how we can apply circular economy ideas to the system,” he said.

Regeneration in Action Having a truly regenerative travel experience may be a unicorn, but a few operators are pointing the way.

Regenesis worked on the development of Playa Viva, a small resort south of Zihuatanejo, Mexico, on the Pacific Coast, which opened in 2009. The firm’s assessment of the more than 200-acre property took in the beaches, the birdfilled estuary and ancient ruins as well as the problems of turtle poaching and poor schools in the village. Ultimately, the small town of Juluchuca became the gateway to the property; an organic agricultural system benefited both the property and local residents; and a 2% fee added to any stay funds a trust that invests in community development.

“Rather than a resort helicoptering in and taking up land, they said, ‘We are the village,’” Reed said. “It’s a paradigm shift.”

Playa Viva is one of 45 resorts belonging to Regenerative Travel, a booking agency that vets members based on metrics such as carbon usage, employee well-being, immersive guest activities and sourcing local food. To date, qualifications for membership have been handled inter-

New Zealand seeks to balance tourism with the well-being of its natural resources and communities. Above, alpacas in Akaroa, New Zealand.

The San Juan Daily Star

A treehouse at Playa Viva, a small resort south of Zihuatanejo, Mexico, on the Pacific Coast, that seeks to balance environmental and community awareness with tourism. nally, but in September the company plans to launch a bench marking system to demonstrate their regenerative progress.

OneSeed Expeditions, an adventure tour operator based in Denver, aims to couple travel with economic development. It uses 10% of its proceeds to provide zero-interest loans to local nongovernmental organizations where it operates in places like Nepal and Peru. The local groups then issue microloans to community entrepreneurs in businesses such as farming and retail.

“The areas of greatest need are not necessarily in areas of the greatest tourism attractions,” said Chris Baker, the founder of OneSeed Expeditions. “We want to use tourism to be able to benefit people outside of those areas.”

Regenerative tourism addresses impacts holistically, from destination and community perspectives as well as environmental. Intrepid Travel, the small-group tour company that, until the pandemic, ran more than 1,000 itineraries globally, has been carbon neutral since 2010. This year it extended its pledge to cover 125% of its carbon emissions.

“There’s this notion that business success means you have to do harm to the world,” said James Thornton, the chief executive of Intrepid Travel, which became a B Corporation, an entity dedicated to benefiting workers, customers, the community and environment, as well as shareholders, in 2018. “When the new normality returns, it shouldn’t come at the expense of sustainability.”

Correcting Overtourism Implicit in many discussions about regenerative tourism is the threat of returning to overtourism, which accounted for excessive numbers of visitors in places like Dubrovnik, Croatia, that ultimately had to cap the number of cruise ships allowed to dock daily in high season.

“For so long, tourism success was defined by grow-

Monday, September 7, 2020

ing the numbers — numbers of visitors, numbers of cruise passengers,” said Gregory Miller, the executive director of the Center for Responsible Travel, a nonprofit group that advocates for sustainable travel. “Even before the pandemic, there was a need for rebalancing.”

Who Defines ‘Better’ Tourism?

Determining what makes a place better and who makes that decision requires local involvement, according to regenerative tourism proponents.

VisitFlanders, the tourism organization representing the northern Belgium region, used local input to rethink its mission, repositioning its stance from growing travel for the sake of the economy to creating an “economy of meaning,” according to its master plan. That includes, among other initiatives, linking visitors with locals who share their passions for things like history or food and making storytelling central to sites like its World War I battlefields.

“We’ve managed to shift the thinking from having their primary objective be about growing the numbers, to creating flourishing destinations, flourishing communities and having them say what kind of tourism they want,” said Anna Pollock, the founder of Conscious Travel, an education and consulting enterprise devoted to positioning travel as a force for good, who worked with VisitFlanders.

A Traveler’s Role in Regeneration Pollock believes regenerative travel is a supply-side concept that asks operators to do more for the environment and community than they take from them. But trav-

23

TRAVEL

elers play a key role in demand.

“Become mindful of the fact that your trip is going to have a set of costs associated with it, which needs to be paid by somebody,” she said. “In the same way you think, ‘Should I buy that cheap T-shirt from the dime store down the road?,’ knowing it’s created by semi-slave labor. Now you’re thinking consciously about who do I buy it from and is it quality.”

The experience of the pandemic — when many are discovering the power of their pocketbooks in supporting local businesses like bookstores and restaurants — is, perhaps, the most instructive in demonstrating sustainability, even if the travel involved is within a few blocks of home.

“Travel is an important vote of your principles,” said Baker of OneSeed. “When you decide to put your time and resources into a trip, you’re affirming that’s the type of business you want out there.”

Sustainable travel, let alone regenerative travel, will still have to find solutions to the carbon emissions produced by air travel. Until the economy recovers, there’s likely to be less travel, more local travel, or slower travel by car, train, bike or foot. This moment of reflection, say proponents, is where regeneration begins.

“It’s about how to regenerate our relationship with life,” said Reed, the architect. “That’s a continual process.

Our children will need that taught to them. Regeneration is a continual cycle of rebirth. That’s how we sustain the planet. You cannot have a sustainable planet without regeneration.”

Socially-distanced beachgoers in the Waikiki area of Honolulu, Hawaii, July 8, 2020. Can a post-vaccine return to travel be smarter and greener than it was before March 2020? Some in the tourism industry are betting on it.

24 LEGAL NOTICE Estado libre asociado de puerto rico CENTRO JUDICIAL DE HUMACAO Tribunal de primera instancia Sala superior.

MUNICIPIO DE HUMACAO representado por su Honorable Alcalde, Luis R. Sánchez Hernández Peticionario vs.

CARLOS M. CRUZ BENÍTEZ, MIRTA I. SANTIAGO GONZÁLEZ, DYNAMIC GROUP, LLC, JJ INVERSIONES, INC., UNIVERSAL PROPERTIES, CRIM, ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO, JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

Partes con interés CIVIL NÚM.: HU2020CV00520.

SOBRE: expropiación forzosa.

EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R.

A: CARLOS M. CRUZ BENÍTEZ, MIRTA I. SANTIAGO GONZÁLEZ, JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

RE: El MUNICIPIO DE HUMACAO se propone adquirir el título de pleno y absoluto dominio de la propiedad que se describe a continuación localizada en la Calle 7 #276, Punta Santiago Comm., Humacao, P.R. para llevar a cabo los fines y propósitos del Proyecto: ESTORBOS PUBLICOS. Parcela marcada con el #276 en el Plano de Mensura preparado por el Municipio de Humacao, Puerto Rico, con una cabida superficial de 1513.1996 metros cuadrados, equivalentes a 0.384 cuerda. En lindes por el NORTE, con la Parcela 255, por el SUR, con la Calle 7, por el ESTE, con la Calle 18 y por el OESTE, con la Parcela 275. Enclava una estructura utilizada para residencia y otras mejoras las cuales se encuentran en un alto grado de deterioro. Dado a su alto grado de deterioro se recomienda la demolición.

CODIFICACION: 282-051061-06-901. El MUNICIPIO DE HUMACAO, representado por su Honorable Alcalde, Luis R. Sánchez Hernández, a tenor con la autoridad conferida mediante la Ley General de Expropiación Forzosa del 12 de marzo de 1903, según enmendada, la Regla 58-Expropiación Forzosa de Propiedad, de las Reglas de Procedimiento Civil, según enmendada, 32 L.P.R.A. Ap. V, R-58, el Artículo 2.001(c) de la ley de Municipios

@

Autónomos, Ley Núm. 81 del 30 de agosto de 1991, según enmendada; Ley Núm. 84 del 29 de octubre de 1992, según enmendada; la Ley Núm. 31 del 18 de enero de 2012, según enmendada; y la Ordenanza Municipal Número 21, Serie Núm. 2015-2016, adoptada por la Legislatura Municipal del Municipio Autónomo de Humacao, interesa adquirir dicha propiedad en pleno dominio para el Proyecto Estorbos Públicos y por exceder la cantidad de la deuda por gastos necesarios y convenientes al valor de tasación no se requiere el depósito de suma alguna en el Tribunal como justa compensación por la propiedad. No habiéndose podido emplazar personalmente a usted por desconocerse su paradero, este Tribunal ha ordenado que conforme lo establecido en la Regla 58.4 C-2 de Procedimiento Civil se emplace por edicto que se publicará una vez por semana durante tres (3) semanas consecutivas en un periódico de circulación general en Puerto Rico. El Tribunal releva a la parte peticionaria del envío a los diez (10) días de la publicación del último edicto por correo con acuse de recibo de una copia del emplazamiento y de la demanda por desconocerse su dirección actual y/o paradero. POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva a la demanda dentro de los treinta (30) días si fuese emplazado por edictos, notificando copia de la misma al (a la) abogado(a) de la parte peticionaria o a ésta, de no tener representación legal. Si usted deja de presentar su alegación responsiva dentro del referido término, el tribunal podrá conceder el remedio solicitado en la demanda, o cualquier otro, si el tribunal, en el ejercicio de su sana discreción, lo entiende procedente.

MARIA A. MERCADO PADILLA Número RUA 14,225 Ave. Ponce de León #1605 Oficina 701 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00909 Tel./Fax.: 787-945-7455/ Email: mercado.maria@gmail.com ABRAHAM FREYRE MEDINA RUA 19,280 COLEGIADO 19585 The Executive BLDG. Banco Cooperativo #623 Ave. Ponce de León, Suite 806-B San Juan, PR 00917 Ofic.: 787-631-2644/ Cel.: 787-392-6692 Email: freyrelex@gmail.com El Tribunal ha señalado el día 19 de octubre de 2020, a las 10:30 AM en Sala 206 para la vista del caso, en cuyo día se determinará el justo valor de la propiedad y las partes a ser compensadas, y a cuya vista podrá usted comparecer y ofrecer prueba de valoración

aunque no haya contestado la Petición. Se le advierte que si dentro del mencionado término no contesta la petición ni comparece a la vista señalada, este Tribunal entenderá que no tiene interés en el caso y procederá a dictar sentencia conforme a las alegaciones de la Petición.

Expedido por Orden del Tribunal en Humacao, Puerto Rico, hoy 25 de agosto de 2020. Dominga Gomez Fuster, Sec Regional. Dalias Reyes de Leon, Sec Auxiliar.

2020. En BAYAMON , Puerto Rico, el 31 de agosto de 2020.

LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario(a). IVETTE M. MARRERO BRACERO, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

VS

LEGAL NOTICE ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA TRIBUNAL DE PRIMERA INSTANCIA SALA DE SAN JUANSUPERIOR.

LUNA ACQUISITION, LLC

CLAUDIO BENITEZ, Estado Libre Asociado de PuerIDAMIS to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de Pri- CASO: KCD2015-2719. SOmera Instancia Sala Superior BRE: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA. de BAYAMON. LUNA ACQUISITION, LLC Demandante v.

CARMEN IRIS GONZALEZ MORALES

Demandado(a) Civil Núm. BY2019CV00126.

SALA 503. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO Y EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: CARMEN IRIS GONZALEZ MORALES -CALLE 28 C-11 ESTANCIAS DE CERRO GORDO, VEGA ALTA, PR 00692 -PO BOX 51570 TOA BAJA, PR 00950-1570 -URBANIZACION ESTANCIAS DE CERRO GORDO, CALLE TIFANY #23, VEGA ALTA, PR 00692

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 31 de agosto de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 31 de agosto de

staredictos@thesanjuandailystar.com

CRETARIO AUXILIAR.

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

COOPERATIVA DE AHORRO Y CRÉDITO DE AÑASCO Parte Demandante Vs

SAMUEL ROSA BRAVO (Socio Núm. 111839), su esposa CARMEN A. DOMENECH y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES compuesta por ambos

Parte Demandada CIVIL NÚM. AG2020CV00612.

IDAMIS SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO CLAUDIO BENITEZ NOTIFICACION DE SEN- (VÍA ORDINARIA). EDICTO A: SAMUEL ROSA TENCIA POR EDICTO. EL SECRETARIO(A) QUE SUSBRAVO, SU ESPOSA CRIBE LE NOTIFICA A USTED CARMEN A. DOMENECH QUE EL 19 DE FEBRERO Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE 2020 , ESTE TRIBUNAL DE GANANCIALES HA DICTADO SENTENCIA, COMPUESTA POR SENTENCIA PARCIAL O RESOLUCION EN ESTE CASO, AMBOS QUE HA SIDO DEBIDAMENTE Se le apercibe que la parte deREGISTRADA Y ARCHIVADA mandante por mediación del EN AUTOS DONDE PODRA Lcdo. Rafael Fabre Colón, P.O. USTED ENTERARSE DETA- Box 277, Mayagüez, Puerto LLADAMENTE DE LOS TER- Rico 00681, Tel. 787-265-0334, MINOS DE LA MISMA. ESTA ha radicado la acción de epíNOTIFICACION SE PUBLICA- grafe en su contra. Copia de RA UNA SOLA VEZ EN UN PE- la demanda, emplazamientos RIODICO DE CIRCULACION y del presente edicto le ha sido GENERAL EN LA ISLA DE enviado por correo a la última PUERTO RICO, DENTRO DE dirección conocida. Pueden usLOS 10 DIAS SIGUIENTES A tedes obtener mayor informaSU NOTIFICACION. Y, SIEN- ción sobre el asunto revisando DO O REPRESENTANDO US- los autos en el Tribunal. Se le TED UNA PARTE EN EL PRO- apercibe que tiene usted un térCEDIMIENTO SUJETA A LOS mino de treinta (30) días para TERMINOS DE LA SENTEN- radicar contestación a dicha CIA, SENTENCIA PARCIAL O demanda de cobro de dinero RESOLUCION, DE LA CUAL y/o cualquier escrito que estime PUEDE ESTABLECERSE RE- usted conveniente a través del CURSO DE REVISION O APE- Sistema Unificado de Manejo y LACION DENTRO DEL TERMI- Administración de Casos (SUNO DE 30 DIAS CONTADOS A MAC), al cual puede acceder PARTIR DE LA PUBLICACION utilizando la siguiente direcPOR EDICTO DE ESTA NOTI- ción electrónica: https://unired.

FICACION, DIRIJO A USTED rarnajudicial,pr, salvo que se ESTA NOTIFICACION QUE SE represente por derecho propio, CONSIDERARA HECHA EN en cuyo caso deberá presentar LA FECHA DE LA PUBLICA- su alegación responsiva en la CION DE ESTE DICTO. COPIA Secretaría del Tribunal de epíDE ESTA NOTIFICACION HA grafe, pero que de no radicarse SIDO ARCHIVADA EN LOS escrito alguno ante el Tribunal AUTOS DE ESTE CASO, CON dentro de dicho término el TriFECHA DE 02 DE SEPTIEM- bunal procederá a ventilar el BRE DE 2020. procedimiento sin más citarle ni LIC. DE DIEGO COLLAR, ALBERTO oírle. Dada en Aguadilla, PuerDEDIEGOLAWOFFICES@GMAIL. to Rico, hoy 2 de septiembre de COM LIC. EGURROLA ALONSO, SILVIA 2020. SARAHI REYES PÉREZ, Secretaria Regional. Arlene SEGURROLFGR@YAHOO.COM Guzman Pabon, Secretaria LIC. TORO ARSUAGA, RAFAEL ANDRÉS Auxiliar del Tribunal I. RAFA@TORO-ARSUAGA.COM LEGAL NOTICE EN SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO, A 02 DE SEPTIEMBRE Estado Libre Asociado de PuerDE 2020. GRISELDA RODRI- to Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL GUEZ COLLADO, SECRETA- DE JUSTICIA Tribunal de PriRIO. POR: F/ ELSA MAGALY mera Instancia Sala Superior CANDELARIO CABRERA, SE- de BAYAMON.

(787) 743-3346

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020 GIB DEVELOPMENT, LLC DEMANDANTE Demandante v.

GDX, LOGISTICS, LLC; LUIS RAFAEL VALDES MEDINA

Demandado(a) Civil Núm. BY2020CV00208 (601). Sobre: DESAHUCIO Y COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: GDX, LOGISTICS, LLC; LUIS RAFAEL VALDES MEDINA

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 2 de septiembre de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 2 de septiembre de 2020. En BAYAMON , Puerto Rico, el 2 de septiembre de 2020. LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario(a). F/ MIRCIENID GONZALEZ TORRES, Secretario(a) Auxiliar.

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

ANTONIO J. PURAS MONSERRATE y LAURA I. BIBILONO RODRÍGUEZ Demandante,

SUCESIÓN DE CARMEN JULIA MASCARO GARCÍA compuesta por FULANO DE TAL, MENGANO DE TAL y SUTANO DE TAL y JOHN DOE

Demandados CIVIL NUM.: SJ2020CV03964.

SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE HIPOTECA Y PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMERICA EL

PRESIDENTE DE LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE PUERTO RICO.

A: SUCESIÓN DE CARMEN JULIA MASCARÓ GARCÍA compuesta por FULANO DE TAL (personas desconocida), MENGANO DE TAL (personas desconocida) y SUTANO DE TAL (personas desconocida), y JOHN DOE (personas desconocida con posible interés)

En este caso la parte demandante ha radicado Demanda para que se decrete judicialmente el saldo del pagaré hipotecario a favor del Portador, por la suma de $239,000.00 de principal con intereses al 5% anual, vencedero a la presentación, garantizado por hipoteca sobre la siguiente propiedad: URBANA: Parcela de terreno radicada en el Barrio de Santurce Norte de esta ciudad con una cabida de doscientos cincuenta y seis metros ochenta y tres centímetros (256.83) cuadrados; que colinda por su frente en línea de diez metros noventa y tres centímetros, con la Calle Hermanos Latimer, por el Sur, o sea el fondo, en línea de cuatro metros noventa y tres centímetros con terrenos de la finca principal propiedad de los hermanos Delgado y Latimer; en línea de dos metros en dirección Norte a Sur, con terrenos también propiedad de dichos hermanos Delgado y Latimer; y en línea de seis metros con terrenos de la finca principal perteneciente a los hermanos Delgado y Latimer; y por el Oeste, en línea de veinticuatro metros cuarenta y centímetros con terrenos de Victoria Odor.

Consta inscrita al folio 117 del tomo 180, finca número 7363, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, sección 1, demarcación Santurce Norte. La parte demandante alega que dicho Pagaré se ha extraviado según más detalladamente consta en la Demanda radicada que puede examinarse en la Secretaría de este Tribunal. Por tratarse de una obligación hipotecaria y pudiendo usted tener interés en este caso o quedar afectado por el remedio solicitado, se le emplaza por este edicto que se publicará una vez en un periódico de circulación diaria general de Puerto Rico y se le requiere para que radique en este Tribunal su contestación y notificación de ella a: Lcdo. Alfredo A. Infante Gutiérrez, 500 Muñoz Rivera Ave., El Centro I, Oficina 215, San Juan, PR 00918, dentro de los treinta (30)

días siguientes a la publicación de este Edicto, apercibiéndole que de no hacerlo así dentro del término indicado, el Tribunal podrá anotar su rebeldía y dictar Sentencia concediendo el remedio solicitado en la Demanda sin más citársele ni oírle. EN TESTIMONIO DE LO CUAL, expido el presente Edicto por Orden del Tribunal, bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, en San Juan, Puerto Rico, a 2 de septiembre de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Sec Regional. Ivelisse Gonzalez Nieves, Secretaria del Tribunal Conf I.

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

E.M.I. EQUITY MORTGAGE INC. Demandante V.

ANTHONY LUIS NIEVES LASALLE, ET ALS.

Demandado(a) CivilNüm.

QU2019CV00185.

Sobre: EJECUCION DE HIPOTECA “IN REM” (VIA ORDINARIA). NOTIFICACION DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: ANTHONY LUIS NIEVES LASALLE YAHAIRA JIMENEZ SOLER NIEVES-JIMENEZ, SOC LEGAL GANAN

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican Ia sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 1 de septiembre de 2020 este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de Ia misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en Ia 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 Ia Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de Ia cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de Ia publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en Ia fecha de Ia publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 2 de septiembre de 2020. En CAMUY, Puerto Rico, el 2 de septiembre de 2020. VIVIAN Y FRESSE GONZALEZ, Secretaria. SUHAIL SERRANO MOYA, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante V.

FERDINAND TORRES VIERA; JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

Demandado(a) Civil Num. SJ2020CV03514.

Sala: 901. Sobre: SUSTITUCION DE PAGARE HIPOTECARIO. NOTIFICACION DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican Ia sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO(A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 31 de agosto de 2020 este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de Ia misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en Ia 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 Ia Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de Ia cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de Ia publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en Ia fecha de Ia publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 3 de septiembre de 2020. En SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, el 3 de septiembre de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria. F/MARTHA ALMODOVAR CABRERA, Secretaria Auxiliar.

LEGAL NOTICE

Monday, September 7, 2020

LA SECRETARIA que suscribe le notifica a usted que el 3 de septiembre de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los 10 días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de 30 días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha 4 de septiembre de 2020. En San Juan, Puerto Rico, el 4 de septiembre de 2020. GRISELDA RODRIGUEZ COLLADO, Secretaria Regional. Mildred Martínez Acosta, Secretaria del Tribunal Confidencial I.

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

JUAN RAMÓN VILA LÓPEZ Demandante V.

HOUSING INVESTMENT CORPORATION; JOHN DOE & RICHARD ROE

Demandados CIVIL NÚM. 5J2020CV04542.

SOBRE: CANCELACIÓN DE PAGARÉ EXTRAVIADO. EMPLAZAMIENTO POR EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS EE.UU. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS.

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, personas desconocidas que se designan con estos nombres ficticios, que PUERTO RICO puedan ser tenedor o RECOVERY AND tenedores, o puedan tener DEVELOPMENT JV, LLC algún interés en el pagaré Demandante VS. hipotecario a que se hace JESÚS M. QUILES referencia más adelante COTTO H/N/C JMQ en el presente edicto, que LANDSCAPING se publicará una sola vez.

SERVICES

Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico TRIBUNAL GENERAL DE JUSTICIA Tribunat de Primera Instancia Sala Superior de San Juan.

Demandada CIVIL NÚM: SJ2019CV11026 (604). SOBRE: COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFICACIÓN DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: JESÚS M. QUILES COTTO H/N/C JMQ LANDSCAPING SERVICES

Se les notifica que en la Demanda radicada en el caso de epígrafe se alega que el 11 de febrero de 1977, se otorgó un pagaré a favor de Housing Investment Corporation, o a su orden, por la suma de $45,500.00 de principal, con intereses al 8%anual, y vencedero el primero 1ro de marzo

de 2006, ante el Notario Raúl J. Vilá Sellés. En garantía del pagaré antes descrito se otorgó la escritura de hipoteca número 248, en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el día 11 de febrero de 1977, ante el Notario Raúl J. Vilá Sellés, inscrita al folio 291 del tomo 1039 de Río Piedras Norte, inscripción primera, Registro de la Propiedad de San Juan, Sección II. El inmueble gravado mediante la hipoteca antes descrita es la finca 30055 al folio 179 del tomo 1490 de Río Piedras Norte, Registro de la Propiedad, Sección Segunda de San Juan. La obligación evidenciada por el pagaré antes descrito fue saldada en su totalidad. Dicho gravamen no ha podido ser cancelado por haberse extraviado el original del pagaré. El original del pagaré antes descrito no ha podido ser localizado, a pesar de las gestiones realizadas. Housing Investment Corporation es el acreedor que consta en el Registro de la Propiedad. El último tenedor conocido del pagaré antes descrito fue la parte demandante. POR LA PRESENTE se le emplaza para que presente al tribunal su alegación responsiva dentro de los 30 días de haber sido diligenciado este emplazamiento, 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 de! referido término, e! 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, !o entiende procedente.

LCDO. JAVIER MONTALVO CINTRÓN RUA NÚM. 17682 DELGADO & FERNÁNDEZ, LLC PO Box 11750, Fernández Juncos Station San Juan, Puerto Rico 00910-1750, Tel. (787) 274-1414; Fax (787) 764-8241 E-mail: jmontalvo@ delgadofernandez.com Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal, hoy 28 de agosto de 2020. Griselda Rodriguez Collado, Secretaria. Marlyn Ann Espinosa Rivera, Secretaria Servicios a Sala.

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

MTGLQ INVESTORS, L.P. Parte Demandante Vs.

ASSOCIATES

INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS CORPORATION; JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE, Como posibles tenedores desconocidos

Parte Demandada CIVIL NÚM: UT2020CV00190.

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

A: JOHN DOE Y RICHARD ROE COMO posibles tenedores desconocidos

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

Marjaliisa Colón Villanueva, al PO BOX 7970, Ponce, P.R. 00732; Teléfono: 787-8434168. En dicha demanda se tramita un procedimiento de cancelación de pagare extraviado.

Se alega en dicho procedimiento que se extravió un pagaré a favor de Associates lnternational Holdings Corporation, por la suma de setenta y cinco mil dólares (75,000.00), con intereses al siete punto cuatro tres cinco por ciento (7.435%) anual, vencedero el diez (10) de julio dos mil treinta y siete (2037), según consta de la escritura número quinientos seis (506), otorgada en Lares, Puerto Rico, el dia cinco (5) de junio de dos mil siete (2007) ante el notario público Félix R. Figueroa Cabán y cuya obligación hipotecaria encuentra inscrita al folio veintidós {22) del tomo trescientos setenta y cuatro (374) de Lares, finca número diecisiete mil ochocientos ochenta y ocho (17,888), inscripción cuarta (4ta). Que grava la propiedad que se describe a continuación: RUSTICA: Solar número dos (2) radicado en el Barrio Pueblo del término municipal de Lares, Puerto Rico, compuesta de cero punto uno siete cuatro cuatro dos siete (0.174427) cuerdas, equivalentes a seiscientos ochenta y cinco punto cincuenta y siete (685.57) metros cuadrados. En lindes por el NORTE, con el solar uno (1) segregado y uso público; por el SUR, con remanente de la finca principal; por el ESTE, con remanente de la finca principal y uso público; y

por el OESTE, con remanente de la finca principal y solar número uno (1) segregado.

Inscrita al folio veintidós (22) del tomo trescientos setenta y cuatro (374) de Lares, finca número diecisiete mil ochocientos ochenta y ocho (17,888).

Registro de la Propiedad de Bayamón Utuado. SE LES APERCIBE que, de no hacer sus alegaciones responsivas a la demanda dentro del término aquí dispuesto, se les anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia, concediéndose el remedio solicitado en la Demanda, sin más citarle ni oírle . Expedido bajo mi firma y sello del Tribunal en Lares, Puerto Rico, a 28 de agosto de 2020. DIANE ÁLVARVEZ VILLANUEVA, Secretaria Regional I. MARILLIAM PEREZ RIVERA, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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

DLJ MORTGAGE CAPITAL INC. Demandante vs.

CMFC, INC., CITIMORTGAGE, INC., FULANO DE TAL Y FULANA DE TAL, posibles tenedores desconocidos del pagaré extraviado

Demandados CIVIL NUM. CG20190V01347.

SOBRE: CANCELACION DE PAGARE HIPOTECARIO EXTRAVIADO. EDICTO. ESTADOS UNIDOS DE AMÉRICA EL PRESIDENTE DE LOS E.E.U.U. EL ESTADO LIBRE ASOCIADO DE P.R. SS.

A: CMFC, FULANA DE TAL Y FULANO DE TAL, como posibles tenedores desconocidos del pagaré extraviado:

Se les notifica por este medio que en el caso del epígrafe se solicita la cancelación del siguiente pagaré: El día 27 de abril de 2007 en Caguas, Puerto Rico, se suscribió un pagaré hipotecario a favor de CMFC, Inc., o a su orden, por la suma de $234,600.00, devengando intereses al 7.75000% anual, vencedero el I de mayo de 2037, testimonio número 3993, constituida mediante la escritura número 66, ante el notario Fernando L. Meléndez López inscrita al folio 121 del tomo 394 (Ágora) de Gurabo, finca número 14693. La hipoteca fue constituida sobre la siguiente propiedad (en adelante “Propiedad”): RUSTICA: Parcela de terreno localizada en e! Barrio Navarro del término municipal de Gurabo, Puerto Rico, identificada con el Número 168 en el Plano de Inscripción de la Urbanización Veredas, con una cabida superficial de 362.50 metros cuadrados, equivalen-

25

tes a 0.0922 cuerdas, en lindes por el NORTE, en una distancia de 14.50 metros con el solar número 175; por el SUR, en una distancia de 14.50 con la Calle número 11; por el ESTE, en una distancia de 25.00 metros con el solar número 167; y por el OESTE, en una distancia de 25.00 metros con el solar número 169. Enclava una casa. FINCA: 14693 INSCRITA AL FOLIO 121 DEL TOMO 394 (ÁGORA) DE GURABO, SECCION SEGUNDA, REGISTRO DE LA PROPIEDAD DE CAGUAS. Se advierte que si no contesta(n) la demanda dentro del término de treinta (30) días de la publicación de este Edicto, se le anotará la rebeldía y se dictará Sentencia en su contra, concediendo el remedio solicitado, sin mas citarle ni oírle Deberá radicar el original de la contestación a la demanda 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 secretaria del tribunal y sala que se menciona en el epígrafe de este edicto con copia a la parte aquí demandante a través delJa Lcda. Edmy

Cortijo Villock, Tromberg Law Group, P.A., 1515 South Federal Highway, Suite 100, Boca Ratón, FL 33432, teléfono 561338-4101. Expido este edicto bajo mi firma y sello de este Tribunal, hoy 25 de agosto de 2020. CARMEN ANA PEREIRA ORTIZ, SECRETARIA DEL TRIBUNAL. ENEIDA ARROYO VELEZ, Secretaria Auxiliar.

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

ORIENTAL BANK Demandante vs.

EDWIN F. ROSARIO COLON Y OTROS

Demandados Caso Civil Núm.

TB2019CV00652. Sobre: COBRO DE DINERO. NOTIFICACION DE SENTENCIA POR EDICTO.

A: EDWIN F. ROSARIO COLON, LUZ RODRIGUEZ GONZALEZ Y LA SOCIEDAD LEGAL DE GANANCIALES COMPUESTA POR AMBOS

(Nombre de las partes a las que se le notifican la sentencia por edicto) EL SECRETARIO (A) que suscribe le notifica a usted que el

San Juan The

28 de AGOSTO de 2020, este Tribunal ha dictado Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución en este caso, que ha sido debidamente registrada y archivada en autos donde podrá usted enterarse detalladamente de los términos de la misma. Esta notificación se publicará una sola vez en un periódico de circulación general en la Isla de Puerto Rico, dentro de los (10) días siguientes a su notificación. Y, siendo o representando usted una parte en el procedimiento sujeta a los términos de la Sentencia, Sentencia Parcial o Resolución, de la cual puede establecerse recurso de revisión o apelación dentro del término de (30) días contados a partir de la publicación por edicto de esta notificación, dirijo a usted esta notificación que se considerará hecha en la fecha de la publicación de este edicto. Copia de esta notificación ha sido archivada en los autos de este caso, con fecha de 1 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020. En TOA ALTA. Puerto Rico, el 1 de SEPTIEMBRE de 2020, cc: LCDO. JAIME RUIZ SALDAÑA-PMB 450. 400 CALLE CALAF. SAN JUAN. PUERTO RICO, 00918-1314 LCDA. LAURA I. SANTA SANCHEZ, Secretario (a) Regional.

LIRIAM M HERNANDEZ OTERO, Sec Auxiliar.

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26

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

The US Open descends into pandemic precaution chaos

By MATHEW FUTTERMAN and BEN ROTHENBERG

F

or two weeks, all seemed well with the plan to hold the U.S. Open in New York just a few months after the city had become the epicenter for the coronavirus in the Western world.

With a handful of notable exceptions, the best players in the world began arriving in mid-August, nearly all of them housed at a Long Island hotel, where they were supposed to comply with strict social distancing rules as they played a warm-up tournament and prepared to play the U.S. Open itself at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens.

The plan that leaders of the United States Tennis Association had developed closely with city and state public health officials — including closing the tournament site to spectators, regular testing, education, behavior monitoring and contact tracing — appeared to be working. And there were protocols in place for what would happen if a player tested positive — protocols that players had agreed upon.

Organizers thought they had all the bases covered.

Then, two days before the U.S. Open, Benoît Paire of France, a 31-year-old veteran known for his smooth strokes and his stylishly bushy beard, tested positive for the coronavirus.

The series of events that has ensued, including revisions to the protocols, disgruntled players confined to their hotel rooms, and contradictory rulings from different public health departments, led to matches being delayed and canceled at the last minute and injected chaos into one of the world’s highest-profile sporting events as the tournament heads into its climactic second week.

Electronic contact tracing revealed that Paire had been in close contact for an extended period of time — a card game at the hotel and possibly other socializing — with seven players, most of them French, including Kristina Mladenovic.

A day after two top men’s singles players had to wait 2 1/2 hours to find out whether they would be able to take the court, tennis officials had to eliminate the top-seeded women’s doubles team of Mladenovic and Timea Babos. Health officials in Nassau County, where the players’ hotel is, decided that allowing Mladenovic to play would violate the county’s protocols, even though Mladenovic had been participating in the

Kristina Mladenovic of France and her doubles partner were disqualified from the United States Open because of Mladenovic’s contact with a different player who had tested positive for the coronavirus. tournament all week.

The USTA, which was caught off guard

by Nassau County’s sudden involvement in the tournament’s protocols, said in a statement that it was obligated to comply with the county’s ruling that all of those who had been in close contact with Paire would have to remain alone in their hotel rooms through a quarantine period that ends next Saturday.

It was the third time in less than a week, and the second time in 24 hours, that the rules for players exposed to the virus had changed.

A Nassau County official speaking on behalf of its health department said it became aware of Paire’s positive test in recent days and was treating the players like any other person in the county who has had direct contact with someone who has tested positive for the virus. The official, who said he could not be quoted by name but declined to give a reason, was not able to explain why the county waited five days after Paire was removed from the draw to enforce its stringent rules on the quarantine.

“We always knew we were going to have to stay vigilant and monitor everything every single day, because we have learned how quickly things can change in this COVID-19 world that we are now living in,” said Chris Widmaier, chief spokesman for the USTA. Those words were likely to be little comfort to Mladenovic, who said earlier in

the week that the tournament had become a “nightmare” for her.

“I have only one desire, and that’s to get my freedom back, and even that we don’t have yet,” Mladenovic said in French, fighting back tears, after she lost her secondround singles match last Wednesday.

Mladenovic has maintained that her exposure to Paire consisted of playing cards with him and other players around a large table for roughly 40 minutes and that everyone had been wearing masks. None of the other players has tested positive.

Mladenovic and her representatives did not respond to messages Saturday.

Before the U.S. Open began, Alexis Colvin, an orthopedist who is the medical director for the USTA, said the tournament would be a test of how well players could adapt to changes in the middle of a competition.

Colvin, who worked in a coronavirus ward earlier in the year, said that because knowledge about the virus prevention measures changes seemingly each week, it was entirely possible that rules would change during the tournament.

“Our protocols are dictated by New York state and the Centers for Disease Control, so if they change then we change,” she said.

And yet, even Colvin could not have foreseen the shifting rules and the subsequent confusion that local health departments have

caused.

Widmaier said that during the summer, the USTA had made it clear to players, their representatives and leaders of both the Association of Tennis Professionals and the Women’s Tennis Association, which represent players and the leaders of tennis tournaments, that players who tested positive would be withdrawn from the tournament and would have to go into quarantine in New York. Players who had come into contact with any player who tested positive would be subject to local health regulations, too.

However, Widmaier said, the organization did not have a final plan for what would happen to players who continued to test negative after they had been exposed to players who tested positive. Also, while the USTA worked closely with health officials in New York City and with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, it did not work closely with officials in Nassau County, even though the player hotels are there.

Last weekend, after Paire’s positive test, USTA officials scrambled to produce a new set of rules for players who had had extended contact with him but whose tests were negative. The rules, which received the approval of health officials in New York City, included daily testing and isolation from the rest of the players, including separate buses, use of hotel stairs instead of elevators and no access to common areas at the National Tennis Center. To remain in the tournament, players had to sign an agreement saying they would adhere with the rules.

Those rules remained in place until Friday, when health officials in Nassau County distributed notices at the player hotels spelling out their decision that the players who had been exposed to Paire would be required to remain in their rooms until the end of their quarantine period next Saturday.

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The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

27

Islanders defeat Flyers and head to conference finals for first time since 1993

By CURTIS RUSH

G

ame 7s have a magic all their own. They are where memories are made, bringing out the kid in every NHL player who dared to dream about a winner-take-all moment.

“When you do everything as a young kid, playing on the streets, you’re playing Game 7,” Islanders coach Barry Trotz said before his team shut out the Philadelphia Flyers, 4-0, on Saturday, advancing to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time in 27 years. “There’s going to be a hero tonight, no question.”

The hero was defenseman Scott Mayfield, along with the entire Islanders defense, which accounted for two goals and limited the Flyers to 16 shots on goal.

The Islanders’ first two goals took the starch out of the Flyers, who had fought gamely to overcome a threegames-to-one series deficit and force Game 7.

Backup goaltender Thomas Greiss also made a heroic stand. He is the second goaltender in franchise history to record a shutout in a Game 7. Glenn Resch did so in the 1975 quarterfinals against the Pittsburgh Penguins.

With 6 minutes, 55 seconds to go in regulation, the Flyers lifted goalie Carter Hart for an extra attacker, opening the way for the Islanders’ Anthony Beauvillier to score in an empty net.

The Islanders will meet the Tampa Bay Lightning in a best-of-seven series that starts today in Edmonton, Alberta.

Mayfield and the 37-year-old defenseman Andy Greene put the Islanders up, 2-0, and forward Brock Nelson gave the Islanders a three-goal cushion going into the third period.

“Guys work their whole life to get this opportunity,’’ Nelson said after the game. “The fan base is passionate and always talks about the wins in the 80s and the guys that won Cups there. And you can see how much it means to them and the community. Those guys are heroes, and everybody in the room is striving to be part of history like that.”

Mayfield’s first-period goal, on only the Islanders’ second shot of the game, was his first career postseason goal in his 26th game.

It was also redemption for his bad luck in Game 6, in which the Flyers scored the double-overtime winner after Mayfield was left defenseless in his own end without a stick, which had broken moments before.

The decision to start Greiss was a calculated risk for Trotz because Greiss had seen action only twice before this postseason. But he had been solid in one relief effort in Game 2 of the second-round series and again in a Game 4 victory.

The Islanders needed someone to be as dependable as the Flyers’ Hart had been at the other end. The

The Islanders celebrated their win over the Philadelphia Flyers in Toronto on Saturday.

Islanders had lost two straight overtime games, squandering a three-games-to-one series lead, and Semyon Varlamov had allowed five goals on only 31 shots in Game 6 for a substandard .839 save percentage.

Hart was peppered with 53 shots in Game 6 and allowed only four goals, giving him an outstanding .925 save percentage.

But in defense of Varlamov in this series, the Flyers scored a number of goals on shots from the point that deflected in unpredictable angles.

Both the Flyers, who were the top seed in the postseason, and the Islanders entered the game with 10-5 playoff records, with three of the Islanders’ losses coming to Philadelphia in overtime.

The first goal of the game is important because goaltending and defensive hockey win in the playoffs, when the checking becomes tighter.

But until Saturday, the first period had been a dry patch for the Islanders. They had failed to score in the first period through four straight games earlier in the series.

A couple of smart cross-ice passing plays played a key role for the Islanders. Derick Brassard, who had scored twice in two previous games, sent a perfect cross-ice pass to Greene when Hart was caught out of

position. Josh Bailey, who has a team-leading 14 assists, was the setup man for Nelson on a well-executed two-on-one that put the Islanders up, 3-0.

The Islanders were facing adversity for the first time in the postseason, and they also had the weight of history on them.

They were trying to match the 1993 Islanders team, coached by Hall of Famer Al Arbour. That team defeated two-time defending champion Pittsburgh Penguins in Game 7 with David Volek playing the hero, scoring the winner in overtime. The Islanders went on to lose to the Montreal Canadiens in the conference finals, four games to one.

This Islanders team is similar to the 1993 Islanders in that neither team was built around individual stars.

The Arbour-coached team had good shooters in Ray Ferraro, Steve Thomas and Pierre Turgeon, a hard-hitting defenseman in Darius Kasparaitis, and adequate goaltending from Glenn Healy. These Islanders play a grinding style and depend on tight defensive structure to wear down opponents.

“We are a team,” Trotz said. “We don’t have a lot of those top-end guys. We’re built more as a four-line team. Everybody has to contribute or we can’t have success.”

28

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

Authentic wins the Kentucky Derby, run without fans

By JOE DRAPE

N

o one really expected a horse race.

The 146th running of the Kentucky Derby, shadowed by protests over racism and police violence in Louisville and beyond, and by the sheer anxiety over the coronavirus pandemic, was expected to be a coronation for a colt named Tiz the Law, who was headed for a credible Triple Crown bid.

Instead, Tiz the Law, who became sort of a symbol for everyday folks, with his workmanlike performances in winning six of seven races in this upended Triple Crown season, was beaten by a colt named Authentic.

It’s that simple.

With Manny Franco in the saddle, Tiz the Law squared his shoulders and turned for home but came up a length and a quarter short of Authentic, who basically led every step of the way.

There was no roar of the crowd. Because of the pandemic, the grandstand was devoid of the more than 150,000 people who normally would have attended.

But Authentic’s victory gave Hall of Fame jockey John Velázquez his third Kentucky Derby win. He won the 2011 edition with Animal Kingdom and repeated in 2017 with Always Dreaming.

The victory gave Velázquez his 200th Grade I victory, making him only the third rider in history to reach that milestone.

“I want to cry,” he said shortly after crossing the finish line.

As he spoke, protests over racial injustice outside the track faded; they were peaceful despite moments of tension.

Before the race began, hundreds of people calling for racial justice circled Churchill Downs, and several members of a Black armed militia knelt in front of Louisville police officers stationed inside a fence erected around the track. An airplane flew over the track with a banner that said “Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor,” referring to the unarmed Black woman who was shot in her home

by Louisville police in March and who has become a focal point of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Authentic, left, won the Kentucky Derby, upsetting the favorite, Tiz the Law. Derby day was the 101st day of protests in the city over the death of Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician who was shot and killed in her home by detectives serving a “noknock” warrant. As the race began, hundreds of protesters lined the chain link fence on the track perimeter, shouting at dozens of police officers equipped with riot gear.

After the race, the protesters left Churchill Downs and continued to march.

Such was the tension and symbolism in an afternoon of racing. The steady roar of law enforcement helicopters was no substitute for the crowds — men with pockets squares and women in fancy hats — who normally descend on this little patch of horse racing heaven to celebrate some aspects of the Old South.

Churchill Downs was docile enough to put its common and most familiar foot forward for America’s most famous race.

With Authentic, trainer Bob Baffert won his sixth Derby and tied Ben Jones for the most victories in the race’s history. He did so after another of his horses, Thousand Words, acted up before the race and was scratched by racetrack veterinarians.

But the fact that Baffert is a Hall of Famer, one who was recently suspended

by the Arkansas Racing Commission for 15 days and who vacated the victories of two of his horses after they tested positive for a banned substance, puts the seamier side of horse racing in the spotlight once more.

Baffert was emotional in victory, shedding tears in post-race interviews not only for Thousand Words’ thwarted Derby start but for his longtime assistant Jimmy Barnes, who injured his hand while trying to settle Thousand Words.

“I just wish Jimmy was here with me — he’s one of the greatest assistants of all time, and if there was a Hall of Fame for assistant trainers, he’d be in it,” he said.

But Baffert has also caught the attention of regulators over the years. The Arkansas violations were his 26th and 27th drug violations, according to public records compiled by the Association of Racetrack Commissioners International and the Thoroughbred Regulatory Rulings database maintained by the Jockey Club.

In addition, the Baffert-trained Justify failed a drug test after winning the Santa Anita Derby, nearly a month before the 2018 Kentucky Derby. Justify wound up winning the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont that year for the Triple Crown.

The rule on the books when Justify failed the test required that the horse be disqualified, forfeiting both his prize money from the Santa Anita Derby and his entry into the Kentucky Derby.

California racing officials investigated the failed test for four months, allowing Justify to keep competing long enough to win the Triple Crown. In August, after Justify’s breeding rights had been sold for $60 million, the California Horse Racing Board — whose chairman at the time, Chuck Winner, had employed Baffert to train his horses — disposed of the inquiry in a rare closed-door session.

The board ruled that Justify’s positive test for the banned drug scopolamine had been the result of “environmental contamination,” not intentional doping.

Baffert has denied any wrongdoing.

California regulators, after a lawsuit from Mick Ruis, owner of the secondplace horse in the Santa Anita Derby, have agreed to hold a hearing this month on whether his colt, Bolt d’Oro, should be declared the winner and awarded the $600,000 first-place check.

At 82, the trainer of Tiz the Law, Barclay Tagg, would have become the oldest trainer to win a Derby if his colt could have gotten by Authentic. It wasn’t to be.

“We didn’t win it,” he said. “Baffert’s hard to beat.”

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

29

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

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

Crossword

Answers on page 30

Wordsearch

GAMES

HOROSCOPE Aries

30

(Mar 21-April 20)

A close neighbour will fill you in on all the local gossip, most of which you will take with a pinch of salt. Friends enjoy your company and you will never run out of conversation.

You and a partner are getting on better than ever before and the two of you will talk long into the night.

Taurus

(April 21-May 21)

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

(June 22-July 23)

The San Juan Daily Star

Monday, September 7, 2020

Even if it means forcing yourself to overcome feelings of shyness, don’t be reluctant to ask for help. You’re doing all you can to make things work. You’ve always been incredibly efficient but that doesn’t mean you should do the lion’s share of the work. Make a special effort to overcome a personal challenge.

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Talking to the right people along with some online research will provide you with the information you need to complete a project. You will recall conversations from the past that could help you in something you are doing now. If someone has been through a similar situation, their advice could turn out to be worth its weight in gold.

Scorpio

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

If an offer or opportunity sounds intriguing, don’t hesitate to find out more. Even if you weren’t thinking about your long-term future, should a chance to advance your job prospects come your way, it would be wise to give this some serious thought. Think before you speak at an important meeting.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

High levels of charm make you extremely popular. Are you single and looking for love?

Your charisma is at an all-time high making it easy for you to attract the attention of a mysterious newcomer. Time spent with your family and friends will be special and rewarding.

Trust your instincts if you get a feeling that someone is trying to deceive or mislead you.

Don’t feel guilty because you’re suspicious of a friend’s words or actions. First impressions will be correct even if someone tries to tell you that you are picking something up wrongly. They are the ones who are getting it wrong.

Cancer

Capricorn

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Interactions in the workplace is the key to business success. Getting on the right side of people in power will bring bigger and better assignments your way. If you’re thinking about making a big change, listen to what a close relative has to say before jumping in.

Stay with what’s strictly practical if you want to complete a job as soon as possible. Experimenting with different ideas will be a waste of time and energy. Cutting corners is not recommended either. An adventurous friend or colleague will want to take a risk. You don’t have to follow their foolish example.

Leo

Aquarius

(July 24-Aug 23)

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

You thrive on challenge but you need to be careful about how much you take on. You can’t possibly expect to achieve everything on your own. In some areas, the stronger the team, the more chance you have of succeeding. It’s a time to accept all help that is offered.

You might feel a strong link with a spiritual friend. You will enjoy discussing subjects like faith, art and nature. Discussions will be deep and meaningful, causing you to reconsider your beliefs. Assumptions you have held since childhood no longer mean the same to you.

You’re in touch with your intuition.

Virgo

Pisces

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

A decision will not be made without you putting a lot of thought into it. You might make a list of pros and cons to make sure you are making the right choice. The care you put into this will be well worth it as you should be delighted by the outcome.

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

Some great opportunities will come through other people. Even if you had hoped to get some peace to think over an important matter, there is too much happening around you.

Someone really needs you and you will benefit from news they want to share. Fight that desire to hide yourself away.

Answers to the Sudoku and Crossword on page 29

Monday, September 7, 2020

31

CARTOONS

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

For Better or for Worse

The San Juan Daily Star

Ziggy

SEMANA, INC • Jueves, 3 de septiembre de 2020 Monday, September 7, 2020 32EDITORIAL

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