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A.M. Costa Rica's Second news page |
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San
José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 28
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 Ministerio de Seguridad Pública
photo
Chopper approaches Paseo
Colón landing spot.Chopper
delivers girl to hospital's door
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Monday was supposed to be the first day of school for a 7-year-old San Ramón girl. After experiencing chest pains, the girl collapsed in what best can be described as a heart attack. There was no pulse and no respiration. The girl was revived but in critical condition, and she was in too fragile a state to make an ambulance trip to the Hospital Nacional de Niños where the best treatment was available. The security ministry's Dirección del Servicio de Vigilancia Aérea took up the challenge and airlifted the girl right to the street in front of the hospital. To have done otherwise would have subjected her to another bumpy ambulance ride. Officials cleared the street about 9:30 a.m. The landing in Paseo Colón is unusual but not unprecedented. One or two critical cases a year come to the hospital that way. Other facilities, like Hospital México, has their own helicopter pads. At last report the girl still was in very critical condition at the hospital. U.S. firm says product defeats coffee rust By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A Tennessee company reports that it has achieved success in eliminating coffee rust, known as roya de cafe (Hemileia vastatrix). The firm, GroGenesis, Inc., said it conducted a field trial in Guatemala. The rust resists many fungicides. The primary field test was undertaken at a large farm located in the department of Santa Rosa, just southeast of Guatemala City and which forms an integral component of a major commercial coffee growing operation, the company said in a release. A single application of the GroGenesis product was manually sprayed across a predefined area, and the field team documented visible degradation of the fungal infestation within 24 hours. Initial skepticism was encountered due to previously unacceptable long-term results from a variety of typical commercial fungicides containing toxic salts (e.g. copper and arsenic) which eventually poison the soil itself, said the company. The fact that the GroGenesis product was shown to be highly effective, non-toxic and suitable for both organic and non-organic growers, increased the level of enthusiasm for the product dramatically, it added. The current outbreak of coffee rust is the worst seen in Central America and Mexico since the fungal disease arrived in the region more than 40 years ago. Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica have declared national emergencies over the disease. The rust mainly infects coffee leaves, but also young fruit and buds. Coffee rust spores are spread by the wind and the rain from lesions on the underside of leaves. Production is cut drastically. City hotel ravaged by Sunday fire By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A criminal investigation has been launched into a blaze that swept a low-budget city hotel Sunday night. The hotel, the Principal, sustained extensive damage. It is located at Avenida 3 and Calle 10. Fire fighters said that some 880 square meters were destroyed including 47 rooms, the reception area and a storage area. That is nearly 8,500 square feet. A pool area was damaged somewhat, said the Cuerpo de Bomberos. Fire investigators said the source of the blaze was in one of the guest rooms. They called in the Judicial Investigating Organization. However, there have been no arrests because investigators said they lacked sufficient proof. Police recover phone of Canadian tourist By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A band of young robbers has been working the Liberia area, and police have been following them. That is why officers were able to detain two suspects moments after a female Canadian tourist became a victim Sunday afternoon, said the Fuerza Pública. The suspects are a 14 year old and an adult, said officers. The woman lost a smartphone, but police were able to recover it almost immediately, they said. Meanwhile, the Fuerza Pública in Nicoya said officers there were alerted to a possible stickup in the beach community of Sámara and managed to stop a car that contained three men who have histories of stickups. The men were stopped at a roadblock leaving Sámara where it appears merchants managed to frustrate a stickup. One said he was held at gunpoint.
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| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 28 | |
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| Coral snake's unusual venom may give helpful medical clues |
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By the Johns Hopkins Medicine news staff
The reason for the lethality of venom from the rare, reclusive Costa Rican coral snake has been a mystery. An international 12-year project revealed that the two main toxins in the venom target certain receptors on nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord of mammals. The toxins may help reveal how flaws in these receptors cause epilepsy, schizophrenia and chronic pain. For more than a decade, a vial of rare snake venom refused to give up its secret formula for lethality. Its toxins had no effect on the proteins that most venoms target. Finally, an international team of researchers figured out its recipe: a toxin that permanently activates a crucial type of nerve cell protein and causes deadly seizures in prey. The details will be published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. “What we found are the first known animal toxins, and by far the most potent compounds, to target GABA(A) receptors,” says Frank Bosmans, assistant professor of physiology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Once they bind to the receptors, they don’t let go.” Biochemical studies revealed the identity of the venom’s active ingredient: it’s actually twin proteins, dubbed micrurotoxins (MmTX) after their serpentine source, the reclusive coral snake Micrurus mipartitus. Most toxins in snake venoms target specialized nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on the surface of nerve cells that make muscles contract, paralyzing the snakes’ victims. But when the researchers tested MmTX on lab-grown cells saturated with nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, nothing happened. This was puzzling because, in mice, MmTX was known to cause a repeating pattern of relaxation and seizures, similar to what’s seen in epilepsy. By tagging the protein with a radioactive label, the team at Aix Marseille University was able to find out what protein it acted on. To the team’s surprise, MmTX binds to GABA(A) receptors — pores on nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. GABA(A) receptors’ job is to respond to the molecule GABA by opening to let negatively charged chloride ions flow into a nerve cell that has just fired. Doing so resets the cell’s equilibrium so that it can fire another signal when needed. |
 Johns Hopkins
Medicine/Alejandro Solórzano
The rare coral snake Micrurus
mipartitusFurther testing showed that MmTX binds to GABA(A) receptors more tightly than any other compound known — 100 times tighter than the plant-derived compound PTX, for example. MmTX also binds to a unique site on the GABA(A) receptor protein. Binding at that site changes the receptor’s shape, making it far too sensitive to GABA molecules. When GABA binds, the receptor’s pore opens permanently and the nerve cell is never able to reset, causing it to misfire, convulsing the animal and potentially causing death. “Anti-anxiety medications like diazepam and alprazolam bind to GABA(A) receptors too, but they cause relaxation instead of seizures because they bind much more loosely,” says Bosmans. His team plans to use MmTX as a tool for learning more about how GABA(A) receptors work. Since errors in the receptors can cause epilepsy, schizophrenia and chronic pain, the team hopes that their future work will be able to shed light on these and other disorders. Other authors of the report include José María Gutiérrez of the Universidad de Costa Rica. |
| Symphony orchestra plans a year of 81 concerts to mark
anniversary |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional plans to mark its 75th anniversary with an incredible 81 concerts, including the 24 concerts of the traditional season that begins Feb. 27. The orchestra plans to present concerts in seven provinces. |
The orchestra
will play in Cartago in March, in Alajuela in April,
in the southern zone in May, in Limón and Heredia in June and in
Guanacaste in August. The orchestra is trying to change its image based on a proposal by Garnier BBDO to show it is not just a San José organization. |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 28 | |||||
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| Ice cores yield evidence of early Spanish air pollution from
mining |
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By The Ohio State University news staff
In the 16th century, during its conquest of South America, the Spanish Empire forced countless Incas to work extracting silver from the mountaintop mines of Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, then the largest source of silver in the world. The Inca already knew how to refine silver, but in 1572 the Spanish introduced a new technology that boosted production many times over and sent thick clouds of lead dust rising over the Andes for the first time in history. Winds carried some of that pollution 500 miles northwest into Perú, where tiny remnants of it settled on the Quelccaya Ice Cap. There it stayed, buried under hundreds of years of snow and ice, until researchers from The Ohio State University found it in 2003. In the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report discovery of a layer within a Quelccaya ice core that dates to the Spanish conquest of the Inca, contains bits of lead and bears the chemical signature of the silver mines of Potosí. The core provides the first detailed record of widespread human-produced air pollution in South America from before the industrial revolution, and makes Quelccaya one of only a few select sites on the planet where the pre-industrial human impact on air quality can be studied today. “This evidence supports the idea that human impact on the environment was widespread even before the industrial revolution,” said Paolo Gabrielli, a research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State and corresponding author of the study. Lonnie Thompson, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and co-author of the study, called the find “another keyhole into the past of human activity in that part of the world,” and suggested that further investigation could better understand pollution circulating in the atmosphere today. Previously, Thompson has called the Quelccaya ice cores a rosetta stone for gauging Earth’s climate history. The samples were cut from ice that formed over 1,200 years as snow settled on the Peruvian Andes. Layer by layer, the ice captured chemicals from the air and precipitation during wet and dry seasons for all those years. Today, researchers analyze the chemistry of different layers to measure historical changes in climate. For this study, the researchers used a mass spectrometer to measure the amount and type of chemicals present in the ice dating back to 800 AD. They looked for antimony, arsenic, bismuth, molybdenum and especially lead. That’s because the refining process that the Spanish introduced to South America involved grinding silver ore, which contains much more lead than silver, into powder before mixing it with mercury in a process called amalgamation. So atmospheric pollution from silver production would chiefly contain traces of lead particulates. The mass spectrometer revealed some spikes in the concentrations of these elements in the years before Spanish rule, but those layers all likely coincide with natural contamination sources, such as volcanic eruptions. Starting just before 1600, however, the Quelccaya ice began capturing much larger quantities of these elements, and the high amounts persisted until the early 1800s, when South American countries declared independence from Spain. To pin down where the pollution came from, the researchers compared their data with those from a peat bog in Tierra del Fuego, Chile, and from sedimentary lake records from regions including Potosí and other mines throughout Bolivia and Peru. These latter sites would have captured the pollution generated in their local area during that time. The chemical signatures in the Quelccaya ice meshed with |
 The Ohio State
University/Paolo Gabrielli
The north dome of the Quelccaya
Ice Cap in Perú in 2003. Even in their highest concentrations, the elements entrapped in the ice are not visible to the naked eye and can be detected only through chemical analyses, Gabrielli explained. The section of core containing them has the translucent white appearance of perfectly clean ice. “The fact that we can detect pollution in ice from a pristine high altitude location is indicative of the continental significance of this deposition,” Gabrielli added. “Only a significant source of pollution could travel so far, and affect the chemistry of the snow on a remote place like Quelccaya.” The spread of human-made pollution across vast distances has become common since the industrial revolution of the late 18th century. Greenland received substantial amounts of airborne lead pollution from Europe and the United States until the 1970s, when national policies began requiring producers to change the formulation of gasoline. And some of the pollution currently troubling North American skies has been traced back to Asia, which is experiencing its own industrial boom right now. A question in the scientific community is whether much earlier activity should be included in measures of human environmental impact. For example, ice cores in Greenland contain traces of lead from as far back as the 5th century BC, which were sent airborne by smelting in the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. This latest ice core from Quelccaya shows that humans generated substantial pollution in the 16th century. Still, the 20th century produced more pollution than any other time in human history. International geological governing bodies are currently considering whether to officially call the current epoch the Anthropocene, or “Age of Humans,” to designate the span of time that humans have been changing the environment. Gabrielli, Thompson and their colleagues hope that the Quelccaya core will provide data for that debate. In the meantime, they are turning their attention to a core that Thompson’s team drew from the Dasuopu Glacier in southwest China. It is the highest-altitude ice core ever retrieved, and it contains some 8,000 years of climate history. Some of that new trace element record, they hope, will tell new and powerful stories of ancient human activity. |
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth
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| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 28 | |||||||
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| Marine missing years ago facing trial for desertion By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The court-martial has begun for a U.S. Marine who vanished in Iraq a decade ago and then wound up in Lebanon. Cpl. Wassef Hassoun's desertion trial started Monday at Camp Lejeune in the eastern state of North Carolina. Defense attorneys maintain Hassoun was kidnapped in 2004 by insurgents and later became tangled up in Lebanese courts. But prosecutors allege Hassoun fled his post because he was unhappy with his deployment and how U.S. troops treated Iraqis. Opening statements were expected to begin today before the military judge at Camp Lejeune. Hassoun's case began in June 2004, when he disappeared from a base in Fallujah, Iraq. Days later, he appeared blindfolded and with a sword poised above his head in an image purportedly taken by insurgents. An extremist group claimed to be holding him captive. Not long after that, Hassoun turned up unharmed at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, saying he'd been kidnapped. Hassoun is a 35-year-old native of Lebanon and a naturalized American citizen. Prosecutors said he faces a maximum sentence of 27 years in prison if convicted of all charges. Another bout of winter rolls into U.S. Northeast By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The Northeast United States was being hit Monday with the third major snowstorm in two weeks. The National Weather Service issued winter storm warnings from central New York State through northern Connecticut, Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. In Boston, in the East Coast state of Massachusetts, residents woke up to as much as a foot of new snow. As of Monday, Boston had received about 1.7 meters (66 inches) of snow this winter, the vast majority in the past two weeks. City officials said snowfall levels put the winter of 2015 on pace to stand among the 10 snowiest recorded winters in Boston's history. Wintry conditions led to 1,500 flight cancellations around the U.S. Monday. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker asked residents of the state to avoid traveling, and many schools and government offices were closed. The storm also delayed proceedings in two major criminal trials. Jury selection for the upcoming trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was canceled for Monday and the murder trial of former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez was suspended for the day. Major USAID contractor facing management probe By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
One of its biggest contractors tied to the U.S. Agency for International Development faces increasing troubles amid allegations of mismanagement and impropriety. USAID last month suspended its association with International Relief and Development and the action means the group will not be given any new USAID contracts. The suspension came after years of reports questioning International Relief’s performance and cost claims. In 2012, then-deputy USAID inspector general Michael Carroll testified before a congressional committee on International Relief's shortcomings in Iraq. “Auditors determined that projects completed under the program did not target identified, prioritized needs of Iraqi communities,” he said. “Of the 146 completed projects we surveyed, 34 percent did not match any needs identified by the corresponding community, and an additional 31 percent did not match the needs communities identified as top priorities,” said Carroll. Investigations turned up other questionable items involving International Relief and its contracts. In an October 2014 audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko “identified 14 material weaknesses and significant deficiencies in internal controls and 12 instances of material noncompliance with the cooperative agreement terms.” Sopko’s report also said an outside auditor, Crowe Horwath, identified $1.8 million in questionable costs. The Washington area aid group has received more than $2.4 billion in contracts and cooperative agreements through USAID since 2007. Last July, Sopko raised another issue with International Relief: Its confidentiality agreements signed by departing employees. Sopko wrote International Relief that “I remain concerned that IRD is acting improperly to limit the rights of potential whistleblowers to report instances of waste, fraud, and abuse.” The latest USAID inspector general’s report, covering April to September 2014, cited the February 2014 distribution of $12.2 million in drugs and medical supplies to seven Afghan Ministry of public health hospitals. The report says that in reality, orders were given that the aid should be distributed to non-government community health clinics. International Relief and Development was created in 1998 by Arthur B. Keys and his wife, Jasna Basaric-Keys. The group’s Web site describes International Relief as “a nonprofit humanitarian and development organization.” While International Relief enjoys the tax breaks allowed for non-profit organization, the firm has been profitable to Arthur and Jasna Keys, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper reported that between 2007 and 2013, IRD’s revenue was slightly more than $3 billion with just over three quarters of that coming from USAID. The Post also reported that from 2008 to 2012, the Keys were paid more than $5.9 million. During the same period, their daughter, and a brother of Jasna Keys received $1.3 million. In 2013, a new management team and board decided to reduce the Keys’ compensation and the couple reportedly gave back some $1.7 million. The Keys retired from International Relief in 2014. International Relief did not respond to requests for comment. But in a statement last month, International Relief said it “is cooperating fully with USAID, remains in close and continuous dialogue with the agency regarding these issues, and is committed to addressing them comprehensively.” International Relief’s Chief Executive Officer, Roger Ervin, said in that statement “it is clear from the suspension notice that USAID has determined that much more remains to be done in certain areas. We are working on a response to USAID that will directly address the agency’s concerns, and re-establish confidence that federal taxpayer funds are being prudently managed by IRD to accomplish USAID’s critical missions.” Meanwhile, USAID continues to probe the contractor. “Depending on the results of USAID’s ongoing review of IRD’s document submissions and management controls, and, if further information is obtained by the Agency (USAID) as the result of the OIG’s investigation, the suspension could lead to debarment,” a senior USAID official said. U.N. study says girls face education barriers, attacks By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A new study finds millions of girls in at least 70 countries are subjected to widespread attacks that are occurring with increasing regularity to prevent them from receiving an education. The report by the U. N. Human Rights Office finds schools and infrastructure in 24 of these countries also are used for military purposes. While celebrating the achievements of the past two decades in ensuring that millions of girls around the world have access to education, the study also highlights the current grim state of girls’ education. U.N. statistics show about 65 million children do not attend school, particularly in countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and West Asia. The report documents many cases between 2009 and 2014 of physical attacks against girls, parents and teachers advocating for gender equality in education. Some of the attacks cited have made headlines and shocked people by their cruelty. These include the killing in December 2014 of more than 100 children by the Taliban at an army school in Pakistan, the abduction of nearly 300 schoolgirls by Boko Haram in Nigeria in April 2014 and the 2012 shooting of the young Nobel Peace Laureate, Malala Yousafzai, by members of the Taliban in Pakistan. The chief of the Women’s Human Rights and Gender Section at the U.N. Human Rights Office, Veronica Birga, says many other alarming attacks against girls never make the headlines. For instance, she cites cases of acid attacks and poisoning by the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “A number of girls were abducted from a Christian school in India and raped in 2013. In Somalia, girls have been forcibly removed from school to become so-called wives of Al-Shabab fighters. And, in countries such as Mali, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, very strict dress codes have been imposed through the use of violence including sexual violence on schoolgirls," said Ms. Birga. The report notes attacks on girls do not take place only in countries in conflict. They also occur in situations of high criminality or political instability, which is the case in a number of countries of Central America. It says girls are attacked by those who are opposed to their education as a means of social change. They believe education is wasted on girls whose role is to remain at home. It says the common cause of all these attacks is discrimination. Ms. Birga says girls who are prevented from going to school are extremely vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. “They are more exposed to child and forced marriages. They are more exposed to trafficking. They are more exposed to worst forms of child labor. And, more in general, a girl that is not educated will face consequences throughout her life. A girl or a woman who is not educated is less likely to be aware of her rights and less likely to be able to claim them," she said. The report urges governments to make the perpetrators of attacks against schoolgirls, their parents and teachers accountable for their actions. It says the message that violence against girls is acceptable is reinforced when attacks are met with impunity. Ex-Guantanamo inmate has encounter with drone By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A drone-fired missile killed an influential Afghan militant in southern Helmand province Monday, local officials said. Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mullah Abdul Rauf was killed, along with five others, while traveling in a car in Eland province, the police chief said. He did not provide additional information. Afghanistan's main intelligence agency said in a statement Rauf was in charge of Islamic State militants in the violence-plagued province in southwestern Afghanistan and he was killed just after midday in an operation carried out by Afghan forces. Rauf, who had been influential in Afghanistan's jihadi movement for well over a decade, is suspected of having recently defected from the Taliban to the Islamic State group and was helping recruit for them, local officials and media reported. The United States operates drones over Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan. U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Islamic State group, which controls a third of Syria and Iraq, has a small but growing presence in parts of Afghanistan, officials and tribal sources said last month. Indian suspect seeking to raise $1.6 billion bail By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
An Indian businessman jailed for failing to repay investors in an illegal bond scheme is scrambling to raise a whopping $1.6 billion bail. Many questions swirl around the scheme that first fueled his meteoric rise and then brought his fortunes tumbling down. Just a year ago, the flamboyant Subrata Roy, 66, lived on a sprawling 300-acre estate in the northern Lucknow city and ran a business empire that included real estate, hotels, television channels, and a Formula One racing team. As the head of Sahara Group, Roy hobnobbed with top politicians and Bollywood stars. But since last March, Roy has been an inmate of New Delhi’s sprawling Tihar jail, while he has been trying to negotiate deals to raise the massive amount he needs to walk out on bail. He was imprisoned for failing to repay millions of small investors from whom he claimed to have gathered billions of dollars to fund his Sahara conglomerate. The bond scheme has been ruled illegal. The bail is the largest ever set by an Indian court. Roy is hoping to raise the cash from two prized hotels his group owns: Grosvenor House in London and the New York Plaza. But the going is not easy. A recent bid to clinch a deal with a U.S.-based capital group headed by an Indian is mired in controversy. “Essentially this is an order against him saying that you guys need to refund this money to the investors... so it is not exactly a condition of bail but more a kind of concept of “you have not been in compliance with our order, and therefore we will hold you till you comply with the order,” Sandeep Parekh, the head of Mumbai-based financial sector law firm, Finsec Law Advisors said, explaining the rationale behind the massive bail order. Securities analyst Prithvi Haldea of Prime Database in New Delhi said the bail is linked to the size of the alleged scam. “This is really mammoth, and we have seen that Mr. Roy despite all his professed wealth has not been able to cough up this amount in almost now a year. Several attempts to put together the money have failed,” he said. At the heart of Roy’s fall from grace is the $4 billion- bond scheme, which helped him grow his business from scratch. Roy said he raised the mammoth sum through regular deposits of as little as 30 cents a day from poor, daily-wage workers like rickshaw pullers and laborers in small towns and villages who have no access to banking. The money he said was paid back when they needed it — to fund a marriage or a medical emergency. He was dubbed a messiah of the poor and said he has repaid most investors. But capital market regulators investigating the scheme have found it difficult to trace many of the 30 million investors for whom Sahara supplied records in 2012 after many requests. Hundreds of letters sent to the addresses given came back undelivered. That prompted the Supreme Court to comment that many names on the investor list “may well be fictitious, concocted and made up.” Mumbai-based financial sector lawyer, Sandeep Parekh, said it has been difficult to establish the money trail. “Nobody really knows, whose money it is, where it came from and where it went, whether it was refunded, how much was refunded. There are no investors claiming money, they are actually looking for the investors, they can’t find them,” Parekh stated. That has led to speculation that the Sahara Group’s bond scheme could have been a cover for money laundering, creating fictitious investors who help channel criminal proceeds into legitimate businesses. The company strongly denies such suggestions and has not been charged with the crime. Congress will air claims that HSBC aided evasion By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
U.S. banking officials plan to appear on Capitol Hill this week to address allegations that Britain's largest financial institution helped global clients avoid taxes and hide hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. U.S. Federal Reserve Governor Maryann Hunter is expected before the Senate Banking Committee to discuss the revelation of 106,000 hidden accounts at the Swiss subsidiary of the British-based HSBC Holding Plc and what the U.S. is doing regarding Americans involved. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and several news organizations obtained bank documents dating back to 2007 that reveal the scope of the tax dodging. The leaked documents contain details about more than 100,000 clients from around the world, both individuals and legal entities. According to the consortium report, academic studies estimate that $7.6 trillion is held in overseas tax heavens, preventing governments from collecting about $200 billion a year in tax revenues. Later this week, U.S. Deputy Associate Attorney General Geoffrey Graber is expected to testify about the leak and U.S. tax recovery efforts at a House of Representatives judiciary subcommittee. Tough questions are likely to be raised as to why the U.S. government has not been more aggressive in hunting down alleged tax cheats, analysts say. The United States, along with Belgium, Argentina, India, and others, are said to be investigating the massive bank. HSBC has in the past faced scrutiny from U.S. authorities. In December 2012, the bank paid a $1.9 billion fine to settle a U.S. Justice Department case in which HSBC and its subsidiaries had been accused of enabling Mexican drug lords to launder billions and assisting clients to violate U.S. sanctions prohibiting financial activity with Iran, Sudan, and Cuba. The settlement, which came six months after a U.S. Senate investigation into HSBC, did not involve the question of the bank’s Swiss operations helping to facilitate tax evasion currently under scrutiny. The U.S. pursuit of HSBC and its hidden account holders, and ones held by other multinational banks, was bolstered with the July 2014 onset of a new law, the Foreign Account Taxpayer Compliance Act. The law, known by its acronym FATCA, requires foreign banks everywhere to report to the U.S. any accounts held by U.S. citizens and residents. Still, there appear to be loopholes enabling tax evasion, analysts say. “FATCA is definitely a huge step towards addressing the problem, but can't single-handedly stamp out tax evasion,” said Joshua Simmons, policy counsel with the transparency and good governance group Global Financial Integrity. “Although it will lead to banks automatically sharing information like that released in the HSBC files, if the bank doesn't know who its client is, then it won't be able to disclose it,” Simmons said. “There are still ways to hide your identity, by far the most common of which is the use of anonymous companies, which we believe FATCA does not take a strong enough step towards.” In Britain, the report outraged lawmakers and sparked criticism that tax authorities had failed to penalize tax evaders. “I just don’t think the tax authorities have been strong enough, assertive enough, brave enough, tough enough in securing for the British taxpayer the monies that are due,” said British Parliament member Margaret Hodge. Meanwhile, a Belgian court is considering issuing arrest warrants in conjunction with an investigation of HSBC’s Swiss banking operations and alleged fraud. “The bank is not giving the required information voluntarily,” a Belgian court spokesman said. “The judge has said that if it’s so hard to get the information, he’s considering international arrest warrants for the present directors in Belgium as well as Switzerland.” India’s Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced Monday that a probe into Indian account holders at HSBC is underway, saying that New Delhi has begun the prosecution of 60 Indian HSBC account holders. An Indian Express reports says that 1,195 names of Indian nationals are on the HSBC leaked account list, which was provided to New Delhi by France in 2011. Jaitley said most of the new names are already known by Indian authorities. HSBC responded to the report by saying its compliance efforts have been insufficient. The bank said it has undergone a radical transformation in recent years and now enforces more stringent reporting requirements. “We acknowledge and are accountable for past compliance and control failures,” the bank said in a statement. “Major regulatory reform is underway in numerous jurisdictions to ensure… that in the near future, an individual wishing to hide assets from tax authorities will be unable to do so. HSBC fully welcomes and supports these reforms.” The bank said that in 2007, its Swiss private bank operations had 30,412 accounts, but by the end of 2014, that number was cut to 10,343. The value of those remaining accounts represents more than $68.5 billion, analysts say. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's sixth news page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015, Vol. 15, No. 28 | |||||||||
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By the University of Vermont news
staff
In 1969, two psychologists at the University of Illinois proposed what they called the Pollyanna Hypothesis — the idea that there is a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently than negative ones. “Put even more simply,” they wrote, “humans tend to look on (and talk about) the bright side of life.” It was a speculation that has provoked debate ever since. Now a team of scientists at the University of Vermont and The MITRE Corp. have applied a Big Data approach, using a massive data set of many billions of words, based on actual usage, rather than expert opinion — to confirm the 1960s guess. Movie subtitles in Arabic, Twitter feeds in Korean, the famously dark literature of Russia, books in Chinese, music lyrics in English, and even the war-torn pages of The New York Times, the researchers found that these, and probably all human language, skews toward the use of happy words. “We looked at ten languages,” says university mathematician Peter Dodds who co-led the study, “and in every source we looked at, people use more positive words than negative ones.” But doesn’t the global torrent of cursing on Twitter, horror movies, and endless media stories on the disaster du jour mean this can’t be true? No. This huge study of the “atoms of language—individual words,” Dodds says, indicates that language itself, perhaps humanity’s greatest technology, has a positive outlook. And, therefore, “it seems that positive social interaction,” Dodds says, is built into its fundamental structure. The new study, "Human Language Reveals a Universal Positivity Bias," appeared in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To deeply explore this Pollyanna possibility, the team of scientists gathered billions of words from around the world using 24 types of sources including books, news outlets, social media, Web sites, television and movie subtitles, and music lyrics. For example, “we collected roughly 100 billion words written in tweets,” said mathematician Chris Danforth, who co-led the new research. From these sources, the team then identified about 10,000 of the most frequently used words in each of 10 languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Arabic. Next, they paid native speakers to rate all these frequently used words on a nine-point scale from a deeply frowning face to a broadly smiling one. From these native speakers, they gathered five million individual human scores of the words. Averaging these, in English for example, “laughter” rated 8.50, “food” 7.44, “truck” 5.48, “the” 4.98, “greed” 3.06 and “terrorist” 1.30. A Google Web crawl of Spanish-language sites had the highest average word happiness, and a search of Chinese books had the lowest, but — and here’s the point — all 24 sources of words that they analyzed skewed above the neutral score of five on their one-to-nine scale regardless of the language. In every language, neutral words like “the” scored in the middle, near five. And when the team translated words between languages and then back again they found that “the estimated emotional content of words is consistent between languages.” In all cases, the scientists found “a usage-invariant positivity bias,” as they write in the study. In other words, by looking at the words people actually use most often they found that, on average, humanity “use more happy words than sad words," Danforth says. This new research study also describes a larger project that the team of 14 scientists has developed to create physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurements of the happiness in large-scale texts, “basically, huge bags of words,” Danforth explains. They call this instrument a “hedonometer”—a happiness meter. It can now trace the global happiness signal from English-language Twitter posts on a near-real-time basis and show differing happiness signals between days. For example, a big drop was noted on the day of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, but the signal rebounded over the following three days. The hedonometer can also discern different happiness signals in U.S. states and cities: Vermont currently has the happiest signal, while Louisiana has the saddest. And the latest data puts Boulder, Colorado, in the number one spot for happiness, while Racine, Wisconsin, is at the bottom. |
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| The
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2015 and may
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| From Page 7: Leading nations told they lag on growth By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Finance ministers and central bankers from the world's 20 leading economies gathered in Istanbul Monday for the opening of a G20 meeting aimed at coordinating action to spur economic growth. Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan, whose country is the current G-20 chair, expressed hope that nations would set binding national investment targets. "But what is important here for us is first to create awareness that investments are important, even if we don't have the government resources, we should look at ways and means of financing them," he said. A leading international economic organization says governments around the world are not doing enough to implement a series of policies once agreed upon to boost economic growth in the coming years. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in its annual growth report released Monday, urged countries to follow through on "comprehensive growth strategies" such as increasing labor productivity and becoming more competitive and innovative. Meanwhile, top finance officials from Britain and the United States called on leading world powers to work together to boost growth and reduce fiscal deficits. In an article published in The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and British treasury chief George Osborne wrote that "governments must use the full set of tools they have at their disposal to support their economies and realize the collective G-20 objective of strong, sustainable and balanced global growth." The two recommended responsible fiscal policies that ensure sufficient resources for education and infrastructure investment, accommodative credit conditions that encourage business and household spending and economic reforms aimed at boosting productivity and raising living standards. |
