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A.M. Costa Rica's Second news page |
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José, Costa Rica, Friday, Jan. 9, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 6
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 Instituto Costarricense de Turismo
photo
Costa
Rica's promotional team erected this sand statue of typicalanimals at Bowling Green Park near Wall Street in New York City. The idea is to motivate New Yorkers to visit the country. This is part of a $3.3 million campaign. Price of dollar expected to be stable By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Financial experts see little chance for a spike in the value of the U.S. dollar this year. One, Orlando Soto, general manager of the financial firm Grupo Acobo, predicted Thursday that the U.S. dollar would stay in the 535 to 545-colon range. He said he expected the dollar to experience downward pressure during the first four months of 2015. He noted that the Banco Central de Costa Rica is exercising control over the price of the dollar. The central bank decided last year that only retail banks could engage in the daily money market negotiations that set the daily value of the dollar. Until then, anyone could attend and bid on quantities of dollars or colons. The dollar spent much of 2014 in the 493-colon range.  Comisión Nacional de
Prevención de Riesgos y Atención de Emergencias
photo
Nueva Cinchona now is a
model down north of Heredia.Residents mark
quake anniversary
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Residents of Nueva Cinchona marked the sixth anniversary of the deadly earthquake with a Mass Thursday at the new community that resulted from the tragedy. The quake destroyed or made many homes in the area unsafe, and earthquake victims were living in plywood boxes for several years. The 91 families eventually were relocated to a safer area in new homes with new utilities. The project was by the Comisión Nacional de Prevención de Riesgos y Atención de Emergencias with the assistance of many other agencies. The afternoon earthquake took at least 34 lives and nearly twice that number remain missing. The quake loosened a ridge that collapsed. Heredia getting a new Web site By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Municipalidad de Heredia will debut its new Web site Monday. Officials say the site is more accessible, attractive and easier to use. The site also is suitable for mobil devices, the municipality said in a release. The site will allow users to fill out online forms and to consult their accounts. The site also will allow users to watch the sessions of the Concejo Municipal. The site is www.heredia.go.cr
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A.M. Costa Rica Third News Page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Jan. 9, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 6 | |
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| Government plans protective tariff for rice growers and
distributors |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The economics ministry did an about face Thursday and said it would impose an additional 27.06 percent import duty on milled rice. The decision is in contrast to that of the Laura Chinchilla administration that was trying to subject local rice growers to the pressures of the international free market. The government said that the action is trying to avoid grave damage to the national rice industry and the investments that have been made there. The government also said it was issuing a decree that would reduce by about 4 percent the price of some rice for consumers. Rice, a staple for many Costa Ricans, is controlled by a complex government bureaucracy that includes the Corporación Arrocera Nacional. There are about 1,400 producers in the country, and many have inefficient operations. The announcement by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Comercio said that rice farmers would embark on a four-year readjustment plan to make them more competitive. The plan calls for greater productivity per hectare, more |
efficiency
in
the distribution chain of rice and a transfer of the savings to the end
consumer with a slowly decreasing price of rice that would bring
national producers in line with world prices. The government insisted that the changes would not affect the consumer. The reduction in the price of rice would be about 50 colons or nine U.S. cents per two-kilo bag of 20 percent broken grain, the lowest retail quality. Under the Central American Free Trade Treaty, Costa Rica has agreed to reduce import duties on rice produced in the United States over 19 to 20 years so that there would be no duty in 2029. The effect on U.S. imports was not defined. Costa Rica imports about 40 percent of its rice each year. The new import duty that raises the total to 62.06 percent will be submitted to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The claim that imports would damage local production meets one of the agreement's requirements for an exclusionary tariff. The Chinchilla administration argued that consumers were subsidizing the country's rice producers. Rice producers and the rice industry are potent political forces. Growers have protested for years the import by private companies of rice from Argentina and Uruguay. |
| Costa Ricans end the holidays with a special ceremony for
the Niño |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica archive article
As it becomes time to put away Christmas things, Costa Ricans cannot pack away Baby Jesus without a ceremony. The event is called rezo del Niño, and such ceremonies are taking place all over the country. The statue of Jesus is the centerpiece of nativity displays. These displays are everywhere. They can be found in public buildings, in apartment building lobbies, office buildings and, of course, private homes. So each location probably will host a rezo del Niño The rezo is fairly standard, and there are professional groups that organize them. The groups include one or more musicians or at least someone on a guitar. Then there is the rezadora, almost always a woman who recites prayers, mainly those represented on the Roman Catholic Rosary. She says one half and the participants in the audience are expected to finish the other half. There also is singing and a musical group that includes someone playing the güiro, a hand-held percussion instrument and the pandereta, a form of tambourine. Naturally the session will close with the singing of "Ave María," which also is traditional. |
 Plaza Real Cariari photo
A previous year's Plaza Real
Cariari rezo del NiñoAt rezos de Niño in the home, light or heavy refreshments usually are served with the men in the other room working on a bottle of rum. The entire neighborhood usually joins in. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's Fourth News page | |||||
| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Jan. 9, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 6 | |||||
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| Canadian computer is flawless in playing heads-up limit Texas hold ‘em | |
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By the University of Alberta news staff
In a world first, researchers in the Computer Poker Research Group at the University of Alberta have essentially solved heads-up limit Texas hold ‘em poker with their program, called Cepheus. “Poker has been a challenge problem for artificial intelligence going back over 40 years, and until now, heads-up limit Texas hold ‘em poker was unsolved,” says Michael Bowling, lead author and professor in the Faculty of Science, whose findings were published in the journal Science. For more than a half-century, games have been test beds for new ideas in artificial intelligence. The resulting successes have marked significant milestones, from IBM’s Deep Blue defeating world champion Garry Kasparov in chess and Watson beating top-earning Jeopardy! champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. But as Bowling points out, defeating top human players is not the same as actually solving a game, especially a game like poker. In poker, players have imperfect information. They don't have full knowledge of past events, and they can't see their opponents' hands. The most popular variant of poker today is Texas hold ‘em. When it is played with just two players and with fixed bet sizes and a limited number of raises allowed, it is called heads-up limit hold ‘em. The possible situations in this poker version are fewer than in checkers, which computing science researchers solved in 2007, led by now dean of science Jonathan Schaeffer. But the imperfect-information nature of heads-up limit hold ‘em makes it a far more challenging game for computers to play or solve. Cepheus, created by Bowling, doctoral students Neil Burch and Michael Johanson and Finnish software developer Oskari Tammelin, is the first computer program to play an essentially perfect game of poker. Cepheus accomplished this goal with no human expert help, only being given the rules of the game. “It was trained against itself, playing the equivalent of more than a billion billion hands of poker,” says Bowling. “With each hand it improved its play, refining itself closer and closer to the perfect solution. The program was trained for two months using more than 4,000 CPUs each considering over six billion hands every second. This is more poker than has been played by the entire human race." |
 University of Alberta/John Ulan
Michael Bowling and his
colleagues play heads-up limit Texas hold 'em poker. Cepheus marks a milestone for artificial intelligence and game theory. Though many perfect-information games (in which all players are aware of everything that has occurred in the game before they make a decision) have been solved, no nontrivial imperfect-information game played competitively by humans has previously been solved. And although perfect information may be a common property of parlor games, it is far less common in real-world decision-making situations. “The breakthroughs behind this result are general algorithmic advances that make game-theoretic reasoning in large-scale models of any sort more tractable,” says Bowling. Fun and games aside, Bowling notes that game theory has always been envisioned to have serious implications, including a surge in game-theoretic applications involving security, such as systems for airport checkpoints, air marshall scheduling and coast guard patrolling. “With real-life decision-making settings almost always involving uncertainty and missing information, algorithmic advances, such as those needed to solve poker, are needed to drive future applications.” Readers can query the program’s strategy or play against it online at http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca |
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2015 and may
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth
news page
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Jan. 9, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 6 | |||||||
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 Voice of America photo
Journalists hold placards
that read 'I am Charlie' and their press cards during a minute of
silence in front of the Paris offices of weekly satirical newspaper
Charlie Hebdo in Paris Thursday.Massive
numbers of police
seeking Paris shooting duo By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The search for two brothers suspected of being behind the Paris shootings at a satirical newspaper narrowed Thursday to a zone near the capital as France held a day of mourning for the victims. Police focused the search for Said Kouachi, 34, and Cherif Kouachi, 32, on a region northeast of Paris after an unconfirmed report that the pair had robbed a service station in the area. An investigation was underway near Villers-Cotterêts, about 80 kilometers west of the city of Reims. More than 88,000 members of security forces were involved in the manhunt. The Kouachis, both French citizens of Algerian origin, were the top suspects in Wednesday's shootings at Charlie Hebdo, a weekly known for cartoons that occasionally mock Muslim extremism. In all, 12 people were killed and 11 were wounded. A third suspect, Hamyd Mourad, 18, turned himself in to authorities, but it appeared uncertain whether he was involved. Police identified the suspects after one of them left his identity card in the getaway car after Wednesday's attack. A police woman was killed in a shootout early Thursday and two people were being held for questioning, but Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said there was no confirmed link between the two incidents. The woman was gunned down while responding to a traffic accident in the Montrouge area just outside the capital. The suspect remained at large. Police were also investigating an explosion at a kebab shop near a mosque in Villefranche-sur-Saone, in eastern France, early Thursday. No one was injured. The incident was being treated as a criminal act. At a news conference Thursday, Cazeneuve described the massive search for the Kouachi brothers, helped by dozens of witnesses and information from videos and mobile phones. He said nine people had been detained for questioning. Authorities believe the attack at the newspaper was inspired by radical Islam. Cherif Kouachi was sentenced to 18 months in prison after being convicted of terrorism charges in 2008, for his involvement in a network sending fighters to Iraq. Investigators also said that Said Kouachi spent several months in Yemen in 2011, receiving terrorist training from al-Qaida's affiliate there. But there was no firm evidence that the brothers were under orders from any terror group. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said both suspects were known to intelligence services. They were in a U.S. central database of known terror suspects and were also on the U.S. no-fly list. Valls also said preventing a second attack was the government's main concern. Cazeneuve said he had invited European interior ministers and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to talks Sunday in Paris to discuss their common terrorist challenge. Flags flew at half-staff, schools closed and security was stepped up during a day of mourning around the Paris area following the country's deadliest terrorist attack in decades. President Francois Hollande convened an emergency cabinet meeting, before a moment of silence was held at midday. As a sign of national unity, Hollande invited arch-rival and opposition leader Nicolas Sarkozy to the Elysee Palace, his first visit since losing power in 2012. Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets of cities across France to show support for the victims. The lights on the Eiffel Tower dimmed late Thursday in tribute to the victims, and Parisians stood in silence in a chilly rain, holding up pens and pencils as a sign of the right to free speech. People set up makeshift memorials around the capital and observed vigils for the victims. Paris resident Mariama Bongoura was among the many at the Place de la Republique, where bouquets were piled up at the foot of a giant statue of Marianne, the symbol of French liberty. Ms. Boungoura described the killings as inhumane. She said it was up to God, not man, to render justice. Muslims like herself are angry at what has happened, she said, because it is against the Koran. Bouquets were also piled up near the office of Charlie Hebdo, about a mile away. Police cordoned off the site, but a small crowd gathered nearby to pay respects. One man placed a bottle of wine alongside the flowers, in tribute to the magazine's bon-vivant spirit. Denis Drigeard Desgarnier arrived in tears. As a youth, he participated in the May 1968 social uprising in France. At the time, he said, Charlie Hebdo's journalists used their pens to defend their cause and free expression. He said the reaction by many French to the shootings was a comfort, especially because they were not blaming the Muslim community for the deaths. The government called for large demonstrations to show solidarity across the country Sunday. Even before the attack, France, home to Europe's biggest Muslim population, was on high alert, like many other countries that have seen citizens leave to fight alongside the radical Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. France has a long history in dealing with terrorism, stretching to the 1990s when Algerian terrorists staged bombing attacks on Paris subways. More recently, more than 1,000 French nationals have headed to Iraq and Syria to join jihadist movements. The gunmen burst into the Charlie Hebdo offices Wednesday during an editorial meeting. Witnesses reported hearing the masked gunmen shouting "God is great!" in Arabic as they entered the newsroom, but said they also spoke fluent French. They were also heard shouting that they had avenged the Prophet Muhammed. Ten journalists were killed, including editor Stéphane Charbonnier and well-known cartoonists Georges Wolinski, Jean Cabut and Bernard Verlhac, who went by the pen name Tignous. Two police officers also were killed. Phillipe Brisolaro, twin brother of one of the police officers killed, said the attack was against more than just the victims. "The whole of France is mobilizing against this," he said. "You cannot insult freedom of speech, insult the authority of the state." Patrick Pelloux, a columnist at the paper and medical doctor, was called to the newsroom by a colleague immediately after the shooting. He described the scene in an emotional interview with French television channel iTele. "It was horrible. Many were already gone because they were shot down in execution style, and we managed to save the others, who this morning are doing well," he said. "I have come here to tell you that the newspaper will continue because they have not won and Charb, Cabu, Wolinski, Bernard Maris, Honore, Elsa, Tignous, Mustapha and the guard who was killed and was tasked with protecting us have not died in vain," Pelloux said. Wednesday's shooting was not the first time Charlie Hebdo has been the target of violence. Its office was firebombed in 2011 after it published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammed on its cover. President Barack Obama made an unannounced visit to the French Embassy in Washington on Thursday, shortly after returning from a trip to Phoenix, to sign a condolences book and express solidarity with the French people. He was joined there by the French ambassador, Gerard Araud. Obama wrote that "as allies across the centuries, we stand united with our French brothers to ensure that justice is done and our way of life is defended. We go forward together knowing that terror is no match for freedom and ideals we stand for — ideals that light the world.'' European Union governments and officials are discussing responses to the killing of the French journalists and could propose new policies in the coming weeks, officials said Thursday. "We must, in the days to come, make sure that this pain transforms itself into concrete actions," the bloc's foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, told a news conference in Riga. "With the pain, we have already begun to work on the response." Muslim leaders in France also have denounced the shooting. The British government said Thursday that it had increased security at its borders, including at ports and at checkpoints it operates on French soil, in response to the Paris attack. Interior Minister Theresa May said the extra security was not based on specific intelligence and that the country's threat alert, which was already at its second-highest level, had not been changed. Meanwhile, cartoonists reacted as they know best, composing biting satirical drawings against what editorialists said was an attack on the foundations of democracy. Among the cartoons that went viral online was one by Australia's David Pope: a picture of a gunman with a smoking rifle standing over a body, bearing the caption "He drew first." Christophe Deloire, head of Reporters Without Borders, called Wednesday a black day for the French press. "How can we imagine a worse attack when this editorial team, Charlie Hebdo, has already been threatened in the past? They've had very serious threats, but nothing ... there was never anything of this proportion. This attack against Charlie Hebdo is maddening," Deloire said. Employees of Charlie Hebdo told French news agency AFP it would print 1 million copies of its next issue, a special edition due out Jan. 14. The provocative, colorful publication has replaced its Web site with a black screen and the message "Je suis Charlie," French for "I am Charlie." The phrase has become a rallying cry in support of the victims online and at vigils around the world since the shooting. U.S. plans to close bases in Europe to save money By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The United States says it will close more than a dozen bases in Europe in a move the Defense Department expects to save $500 million per year when fully implemented with no impact on the military’s ability to respond across Europe. The list of European base closures announced Thursday includes operations at Royal Air Force base Mildenhall northeast of London. The base closure is among the largest since the end of the Cold War. The base is home to tanker, reconnaissance and special operations aircraft, and 3,200 U.S. military personnel and their families. The U.S. also will end operations at 14 other bases in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Many of the bases have been in use since about the time of World War II. Analysts tell The Wall Street Journal the European base closings should help smooth the way for more base closings in the United States. Adoption agency head admits Ethiopian scheme By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The former head of a U.S. adoption agency pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to charges of arranging phony adoptions from Ethiopia with the aim of defrauding the U.S. government. The man, James Harding, who was an official with International Adoption Guides, admitted defrauding the U.S. State Department by submitting false adoption papers for Ethiopian children along with their visa applications. The papers included contracts signed by orphanages for children who never lived at the facilities. Harding also admitted paying bribes to two Ethiopian officials for their help with the scheme. Boston is U.S. candidate for 2024 Olympic Games By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The northeastern city of Boston has been selected as the U.S. candidate city that will bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. At a meeting in Denver, Colorado, Thursday, a 15-member U.S. Olympic Committee panel chose Boston over two-time Olympics host Los Angeles, as well as San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Boston has never hosted an Olympics. “We're excited about our plans to submit a bid for the 2024 Games and feel we have an incredibly strong partner in Boston that will work with us to present a compelling bid,” committee Chairman Larry Probst said in a statement. The U.S. itself has not hosted a Summer Olympics for almost 20 years. The last was Atlanta in 1996. Boston will face stiff competition from abroad, including Rome and perhaps Berlin and Paris, as well as a city yet to be determined from Africa. Cities have until September to officially put in a bid. A decision on the 2024 host is expected to be made by the International Olympic Committee in mid-2017. There is opposition in Boston to the city's bid to host the 2024 Olympics. Opponents say the city cannot afford to divert resources and attention from other needs, like adding affordable housing and fixing its transportation infrastructure. U.S. protests Saudi sentence of 1,000 lashes for blogger By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The United States is asking Saudi Arabia to drop its sentence of 1,000 lashes for a liberal Saudi blogger, calling the punishment brutal and inhumane. Raif Badawi, who was charged with offenses including insulting Islam, is scheduled to receive the first 50 lashes in a public flogging after Friday prayers in the Red Sea coastal city of Jiddah. The blogger, who has been in custody since his 2012 arrest, was sentenced in May to the flogging and 10 years in jail. The Jiddah Criminal Court also ordered him to pay a fine of 1 million Saudi riyals, about $266,000. In Washington, the State Department on Thursday asked Saudi authorities to cancel the sentence of 1,000 lashes. Spokeswoman Jen Psaki urged Saudi officials to review Badawi's case and punishment. "We are greatly concerned by reports that human rights activist Raif Badawi will start facing the inhumane punishment of 1,000 lashes, in addition to serving a 10-year sentence in prison for exercising his rights to freedom of expression and religion,” Psaki said. "… The United States strongly opposes laws, including apostasy laws, that restrict the exercise of these freedoms, and urges all countries to uphold these rights in practice." Badawi also had been charged with cyber crime and disobeying his father and his faith. He had run the Free Saudi Liberals Web site, which included articles critical of Saudi religious leaders and historical Muslim figures. The site has been shut down. A representative for Amnesty International said the organization was aware of Badawi’s expected flogging. The human rights group said flogging "violates the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment in international law." Badawi is scheduled to receive 50 lashes a week for 20 weeks, Amnesty International has reported. |
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2015 and may
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| A.M. Costa Rica's sixth news page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Jan. 9, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 6 | |||||||||
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By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Chinese President Xi Jinping has pledged to increase cooperation with Latin America and the Caribbean as he opened a forum in Beijing with leaders from the region. The meeting between Xi and leaders of some 30 Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños comes as China pushes for more influence in what has traditionally been Washington's backyard. Xi said two-way trade between China and Latin America was expected to rise to $500 billion in 10 years. China has particularly strong ties with several Latin American nations that have clashed diplomatically with the U.S., especially Venezuela. Wednesday, Xi met with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who said he received pledges of $20 billion in Chinese investment in his country's beleaguered economy. Costa Rica holds the Presidencia Pro Témpore of the organization. Pings detected from AirAsian aircraft By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Indonesian authorities say searchers have detected ping signals from the black boxes of AirAsia Flight 8501, which crashed in the Java Sea on Dec. 28. An official said Friday the pings appeared to be coming from an area on the sea floor separate from the tail section where the voice and data recorders were located. The recorders may offer essential information about the doomed flight. The tail section of the plane was located Wednesday on the sea bed about 30 kilometers from the plane's last known location at a depth of around 30 meters. The Airbus 320 vanished from radar screens over the northern Java Sea less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore. There were no survivors among the 162 people on board. Only 46 bodies have been recovered so far. Authorities hope most of the rest of the victims can be recovered from the several large pieces of wreckage on the ocean floor. Before takeoff and during the last moments of the flight, the pilots requested to fly at a higher altitude to avoid a storm. The request was not approved because other planes were in the area. |
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| From Page 7: U.S. unemployment claims decline By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Fewer Americans applied for unemployment assistance last week, the latest favorable sign from the growing U.S. economy. The government says as the calendar turned into the new year, 294,000 workers made first-time claims for jobless benefits, 4,000 fewer than the week before. The applications for unemployment compensation have stayed steady at below 300,000 a week since September, an indication employers are laying off fewer workers and hiring more. After uneven U.S. economic advances during much of his six years in office, President Barack Obama has been touting the recent robust growth of the world's largest economy. Wednesday, he told a group of auto workers in the country's industrial heartland that he wants workers throughout the country to personally sense that better fortunes are in the offing. "One of my New Year's resolutions is to make sure that more Americans, in Wayne, more Americans in Michigan, more Americans all across this great country, that everybody feels like they're coming back." The U.S. economy advanced by 5 percent in the July-to-September period, a marked contrast to slowing growth in China, a recession in Japan, and a near stagnant economy in Europe's 18-nation euro currency bloc. Friday, the U.S. government is set to release employment numbers for December. Economists are projecting that businesses added about 240,000 more jobs last month, pushing the total for all of last year to nearly three million. That would be the most since 1999. At the same time, analysts say the unemployment rate could drop another notch, from 5.8 percent to 5.7 percent, which would be the lowest since June 2008. |
