 |
 |
Your daily |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||
 |
| A.M. Costa Rica Second newspage |
 |
||||||||
| Home |
Tourism |
Calendar |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About us |
|
|
|
|||||||||
 |
| Costa Rica Expertise Ltd http://crexpertise.com E-mail info@crexpertise.com Tel:506-256-8585 Fax:506-256-7575 |
 Click HERE
for great
hotel discounts
|
|
 A.M. Costa Rica/Saray Ramírez
Vindas
Mark Langdale shows off the decoration given him by Fernando
Berrocal, the security minister.Security minister gives
Langdale a farewell medal By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
In Spanish they call it a despidida, a farewell event. That's what the security minister threw for Mark Langdale Tuesday. Langdale, a Texan, is returning to the United States around Jan. 24 to direct and supervise the construction of the George Bush Presidential Library. He was supposed to leave Jan. 1, but aides at the U.S. Embassy said he had too much work to wrap up. The security ministry does not normally throw parties or present medals. But Fernando Berrocal, the minister, said that Langdale was a good friend and provided excellent cooperation between the United States and the security ministry. The decoration was the Fuerza Pública's gold medal for exceptional service. Langdale has been here for two years and has brought Costa Rican law officers and prosecutors to the United States. The war on drugs is a priority for the United States, and Berrocal said that the country could not do the job without the help of the U.S. Coast Guard. Langdale responded in much better Spanish than when he started. World Bank OKs loan for Limón makeover By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The World Bank has approved a $72.5 million loan for Limón Ciudad Puerto, one of the three Arias admininstration iniciatives to improve the Caribbean coast community. One part of the project is to control the flooding that hits barrios San Luis and Santa Fe periodically from the nearby Río Limoncito. Restoration of principal public and historic buildings also is on the agenda. The two other parts of the plan include improvements to the Limón ports and a social development component.
|
| This
space is available for your commercial message |
 |
 |
| A.M. Costa Rica third newspage |
|||||||||
| Home |
Tourism |
Calendar |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About us |
|
|
|
|||||||||
 |
| New
Canadian ambassador seeks to make ties even stronger |
|
|
By Helen Thompson
of the A.M. Costa Rica staff Fresh from a Christmas holiday exploring the “stunning country” that will be his home for the next three years, Neil Reeder is back in his la Sabana office getting to grips with his new role as Canadian ambassador to Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras. Reeder is effusive about the beauty of the landscape around Puerto Viejo and Arenal, where he traveled with family during his Christmas break, and continues to be so as he goes on to talk about the role that he took up only two months ago. “Canada and Costa Rica already have a solid relationship, but I want to take it to the next level of intensity,” Reeder said, his back to his office's sweeping views of the mountains surrounding San José. The two countries have been on good diplomatic terms for more than 50 years and celebrated five years of free trade in 2007. Canada worked closely with President Óscar Arias Sánchez during his first presidential term in the 80s, showing support for his peace plan, and Canada has been the largest direct investor in Costa Rica during the last two years, said Reeder. Up to 100,000 Canadians come to the country each year for tourism, and a community of 1,000 registered Canadians live here permanently. Estimates of the number who live here unregistered with the embassy have been as high as 10,000. Big Canadian businesses such as Scotiabank and Four Seasons have prominent public presences in Costa Rica. The job of keeping amiability between two countries who are already on such close terms may seem a cozy position to have, but Reeder said he will be putting as much effort into this job as into posts he has held in places such as Brunei, Hong Kong, Washington and Mexico during his 26 years in the Canadian foreign service. “I want to encourage more high-profile visits to the country on the level of senior officials, like the recent visit of the Secretary of State Helena Guergis,” the Saskatchewan native said. Ms. Guergis came to Costa Rica last November to mark the fifth anniversary of the trade treaty. Canadian representatives insist that the treaty has not encountered any great difficulties since its inauguration, but Reeder wants to make it even more extensive, to include services and investments. On a personal interest level, Reeder said he feels that educational and cultural ties between the countries could be strengthened. “Mexico and Brazil send thousands of students to Canadian universities every year, but not that many come from Costa Rica. We need to get more Canadian universities down here representing themselves so people think of Canada as a place to study. When they finish they are often a kind of ambassador for both countries.” Reeder himself studied history and journalism, at first in Ottawa and then at Carleton University, graduating in 1981. He currently has two daughters studying at universities in Canada, and his son, Ryan, who will turn 15 this month, is continuing his schooling at the Country Day School in Escazú. Canadian culture, including performers and artists, may also be making a more prominent appearance in Costa Rica if Reeder gets his way. |
 A.M. Costa Rica/Helen Thompson
Canadian Ambassador Neil ReederHe said he anticipates finding the introduction of these ideas more difficult due to the government's preoccupation with the free trade agreement with the United States, but he says that it is all about carving out your own niche. “I don't see any obstacles to these plans – to be successful you need to show the importance of these issues to the host government, and we are good friends with this country. "Costa Rica is a priority country for us, especially since its acceptance onto the Security Council, and this relationship works both ways.” Costa Rica began a non-permanent stint in the U.N. Security council this month. The relationship between Costa Rica and Canada is much closer than between Canada and Reeder's other two charges, Honduras and Nicaragua. Although Reeder has been to Nicaragua several times, he will make his first appearance in Honduras next week. Development assistance is still the top priority in Honduras and Nicaragua, whereas Costa Rica is no longer a development assistance country because of its higher national income. Canada still acknowledges the gap between rich and poor in Costa Rica, supporting small projects on a local community level through the Canada Fund, which aims to improve living conditions among the lowest-income populations. It may be just the honeymoon period of his new job, but Reeder's enthusiasm over Costa Rica's community of Canadian retirees, small entrepreneurs, business men and occasional visitors as well as the diplomatic relationship between the two countries, has few dents in it. He said that during their short stay, the family members who accompanied him – his wife, Irene, and son – have already become very happy in Costa Rica. “Each country that I work in has its own charm,” Reeder added. “And Costa Rica will come to have distinct and fond memories for me. I'm looking forward to taking a good relationship and making it even better.” |
| Freeze
on project prompts developers to run water lines |
|
|
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Developers in Playa Hermosa are banding together to spend over half a million dollars on new plumbing infrastructure in order to be allowed to continue building against the wishes of the Hermosa Activist Group. The community group has been fighting to stop further real estate construction in the northwestern Guanacaste region and looked to be gaining ground in November when, it said the Sala IV constitutional court revoked the environmental approval of a major development on Playa Hermosa. The Canyon Ridge development ran into problems when Costa Rica's national water provider said that it would not be able to get sufficient water to the site of the project. The Hermosa Activist Group's January newsletter stated that for this reason, the Sala IV annulled the approval given by the Secretaria Tecnica National Ambiental to Canyon Ridge, which is being built by Remax Los Tres Amigos. An environmental approval is a legal requirement for all developments, as it shows the project has sustainability and allows the building project to gain other permits. Developers, however, deny that this will discourage them from going ahead with the 40-unit condominium complex that will be situated just off the main road of Hermosa. Instead, Los Tres Amigos and other developers are forming a water users' association and spending their own money installing pipelines that will supply their sites with the water that the Instituto Costarricense de Acueductos y Alcantarillados is unable to provide. |
“Canyon Ridge is a viable project,”
Raymond Heck, one of the owners of
Los Tres Amigos, said. “Running these pipelines is the last step we
have to perform before we can continue.” The Hermosa Activist Group filed a Sala IV case in March which requested the stoppage of all large-scale development in the region of Playa Hermosa until water rights were secured for area residents. It also asked for a suspension of new permits and the closure of all construction that did not hold a permit – something that could potentially undermine much of the real estate in Guanacaste, where it has been found that about one in four developments are illegal. The municipality forced Los Tres Amigos to stop construction in August, allegedly due to lack of the correct permits. The site will remain devoid of action until the water infrastructure is put in place, which Heck said could take as little as a month. From that point, construction of the complex, which will include four three-story buildings and three four-story buildings, is expected to be complete within a year and a half, he said. “Hermosa has problems with water already,” Heck said. “People are without water every few days. This new infrastructure will provide 5-600 more hookups, and Canyon Ridge will only be using 42 of these. This will benefit all the properties that surround our site.” |
| Guard
struggles with bandit in Escazú and dies from bullet |
|
|
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A man attempting to rob a construction store shot and killed a guard in Bello Horizonte, Escazú, Tuesday morning, said police. At about 11 a.m. three men pulled up to the store in a blue car, said officials at the Judicial Investigating Organization. One of the men, appearing to be a client, entered the store, Distribuidora Santa Bárbara. The other two men waited in the car, said officials. |
Once inside, the man attempted to
force the guard, Juan Risso, to put
down his shotgun. A struggle ensued, and Risso was shot in the back.
Risso, 45, was alive when the ambulance arrived, said Mario Abarca, a
Fuerza Pública officer in Escazú. However, the guard died before paramedics could transport him to the hospital said Abarca. The three men are still at large and did not get away with any money, said officials. |
 |
 |
||
|
|
|
|
| You need to see Costa Rican tourism information HERE! |
| A.M. Costa Rica fourth news page |
|||||||||
| Home |
Tourism |
Calendar |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About us |
|
|
|
|||||||||
 |
| New
study casts doubt on claims of world deforestation |
|
|
By the University of Leeds Press Office
Claims that tropical forests are declining cannot be backed up by hard evidence, according to new research from the University of Leeds. This major challenge to conventional thinking is the surprising finding of a study published this week in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences by Alan Grainger, senior lecturer in geography and one of the world's leading experts on tropical deforestation. "Every few years we get a new estimate of the annual rate of tropical deforestation,” said Grainger. “They always seem to show that these marvellous forests have only a short time left. Unfortunately, everybody assumes that deforestation is happening and fails to look at the bigger picture — what is happening to forest area as a whole.” In the first attempt for many years to chart the long-term trend in tropical forest area, he spent more than three years going through all available United Nations data — and found some serious problems. “The errors and inconsistencies I have discovered in the area data raise too many questions to provide convincing support for the accepted picture of tropical forest decline over the last 40 years,” he said. “Scientists all over the world who have used these data to make predictions of species extinctions and the role of forests in global climate change will find it helpful to revisit their findings in the light of my study.” Grainger does not claim that tropical deforestation is not occurring, as there is plenty of local evidence for that. But owing to the lack of frequent scientific monitoring, something for which he has campaigned for 25 years, available data cannot be used to track the long-term global trend in tropical forest area with great accuracy, he reported. “The picture is far more complicated than previously thought,” he said. “If there is no long-term net decline it suggests that deforestation is being accompanied by a lot of natural reforestation that we have not spotted.” Grainger first examined data published every 10 years by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization since 1980. These cover all forest in the humid and dry tropics and appear to indicate decline. The organization's Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000, for example, showed that all tropical forest area fell from 1,926 million hectares to 1,799 million hectares between 1990 and 2000. Ten years earlier, however, the previous report said that tropical forest area fell from 1,910 million hectares to 1,756 million hectares for the same 90 countries between 1980 and 1990. |
“Owing to corrections to the earlier
study, the 1990s trend was just like a re-run of that in the 1980s,”
said Grainger. “The errors involved in making estimates for forest area could easily be of the same order as the forest area reported cleared in the previous 10 years. Even if you take enormous care, as FAO does, I argue that large errors are inevitable if you produce global estimates by aggregating national statistics from many countries. This has important implications for the many scientists who rely on FAO data.” Since errors in national statistics are higher for forests in the dry tropics than for forests in the humid tropics, in places near the Equator such as Amazonia, Borneo and the Congo Basin, he repeated the process just for tropical moist forest, with a different set of data, in the hope it would give a clearer picture. This time he found no evidence for decline since the early 1970s. Indeed, while his own estimate in 1983 of tropical moist forest area in 1980 was 1,081 million hectares, the latest satellite data led to an estimate of 1,181 million hectares for the same 63 countries in 2000. He is cautious about the apparent slight rise. “We would expect to see some increase in estimates as we use more accurate satellite sensors. This is even apparent in FAO’s data. It is sad that only in the last 10 years have we begun to make full use of the satellite technology at our disposal.” Despite the large errors attached to present estimates, the lack of apparent decline in tropical moist forest area suggests that deforestation is being offset by natural reforestation at a higher rate than previously thought. Grainger uses data from the Food and Agricultural Organization's latest report, published in 2006, to show that in a few countries, such as Gambia and Vietnam, forest area has actually expanded since 1990, as the reforestation rate has exceeded the deforestation rate. He said he believes that a rise in natural reforestation is a logical precursor to this switch from net deforestation to net reforestation. It has already been the subject of studies in Brazil, Ecuador and India, but available data are too poor to be sure of its exact scale worldwide. To give more reliable data Dr Grainger said scientists need a world forest observatory to monitor changes in forests in the tropics and elsewhere. "What is happening to the tropical forests is so important, both to the peoples of tropical countries and to future trends in biodiversity and global climate, that we can no longer put off investing in an independent scientific monitoring program that can combine satellite and ground data to give a reliable picture,” he said. |
| Intel
Corp. will build its own low-cost computer for use in developing
countries |
|
|
By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Intel Corp, the world's biggest computer chip manufacturer, has withdrawn from the non-profit program to get low-cost laptop computers into schools in developing countries. Nicholas Negroponte, the head of the One Laptop Per Child project, said Intel withdrew because it is developing a competing low-cost computer. Speaking to Fortune Magazine, Negroponte said Intel was always skeptical about this program because it uses a processor from AMD Corp., Intel's chief rival. Larry Magid, a computer analyst based in California's Silicon Valley outside San Francisco, sees benefits in there being competing entries in the under $400 laptop market. "I don't see any harm in having more than one standard," he said. "This isn't like two different DVD standards. As long as they all access the same Internet and as long as there is a suite of software for both, I don't see a big issue." |
The first One Laptop Per Child
computers, built in Taiwan, are already
in production. Even though they cost nearly twice as much as the $100
per unit originally planned, they have been ordered by the governments
of Peru and Uruguay. Negroponte, who heads the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says two to three million units will be shipped in 2008. Computer analyst Magid has tested the computer. "I think the Negroponte machine is brilliant," he added. "It absolutely fits a need. At the same time I don't see why children in the developing world any more than in the rest of the world should be stuck with only one option." Intel's competing Classmate computer is to cost about $250, about 30 percent more than the green and white XO model from One Laptop Per Child. Other companies are also working on low-cost laptops. |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| News from
the BBC up to the minute |
BBC sports news up to the minute | ||||||||||||||||
| BBC news and sports feeds are disabled on archived pages. |
|||||||||||||||||
| A.M. Costa Rica Sports news local and from the wires |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
|
|
