Woman attacked in home
and suffers slashed arm


Police captured two suspects less than a kilometer away from the home of a U.S. woman who was beaten up and stabbed Saturday.

The crime, believed to be a home invasion, happened in La Cruz, Guanacaste, according to police.

The Poder Judicial said that two men entered the woman's home Saturday afternoon, beat her up and stole items there. Two suspects were captured a kilometer away, said the Poder Judicial, giving their last names as Alonso Mendoza and Barrero Hurtado. They were being processed in the Liberia prosecutor's office Monday.

Police identified the woman as Mary Kathleen Gells, 55, originally from Iowa. They said she was a tourist who was on vacation here. Police also said that the woman was admitted to  Hospital Edgardo Baltodano Briceño in Liberia in stable condition. They said she suffered a deep cut in her right arm when she tried to defend herself.

Police said that $1,200 in U.S. currency and 200,000 colons were taken from the woman as well as various pieces of jewelry worth about 500,000 colons. Police said they recovered the jewelry when they detained the two men.

Study says why volcanoes
are not at plate junctures

 
If tectonic plate collisions cause volcanic eruptions, as every fifth grader knows, why do some volcanoes erupt far from a plate boundary?

A study in Nature suggests that volcanoes and mountains in the Mediterranean can grow from the pressure of the semi-liquid mantle pushing on Earth’s crust from below.

“The rise and subsidence of different points of the earth is not restricted to the exact locations of the plate boundary. You can get tectonic activity away from a plate boundary,” said study co-author and associate professor of earth sciences Thorsten Becker. He is on the faculty at the University of Southern California.

The study connects mantle flow to uplift and volcanism in mobile belts — crustal fragments floating between continental plates.

The model should be able to predict uplift and likely volcanic hotspots in other mobile belts, such as the North American Cordillera (including the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada) and the Himalayas. “We have a tool to be able to answer these questions,” Becker said.

Scientists previously had suggested a connection between mantle upwelling and volcanism, Becker said. The Nature study is the first to propose the connection in mobile belts.

Becker and collaborator Claudio Faccenna of the University of Rome believe that small-scale convection in the mantle is partly responsible for shaping mobile belts.

Mantle that sinks at the plate boundary flows back up farther away, pushing on the crust and causing uplift and crustal motions detectable by a global positioning system, the authors found.

The slow but inexorable motions can move mountains — both gradually and through earthquakes or eruptions.

The study identified two mountain ranges raised almost entirely by mantle flow, according to the authors: the southern Meseta Central plateau in Spain and the Massif Central in France.

Becker and Faccenna inferred mantle flow from interpreting seismic mantle tomography, which provides a picture of the deep earth just like a CAT scan, using seismic waves instead of X-rays.

Assuming that the speed of the waves depends mainly on the temperature of crust and mantle (waves travel slower through warmer matter), the authors used temperature differences to model the direction of mantle convection.

Regions of upward flow, as predicted by the model, mostly coincided with uplift or volcanic activity away from plate boundaries.

“Mantle circulation … appears more important than previously thought, and generates vigorous upwellings even far from the subduction zone,” the authors wrote.

The study culminates work started 13 years ago when Becker was a graduate student at Harvard University and Faccenna was a visiting scholar.

Vanishing profession at work


Safecrackers are considered the elite of the criminal world, but it is a dying profession with the growing use of electronic transfers and better security.

But that is not the case in Guápiles where someone cut cables to an alarm system and then used an acetylene torch to cut into a safe at a financial institution there. The crook had access because the target sits next to a vacant lot.

The Judicial Investigating Organization said that it was seeking the help of the citizenry to help locate a suspect. They said a large sum of money was taken, probably Saturday night.

All photo by the conservation organization Yaguará

offering any alternatives.” Often the positive aspects of conservation like income from tourism does not reach local people.

Poaching for pelts is another risk to the populations of the spotted cats, with commercial outlets in Panamá not understood by the authorities, said Bustamante.

Usually following an incident of lost livestock, the offending animal might be hunted down and shot. Dogs track the cats, and there is still an element of hunting for the thrill of the chase itself in the rural society as well as sport hunters from San José and Panama City.

Compensation for ranchers’ losses is a strategy little tried outside of North America where it is usually related to wolves. But given that even one individual of a rare species is a huge loss from such a small population and gene pool as is present on the Osa Peninsula, if it avoids other needed conservation efforts by keeping the offending animal from being killed then it is highly cost-effective, the association says.