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| A.M. Costa Rica's Second news page | |
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San
José, Costa Rica, Thursday, May 15, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 95
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 Ministerio
de Gobernación,
Policía
y Seguridad Pública photo Helicopter
is about to land at Hospital México.
Mercy flight
lands at hospital
for burned Talamanca tot By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Only in urgent cases does the Servicio de Vigilancia Aérea fly medical patients directly to Hospital México. The agency, part of the security ministry, did so Wednesday when a helicopter crew brought a badly burned girl from the Talamancas. The craft landed directly on the concrete pad at the front of the hospital. The girl, 3, had suffered severe burns to her legs and back. The helicopter crew also brought the mother, the ministry said. The same crew flew a newborn from Golfito also Wednesday. The infant went to the Hospital de Niños by ambulance from the landing spot at Juan Santamaría airport. New committee will see legislation on Guanacaste By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Lawmakers from Guanacaste have engineered the creation of a special committee to handle the problems of that province. The goal is to promote the economic development of the area, an announcement said. The new group will have true committee status in that it will be able to discuss laws, approve or disapprove them and submit them for a binding vote to the full legislature. The special committee will endure for four years, the life of the current legislature, the announcement said. The new committee said that a priority is the creation of a special economic zone for Guanacaste where businesses can thrive. Finance minister conducts strategy talk with officials By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Helio Fallas, who serves double duty as vice president and also the head of the finance ministry, met Wednesday morning with a handful of officials as part of the effort to get a grip on the nation's budget. Later, in a summary provided by his Ministerio de Hacienda, Fallas was reported to be concerned by the increase in 2013 of the national debt. That increase was 10.5 percent, the summary said. Fallas met with Marta Acosta, the Contraladora de la República, the chief budget watchdog. He also met with Olivier Castro, the new president of the Banco Central; Carlos Obregón, executive president of the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad; Sara Salazar, the executive president of the Refinadora Costarricense de Petróleo, and the two Hacienda vice ministers, José Francisco Pacheco and Fernando Rodríguez. Fallas was quoted as saying he wanted to get different points of view on the nation's financial situation. He also was reported to be concerned by the low level of execution of important public works projects. He cited as an example the government's Limón Ciudad Puerto plan to revamp that area around the Caribbean administrative center. He also was reported looking at inconsistencies in the payments of pensions and other money given to government workers. He also was reported to have identified weaknesses within his own ministry that he is planning to fix. As minister of Haciendaa, Fallas is the leading figure in efforts by President Luis Guillermo Solís to rein in the national budget, which is likely to show a 6 percent deficit this fiscal year. Museums will have their day Sunday with special events By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The nation's museums are gearing up for the International day of museums, declared to be Sunday by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The Museo de Arte Costarricense is filling its sculpture garden with artist who will be there to interact with visitors. The artists were identified as Roberto Lizano, Dunia Molina, Adolfo Siliézer and Manuel Vargas. Other museums are expected to be announcing their programs as the weekend approaches. The Museo de Arte Costarricense is in Parque la Sabana. ''Passion of St. John' due for two performances By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional and the Coro Sinfónico Nacional will be presenting a special concert tonight and Friday at 8 p.m. in the Teatro Nacional. The groups are under the direction of John Nelson and Ramiro A. Ramírez The work is the "Passion of St. John" by Johann Sebastian Bach. The 18th century work is inspired by the Gospel of John. The first performance was in 1724. Typically the chorus follows the words of the Bible closely. Admission is 10,000 colons, a bit less than $20. There are discounts for seniors and students.
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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 A.M. Costa Rica.com Ltda. 2014 and may not be reproduced anywhere without permission. Abstracts and fair use are permitted. Check HERE for details | ||||||
A.M. Costa Rica Third News Page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Thursday, May 15, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 95 | |
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| World Health reports half of Costa Ricans say they do not
drink alcohol |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Nearly half of Costa Rica's population abstains from drinking, according to a World Health Organization study released this week. The global report showed the nation as consuming much less alcohol per capita than the American average. At 5.4 liters of alcohol a year, Costa Rica's rate of consumption for both sexes was also less than the world average of 6.2 liters. Male drinkers in the country almost double the amount of female drinkers. More than a quarter of the population over the age of 15 says they have never drunk alcohol in their lives. The calculated average accounts for a beverage's pure alcohol percentage and population size, so the number means each Costa Rican citizen would consume an average of 5.4 liters of pure alcohol in a year. The country shows a strong preference to beer, as the malty stuff accounts for 60 percent of total alcoholic intake compared to 35 percent for liquor and a mere 5 percent for wine. In terms of health, the report details that there are many who abuse alcohol, as it's the nation's most consumed drug. According to the World Health Organization, public health care is one of the bigger factors when looking at the prevalence of alcohol in different societies. “Many of these differences are mitigated, but not entirely removed, |
 A.M. Costa Rica file photo
Assembly line of bottles ready
to receive contents.by the universal availability of health care within the society,” the report reads. “Where there is unequal access to treatment or other resources, the health and social consequences of a given level or pattern of drinking are also likely to be more severe for those with less resources.” Compared to Costa Rica, the United States with 9.2 liters a year and Canada with 10.2 liters came in with far higher rates of alcohol consumption per capita. The report states that more than 3 million deaths occur every year that stem from alcohol. |
| Water institute ordered to provide service to four
Limón villages |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Instituto Costarricense de Acueductos y Alcantarillados has been ordered to supply four remote native communities with drinking water within seven days. The Sala IV constitutional court upheld an appeal from the Asociación de Desarrollo Integral de la Reserva Indígena Cabécar de Talamanca. The communities involved are San Vicente, Sibuju, and San Miguel. Also the Asociación de Desarrollo Integral de la Reserva indígena Cabécar de Tayni in Estrella de Limón presented an appeal for the estimated 500 residents of Gavilán. This is a community where the Instituto Costarricense de Acueductos y Alcantarillados drilled a well that produced water unfit for human consumption, said the summary of the case. |
The water utility
has six months to come up with a plan to drill
another well. Meanwhile, within seven days the utility was told it has
to bring in trucks with water or otherwise get water to the community.
The state water company has said that the village is not accessible to
trucks. Community members submitted multiple requests and complaints to the utility after having to drink contaminated water for an extended period, according to a report from the Poder judicial. When ruling on both cases, the judges agreed this was a violation of essential human rights, especially when considering a vulnerable group like the native peoples. As in parts of Guanacaste, one of the contaminant is naturally occurring arsenic, the court noted. |
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| You need to see Costa Rican tourism information HERE! |
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| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's Fourth News page | |||||
| San José, Costa Rica, Thursday, May 15, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 95 | |||||
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| Baby turtles are influenced for life by first brush with
ocean currents |
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By
the University of Southampton news service
New research has found that adult sea turtle migrations and their selection of feeding sites are directly influenced by their past experiences as little hatchlings adrift in ocean currents. When they breed, adult sea turtles return to the beach where they were born. After breeding, adult sea turtles typically migrate several hundreds to thousands of kilometers to their feeding habitats. However, there has been little information about how turtles chose their feeding sites. For example, some turtles migrate to feeding habitats thousands of kilometers away, while other turtles don’t migrate or feed in the open ocean. The study, which involves the University of Southampton, looked at what habitats the turtles would have experienced as juveniles. Newborn hatchling sea turtles are too small to track with satellite tags. However, when they emerge from their eggs, they head to the ocean and drift with ocean currents to their juvenile development habitats. The researchers combined all the available satellite tracking data on adult turtles with models of how the world's sea water moves past nesting sites to study where the hatchling sea turtles drift to. By comparing global patterns in the migrations of all satellite tracked sea turtles with global hatchling drift patterns, they showed that adult sea turtle migrations and foraging habitat selections were based on their past experiences drifting with ocean currents. |
Rebecca Scott, who
led the study soon to be reported in the journal
Ecology, says: “Hatchlings' swimming abilities are pretty weak, and so
they are largely at the mercy of the currents. If they drift to a good
site, they seem to imprint on this location, and then later actively go
there as an adult. And because they're bigger and stronger they can
swim there directly. “Conversely, if the hatchlings don't drift to sites that are suitable for adult feeding, you see that reflected in the behavior of the adults, which either do not migrate or they feed in the open ocean, which is not the normal strategy for most turtle species,” explained Dr. Scott. She is based at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany. Many animal groups undertake great migrations, and the process of learning where to go on these travels can take several forms. For example, some juvenile whales and birds learn migration routes by following their mothers or more experienced group members, while other bird and insect species seem to be born with the information or a map sense that informs them where they should migrate. However, neither of these strategies works for turtles. Once the adult female has laid her eggs on a beach, her involvement in her offspring's development ends. When the hatchlings crawl down the beach into the water, they are on their own, There is no experienced turtle to follow, and they go where the ocean takes them. |
Here's reasonable medical care
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| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth news page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Thursday, May 15, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 95 | |||||
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| Republicans have advantage with U.S. midterm elections By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
U.S. congressional elections are less than six months away, but Democrats are already worried their voters will not be able to match the intensity of Republicans in November. Light voter turnout is the norm in non-presidential election years, and it’s already a concern for President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in 2014. The president has been trying to whip up enthusiasm among his core supporters during some recent speeches around the country including a campaign fundraiser in California. “We’re going to have to make sure that we are coming out with the same urgency and the same enthusiasm that we typically show during presidential years,” he said. “ That’s what we are going to need.” Republicans are counting on dissatisfaction with the president and his signature health care law to drive their voters to the polls, and analyst Charlie Cook said, for the moment, that gives them the upper hand looking ahead to November. Cook said one of the keys to recent midterm elections is that Republican voters are much more likely to turn out than Democrats. Democrats, he said, do much better in presidential election years like 2008 and 2012. “In a presidential election year the turnout is big, it’s diverse and it looks more or less like the country,” Cook said. “But in midterm elections when the turnout is smaller, it is whiter, it is more conservative, it’s more Republican. It’s just real different.” Cook said that Democrats have been trying to turn around the public’s negative perception of the Obama health care law, known as the Affordable Care Act. But Cook said don’t hold your breath on that happening anytime soon. “Americans may grow to love the Affordable Care Act but it sure as heck is not likely to happen between now and November, and I think the odds of that happening between now and 2016 are relatively small,” he said. President Obama’s recent poll ratings have been among the lowest of his time in the White House. Democrats are still recovering from the chaotic rollout of the health care law. And Republicans seem energized to vote against the president and Obamacare in November. All this adds up to a tall order for Democrats hoping to get voters out to the polls, said Democratic pollster and strategist Celinda Lake. “Turnout is going to be a huge issue for the Democrats, particularly younger people who are very discouraged about the economy, unmarried women, African-Americans, Latinos, all that are core constituencies for us,” Ms. Lake said. Ms. Lake said that the very groups the Democrats need to energize have not felt the improvement in the U.S. economy. She added that the recent focus on Ukraine and Russia has caused a drop in public approval of the president’s handling of foreign policy, which had long been a strength in public opinion surveys for the Obama White House. Lake said Republicans will probably have a turnout advantage this year, especially with older white voters who tend to turn out in midterm elections more than other voting blocs. In short, Ms. Lake said it looks like a tough election cycle for Democrats in November, though she believes Democrats can still hold on to their Senate majority by helping incumbents in key states. Many Republicans are confident of their chances in November. But they also know they have been disappointed in recent elections when their expectations fell short, especially about retaking control of the Senate. In recent years, Tea Party-backed candidates have often failed in the general election, depriving Republicans of seats they otherwise would have won with more centrist candidates. The battle between the Republican establishment and the Tea Party continues to play out this year with the establishment doing better so far. The one exception was in Nebraska where Tea Party favorite and university president Ben Sasse won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate by defeating four other contenders. In terms of overall election strategy for 2014, House Speaker John Boehner says he wants his party to remain focused on the president, the health care law and jobs and the economy in the months leading up to November. “I think it takes some audacity to call for greater cooperation amongst nations on the economy when they won’t even focus on the jobs issues that we’ve got right here in America that need to be resolved,” he said. Cook and other analysts predict Republicans will hold their majority in the House of Representatives and may even pick up a few seats in November. Most of the attention will focus on the 36 Senate races where Republicans are favored to pick up seats currently held by Democrats. The problem for Democrats is that several of the key Senate races are taking place in states where Republican Mitt Romney rolled up big victory margins in the 2012 presidential race, like Alaska, Arkansas and Louisiana. Democrats have very few opportunities to win Republican seats. Their best chance may come in Kentucky where a veteran senator, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, faces a strong Democratic challenge from Stephanie Lundergan Grimes. And that is assuming McConnell beats back a primary challenge from Tea Party favorite Matt Bevin, who trails by a wide margin in recent polls. Public opinion analyst Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute says Republicans sense they have their best chance in years to win back control of the Senate. “These Senate contests are such high stakes contests,” Ms. Bowman said. “The Republicans would desperately like to win control of the Senate and actually have a decent margin in the Senate in order to try to move some of their own issues along.” All 435 House seats and 36 of the 100 Senate seats are at stake in November along with 36 state governorships. Cook said if the Republicans succeed in holding all their own Senate seats they have an excellent chance to gain the six additional seats they need to claim a majority in the Senate next January. Primaries are key to field viable election candidates By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Republicans in a number of U.S. states head to the polls in coming weeks to vote in primary elections to pick the party's candidate for November's midterm elections. The primaries in some of these states are seen as a test of the conservative Tea Party movement, which has been influential in Republican party politics since scoring significant victories in the 2010 midterms. In Kentucky, Senate Republican Minority leader Mitch McConnell faces a primary challenge from a Tea Party-backed candidate. But, waning enthusiasm for some of the Tea Party candidates could affect the outcome of these races with party control of Congress next year hanging in the balance. Conservative Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin has forged a well-traveled path throughout Kentucky in his bid for the U.S. Senate. He says he hears the same concerns among voters across the state. “They’re worried about the economy. They are worried about their ability to maintain their own jobs, let alone their children and grandchildren," said Bevin. Those are the concerns of Bowling Green, Kentucky, voters such as Brian and Claudia Strow, who are looking for a candidate that can best bring job growth to Kentucky. “Our unemployment rate is still much higher than the national average. It is 7.9 percent here in March. People are looking around trying to ask what kind of government policies might be conducive to job creation," said Claudia Strow. Bevin is popular among conservative Tea Party voters who were key to midterm election wins nationwide in 2010 that changed the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives. Their concerns: what they see as government intrusion into their lives, especially President Barack Obama's health care reform law. A Republican Senate candidate in the Midwest state of Iowa, Matt Whitaker, says four years later, conservative voter outrage over President Obama's health care reform continues. But it might not be enough of an impact to draw out as many voters this midterm election cycle, says University of Kentucky Professor Al Cross. “I think there is some fatigue among people who were all energized by the Tea Party," said Cross. Such as in North Carolina, where the Republican establishment candidate recently defeated Tea Party rivals to win his party's Senate nomination. Yet it's a different story in Nebraska, where Tea Party backing helped Ben Sasse win the Republican Senate primary. But in Kentucky, despite Tea Party support, Matt Bevin trails incumbent McConnell in polling, even though McConnell’s approval ratings are very low. “McConnell, interestingly enough, had about the same job approval numbers as Obama, in one of the polls early in the race. There’s just not a great reservoir of love for Mitch McConnell," said Cross. If McConnell does win the primary, the race against his likely Democratic challenger in November's general election could be one of the toughest of McConnell’s career. “It matters, because he is the leader of the Republicans, and he is the most vulnerable Republican incumbent by far," explained Cross. It is a seat Cross says Republicans need to win in their national strategy to secure a majority in the U.S. Senate. And this could hinge on whether Tea Party-backed candidates help or hinder Republicans in achieving this goal. Obama to inaugurate today museum marking Sept. 11 By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A new museum that remembers the horror of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States is set to open in New York. U.S. President Barack Obama is dedicating the National September 11 Memorial Museum today, and it opens to the public next week. The museum is located on the footprint of the once-spiraling twin towers of the World Trade Center, destroyed when al-Qaida terrorists commandeered commercial passenger jets and flew them into the upper floors of the skyscrapers. The $700-million museum and memorial plaza has been years in the making. Its completion has often been troubled by disputes over its design, construction delays and, to this day, whether unidentified remains of some of the victims of the attacks should be buried in the depths of the new structure or above ground. The museum is almost entirely underground, extending to the bedrock where the steel supporting the World Trade Center was anchored. Massive pieces of distorted steel recovered from its destruction are on display, as are a wide array of remembrances of the attack. There are pictures of those killed, a handwritten plea for rescue and voices of people from around the world recalling where they were when they heard about the attack and watched the day's horror unfold on live television. A film,"The Rise of al-Qaida," can be seen at the end of the exhibition. When entering and leaving the museum, visitors can look up through a glass ceiling and see a new tower, One World Trade Center, that is scheduled to open late this year. The 2001 terrorist attacks killed nearly 3,000 people, including at the Defense Department outside Washington and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, area Jacqueline Kennedy's letters to priest finally revealed By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A newly discovered collection of 33 letters former U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to an Irish priest a half-century ago are giving new insight into the deepest thoughts of one of the most private people in American public life. The letters cover the years from 1950 to 1964, a period that includes her marriage to John F. Kennedy, then a rising politician, his 1960 election as president, his 1963 assassination and the aftermath. The letters, first reported in The Irish Times, were written to the Rev. Joseph Leonard, a family friend, and discovered hidden at All Hallows College in Dublin this year. They were sold to an expert in rare books, Owen Felix O'Neill, and are scheduled to be sold at auction in Ireland next month where they could fetch up to $1.6 million. In 1950, then Jacqueline Bouvier first met Leonard on a trip to Ireland. She met him in person just one more time, in 1955, after she had married the then-U.S. sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. She described it as a fairy tale visit. They corresponded regularly until Leonard's death in 1964. She sometimes disclosed her innermost thoughts, but on other occasions, especially early on, was more lighthearted, discussing arts and literature and her personal life. In one early letter, she said that Leonard, who was so different from the priests she had met in the U.S., helped renew her commitment to her Catholic faith. "I terribly want to be a good Catholic now and I know it's all because of you," she wrote. In the letters, Jacqueline Kennedy compares her husband to Shakespeare's Macbeth because of his all-consuming ambition and worries about his womanizing. A few months after the assassination, she confided, "I am so bitter against God." Additional excerpts from the letters: * In her first letter to Leonard, after he had chaperoned her around Dublin, she said she was miserable at leaving Ireland. * Leonard also made the 1955 visit with Sen. Kennedy memorable. "You will never know how much our visit meant to both of us — of all the places we've ever been together that was — always will be — the best. And why? All because of one person whom there is no one else like on this earth — you." * In a 1952 letter, she describes some of her early impressions about her future husband. "I think I'm in love with — and I think it would interest you — John Kennedy — he's the son of the ambassador to England — the second son — the oldest was killed. He's 35 and a congressman." * In a later letter she described his ambition and their courtship. "He hurt me terribly when he was campaigning and never called up for weeks. I think he was as much in love with me as he could be with anyone and now maybe he will want to get married because a senator needs a wife, but if he ever does ask me to marry him it will be for rather practical reasons — because his career is this driving thing with him." * On marriage itself: "After a year, I love being married much more than I did even in the beginning." * Jacqueline Kennedy struggled with the president's death. "I think God must have taken Jack to show the world how lost we would be without him — but that is a strange way of thinking to me." She later added with a touch of humor: "God will have a bit of explaining to do to me if I ever see him." Secret team is working to defeat Chinese censors By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
It’s a safe bet that no nation has a more comprehensive and redundant system for filtering and censoring the Internet than China. Officially, it’s called the Golden Shield Project and is designed, among other things, to prevent injury to the interests of the state or society. Unofficially, it’s known around the world as the Great Firewall of China, and since 2003 it has effectively blocked just about anything the Chinese government deems too controversial. Since its launch, China has limited or completely blocked access to a growing number of Web sites based in other nations. Increasingly, it also has been aggressive about censoring homegrown sites where Chinese citizens share their opinions, such as on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular social network Weibo means “microblog” in Mandarin. That’s something one man is working hard to fight. He can’t tell you where he is, won’t allow his voice to be recorded and can be reached only via a secure line and encrypted phone. He goes by the pseudonym Charlie Smith. He is co-founder of the Web site GreatFire.org. Since 2011, Smith and other like-minded free-speech activists have been documenting China’s extensive censorship of the Internet at GreatFire. “We started monitoring a few hundred URLs and now we’re up to about 100,000,” Smith said. “It’s the No. 1 resource for checking to see whether a site is blocked in China.” GreatFire has recorded hundreds of thousands of blocks, and Smith and his partners have become a major thorn in the side of Chinese officials. A look at GreatFire one recent day showed how many of Google’s services were blocked: exactly all of them, which Wikipedia pages are blocked and by how much. Now Smith is hoping to up the stakes with a new app that he says allows Chinese netizens to see what they’re missing due to censorship on China’s largest social media platform, Sina Weibo. It’s estimated that thousands of posts are deleted every day on popular social media sites like Baidu and Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like micro-blogging platform. For example, one study in 2013 found that approximately 12 percent of posts on Sina Weibo were deleted by Chinese authorities, often within minutes after posting. For several years now, Smith and his colleagues have been reposting as many of those censored posts by Chinese citizens as possible on another Web site FreeWeibo.com. That’s helpful for many living outside of China, but not so much for those living there, as FreeWeibo and GreatFire are completely blocked by the Great Firewall. Then, a little over a year ago, Smith had an idea how to break through the firewall. It began when he noticed that Chinese authorities suddenly blocked the popular web development site Github.com. “Github is used by a lot of Chinese web developers to write code while America sleeps,” he said. “The authorities one day decided to block access to that site, probably because someone had reposted a petition asking the U.S. to deny entry for all those who were involved in creating the Great Firewall.” The reaction, Smith said, was as swift as it was unexpected. “All of these developers were like ‘Hey, what’s going on? This is our livelihood, why is this site blocked? This isn’t like the New York Times, this is how we make money,’” Smith said. “The dollar talks, right?” Apparently so. Realizing their mistake, authorities quickly unblocked the site, presumably opting to allow a little unpleasant content through the Great Firewall in exchange for greater economic reward. From that, Smith said, the idea of what he calls collateral freedom was born. “We realized, well, hold on, these guys were serving up this banned information on a Web site that was too valuable to block,” he said. “The Chinese couldn’t selectively block the controversial things without taking out the entire site, but that would have terrible consequences. So in essence, these cloud services are unblockable.” With this in mind, Smith and his colleagues soon developed an app that collected the deleted Weibo posts they had been gathering and delivered them to users via a very popular service in China – Amazon’s AWS cloud-computing service. They called their app, first developed for Apple, FreeWeibo. Since Amazon’s AWS is encrypted, individual posts can’t be blocked without blocking the entire site. But because AWS is used by so many major Chinese firms, it’s essentially unblockable. “Collateral freedom,” said Smith. “We published first on Apple, and the app was working no problems,” Smith said. “And then the authorities called up Apple and said, ‘Can you remove that app?’ And Apple said, ‘Yeah, we can do that, no problem. Yes, sir.’ And they did.” Apple representatives declined to respond to several requests for comment. Because Apple tightly controls all apps delivered through its proprietary App Store, Smith reasons the tech giant didn’t want to risk angering Chinese officials and losing a very profitable market all for one anti-censorship application. But, he said, what was first seen as a setback was actually a blessing in disguise. “This was good for us because we went to look at Android,” he said. “That market is so fragmented in China that it’s actually very difficult for them to call up all the stores and say, ‘Remove this,’ because there are just so many. Plus, our download link is now delivered through the cloud, so that’s unblockable as well.” In China and elsewhere, there are now many sites where you can download the FreeWeibo app for Android devices. Smith estimates there are some 2,000 active daily downloads, and he said he expects that number to skyrocket with the approaching June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Every year around that date, Chinese authorities step up their censorship of blogging sites like Sina Weibo. But this year, that censorship may be diluted for users with FreeWeibo who really want to see what their fellow citizens are posting online. “This app is totally seamless,” Smith said. “You get it, install it, bang, you don’t have to do anything, no changes on your phone, all the information gets delivered, you’re done.” And it doesn’t just stop with Sina Weibo. Using the same collateral damage idea, Smith said “anything that’s blocked in China, we can do the same thing.” That means just about any content currently censored by the Great Firewall, from news reports to regime critics and anything else, might now find a way into China. “We want to expand this out, on a paid-for basis, as a way of sustaining what we’re doing,” Smith said. “We’ve been pretty much self-funded to this point, but our bills are starting to go way up. So we’re trying to use this as our business model.” Humans are just too dumb to meet ET, prof suggests By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Are humans alone in this mammoth universe? Or are there other life forms and civilizations out there waiting to be discovered? Would humans be ready for such an encounter? The answer is no, according to a new study conducted by a Spanish neuropsychologist, who found humans aren’t smart enough, and are too influenced by religion, to be able to handle such contact. The study, published in Acta Astronautica, was conducted by Gabriel G. de la Torre, a professor with the Department of Psychology at the University of Cádiz in Spain, who has also worked on projects for the European Space Agency and the European Science Foundation. For his study, de la Torre analyzed the ethical and sociological implications of a possible human/ET interaction. He wondered, “Can such a decision be taken on behalf of the whole planet? What would happen if it was successful and someone received our signal? Are we prepared for this type of contact?” To get answers to these questions, de la Torre sent out a questionnaire to 116 American, Italian and Spanish university students. The survey was designed to assess the respondent’s knowledge of astronomy, their level of perception of the physical environment, their opinion on the place that things occupy in the cosmos, the likelihood of contact with extraterrestrials as well as religious questions such as, “Do you believe that God created the universe?” The students’ answers indicated that the general public’s knowledge of the universe and our place within it — even at the university level — is still poor. “Regarding our relation with possible intelligent extraterrestrial life, we should not rely on moral reference points of thought, since they are heavily influenced by religion,” said de la Torre. “Why should some more intelligent beings be good?” De la Torre’s curiosity about a possible ETI/Human encounter was piqued by a project currently being considered by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California. The SETI project began in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a mission to hunt for radio signals being broadcast by extraterrestrial intelligence. For the last several years, there have been some at SETI who would not only like to listen for signs of ETI, but would like to also regularly send messages to them as well. The proposed project is called Active SETI, also known as METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). Since 1974, a number of specific messages from Earth have been beamed out to targeted areas of the cosmos in hopes that an intelligent extraterrestrial being would receive it and realize that we’re here, too. Renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking has raised concerns about transmitting these messages to areas light-years away from Earth. In a 2010 documentary, Hawking said communicating with aliens could pose a threat to Earth. Hawking likened a possible human/ETI encounter to one that took place over 500 years ago between Christopher Columbus and the natives of the New World. “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” said Hawking. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.” But SETI’s senior astronomer looks at it differently. “We can reliably state that a culture able to project force to another star system is at least several centuries in advance of our own,” said Seth Shostak in article he wrote for The Edge magazine. “This statement is independent of whether you believe that such sophisticated beings would be interested in wreaking havoc and destruction. We speak only of capability, not motivation.” Deciding whether humans should purposely send out messages for possible reception by ETI might be something that’s irrelevant anyway. Radio presence has been regularly transmitted throughout space since World War II when television, FM radio and radar were first being used. TV, FM and radar all broadcast at frequencies that are high enough for their signals to escape the atmosphere and continue outwards into outer space where they could possibly be intercepted by ETI. Study author de la Torre doesn’t believe a handful of scientists should monopolize the debate on this subject. “In fact, it is a global matter with a strong ethical component in which we must all participate,” he said. Protection sought for site where 'Santa María' may be By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
An explorer who claims to have found the sunken remains of Christopher Columbus' flagship, "Santa Maria," said salvage operations must start quickly to prevent looting. Marine explorer Barry Clifford said he has already started talks with the Haitian government and hopes he can start work next week. He said there is nobody watching over the wreckage right now. The ship is on the bottom of the Caribbean Sea off northern Haiti, the same place where Columbus wrote that he and his crew abandoned ship after hitting a reef on Christmas Day 1492. Clifford said he now has strong evidence that this is Columbus' ship. He and his crew first found it in 2003, but was unable to identify it then as the Santa Maria. Clifford said he would like to put anything recovered from the ship on public display and use the proceeds to help Haiti. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It has still not fully recovered from the 2010 earthquake. Columbus is the Italian-born explorer who set sail in 1492 to seek a shorter sea route from Spain to Asia. He landed in the modern-day Bahamas and also stopped in Cuba and the island of Hispaniola before returning to Spain. Cuba gets cozy with Russia to extend Moscow's reach By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Russia’s Security Council and Cuba’s Commission for National Security and Defense have signed a memorandum on cooperation and agreed to establish a joint working group, the secretary of the Russian Security Council said Wednesday. “The situation in the world is changing fast and it is dynamic. That’s why we will need the ability to react to it promptly,” Nikolai Patrushev said. A Cuban delegation led by Col. Alejandro Castro Espin arrived in Moscow Tuesday and held a meeting with the leaders of the Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Russia’s primary external intelligence agency. The delegation is also scheduled to meet with representatives from the Federal Security Service, the principal security agency of the Russian Federation and the main successor agency to the Soviet Union’s Committee of State Security, or KGB. “Russia and Cuba need an effective cooperation tool to respond to sensitive issues. The memorandum may define priorities for cooperation to ensure effective security of both states,” said Castro Espin, who is Cuban leader Raúl Castro's son. Patruschev has been linked in recent years to the rapprochement between Moscow and Havana. In the 1970s, he worked with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the KGB. Guillermo Fariñas Hernández, a well-known Cuban dissident who won the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 2010, told martinoticias.com the intelligence sharing can be seen as "a resumption of the Cold War in retaliation for recent moves by NATO and the United States with respect to Ukraine." "They are now physically close to the Russian border, and they [, in retaliation, have appeared somewhere close to U.S. territory to compensate for this development," he said, referencing the Russians.. Russia will resume its position on the island of Cuba to influence Central and South America as well as the United States itself, Fariñas Hernandez said. |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Thursday, May 15, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 95 | |||||||||
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Meteor explosions
reported to be more than suspected By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Last year, a meteorite exploded 23 kilometers above Chelyabinsk, Russia. It was estimated to be 18 meters long with the mass of about 10,000 tons. If it had fallen in a populated area, an entire city could have been devastated. Luckily, the meteorite disintegrated and most of the fragments fell into Lake Chebarkul. Space rocks often enter the Earth’s atmosphere and usually explode and burn before falling to the ground. About 70 percent of the planet is covered with water so most of them disappear beneath the oceans’ surface. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Preparatory Commission, based in Vienna, Austria, says the Earth is visited by meteorites more often than is widely known. “Since meteorites are sometimes entering the atmosphere, and they are creating loud air bursts," said acoustic officer Pierrick Mialle. "Then we will record those at some of the stations." The commission controls a worldwide network of seismic, hydrostatic, ultrasound and radioactivity sensors that monitor possible violations of the Nuclear Test ban treaty. They also document meteor encounters. Between 2000 and 2013, 26 powerful explosions of large meteorites were recorded entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The B612 foundation, which monitors meteorite impacts, estimates at least four of them were stronger than the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. In addition to loud noise, explosions create low frequency infrasound, out of humans' hearing range, which can travel very long distances. The February 2013 explosion of the Chelyabinsk meteorite was recorded by CTBTO stations as far as Antarctica. Mialle says listening stations have an array of four to 15 high-technology sensors. “They are called micro barometer because they measure micro fluctuations of the atmosphere," Mialle said. "It’s like a large microphone except there’s no membrane.” Some of the explosions are hard to identify immediately after detection. “For instance, the first time we had this, what was later called the Super Bolide of North Pacific, in the first few weeks all that was known was a large event in the middle of the Pacific, but we didn’t know what it was,” Mialle said. The commission keeps contact with other agencies that track meteorites, such as NASA, which later confirmed that the mysterious explosion was caused by a meteorite. When complete, the CTBTO system will have 337 stations worldwide monitoring nuclear explosions and other loud sounds in the atmosphere. |
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| From Page 7: Tourism chamber elects man from Turrialba By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Pablo Abarca Mora has been named as the president of the Cámara Nacional de Turismo. He is the head of the Cámara de Turismo de Turrialba. Just like the new minister of Turismo, Wilhelm von Breymann, Abarca has experience
“I fully endorse Canatur's proposal of having a state policy for tourism because its been a plan that has the sector's support and has been supported with serious arguments that we will continue,” he said. Abarca also mentioned that there are concerns with the chamber's infrastructure that need to be solved. He added that his team will try to increase the chamber's overall role in the sector by focusing heavily on promotion tactics to draw more visitors to Costa Rica. |
