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A.M.
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Published Tuesday May 24, 2016, in Vol. 17, No. 101
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San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday May 24, 2016, Vol. 17, No. 101
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By the A.M. Costa
Rica staff
with wire service reports As one legislator put it, Costa Rica can no longer keep silent on Venezuela without being accomplices to the drama in which citizens there live. So with the approval of 24 lawmakers, the legislature passed resolution of solidarity with the Venezuelan people and their efforts to achieve peace and seek solutions to the crises in government through peaceful and legal means with respect to human and political rights, democracy and the constitutional order. The resolution will be sent to the Venezuelan legislature, which is dominated by opponents of President Nicolás Maduro. The president is trying to shut down the legislature and sidestep a recall petition. Meanwhile, the economy is so bad that the Mexican firm of Fomento Económico Mexicano, S.A.B. de C.V., doing business as FEMSA, said it would stop producing. Lawmaker Gerardo Vargas Rojas said that he and colleagues were in Venezuela Dec. 6 and saw the suffering of the people there. He cited lack of goods and hunger. In part due to the low price of petroleum but also due to decades of mismanagement, the Venezuelan economy is in deep distress. Citizen have been marching in the street in an effort to advance the call for a recall referendum. The Mexican soft drink firm said Monday that its Venezuelan subsidiary will stop producing Coca Cola due to a lack of sugar. "Sugar suppliers in Venezuela have informed us that they will temporarily cease operations due to a lack of raw materials," Coca-Cola Co. spokeswoman Kerry Tressler said. Production of Diet Coke, Coke Zero, and other sugarless beverages will continue in Venezuela, the company added. Rising production costs, price controls, and limited access to necessary fertilizers has lead to a recent decline in sugar cane production in Venezuela. The effects of food shortages are being felt across the country amid its recession. A barley shortage has already forced the country's biggest brewer, Empresas Polar, to close its plants. The economic crisis culminated last week, with Maduro announcing a 60-day state of emergency. The International Monetary Fund predicts that inflation in Venezuela, which is already the world’s highest, could more than double in 2016, topping out at more than 720 percent. Jacó meeting to map out zika campaign By the A.M. Costa
Rica staff
Concerned residents of Jacó are meeting this afternoon at Crocs Casino & Hotel to discuss the potential health and commercial impacts of the zika virus, according to Robert Sinclair, an expat who has become involved in the campaign. “We will present a full plan of action aimed at keeping Jaco zika safe,” he said in an email. Attending will be Ministerio de Salud officials and Randall Chaves, president of the Surf Federación de Surf de Costa Rica, who is expected to speak. One of the goals of the anti-zika campaign is to make the community safe for those who will visit to watch and participate in the World Surfing Games in August. The surfing event is supposed to bring some $36 million into the local economy. Sinclair has been mobilizing other expats in the Pacific coast community to fight the disease. At last report there were 31 active cases of zika there, mostly in some low-income residential areas of the town. The health ministry has been fumigating and going house to house to eliminate places where the zika-carrying mosquito can breed.
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A.M. Costa Rica Third News Page |
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San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday May 24, 2016, Vol. 17, No. 101
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| Eruptions
can be much more powerful than most people expect |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
History shows that volcanoes should not be underestimated. Mount Vesuvius killed an estimated 16,000 persons when it exploded in 79 A.D. The mountain sent up plumes of ash and smoke 33 kilometers into the air, some 20.5 miles. The pyroclastic flows entombed the Roman communities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which now are museums. Ash fell as far away as what is today Istanbul. Mount St. Helens exploded in the U.S. State of Washington in 1980. The column rose up an estimated 80,000 feet and rained ash on 11 U.S. states. Some 15 persons died and the economic loss approached $3 billion. The Irazú volcano staged a series of eruptions in 1963, and although there was no serious damage, ash rained on San José and other areas of the Central Valley for two years. Mount Arenal in Costa Rica erupted in 1968 and wiped out Tabacón, Pueblo Nuevo and San Luís. The explosion sent rocks the size of Volkswagens miles in all directions and destroyed much of the area livestock, agricultural land and several communities. Refugees flocked to Ciudad Quesada. The death toll was 87. Mount St. Helens and Mount Vesuvius gave ample signs of activity with local earth tremors. The Arenal explosion was a surprise. By these eruption standards, the current activity at the Turrialba volcano is minor. The 3,340-meter, 10,958-foot mountain had multiple eruptions Monday, at 10:30 a.m., 1:35 p.m., 2:30 p.m., 2:45 p.m., 3:09 p.m., 3:30 p.m. and 4:01 p.m., according to the Observatorio Vulcanológico y Sismológico de Costa Rica at Universidad Nacional. The ash column rose up to 500 meters to 1,000, nearly 1,700 to 3,400 feet. Ash was reported falling in San Isidro del Guarco, Turrialba, Paraiso, Cartago, Alajuela, Curridabat and Tibás. The ash dispersal depends on the wind direction. So far officials have taken steps to close the mountain and the Parque Nacional Volcán Turrialba that surrounds it. Farmers continue to work their land on the flanks of the |
 Brooklyn
Museum/William Henry Goodyear
Pompeii residents may have thought that the
distance from Vesuvius was enough to protect
them. This is what is left of the city’s forum.mountain despite the ash fall while others tend and milk their cows. Most scientific observers expect the mountain to go back to sleep. The alternative would be an unpleasant surprise because pyroclastic flows can move at great speeds for miles. Many who died in Pompeii were at the sea coast awaiting evacuation. Many died in their sleep because they did not take the activity in the mountain seriously and waited too long to leave. The national emergency commission tries not to be alarmist when it suggests basic preparations, like three days of food, plenty of water on hand, flashlights, extra batteries and a battery-powered radio. These precautions could apply to persons well away from any volcano. After all, the Central Valley has active volcanoes to the west and to the east, including Poas, Barva, Irazú and Turrialba. |
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fourth News page |
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San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday May 24, 2016, Vol. 17, No. 101
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| U.S.
study fails to link amphibian decline to any single cause |
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By the U.S. Geological
Survey news staff
New U.S. Geological Survey-led research suggests that even though amphibians are severely declining worldwide, there is no smoking gun and thus no simple solution to halting or reversing these declines. “Implementing conservation plans at a local level will be key in stopping amphibian population losses, since global efforts to reduce or lessen threats have been elusive,” said Evan Grant, a Survey research wildlife biologist who led the study published in Scientific Reports. “This research changes the way we need to think about amphibian conservation by showing that local action needs to be part of the global response to amphibian declines, despite remaining questions in what is causing local extinctions.” The evidence threats differ and include disease, pesticides, climate change and human influences. The chytrid fungus is known to have a major impact on frogs in Costa Rica. Amphibian declines are a global phenomenon that this new research demonstrates has continued unabated in the United States since at least the 1960s, and which are occurring even in protected national parks and refuges. Scientists have broadly linked declines to environmental factors like climate, human influence such as land-use change, and contaminants and disease, but have not been able to use actual scientific data on a large scale to discern causes of the ongoing disappearance of amphibian populations. The new study is the first to test this linkage at a continental scale, and finds that the presence and intensity of the four main threats, human influence, disease, pesticide application, and climate change, varies substantially across the U.S. The causes of the declines are more variable and more locally driven across the United States than had been assumed. For example, the research provides evidence that the average decline in overall amphibian populations is 3.79 percent per |
 U.S.
Geological Survey/Alan Cressler
American bullfrogs at the
Atlanta Botanical Garden.
year, which supports previous survey-led research findings from 2013 that showed a
similar rate of loss, though the new research finds
that the decline rate is more severe in some regions,
such as the West Coast and the Rocky Mountains. If
this rate remains unchanged, these species would
disappear from half of the habitats they occupy in
about 20 years.
"Losing 3 or 4 percent of amphibian populations might not sound like a big deal but small losses year in and year out quickly lead to dramatic and consequential declines,” said Survey ecologist Michael Adams, a study coauthor. David Miller, a professor at Penn State University and the lead biometrician in the study, summarized the extent of the effort. "This study involved a truly comprehensive and collaborative effort to bring together data from researchers across the United States,” Miller said. “We combined nearly half a million actual observations of 84 species across 61 study areas to answer questions about the causes of wide-scale amphibian declines.” |
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth news page |
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San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday May 24, 2016, Vol. 17, No. 101
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 Voice of America
photo
The memories run deep for someMemories of Vietnam
still
generates sharp differences By the A.M. Costa Rica wire
services
“And it’s one, two, three; what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam!” Those words seemed to echo out of a distant past ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Vietnam, a country with which the United States now maintains good relations as well as important trade ties. When Country Joe McDonald sang his anti-Vietnam war protest song, "I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag," at the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in August 1969, it drew loud cheers and soon became one of the main anthems of the anti-war movement. McDonald sang it again in April before an audience at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, that included many people who had fought in Vietnam as well as many who had opposed the war. The singer, who served in the U.S. Navy in the early 1960's but never went to Vietnam, said he was pleased when he found out that many U.S. soldiers fighting in that war used to listen to the song. “The unique thing about the song is that it does not blame soldiers for war,” he said. “I always say that blaming soldiers for war is like blaming firefighters for fire.” More than 40 years after it ended, the war in Vietnam, and America’s role in it, continue to provoke bitter debate, especially among those who fought in it. Among Vietnam veterans there are mixed feelings about whether the war was justified and winnable along with a lot of hurt and confusion over an event that drastically changed their lives. Among them is Kerry Orr, who was wounded in 1969, went home to recover and then several years later saw news reports of the North Vietnamese victory. “That is hard,” Orr said, “to think that we lost it because we just didn’t want to win it, and I still don’t understand why we didn’t want to win it.” That sentiment is even more bitter among former South Vietnamese soldiers such Captain Michael Do. “President Nixon promised that he would help with any means, any way, to save Vietnam if the Communists attacked again,” Do said. “But they did nothing.” Under the peace agreement signed in Paris in January 1973, the United States agreed to pull out its troops as long as the North Vietnamese did not invade the south. Do, who later spent time in a concentration camp, said the Communists were supported by China and Russia, while U.S. aid to South Vietnam was drastically reduced. "We didn't have ammunition," he remembers. One of the men responsible for U.S. policy at that time was former secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who won a Nobel Prize for his part in negotiating an end to U.S. involvement in the war. Many critics say Kissinger committed war crimes by advising President Richard Nixon to bomb Vietnam’s neutral neighbor, Cambodia. In his appearance, Kissinger said that policy was justified by the four divisions the North Vietnamese army sent into Cambodia. “In the third week of the Nixon presidency, they started an offensive in which every week up to 500 Americans were killed,” he said. “Many of these attacks, more than half of these attacks, came from the areas that were occupied by those four divisions inside Cambodian territory.” As one of the soldiers put at risk by those enemy troops, veteran Orr does not understand why Kissinger’s policy is even questioned. “You are allowing North Vietnam to move troops through Laos and Cambodia in full open, knowing that they are doing it, to get closer to me, to kill me, because it is a neutral area? Why not stop them?” Many other veterans of the war attending the conference, including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, take a different view. He and many others who fought in the conflict came to believe U.S. war efforts were counterproductive. Government documents from the 1960s and 1970s show that policymakers knew that Vietnam was a morass even as they escalated U.S. involvement, author Robert Schenkkan said. “The historical record is pretty substantial by this point that the idea of a military victory, given the circumstances, the political and social circumstances of the time, was not in the cards," Schenkkan said. He and other critics of the U.S. war effort say U.S. soldiers were told they were fighting communism, but Vietnamese nationalists saw them as foreign invaders. “We were not fighting the war we thought we were fighting,” Schenkkan said. The conflict became more complicated after it turned into a Cold War proxy fight. Bryan Chu, who fled Vietnam with his family after the Communist takeover of Saigon in 1975, believes U.S. involvement made the war bigger. “When the U.S. started sending troops to Vietnam, it escalated the war into the war between China and the United States, between the Soviet Union and the United States," Chu said. The Vietnam War Summit was held in the presidential library of the man mostly responsible for escalating U.S. involvement in the conflict, Lyndon Baines Johnson. His younger daughter, Luci Baines Johnson, was then married to Patrick Nugent, a soldier serving in Vietnam. Nugent's brother was also serving in Vietnam. The president's older daughter, Lynda Bird Johnson, married Charles Robb, a Marine serving in combat. The sisters took the protests outside the White House personally. “When we heard those chants of ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?' we knew that one of those boys could be my husband or my brothers-in-law and so the men and women who were in Vietnam were family to us,” Luci Baines Johnson said. She said her father tried to find an honorable way out of the war after announcing he would not run for re-election in March 1968. “Nothing did he want more than to bring those brave and honorable and good men and women safely home,” she said. Luci Baines Johnson believes bringing opponents of the war together with former soldiers and policymakers at the summit in April contributed to healing and understanding. “Maybe all of us, all of us,” she said, “were really trying, with all that was in us, to do the right thing for our country.” Americans born since 1975 have no such visceral connection to the war that divided the United States, but they do view it in terms of more recent overseas military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans seen uniting behind the likely nominee By the A.M. Costa Rica wire
services
U.S. Republican voters appear to have largely cast aside their reservations about presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, a key factor in boosting him into a dead heat with the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. For months Mrs. Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of State, has held a double-digit percentage lead over Trump, a brash real estate billionaire seeking his first elective office. But a spate of national polls in recent days shows the contest virtually even five and a half months ahead of November's national election. "The Republican base has coalesced around Trump," said political scientist Stephen Wayne at Georgetown University. Meanwhile, he said Democratic voters have yet to consolidate behind Mrs. Clinton, who faces a remaining challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders, before likely clinching the Democratic nomination June 7, when the last key state nominating contests are held. William Galston, a senior fellow at Washington's Brookings Institution, said Trump "has succeeded in consolidating his support with the Republican Party a lot faster than a lot of people thought he would be able to." Conversely, he said, Clinton has had difficulty winning support from Sanders' most ardent backers. In the months-long state-by-state contests against 16 other Republican contenders, Trump won 41 percent of the vote. But The Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Trump is now winning 85 percent support from Republicans in a matchup against Mrs. Clinton, even as some key Republican figures, including 2012 party nominee Mitt Romney, have refused to endorse him. The U.S. polling shows both Trump and Clinton are viewed negatively by a majority of voters. But Republicans, even if they supported one of Trump's Republican opponents, certainly view him as the lesser of two evils compared to Mrs. Clinton, said Wayne. Galston said he expects Mrs. Clinton, the country's top diplomat from 2009 to 2013, to get a similar upswing in the polls when she clinches the Democratic presidential nomination, while Wayne says that if July's Democratic national nominating convention is fairly cooperative between Clinton and Sanders supporters, "I expect she'll get a bounce and go back in front" of Trump. "There's an overarching issue here," Galston said. "People are clearly in the mood for change and the question I think that is most likely to decide this election is whether the American people feel safe and comfortable with the kind of change that Donald Trump is recommending.” Galston added that he suspects that Trump will attack Mrs. Clinton as the candidate of the status quo and she will attack him as a loose cannon, reckless, someone who's too risky to take a chance on. “And the people are going to have to make their judgment about their preference for the relative security that Secretary Clinton offers as opposed to the change, but risk, that Mr. Trump represents," he said. Wayne said the campaign to replace President Barack Obama when he leaves office next January could remain close all the way to November because "the country has near parity" between Republicans and Democrats. U.S. elections, however, are not decided by the popular vote, but rather by the electoral college with each state's electoral votes determined by its population and the number of senators and representatives it has in Congress. Numerous U.S. analysts, including Wayne, say Mrs. Clinton holds the edge there, with the U.S. states with the biggest number of electoral votes mostly voting for Democratic presidential candidates over the last six elections. Galston and Wayne said a variety of factors will play into the outcome. "Let's look at history here," Galston said. "The stronger the incumbent two-term president is, the more likely the voters are to support the candidate of his own party to succeed him. And President Obama has improved his standing very considerably over the past six months, so that's one factor to keep in mind. "At the same time, people are clearly discontented with the slow pace of the economic recovery," he said. "Jobs have come back a lot faster than wages. It is possible that we're at the beginning of a period of acceleration in wages. If that's the case, then people may be a little bit happier about the economy and their personal circumstances in six months than they are today. That would also be good news for Secretary Clinton." However, said Wayne, "There's a lot we don't know yet" about the election, such as who either candidate will select as a vice-presidential running mate, the outcome of an investigation into Mrs. Clinton's use of a private email server to handle her messages while she was secretary of State, and voters' reaction to Trump's business bankruptcies and lawsuits against his corporations. For his part, Sanders says Mrs. Clinton is jumping the gun a little bit in considering herself the Democratic nominee. He has acknowledged that he has only a narrow path to overtaking her, but says he expects to do very well in the nine remaining nominating contests. "If we win the nomination, I assure you Donald Trump will not become president," Sanders told one rally over the weekend. Sanders called attention to the latest polls that show him defeating Trump by a bigger margin than Mrs. Clinton with some even showing her trailing Trump. Trump may be engineering political image makeover By the A.M. Costa Rica wire
services
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appears to be in the midst of a bit of an image makeover, trying to make the pivot from outraged political outsider to a general election candidate acceptable to mainstream America. “We are going to make America great again, greater than ever before,” Trump told supporters at a recent event in New Jersey. “And we are going to have a lot of fun and we are going to be respected as a country again!” At times, Trump has adopted a softer tone where formerly he would be combative. He was nearly deferential in his recent interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News when she recalled past Twitter exchanges in which he called her a “bimbo.” “Well that was a retweet, yes. Did I say that? Ooh, okay. Excuse me,” Trump said with just a hint of a sheepish smile on his face. One of Trump’s earliest supporters in Congress, Rep. Chris Collins of New York said recent exchanges with Republican lawmakers are paying off. “He’s collaborative, listening back and forth. That is who Donald Trump is and America is going to get very comfortable with that as we move on,” he said. Trump has defied conservatives who warned his nomination would tear the party apart and Democrats who had hoped for the same thing. “I will have to say, to my surprise, the Republican Party seems to be mustering behind Trump in a way that sure didn’t look likely even a few weeks ago,” said noted conservative pundit Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard. He was a guest on Voice of America’s “Issues in the News.” But despite the signs of unity and his surge in the polls, some experts suggest Trump still has a long way to go to ease fears about his candidacy between now and November. “Trump’s biggest problems, when you say what is negative about Trump to the American people, is his personality,” said Frank Newport of the Gallup polling organization. “He’s arrogant. He’s a wild man. He’s not controlled. He’s racist. He says things that he shouldn’t and regrets it later. That is what the public tells us.” Even as he seeks to moderate his image, Trump has already focused his fire on likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. “Can you imagine another four years of the Clinton’s, seriously? Can you imagine, seriously?,” he said. Whether Trump succeeds in transforming himself from a blustering, undisciplined primary contender who scares and repels voters into a plausible presidential candidate who can appeal to moderates could determine the outcome of the November election. A big part of Trump’s challenge is keeping his base happy while moderating and trying to broaden his appeal. “If he’s able to keep the impolitic character of his comments, which a lot of people on the right love, and yet at the same time to seem presidential, and I think that is the trick he is going to start to try to pull off,” predicted Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy analyst with Brookings. Baltimore cop acquitted in death of Freddie Gray By the A.M. Costa Rica wire
services
A Baltimore police officer was found not guilty on charges related to the death of Freddie Gray, a young African-American man who died last year after suffering severe injuries in the back of a police van. Officer Edward Nero faced charges of second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. He was acquitted Monday of the charges following a bench trial, which he had requested. Nero faced up to 10 years in prison if he had been convicted. Prosecutors say the 30-year-old officer unlawfully arrested Gray, 25, on April 12, 2015, without probable cause and failed to secure him in the police van with a seatbelt. Attorneys for Nero argued he did not make the arrest and that it was the driver's responsibility to ensure that Gray was secure. Gray was handcuffed and shackled by his feet, but not buckled in to the seat after being arrested. It has been alleged this caused his body to slam against the side of the van, severing his spinal cord and leaving him in a coma. Gray died on April 19, 2015. His death led to riots in black neighborhoods in Baltimore with protesters marching against police treatment of young African-Americans. The city agreed in September to pay Gray's family $6.4 million to settle civil litigation in the case. Five other officers are facing charges. Three of them are black. The other two are white. Nero is white. Nero was the second officer to go to trial in the case. Officer William Porter, who is black, awaits a second trial after his first ended in a hung jury in December. The van's driver, Caesar Goodson, faces the most serious charge of second-degree depraved-heart murder for refusing to take Gray to the hospital and instead stopping to pick up another prisoner. Goodson is also black. Asian-American advocates take on Ivy League schools By the A.M. Costa Rica wire
services
A coalition of more than 100 Asian-American groups has asked two federal agencies to investigate three Ivy League universities for allegedly discriminating against Asian-Americans during their admissions processes. The Asian-American Coalition for Education sent a letter of complaint Monday to the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights and the U.S. Justice Department, asking them to investigate Brown University, Dartmouth College and Yale University. The complaint alleges the percentage of Asian-Americans at Brown and Yale has not changed in the last 20 years, and at Dartmouth over the last 10 years because of racial quotas and caps that severely burden Asian-American applicants. The percentages remain flat, the coalition says, although the number of qualified Asian-American students has increased dramatically over the past two decades. The coalition wants the federal agencies to require the schools to halt or limit the use of race-based and subjective admission criteria and publish the qualifications of applicants. In response to the complaint, Yale says academic metrics are not the sole determinants for admission, while Dartmouth explains it considers the whole person when screening applicants. This is the latest in a series of complaints that Asian-American interests have lodged against selective schools. The Education Department has never found evidence that the schools engaged in deliberate discriminatory practices. Obama outlaws some terms for designating minorities By the A.M. Costa Rica wire
services
President Barack Obama has signed a bill outlawing the federal government from using what many say are offensive and outdated terms used to describe minority groups. The House and Senate passed the bill last week with no opposition. The White House says the new law modernizes the way the federal government refers to some minorities. Federal laws can no longer refer to African-Americans as Negroes, Asian-Americans as Orientals, and Native Americans as Indians. New York Democrat Grace Meng was chief sponsor of the bill in the House after discovering the word Oriental while researching government documents. "Many Americans may not be aware that the word Oriental is derogatory. But it is an insulting term that needed to be removed from the books," Rep. Meng said. "I am extremely pleased that my legislation to do that is now the law of the land." Other new terms to be used in federal paperwork include Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, and Alaska Native in place of Eskimo and Aleut. Right winger concedes defeat in Austrian voting By the A.M. Costa Rica wire
services
The far-right candidate in Austria's presidential election has conceded defeat. Norbert Hofer, nominee of the euro-skeptic, anti-immigration Freedom Party, said Monday that he was sad he had not won, but called the work of his supporters an investment for the future. While the results from Sunday's vote have not yet been officially announced, Alexander Van der Bellen, a former Green Party chief running as an independent, appears to have won a significant chunk of the 90,000 absentee ballots that remained to be counted. The two candidates were in a dead heat as of late Sunday. Sunday's faceoff came just weeks after Hofer and Van der Bellen swept aside challenges from ruling Social Democrat coalition candidates Rudolph Hundstorfer and Andreas Khol. Both Hundstorfer and Khol were routed April 24 in first round voting, with each winning about 11 percent of the vote. A huge influx of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and South Asia into western Europe has spawned a backlash against official EU policy that initially welcomed migrants to the relative safety and prosperity of western Europe. Sentiment began shifting as Austria took in 90,000 asylum seekers last year, while neighboring Germany opened its borders to more than one million migrants, many of them fleeing Syria's long and deadly civil war. EU officials have since negotiated a deal with Turkey under which migrants fleeing its shores by boat for Greece will be returned in exchange for nearly $7 billion in European aid. |
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| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
| The
contents
of
this Web site are copyrighted by Consultantes Río
Colorado S.A. 2016 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 sixth news page |
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San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday May 24, 2016, Vol. 17, No. 101
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Brazilian minister denies plotting
coup By the A.M. Costa Rica wire
services
A Brazilian government minister, shown in a leaked recording to allegedly be plotting the impeachment of suspended president Dilma Rousseff to stop a corruption probe, said Monday that he would temporarily step down. The man, Planning Minister Romero Jucá, denied the allegations and said a partial transcript of the tape, published Monday in the Folha newspaper, was taken out of context. The recording, made in March, allegedly showed Jucá and a former oil company executive, Sergio Machado, discussing a government probe of corruption at the state-run oil company Petrobas, in which both men are implicated. According to the transcript, Jucá said, "We have to change the government so the bleeding is stopped." Machado allegedly responded with "the easiest solution is to put Michel in," a reference to Vice President Michel Temer, a Rousseff foe who is acting president. Jucá reportedly said he was working with the country's justices, who have the final word on impeachment. Ms. Rousseff's supporters said the leaked tape bore out their contention that the president was the victim of a coup. The Brazilian Senate voted to impeach Ms. Rousseff on charges that she used accounting tricks to hide the Brazilian budget deficit when she ran for re-election in 2014. She has been suspended from office for the duration of her impeachment trial. Mercury pollution reported in Amazonia By the A.M. Costa Rica wire
services
Peru's President Ollanta Humala has declared a 60-day state of emergency in a large remote area of the Amazon jungle because of extremely high levels of mercury poisoning from illegal gold mining. The country's environment minister said 41 percent of the population of Madre de Dios is being exposed. The mercury is not only in people but also polluting rivers and fish. The government plans to send hospital ships and loads of untainted fish to the area near the border with Brazil. Peruvian officials blame the mercury contamination on illegal gold mining, saying the miners use mercury to separate the gold from rock and dump the chemical into the rivers. The government is trying to clamp down on illegal mining. Spanish reporter missing in Colombia By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The military has joined the search for Salud Hernández-Mora, a Spanish newswoman who works as the Colombian correspondent for El Mundo, a leading daily in Madrid. Ms. Hernández-Mora has not been seen since Saturday when she tweeted from a mountain community near the Venezuelan border. The area is controlled by the rebel group, the Ejercito de Liberación Nacional. Ironically, Ms. Hernández-Mora was in the community of El Tarra to cover a strike by the residents in support of two missing children. The youngsters have since reappeared, said El Mundo. |
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| From Page 7: Appeals panel voids Bank of America fine By the A.M. Costa Rica
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A U.S. federal appeals court threw out a mortgage fraud conviction Monday against Bank of America and dismissed a $1.2 billion fine against the country's second-biggest bank. The three-judge panel in New York ruled there was not enough evidence for a jury to find the bank liable at a 2013 trial. The judges said U.S. prosecutors failed to prove that Bank of America's Countrywide Financial division purposely set out to sell fraudulent mortgages. A Bank of America spokesman says the bank is pleased by the appeals court ruling. The U.S. Attorney's Office in New York, which prosecuted the case, had no comment. The Justice Department charged Countrywide of purposely selling the government-backed mortgage providers thousands of bad loans that could never be paid back. Such bad loans helped bring on the global financial collapse and worldwide recession in 2008. |
