Ny Safidinao

Severe government austerity measures designed to jolt Puerto Rico out of an 11-year recession propelled thousands of protesters into the streets across the island's capital on Tuesday in a series of marches that ended in chaos. Rallies that began in different parts of the city remained largely peaceful throughout the day as students, teachers, government employees and private sector workers wound their way through the streets to converge in the downtown area. But the demonstrations ended in gasps, tears and fits of coughing after police fired gas canisters into crowds who had come up against their barricades. Adrian Florido @adrianflorido Just got teargassed at the protest in San Juan's financial district. 2:20 PM - May 1, 2018 274 425 people are talking about this Twitter Ads info and privacy In recent days police and protesters had agreed on the route the marchers would take around San Juan's financial distric...

Say sayonara to the 50 stars on our grand old flag. If speculation can be believed, the United States of America could soon add two more brethren to its ranks. And no, it’s not Canada or Mexico. Odds are, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico could soon claim statehood,  OZY  reports. The movement to make Washington, D.C. a state gained momentum in the spring of 2016, when 86 percent of D.C. voters approved a petition on the matter. The district later drafted a state constitution during a summer convention. Meanwhile, proponents also attended the Republican and Democratic national conventions to advocate for their cause. “We’ve accomplished a lot in educating Americans around the country,” says Paul Strauss, the district’s two-term “shadow senator.” D.C.’s representatives may sit in Congress but do not vote. Although the district’s population is bigger than Wyoming’s or Vermont’s, concerns regarding the legality of its statehood have sinc...

Up from the ashes of the D.C. statehood movement has risen a fresh idea: to present D.C. and Puerto Rico as a pair of vote-neutering twins, where the territory’s right-leaning representatives in Congress would cancel out the District’s left-leaning ones. Never mind that Puerto Rico, home to about 3.5 million vote-starved brethren, who are more or less evenly split along party lines, has five times more people than the District.  Our dispatch from the latest, and somewhat pointless, statehood commission meeting. Puerto Rico Features in New Statehood Strategy

IVETTE FELICIANO:  Along the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico, graffiti reading “No more abuse” and “Fascism in Puerto Rico” are a window into the unrest sparked by the largest financial crisis in the island’s history. Since January, thousands have protested austerity measures and cuts to public services imposed on this U.S. territory that’s home to 3.4 million U.S. citizens. But Puerto Rico currently owes creditors a massive $72 billion. Last year, following a series of defaults on debt payments, Congress passed and President Obama signed the Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Economic Stability Act, or PROMESA, which means “promise” in Spanish. The law gave a financial oversight board veto power over Puerto Rico’s budget and provided a process to restructure the debt. Did you realize what you were getting yourself into? JOSE CARRION:  I did not. IVETTE FELICIANO:  Jose Carrion, who runs a large insurance brokerage in San Juan, chairs the appointed seven m...