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Puerto Ricans, upset at botched primary, demand answers

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Puerto Ricans demanded answers Monday after botched primaries forced officials to reschedule voting at centers lacking ballots, an unprecedented decision being called a blow to the U.S. territory’s democracy.

The island’s elections commission remained silent as anger and embarrassment spread across Puerto Rico one day after hundreds of voters were turned away from shuttered centers that for unknown reasons received ballots several hours late or never received them at all.

It was the first time primaries have been halted and led many to worry that it has cracked Puerto Ricans’ confidence in their government and could affect the outcome of upcoming November general elections on an island with a voter participation rate of nearly 70%.

“That scar will never leave Puerto Rico,” said political analyst Domingo Emanuelli. “It was a hold-up of the country’s democracy.”

Gov. Wanda Vázquez and other officials from Puerto Rico’s two main parties demanded the resignation of Juan Ernesto Dávila, president of the election commission. He declined comment via a spokeswoman but told NotiUno radio station that he would resign once the primaries are over, saying it would be irresponsible to step down before that.

Meanwhile, questions about why Puerto Rico held a primary if ballots were not available and how it was possible that no one knew about the problem until it was too late remained unanswered.

The electoral commission officials for the pro-statehood New Progressive Party and the main opposition Popular Democratic Party did not return calls or messages for comment.

The primary is one of the most closely watched races in the island’s history since it pits two candidates who served as replacement governors following last year’s political turmoil. Vázquez faces Pedro Pierluisi, who represented Puerto Rico in Congress from 2009 to 2017.

Pierluisi briefly served as governor after Gov. Ricardo Rosselló resigned in August 2019 following widespread street protests over a profanity-laced chat that was leaked and government corruption. But Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court ruled that Vázquez, then the justice secretary, was constitutionally next in line because there was no secretary of state.

Meanwhile, the main opposition Popular Democratic Party, which supports Puerto Rico’s current political status as a U.S. territory, is holding a primary for the first time in its 82-year history. Three people are vying to become governor — San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, known for her public spats with U.S. President Donald Trump following the devastation of Hurricane Maria; Puerto Rico Sen. Eduardo Bhatia; and Carlos Delgado, mayor of the northwest coastal town of Isabela.

A federal control board that oversees Puerto Rico’s finances dismissed accusations that the electoral commission did not have enough funding, saying it approved all of its funding requests.

“The disruptions ... are the result (of) inefficient organization at an agency that only two weeks ago struggled to procure the printing of ballots for an election that was originally supposed to take place on June 7,” the board said in a statement. “The State Elections Commission has sufficient money, and it has the more than enough staff to perform the one task it is charged with.”

While another primary is scheduled for Aug. 16, some expect lawsuits and legal loopholes to potentially upset those plans.

Edgardo Román, president of the Bar Association of Puerto Rico, said the situation is in a legally gray area since it was never contemplated. A new date has to be set for those who didn’t get a chance to vote because the ballots never arrived, he said, but it’s less clear what will happen to those who didn’t return to centers to vote because they didn’t find out in time that the ballots eventually arrived.

“Everything has been rather abrupt,” he said. “We have had the worse electoral experience in the history of Puerto Rico.”

At least one voter filed a lawsuit against the commission and the electoral officials of the two main parties late Sunday via the American Civil Liberties Union. Pierluisi also filed a lawsuit against the commission and the two officials as he rejected its decision to hold another primary next Sunday.

The political upheaval was demoralizing to some, but Gireliz Zambrana, a 31-year-old federal employee who didn’t get a chance to vote on Sunday, said he would try again on Aug. 16 even though he is frustrated and said what happened is irrational.

He stressed that Puerto Rico’s situation had to change: the island is still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria and a series of strong earthquakes amid a pandemic and a 13-year economic recession.

“One has to go out and vote,” he said. “The only way to fix all of this is kicking people out.”

Azar visit to Taiwan is fresh thorn in prickly US-China ties

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — The visit by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to Taiwan this week comes amid mounting tensions between Washington and Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its own territory to be annexed by force if necessary.

From the South China Sea to TikTok, Hong Kong and trade, China and the U.S. find themselves at loggerheads just months ahead of the American presidential election. In a throwback to the Cold War, the two ordered tit-for-tat closures of consulates in Houston and Chengdu and rhetorical sniping is now a daily occurrence.

Washington potentially exacerbated those frictions by sending Azar to Taiwan, making him the highest-level U.S. official to visit the self-governing island democracy since formal diplomatic relations were severed in 1979 in deference to China,

Beijing has been ratcheting up pressure on Taiwan, but that’s just one area in which its increasingly assertive foreign policy and the accompanying push-back from Washington have taxed diplomacy on both sides.

Washington drew Beijing’s ire last month when it parted with years of ambiguity by explicitly denying most of China’s claims in the strategically vital South China Sea. China says it owns the waterway and that activity in the area by the U.S. Navy, including sailing ships close to Chinese-controlled islands, threatens regional peace and stability.

Other disputes center on economic and cultural issues.

A two-year-old tariff war has buttressed U.S. actions targeting Chinese institutions and officials. Washington has been campaigning to exclude Chinese telecoms giant Huawei from the U.S. and its allies, a push China sees as a bare-knuckled attempt to restrain its development as a global technology power.

The U.S. says Huawei is beholden to China’s ruling Communist Party and threatens to compromise personal data and the integrity of the information systems in the companies in which it operates. China says there is no proof of that.

President Donald Trump stepped-up the technology confrontation on Thursday with an executive order banning dealings with the Chinese owners of consumer apps TikTok and WeChat, possibly leading to their becoming unavailable in the lucrative U.S. market.

The U.S. has sanctioned Chinese companies and officials over the persecution of Muslims in the northwestern region of Xinjiang and has now turned its eye toward stricter Chinese control in Hong Kong. As Azar was preparing to meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on Monday, police arrested newspaper publisher and leading opposition figure Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong as part of a crackdown on voices questioning Beijing’s policies toward the former British colony, now a semi-autonomous Chinese city.

Washington has moved to withdraw trading and other privileges granted to Hong Kong in response to China’s imposition of a sweeping national security law seen as an attack on free speech and political activism. China has denounced such actions as infringing on its domestic political affairs and Beijing-backed officials sanctioned by Washington, including the city’s leader Carrie Lam, appeared over the weekend to laugh-off the penalties.

Human rights complaints are a long-standing source of tension between the sides, and Trump has added to them with repeated allegations that China covered-up the initial outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

The accumulated accusations against Beijing have observers saying Trump is hoping mistrust of China will boost his re-election chances come November. Democratic Party rival Joseph Biden has substantial foreign policy experience and has spent time with China’s leader Xi Jinping, but underlying differences between the sides are expected to continue no matter who wins the election.

Beijing has protested Azar’s visit as a betrayal of U.S. commitments not to have official contact with the island. Azar’s visit was facilitated by the 2018 passage of the Taiwan Travel Act, which encouraged Washington to send higher-level officials to Taiwan after decades during which such contacts were rare.

Warmer relations with Taiwan are largely a result of strong bipartisan support in Congress, but also appear to show how the Trump administration is willing to defy Beijing’s threats and promote an alternative to Chinese Communist Party authoritarianism.

At the start of Monday’s meeting with Tsai, Azar said the island’s success in dealing with COVID-19 was a “tribute to the open, transparent, democratic nature of Taiwan’s society and culture.”

An island of 23 million people, Taiwan moved swiftly and aggressively to contain the coronavirus and has recorded just 277 reported cases and seven deaths from the illness.

Since taking office in in 2016, Tsai has angered Beijing with her refusal to recognize China’s claim to the island. Beijing has in turn cut contact with Tsai and brought increasing diplomatic, economic and military pressure against her, including by poaching away several of its remaining diplomatic allies and excluding Taiwan from international gatherings including the World Health Assembly.

Such moves have increased already considerable bipartisan sympathy for Taipei in Washington and prompted new measures to strengthen governmental and military ties.

Azar’s visit will put further pressure on China-U.S. ties, but won’t be seen as entirely unprecedented by China’s leaders, said Shi Yinhong, an expert on international relations at Beijing’s Renmin University

“Of course, there will be very negative impact on China-U.S. relations, especially under the circumstances that China and the U.S. have fallen into confrontation in almost all areas,” Shi said.

Beijing will respond with diplomatic protests and will seek to prevent the further expansion of relations between Taipei and Washington, Shi said.

Azar’s visit “is serious, but it is not extraordinary,” Shi said.

Global shares push higher on stimulus moves, US jobs data

Shares advanced Monday in Europe and Asia after President Donald Trump issued executive orders to provide tax relief and stopgap unemployment benefits for Americans hit by the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

Investors are watching for further developments on stimulus for the U.S. economy and on trade tensions between Beijing and Washington. Trade talks are planned for Friday, to be held virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Germany’s DAX was flat at 12,673.25 while the CAC 40 in France added 0.5% to 4,911.65. Britain’s FTSE 100 picked up 0.3% to 6,050.82. The future for the S&P 500 was flat, at 3,345.80 while the future contract for the Dow industrials gained 0.2% to 27,389.00.

“It has been an unusually risk-friendly start to the Monday proceedings, but there is still a lot of wood to be chopped on the U.S. stimulus deal, while Aug. 15 trade talks loom ominously,” Stephen Innes of AxiCorp said in a commentary.

Stock prices fell in Hong Kong after the authorities arrested pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai and some of his associates on suspicion of collusion with foreign powers.

The Hang Seng index dropped 0.6% to 24,377.43.

Lai was arrested Monday under the city’s national security law and posts on Twitter showed him being taken away by police, as dozens of uniformed police searched the headquarters of his newspaper, Apple Daily.

The national security law that came into effect June 30 is widely seen as a means to curb dissent after anti-government protests rocked Hong Kong last year. It has raised questions over whether and to what extent Communist Party leaders in Beijing will respect the “one-party, two-systems” arrangement promised to the former British colony for a half-century after China took control of the semi-autonomous in 1997.

Elsewhere in Asia, South Korea’s Kospi jumped 1.5% to 2,386.38 and the S&P/ASX 200 in Australia surged 1.8% to 6,110.20. The Shanghai Composite index advanced 0.8% to 3,379.25.

Shares also rose in Taiwan, India and Thailand.

China reported its consumer price index rose to 2.7% in July from 2.5% in June as flooding disrupted farming across much of the country, pushing food prices higher. But producer prices and core inflation, which exclude food and energy prices, fell to a ten-year low of 0.5%, reflecting continued weakness amid the pandemic.

Sentiment on Wall Street was lifted Friday by positive U.S. jobs data, with U.S. employers adding nearly 1.8 million jobs last month, about 185,000 more than economists had forecast.

The S&P 500 inched up 0.1% to 3,351.28 to eke out a sixth straight gain on Friday. It is within 1% of its record high set in February.

But uncertainty overhangs the markets, with the total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. surpassing 5 million. Technology stocks have taken a hit as investors fret that China could retaliate for President Donald Trump’s latest escalation against Chinese tech companies.

With Republicans and Democrats in Congress reportedly far apart late last week on stimulus legislation, Trump issued a set of four executive orders.

They call for:

—Continued payments of up to $400 a week of supplemental federal unemployment benefits for millions of Americans out of work during the outbreak.

—A payroll tax deferral that would allow employers to defer collecting the employee portion of the payroll tax, including the 6.2% Social Security tax on wages, effective Aug. 1 through the end of the year.

—The Treasury and Housing and Urban Development departments to find funds to help people struggling to pay their rent.

—Extension of a moratorium on student loans backed by the federal government that would have expired on Sept. 30 and that also forgave interest on the deferred payments.

Analysts questioned the impact of the orders, which appear certain to face legal challenges. Democrats called the move a pre-election ploy that would burden cash-strapped states, which may be expected to pick up more of the tab for unemployment benefits.

Trump issued the orders after congressional talks broke down. Democrats initially sought a $3.4 trillion package, but said they lowered their demand to $2 trillion. Republicans had proposed a $1 trillion plan.

Both the White House and congressional Democrats indicated Sunday they wanted to resume negotiations, but no talks were scheduled.

With the Nov. 3 election approaching, the White House is nervously watching signs that the economic recovery is slowing down as the coronavirus surges.

In other trading Monday, U.S. benchmark crude oil gained 62 cents to $41.84 per barrel. On Friday, it gave up 73 cents to $41.22 per barrel..

Brent crude, the international standard for pricing, added 47 cents to $44.87 per barrel.

The U.S. dollar rose to 105.96 Japanese yen from 105.92 yen. The euro slipped to $1.1772 from $1.1789.