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A.M. Costa Rica
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| A.M. Costa Rica's Second news page | |||||||||
| San José, Costa Rica, Wednesday, April 18, 2012, Vol. 12, No. 77 | |||||||||
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| This primo advertising
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Electric rates in valley
will go up about 4.67% By the
A.M. Costa Rica staff
Central Valley customers of the Compañía Nacional de Fuerza y Luz are facing a 4.67 percent rate increase. The Authoridad Reguladora de Servicios Públicos has approved that amount, which is about half what the company sought. The increase amounts to between two and four colons per kilowatt. The price setting agency said that a family with an 11,300-colon ($22.60) monthly electric bill would soon be paying 11,600 colons ($23.20). The new rates become effective when they are published, probably next week. President picks successor to former finance minister By the
A.M. Costa Rica staff
President Laura Chinchilla has named career economist Edgar Ayales as the new finance minister or minister of Hacienda. He replaces Fernando Herrero, who quit after La Nación revealed that he paid less taxes than he should have. Ayales is a graduate of the University of Kent in England. His undergraduate degree is from the Universidad de Costa Rica. He has helped draft many of the country's tax laws, said Casa Presidencial. Ayales is out of the country now consulting with the Central Bank of Angola. He has been a consultant to the Banco Central here and has worked with the International Monetary Fund. He also has been executive director of the Interamerican Development Bank. The new minister inherits a government with its finances in disarray because the Sala IV constitutional court has delivered a setback to plans to implement a 14 percent value-added tax. The president declined to comment on that Tuesday and Casa Presidencial said the administration is waiting to read the written decision from the magistrates before refining a strategy. Purchasing systems merger being studied by experts By the
A.M. Costa Rica staff
A team of experts is in town to evaluate and propose the merger of the central government's two online purchasing systems. The expert comes from the Organization of American States and the Interamerican Development Bank. The two purchasing systems are Comprared and MerkLink. The idea is to reduce the cost of items purchased by the state. One expert is the former director of the Gobierno Digital de Chile. He is Alejandro Barros. Quake hits near Turrialba By the
A.M. Costa Rica staff
A 3.1 magnitude earthquake took place Tuesday at 12:30 p.m., said the Laboratorio de Ingenieria Sismica at the Universidad de Costa Rica. The Red Sismológica Nacional estimated the epicenter to be 5.8 kilometers north of Turrialba Centro. That is about 3.5 miles. The Red at Universidad Nacional said the cause was a local fault and not due to activity by Volcán Turrialba.
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| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
| The contents of this page and this Web site are copyrighted by Consultantes Río Colorado 2012 and may not be reproduced anywhere without permission. Abstracts and fair use are permitted. Check HERE for details | ||||||
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| A.M. Costa Rica Third
News Page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Wednesday, April 18, 2012, Vol. 12, No. 77 | |
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Jo Stuart |
 Ministerio de Gobernación,
Policía y Seguridad Pública photo
With no vendors in sight, police
keep watch near the Catedral Metropolitana at Avenida 4. |
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| Street vendors appear to have taken a
one-day vacation Tuesday |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
In a well-publicized effort against street vendors, police and other agencies descended on the center of the city Tuesday. The only thing missing were street vendors. They had sent out a notice to the press the previous afternoon, and camera operators attended. Typically street vendors have a sense when the police are going to crack down and confiscate their goods. Municipal police officers have been waging a battle against the vendors for years. In some cases, the small-scale sales operations have moved from the major streets into side streets where they are less likely to be bothered by the authorities. Tuesday municipal officers, immigration agents and representatives of the Patronato Nacional de la Infancia took |
part in the effort. The Patronato
was there because children frequently
are working with their parents. Immigration was there because many
street vendors are not in the country legally. The Fuerza Pública was there because in the past vendors battled municipal police to a draw. In addition to blocking the passage on the major pedestrian walkways, many vendors sell counterfeit goods, like CDs, and sometimes stolen items. Teams of police spent the day patrolling the center city, but not much success was reported. Police officials consulted with the Defensoría de los Habitantes before conducting the sweep. The nation's ombudsman frequently has taken the side of vendors. |
| Fuerza Pública officer dumped
because of his Nazi beliefs |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A good policeman must have a touch of authoritarianism. After all, that's the job. But being a Nazi is more than Costa Rica wants, at least when the affiliation shows up on the Internet. So the security minster fired a Fuerza Pública officer Tuesday after a minor flap because the man showed up in an Internet social site smoking in uniform, drinking a bottle of beer and standing with comrades giving a Nazi salute. The man is Ronald Herrera Borges, who was assigned to the San Pedro detachment. According to Mario Zamora Cordero, the minister, being a Nazi is outside the political beliefs that the police force will accept. Police officers should not join movements that demand xenophobia political positions, he was quoted as saying in a news release. |
The minister fired the police
officer with what is called responsibilidad
patronal,
meaning the man must get a payoff because no
fault can be shown. But Zamora said that the man was not a very good officer anyway. He has been late, clashed with colleagues and did not follow orders, the minister said. Zamora acted rapidly after photos of the officer showed up in the Spanish news media. But members of the Partido Acción Ciudadana said that they saw the photos three months ago and reported them to the officer's superiors but nothing happened. It was they who leaked the photos to the news media, they said. Zamora said that higher ups in the Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía y Seguridad Pública will review hiring practices to see if they can weed out applicants with anti-social tendencies. |
| Foundation's
environmental report is flawed, mining firm says |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The firm that seeks to operate the Crucitas gold mine in northern Costa Rica says an environmental study is false. The study was by the Fundación Neotrópica, and it determined that environmental damage at the mine site could be as much as $12 million. The report was done by a team headed by Bernardo Aguilar, the foundation executive director. The study was requested by the Ministerio de Ambiente, Energía y Telecomunicaciones. The mine operator, Industrias Infinito S.A., said that the foundation included an adjacent lumbering operation in its evaluation. The foundation compared air photos of the site since 2005 because the company would not permit foundation workers to enter the mine project. Industrias Infinito said in a release Tuesday that the foundation |
included an adjacent property in its
evaluation, and the property is a
lumbering operation. The trees that were cut down are not the
responsibility of the mining firm, it said. Industrias Infinito identified the adjacent property as Compañía Madera del Norte run by Jorge Jiménez Berrocal. The lumbering company is following an approved plan, the mining firm said. The Crucitas site contains an estimated 800,000 ounces of gold, but Costa Rica has worked for the last two years to cancel the firm's concession. The company has been the target of several court reverses, and environmentalists have fought the mining project aggressively. Infinito is the subsidiary of a Canadian firm. If the company is prohibited from mining the gold, Costa Rica faces a long fight in international arbitration. The environmental survey is to gain evidence in anticipation of that battle. |
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| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
| The contents of this page and this Web site are copyrighted by Consultantes Río Colorado 2012 and may not be reproduced anywhere without permission. Abstracts and fair use are permitted. Check HERE for details | ||||||
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| A.M. Costa Rica's Fourth News page | |||||
| San José, Costa Rica, Wednesday, April 18, 2012, Vol. 12, No. 77 | |||||
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Jo
Stuart |
| Artist's life here started with search
for reasonable dental work |
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By
Shahrazad Encinias Vela
of the A.M. Costa Rica staff Love brought artist Scott Wimer to live in Costa Rica, but it was a need for dental work that introduced him to the country. At 21 he was living in Paris as a fashion photographer. By the age of 28 he left his life in the fast lane and returned to the United States. He moved to San Francisco where he worked as a cab driver, in what Wimer referred to as humbling. “I'm actually probably one of the only people to move there (San Francisco) to stop doing drugs,” said Wimer jokingly. Before his move to Europe, Wimer went to the Art Institute of Chicago and stumbled onto photography by taking pictures of his model friends to help build their folders. His girlfriend at the time had moved to Paris to model, and after a short amount of time she bought his ticket to France. And so began his career in the fashion industry. His hard partying ways led him to a need for change. At least that's what his shrink told him, said Wimer. His therapist said either he leaves or die young as a result of the way he was living. So he packed up and moved to the home of the Golden Gate Bridge. Wimer has lived in this country for more than a year. He got his first taste of Costa Rica five years ago when he came to the country for a dentist appointment and continued his trips for further medical reasons. Wimer like many Americans in the United States doesn't have health insurance, let alone dental insurance. He Googled “cheap dental” and the Web site of a dentist popped up, so Wimer said he sent an email to the dentist and the doctor called him right away. He said he travelled to the country and after a few years of visiting, the country grew on him. And now he is happily married to a Tica and has opened his own gallery in the Barrio Otoya neighborhood. |
 A.M.
Costa Rica/Shaarazad Encinias Vela
Scott
Wimer and one of his photos
“ I tend to fall in love and move,” said Wimer. He said that was the case when he moved to Paris, to Italy and now to Costa Rica. But it seems that his romantic side has allowed him to experiment and continue to work in the art industry. At his gallery his new experimental works are on exhibit. He manipulates his photography with digital media and he blends painting to the mix. This is something new to him, he said. Although he is still experimenting with the style, he has been successful as he has sold certain pieces. He has sold a few pieces to certain ambassadors. One of his pieces that he sold to an ambassador and his wife was a manipulated picture of a local nightspot around 5 a.m. Wimer said he took the picture from his seat in the bus as it drove past the site. “I like to capture real stuff happening,” said Wimer. “I like to have a lot of fun!” |
| Economic study says offshoring does
little damage to U.S. jobs |
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By
the University of Buffalo news service
Sending jobs overseas may not be as damaging to the U.S. economy as commonly believed, according to a study by a University of Buffalo economist. Offshoring, the practice of moving specific operational tasks originally performed in one country to a new location abroad, is just another form of trade in goods and services, says Winston Chang, an expert in international economics. U.S. firms, in fact, become more efficient and competitive when offshoring savings are redirected to new areas of operation, new products and services, or invested in further research and development, Chang, a professor, noted. Chang's paper, which appears online in the Social Science Research Network collects research from numerous studies supporting a conclusion long held by economists but not similarly embraced by the general public: that services offshoring has had a negligible impact on net employment and median earnings in the U.S. Although offshoring is blamed for a staggering quantity of job losses and has created heated debate in the media, Chang cites research that indicates the projected number of 3.4 million jobs offshored between 2002 and 2015 in nine occupational categories prone to offshoring is a miniscule 0.53 percent of the nearly 60 million jobs within those categories. "The potential job loss, though different among industries, is not as large as feared," said Chang. An annual loss of 100,000 service jobs is about 0.1 percent of total employment, according to studies. The possibility of that trend continuing, however, raises fears that most or all service jobs, which account for 70 percent of U.S. employment, could be eventually offshored. Chang says those concerns are both empirically and theoretically flawed. |
"Services such as catering, retail,
hotels, restaurants, tourism and personal care, which require the buyer
and seller to be present in
the same place, cannot be outsourced," said Chang, referring to the
argument's empirical mistake. "Furthermore, offshoring occurs mostly to
mundane and standardized types of work. Complex jobs that require
higher skills are more difficult to offshore. High-skilled workers
benefit from the vast increase of low-skilled workers in the world.
Offshoring promotes growth in developing countries, raising income and
creating more demand for high-skill products." In addition, Chang noted that "a lot of transactions are not suited to the arms' length approach. Instead, they require the establishment of long and familiar business relations." The world is not flat in this respect, he said. By offshoring some stage of production abroad, U.S. firms can create more domestic employment in other stages of production, Chang said. "The upstream blueprint designs and the vast downstream distribution and retail operations in the U.S. benefit from the possibility of offshoring some intermediate stages of such production as manufacturing and assembly operations." "Offshoring has undoubtedly contributed to the economic growth of many developing countries, which has led to currency appreciation and higher standards of living," he said. "It is possible that we are about to see the tides turn as manufacturing activities are being reshored back to the U.S. due to rising costs in these developing countries." GE is one of the firms to have pulled jobs back to the U.S. Sharp wage increases in India's IT sector, along with the U.S. recession and the decline of the U.S. dollar, in fact, led the company to dispose of back office operations that had been offshored to India, Chang said. |
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Food |
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Jo
Stuart |
| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
| The contents of this page and this Web site are copyrighted by Consultantes Río Colorado 2012 and may not be reproduced anywhere without permission. Abstracts and fair use are permitted. Check HERE for details | ||||||
| A.M.
Costa Rica's Fifth news page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Wednesday, April 18, 2012, Vol. 12, No. 77 | |||||||||
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Jo
Stuart |
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| French
predictions put Sarkozy at a disadvantage By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
French voters go to the polls Sunday for the first round of presidential elections with two top contenders dominating the campaigning, incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, the Socialist Party candidate. Sarkozy is running for a second term, and many analysts say he is facing an uphill battle. After five years in office, he is seen by many French voters as not delivering on his promises of cutting government spending, increasing wages and creating more jobs. “He sees himself as the candidate of economic growth,” said John Merriman, an expert on France at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “But in fact, the results of his presidency have not been marked by any economic growth at all. “It still has a very high unemployment rate, young people particularly - educated young people, uneducated young people - the level of unemployment is very, very high,” Merriman said. “And this is going to work against Sarkozy.” The latest statistics show more than 20 percent of France’s young people are unemployed, more than twice the overall unemployment rate. Merriman and others say Sarkozy, married to former super-model Carla Bruni, has alienated many people because of his lavish life-style. “He gives the impression that all he really cares about is big yachts and big trips and big restaurants and big money,” said Merriman. In an effort to counter that perception, Bruni told several French news outlets: “We are modest people.” Dominique Moisi, senior adviser to the French Institute for International Affairs in Paris, points to some of Sarkozy’s accomplishments. “Resisting the financial and economic crisis. Being at the helm of the European presidency of the Union at the worst time and sustaining the high winds. Starting to reform France on retirement age and the university system. And intervening and making a difference in the Ivory Coast and Libya.” Moisi said Sarkozy’s message to voters should be simple: “You need me. Help me save you because the winds are going to be even tougher. You need someone with experience. In fact, any other candidate would be dangerous for you because he would lack the experience I’ve had.” Sarkozy’s main challenger, Hollande, is a veteran politician who has never held a national government position. A graduate of the prestigious National School of Administration, Hollande has been a member of the National Assembly since the late 1980s and secretary-general of the Socialist Party. Hollande, according to Moisi, is “a discreet person, a man who says: ‘you must vote for me because I’m normal.’ But as a result, the French may not only find him normal, but slightly banal. “He is not charismatic - that’s the least one can say,” Moisi concluded. “But he is reasonable, serious and, in fact, friendly.” Hollande’s political platform includes raising taxes on the very rich, freezing fuel prices, increasing welfare payments and hiring 60,000 new teachers. He has called for 75 percent tax on France's richest people. His ex-partner, and the mother of his four children, is Segolene Royal. She was the Socialist Party presidential candidate in 2007, but lost to Sarkozy. She has endorsed Hollande this time around. There are eight other candidates for the French presidency, including far-right Marine Le Pen, far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon and centrist Francois Bayrou. No one is expected to get the 50 percent necessary to win outright in the first round of balloting this Sunday. This will mean that the two top vote-getters will face each other in a second round of voting scheduled for May 6. Public opinion surveys show Sarkozy and Hollande are expected to make it through to the second round. Noise has complex effect on plants, study reports By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Researchers haven’t given much thought to the effect of noise and noise pollution on plants. But that could be about to change. In northwestern New Mexico’s Rattlesnake Canyon, gnarled juniper trees and piñon pines dominate a landscape of high mesas and rough sandstone cliffs. Tucked in among the trees are thousands of natural gas wells. About one-third of them are pressurized by ear-splitting compressors. “They run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with the exception of periodic maintenance, so they are going all the time,” says Clinton Francis, of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina. Since 2005, he’s been studying how Rattlesnake Canyon’s birds respond to the compressors’ non-stop racket. “Black-chinned hummingbirds, for example, tend to prefer and settle in really noisy landscapes, and western scrub jays tend to avoid these noisy areas,” Francis says. So the noise in the canyon is changing the way the birds behave. And that got Francis wondering whether that’s having an effect on plants the birds interact with. Take piñon pine trees and scrub jays, for example. “We know that jays are really important seed dispersers for piñon pine,” he says. The jays bury the seeds to snack on later, but inevitably, some get forgotten and grow into new pine trees. Francis already knew there were fewer pine seedlings at noisy sites. Was that because the noise was keeping the jays away from their pine nuts? Francis set up motion-trigger cameras at both noisy and quiet sites, put out some pine seeds, and waited. As he predicted, jays avoided the noisy sites, not stashing any nuts there. “We only found them removing seeds on the quiet sites,” he says. But that wasn’t the only thing the cameras saw. At the noisy sites, mice were gobbling up the seeds, leaving nothing behind to sprout. So for the pine trees, it looked like the compressor noise was delivering a double whammy. “We’re just not getting as many seeds going into the seed bank in noisy areas, and the ones that do might be consumed by the mice that are there.” |
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Jo
Stuart |
| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
| The contents of this page and this Web site are copyrighted by Consultantes Río Colorado 2012 and may not be reproduced anywhere without permission. Abstracts and fair use are permitted. Check HERE for details | ||||||
| A.M.
Costa
Rica's sixth news page |
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| San
José,
Costa Rica, Wednesday, April 18, 2012, Vol. 12, No. 77 |
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Latin America news |
Global
economy improves
slowly, Monetary Fund says By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The International Monetary Fund says in a new report that the global economic outlook is improving. Despite a marked slowdown in Europe, the global lending institution projects the world economy will grow 3.5 percent this year, a slight improvement from its earlier forecast in January. Growth in developing countries remains brisk, but significant risks remain. The Fund says the U.S. job market is starting to show signs of life, factory output is up sharply from recessionary lows and American consumers are spending more. There's also good news from Europe, where coordinated efforts by the European Union may have eliminated the threat of a Greek default and lowered borrowing costs in other high debt countries. But Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard says the global economic picture is complicated. "Things have quieted down since but an uneasy calm remains. One has the feeling that at any moment, things could well get very bad again," he said. Analysts point to Spain as a potential risk. Yields for Spanish bonds have doubled since March on speculation that Europe's fourth largest economy might seek financial support. But William Hobbs from VP Research says that's an unlikely scenario. "Spain is not Greece. Spain has a viable, albeit open-to-reform economy, and they have globally-respected businesses and generally an economy which we think will eventually see it through these dark times to come," he said. The Fund sees promise in developing economies, particularly those in Asia, which are projected to grow 7.5 percent this year. China's growth will likely slow slightly to 8.2 percent. But the pace is expected to accelerate in the Middle East and North Africa as oil prices continue to rise. Improvements are also seen in sub-Saharan Africa and South Africa, where economic output is likely to expand 5.5 percent. Still, Blanchard says he sees reason for caution. "For many countries, the challenges come mainly from the outside in the form of lower exports to advanced countries because of the low growth there, of the volatility of commodity prices which affects both exporters and importers and the high volatility of capital flows," he said. The report comes as the 187-nation institution and its sister lending organization, the World Bank, prepare to hold annual spring meetings in Washington. |
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