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A Commonwealth in Crisis

On Sunday, Puerto Rico will likely default again on some of its debts, which now total over $70 billion.

It is an entity that is often almost completely at the whim of Congress, the most dysfunctional body in national politics today.

Trump Lashes Out at Puerto Rico Mayor Who Criticized Storm Response

President Trump lashed out at the mayor of San Juan on Saturday for criticizing his administration’s efforts to help Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, accusing her of “poor leadership” and implying that the people of the devastated island were not doing enough to help themselves.

As emergency workers and troops struggled to restore basic services in a commonwealth with no electricity and limited fuel and water, Mr. Trump spent the day at his New Jersey golf club, blasting out Twitter messages defending his response to the storm and repeatedly assailing the capital’s mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, and the news media.

Thousands of people are fleeing Puerto Rico as the island remains without power and the death toll continues to climb more than a month after Hurricane Maria. Even for those who can afford plane tickets and get to the airport, there’s another hurdle: evacuating with pets.  Leaving the island with animals in tow has become a huge challenge, said Sarah Barnett of the Humane Society of the United States, which has workers on the ground in Puerto Rico. The pet owners Barnett has spoken with have been “hysterical” with worry, she said.

Some pet owners stayed, remaining in dire conditions to care for animals. Others had to make gut-wrenching decisions. Claudia, a single mother who left for North Carolina with her baby and two dogs, left her other three dogs with a friend. She’s now desperately trying to bring those dogs to the mainland, too.

“They’re inundated with people wanting to fly their animals out in cargo,” Barnett said. American Airlines is accepting a limited number of pets per flight as checked baggage, and United is transporting animals through its PetSafe program.  Delta did not reply to a query about whether it is flying pets in cargo, though it previously waived fees for pets flying in the cabin from Puerto Rico. JetBlue and Southwest never transport pets in the cargo hold, though they both fly a limited number of small pets in the main cabin. A JetBlue spokesperson told HuffPost the airline has waived all in-cabin pet fees for flights out of Puerto Rico through Nov. 15, and doubled the number of pets per flight from four to eight.

Those explosive — and arresting — hearings led to the 1970 passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, a law designed to allow prosecutors to go after enterprises that engaged in extended, organized criminality. RICO laid out certain “predicate” crimes — those that prosecutors could use to stitch together evidence of a corrupt organization and then go after everyone involved in the organization as part of an organized conspiracy. While the headline-grabbing RICO “predicates” were violent crimes like murder, kidnapping, arson and robbery, the statute also focused on crimes like fraud, obstruction of justice, money laundering and even aiding or abetting illegal immigration.

What lawmakers heard Wednesday sounded a lot like a racketeering enterprise: an organization with a few key players and numerous overlapping crimes — not just one conspiracy, but many. Even leaving aside any questions about the Mueller investigation and the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen leveled allegations that sounded like bank fraud, charity fraud and tax fraud, as well as hints of insurance fraud, obstruction of justice and suborning perjury.

RICO was precisely designed to catch the godfathers and bosses at the top of these crime syndicates — people a step or two removed from the actual crimes committed, those whose will is made real, even without a direct order.

US election 2016: Marco Rubio 'wins big in Puerto Rico'

Marco Rubio is set to win the latest contest in the battle to be the Republican presidential candidate, a day after being urged to quit the race.With more than a quarter of votes counted, Rubio has nearly 75% of the vote in Puerto Rico.

On Saturday Mr Trump called for a "one-on-one" battle with Cruz, urging other rivals to quit the race.

Marco Rubio is projected to win Puerto Rico's Republican primary, according to the Associated Press.

The Florida senator campaigned in Puerto Rico on Saturday, where he downplayed his poor showing in Saturday's slate of primaries. But delegates added on Sunday will help his total climb against Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Overall, it's just the second outright win for Rubio; he also won the Minnesota caucuses on Super Tuesday.

Marco Rubio is set to win the Puerto Rico primary.

“The numbers are overwhelming,” Jenniffer Gonzalez, chairwoman of Puerto Rico's Republican Party, told the news agency. “This primary in Puerto Rico... will demonstrate that the Hispanic vote is important.”

With a quarter of the votes counted, Rubio received nearly 75 per cent of votes in the US territory, the Associated Press reports.

our years after Hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico’s electrical grid a shambles and the entire island in the dark, residents had expected their fragile power system to be stronger now. Instead, unreliable electricity remains frustratingly common, hindering economic development and daily life.

Surging demand in August and September led to rolling blackouts affecting a majority of the island’s 1.5 million electrical customers.

Last week, several thousand people marched along a main highway in San Juan, the capital, blocking traffic with the latest in a series of protests over the seemingly unending electricity problems plaguing the island.

he flow of cocaine from the Caribbean to the U.S. has more than doubled in the past three years.

t is the

first federal plan of its kind that outlines the steps federal authorities are taking and will take to crack down on drug trafficking specifically in both U.S. territories.

Storm-ravaged Puerto Rico has promised a full audit of a $300m (£227m) deal won by a small electrical firm with Trump administration connections.A US House of Representatives committee is also scrutinising the contract.The chief executive of Whitefish Energy Holdings in Montana knows US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, while one of its investors has donated to Donald Trump.

Puerto Rico, a US territory whose 3.4 million residents are US citizens, was struck by two hurricanes in September - Irma and, later, the more-destructive Maria. The second storm all but wiped out the island's power grid.

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) placed the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in charge of "the immediate power restoration effort".When asked by BBC News about the contract, USACE spokeswoman Catalina Carrasco said on Monday "the US Army Corps of Engineers does not have any involvement with the contract between the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority and Whitefish". She referred further questions to Prepa.

Trump has faced consistent criticism for his response to the crisis, including from Cruz, who accused the administration of not doing enough.

Cruz added: “I think the president lives in an alternative reality world, that only he believes the things he is saying. But certainly people are still without electricity. We knew it was going to take a long time for that to happen. But the basic services are still not there yet, and there doesn’t seem to be any [sign] of how it’s supposed to go.”

Cruz said: “Listen, people have different styles and different ways of doing things. I’m always looking injustice in the face. Of course the response got here, but was it enough? No. And people from this administration have admitted to it.”

Suspected leptospirosis cases rising in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria

The bacterial infection can be transmitted through drinking water or open wounds

Doctors on the island have expressed concerns about burgeoning health crises amid hospitals that are overwhelmed, undersupplied and sometimes burning hot

The Department of Housing and Urban Development will allow the US territory to access the $8.2 billion once the agency publishes a Federal Register notice on how it plans to distribute the funds, according to Politico.

So far, it has only received $1.5 billion

HUD has been authorized to administer nearly $20 billion to the island’s hurricane relief efforts through its Community Development Block Grant.

Pedro Pierluisi was sworn in as Puerto Rico's 12th elected governor on Saturday, promising to turn the page on years of social and political turbulence in the U.S. territory and to restore trust in a government whose credibility has been badly damaged by its response to a string of recent crises.

His swearing-in on Saturday was the culmination of two prior attempts to claim the governorship, first in 2016, when he lost his party's gubernatorial primary, and again in 2019, after the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló.

At the heart of Pierluisi's address on Saturday was an acknowledgement of the pain that many Puerto Ricans have endured in recent years — from twin hurricanes, earthquakes, the island's debt crisis, corruption scandals and the ongoing pandemic — and a pledge to usher in better days.

According to conventional historical belief, Puerto Ricans have mainly Spanish ethnic origins, with some African ancestry, and distant and less significant indigenous ancestry. Cruzado's research revealed surprising results in 2003. It found that, in fact, 61 percent of all Puerto Ricans have Amerindian mitochondrial DNA, 27 percent have African and 12 percent Caucasian.[4]

The trade in slaves was abolished in the British Empire through the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. Men, women and children who were already enslaved in the British Empire remained slaves, however, until Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. When the Slavery Abolition Act came into force in 1834, roughly 700,000 slaves in the British West Indies immediately became free; other enslaved workers were freed several years later after a period of forced apprenticeship.[citation needed] Slavery was abolished in the Dutch Empire in 1814. Spain abolished slavery in its empire in 1811, with the exceptions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo; Spain ended the slave trade to these colonies in 1817, after being paid ₤400,000 by Britain. Slavery itself was not abolished in Cuba until 1886. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848.

The more significant development came when Christopher Columbus wrote back to Spain that the islands were made for sugar development.[20] The history of Caribbean agricultural dependency is closely linked with European colonialism which altered the financial potential of the region by introducing a plantation system. Much like the Spanish enslaved indigenous Indians to work in gold mines, the 17th century brought a new series of oppressors in the form of the Dutch, the English, and the French. By the middle of the 18th century sugar was Britain's largest import which made the Caribbean that much more important as a colony.

(CNN)The first US case of the coronavirus was reported January 21 -- a Washington state man who had recently returned from China. Now, the country has at least 82,250 cases across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Alabama: 531 (including one death)Alaska: 69 (including one death)Arizona: 508 (including eight deaths) Arkansas: 349 (including three deaths)California: 3,006 (including 65 deaths)Colorado: 1,430 (including 24 deaths)Connecticut: 1,012 (including 21 deaths)Delaware: 143 (including one death)District of Columbia: 267 (including three deaths)Florida: 2,353 (including 28 deaths)Georgia: 1,643 (including 56 deaths)Guam: 45 (including one death)Hawaii: 106 Idaho: 189 (including three deaths)Illinois: 2,538 (including 26 deaths)Indiana: 645 (including 17 deaths)Iowa: 179 (including one death)Kansas: 168 (including three deaths)Kentucky: 248 (including five deaths)Louisiana: 2,305 (including 83 deaths)Maine: 155Maryland: 580 (including four deaths)Massachusetts: 2,417 (including 25 deaths)Michigan: 2,856 (including 60 deaths)Minnesota: 346 (including two deaths)Mississippi: 485 (including five deaths)Missouri: 502 (including eight deaths)Montana: 90Nebraska: 73Nevada: 535 (including 10 deaths)New Hampshire: 137 (including one death)New Jersey: 6,876 (including 81 deaths)New Mexico: 136 (including one death)New York: 37,258 (including 385 deaths)North Carolina: 636 (including two deaths)North Dakota: 52Ohio: 867 (including 15 deaths)Oklahoma: 248 (including seven deaths)Oregon: 316 (including 11 deaths)Pennsylvania: 1,687 (including 16 deaths)Puerto Rico: 64 (including two deaths)Rhode Island: 165South Carolina: 456 (including nine deaths)South Dakota: 46 (including one death)Tennessee: 957 (including three deaths)Texas: 1,424 (including 18 deaths)US Virgin Islands: 17Utah: 402 (including one death)Vermont: 158 (including nine deaths)Virginia: 460 (including 13 deaths)Washington: 3,207 (including 149 deaths)West Virginia: 76Wisconsin: 707 (including eight deaths)Wyoming: 55Repatriated cases: 70

CORRECTIONS: A previous version of this story included an incorrect number of cases for Florida. That number has been corrected. On March 14, CNN revised the US death count, taking it down by one after discovering a double count of one death. This article also has been updated with the correct number of deaths for Hawaii, and cases for Wisconsin, Alabama.

President Donald Trump launched a Twitter attack Saturday morning on San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz for "poor leadership ability," saying she and others in Puerto Rico "want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort."

"This is the time to show our 'true colors,'" she wrote. "We cannot be distracted by anything else."

The President again praised the federal government's response on the island, which is grappling with the devastating impact of Hurricane Maria, saying the 10,000 federal workers there were doing a "fantastic job."