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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, July 22, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 144 | |||||||||
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| Costa Rica Expertise Ltd http://crexpertise.com E-mail info@crexpertise.com Tel:506-256-8585 Fax:506-256-7575 |
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Too many black eyes are
hurting Tico tourism image Dear A.M. Costa Rica: “The tourism industry in Costa Rica is thriving,” so said by some of the printed articles. The only way to account for the numbers is by the flights arriving and passenger counts. This must be good enough for the powers that be to justify turning a blind eye to the problems of tourism crime. I have stayed away for months not writing anymore letters to the editor of A.M. Costa Rica. I still read it every morning and I am saddened by much of the news. But after today's news and a story related to me by a client of mine, I am inspired to write once again. A few weeks ago, a murder was committed by someone who had had 41 prior arrests. How could this happen? Who let this man free and why? Is anyone being held accountable for this? Was this simply a judges decision? I would really like to know. How about ankle bracelets to track those let free on society? And now this murder on the Osa Peninsula of a 52 year old woman from the United States. I would bet that those previous murders in that area are related to the same criminals. I would also bet that the perpetrators of this murder have been arrested many times before. Are these judges lifetime appointees? Are they being forced to lighten sentences because of prison overcrowding? Is someone being paid off? Where is the investigative journalism? What is preventative detention anyway? Recently a judge for the Tribunal Penal de Corredores lifted a three-month detention for a woman who is accused of stealing $300,000 with an ATM card over a 10-month period with a debit card stolen from her husband's employer while she was out of the country. Does the judge have to explain why he let her go? Does she get to keep the money? Will she ever be punished? We always read about the crime but never too much about the punishment or the lack of and a judicial explanation. Are these judges ever held accountable for their actions? They say that corruption comes from the top down. The inspiration to write this comes from a current client of mine. I have vacation rentals and meet people from all over the planet. All good people who came to discover and enjoy the many adventures in Costa Rica. Many leave with a good impression and can't wait to tell their friends. This is what builds on more tourism. Word of mouth is better than any other form of advertising. But then there are the others. This current client was stopped by the tránsitos in a speed trap. The speed dropped from 80 to 60 after a curve, and there they were. They were showed by the officer the carbons of many tickets he had written in his book to scare them. Told that they would have to return to San José to pay and the exaggerated fee they would have to pay. Making a long story short, they gave him 40,000 colons in fear that their vacation would be interrupted. I hear this story more often than I want to say. Maybe there should be periodic lie detector tests for the police to keep their jobs. This to go along with the other petty crime of car theft and break-ins places a black eye on Costa Rica tourism. It affect all of us here because when these people return to the places they came from, the stories they will relate about their trip to friends will have the ones about the police extortion or the break-ins and other atrocities committed upon them in the forefront. The person hearing this will think negatively about planning their next vacation here in Costa Rica. I said in a previous article that they, Costa Rica, after selling out to China, should have taken the $80 million dollars for the new stadium that they can't afford to maintain and instead built a $40 million stadium and used the other $40 million to build some new prisons. Adding more police is not going to solve the problem. Correctly punishing the criminals is. Tom Ploskina
Nuevo Arenal
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| San José, Costa Rica, Thursday, July 21, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 143 | |||||||||
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| Contracts approved for work on three more major bridges |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The transport ministry has gotten the financial green light for three more improvements of major bridges in the country. This brings the total to eight. The latest contracts to be approved involve Ruta 32, the San José-Guapiles highway, Ruta 4 in Puerto Viejo de Sarapiquí and Ruta 218 that connects San José with Guadalupe. Two jobs that were begun last year are nearly done. A bridge over the Río Aranjuez is listed as 80 percent complete and one over the Río Abangares is listed as 70 percent complete. Three other bridges, over the rios Azufrado, Nuevo and Puerto Nuevo, have been approved and contractors are moving machinery into place to begin work. The bridges approved this week span the Río Sucio on Ruta |
32 (187
meters or 614 feet), the Torres on Ruta 218 (66.4 meters or about 218
feet) and the Chirripó on Ruta 4 (176 meters or about 578
feet). Each
was built with the expectation of handing from 24 to 32 tons in the
1950s. But the bridges will be reinforced to handle 40 tons, said the Consejo Nacional de Vialidad. Bridges were a political problem during the Óscar Arias Sánchez administration. There were several spectacular accidents involving various spans, and studies showed that most of the nation's bridges were in bad state of repair. The ones being rebuilt are those handling high traffic. Bridges also will be a topic Tuesday when structural experts from Virginia Tech present a seminar at the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica on management of risks and experiences with devices to measure earthquakes. |
| 'Little summer' weather conditions
might hold for weekend |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Central Valley and other parts of Costa Rica received a three-day break from heavy rain, and the situation may continue through the weekend. "It looks like Christmas," a Costa Rican gushed Thursday while looking at the blue skies and puffy white clouds over San José. The Instituto Meteorológico Nacional said that this phenomenon of a brief period of what Costa Ricans call summer usually takes place in the last 15 days of July. This is called the veranillo, meaning "little summer" or |
canicula. In order to qualify as
such, the weather experts require five straight days of good weather.
That may happen. Since Sunday there has been a significant reduction in the patterns of rain in Guanacaste, the central Pacific and the Central Valley, said the weather institute. Winds will continue to increase, perhaps to damaging levels in Guanacaste, and basically keep the rain away. But don't blame the weather institute for brief periods of rain. The period is defined in general not as a total absence of rain but a significant reduction in the intensity, the agency said in a release. |
| Good food from the literary to the real thing |
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| This past week I
have been enthralled by classic French cooking, French wines, and
gifted, yet afflicted artists who may become outcasts and whose gifts
may never emerge because of their inner devils. The reason for this enthrallment is that I have been reading Julia Child’s ebullient account of her life in France. Her book, aptly titled "My Life in France," describes the many meals she had dining and wining in French restaurants in the 1940s and 50s when classic French cooking was queen. It is hard to believe that she started out as an upper middle-class American woman from Pasadena who didn’t know how to cook and finds her passion when she tastes, for the first time, a classically prepared French meal, done to perfection. She went on to become a world class French chef and teacher. Her book also includes some simple recipes prepared the French way. I am working on omelettes and scrambled eggs. I also attended the performance “Van Gogh” at the Laurence Olivier theatre presented by the Little Theatre Group of Costa Rica. Artist performer Joseph Kaknes told us the story of Van Gogh’s life as the painter would tell it, painting a canvas as he talked. The set consisted of his own paintings. This audience was as engrossed as a child listening to a gifted storyteller recount a fascinating tale of love and tragedy and the plight of the mentally ill. For Van Gogh, painting was an addiction and probably what kept him alive for 38 years, when he killed himself in despair. Kaknes’ performance and obvious love of his subject whom he brings to life so well, made his plea that we show more kindness to those who are different and or some way incapacitated, resonate. On Tuesday I was in the city, and after having some dental work done, decided I needed a bit of self-indulgence. I went to the Magnolia Restaurant in the Casino Colonial on Avenida Primera, between Ninth and Eleventh Streets. I like the restaurant because of the many windows overlooking the avenue. Almost a French sidewalk café. And they have a usually very good ejecutivo (fixed price lunch) for just under 3,000 colons. I had the tortilla soup (tasty hot with a nice amount of cheese), then I chose the spaghetti Alfredo with mushrooms. Remember I had just come from the dentist. |
The spaghetti was cooked al dente and just right to my taste, and the white sauce was Goldilocks perfect in thickness and amount. I couldn’t finish the whole plate, but I managed to find all of the mushrooms. Dessert was dainty chunks of canned pears on a caramelized leche dulce pudding on top of a crisp and slightly sweet crust. I managed to eat all of that. I asked Tiffany the name of the chef – Don Adrian Vera – and told her to give him my compliments. During my lunch I, of course, watched the passing parade of pedestrians and traffic. It was nice to see a couple, the father carrying a tiny baby on his chest in a baby saddle, holding an umbrella (the father, not the baby, or I would regret forever not having a camera) to protect the baby from the sun. The only glitch in the day was the taxi trip home. A 20-minute drive took 40 minutes and cost me three times as much as usual, thanks to one avenue closed for repairs and another because of a strike. Wednesday evening I started writing my column, which was going nicely when the lights went out. It was dark outside and dark inside. I felt my way to my bedroom for the flashlight in my bed table, then to the sideboard in my living room, rummaged around looking for a candle, found a candle holder, a very dusty candle holder. Then a match or lighter. If you don’t smoke, these can be hard to find. Finally assembling everything, I realized how ill prepared I am for a simple blackout, let alone a serious earthquake. After a few minutes trying to type in the dim light, or even read, and wondering how Ben Franklin managed to be so prolific, I decided it was an ideal time to meditate. I moved to the living room, put my candle on the coffee table, made myself comfortable in front of it, my thumbs and forefingers found each other, I took a deep breath. And the lights went on. |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, July 22, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 144 | |||||||||
 Ministerio de Gobernación,
Policía y Seguridad Pública/Paul Gamboa
Striking Caja union members staged another parade and show of
force Thursday in the downtown area. |
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| Caja strikers served with orders involving public health |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The health ministry told striking hospital workers that they had to stop blocking laundry services. That was the major development Thursday as unions of the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social completed a third day of a partial strike. In addition, the acting minister, Ana Morice, ordered the striking union leaders to turn over in six hours a list of all the individuals jeopardizing public health, meaning strikers. She said the Ministerio de Salud would file criminal complaints. Although the union leaders probably will not comply with the health order, they still could face sanctions for not doing so. The laundry issue involves the Hospital de Heredia, the Hospital Nacional de Niños, the Hospital Nacional de Geriatría y Gerontología, the Hospital de Las Mujeres, among others. The ministry said that dirty laundry was piling up and that the union leadership should take steps to allow full access to the laundries for those who wish to work. Some laundry areas had been blocked. The order was directed specifically at Luis Chavarría, secretary general of Unión Nacional de Empleados de la Caja. |
Worker support for the strike seems
to be declining, in part because
the government said it would not pay the strikers. There also seems to be little support for the strike among the public, based on informal polls done by television and radio stations. Casa Presidencial estimated about 12 percent participation in the strike by Caja workers Tuesday, the first day. Participation has declined. Still strikers had enough support to conduct another march up Paseo Colón and Avenida Secunda Thursday. The strike is about disability payments, job security and the fact that the Caja is deeply in the red. The unions want the central government to pay an estimated $2 billion that it owes for social security charges for its employees over the years. Part of the lack of public support stems from the impossibility of Caja and central government officials from meeting the demands. The disability pay was the object of a Sala IV constitutional court decision, and the central government just does not have that kind of money. It already is expecting a $900 million budget deficit for the first half of the fiscal year. |
| Anatomy of sloths was critical element of their slow
lifestyle |
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By the Friedrich Schiller
University Jena news staff
They live their lives upside down. Instead of defying the force of gravity in an upright position, sloths spend most of their lives hanging in trees upside down. If they have to move, they do so only slowly. Very slowly. But why are sloths so 'lazy'? And how has the locomotive system of these outsiders adapted to their unhurried lifestyle in the course of evolution? Zoologists of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany have looked into the matter comprehensively. "To our great surprise the locomotion of the sloths is basically not so different from the locomotion of other mammals, like monkeys for instance, which instead of hanging from tree branches, balance along them", said John Nyakatura. In his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Systematic Zoology and Evolutionary Biology with Phyletic Museum, the evolutionary biologist analyzed the locomotion of sloths with X-ray video equipment. That was not so easy at the beginning, as the first sloth stepping in front of the camera for the Jena scientist simply refused to work. "Mats, the sloth, just didn't want to co-operate", Nyakatura remembers, smiling. Therefore it was given to a zoo and made headlines around the globe as the 'laziest animal in the world'. In comparison, the two-toed sloths Julius, Evita and Lisa appeared to be more co-operative. They moved along the provided pole in the X-ray tube. "The position of their legs and the bending of their joints matches exactly those of other mammals in the process of walking", Nyakatura explained. Hence one could imagine the locomotion of sloths actually as walking under a tree, he said, adding just much slower than other quadrupeds. However, the evolutionary biologist found distinct differences in the anatomical structure of the animals. "Sloths have very long arms, but only very short shoulder blades, being able to move freely on top of a narrow, rounded chest. This lends them a maximum radius of movement." Moreover a dislocation of certain muscular contact points occurred which enabled them to keep their own body weight with a minimum of energy input. |
 John Nyakatura and one of his subjects
"In the evolution of the sloths, the adaptation to the slow, energy saving way of movement occurred solely through their anatomy," Nyakatura summed up. What was even more astonishing, this principle developed in two cases independent of each other: in the two-toed sloths and in the three-toed sloths, he said. But although the outward appearance and lifestyle of the animals may lead to the assumption of them being related to each other, these two families are, from an evolutionary point of view, only distant relations. "With their mode of life the sloths are filling an ecological niche," adds Martin S. Fischer, a professor who oversaw Nyakatura's doctoral thesis. "Sloths lead their lives in energy saving mode." Their usage of energy saving food in connection with an unobtrusive lifestyle turns them into complete models of energy saving among the mammals, according to the Jena professor. And this was a well-known recipe for success, completely unrelated to laziness. |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, July 22, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 144 | ||||||||||
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| Hurricane Dora weakening off México's Pacific coast By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Hurricane Dora, which was close to becoming a powerful Category Five storm, has weakened as it moves in the Pacific Ocean parallel to Mexico's southern coast. The Miami-based National Hurricane Center said the storm was located about 340 kilometers or 210 miles southwest of Cabo Corrientos. It is traveling northwest at a speed of 9 miles per hour. The center said the storm once had winds of 250 kilometers an hour, almost making it a Category Five storm on the 1-5 scale of hurricane intensity. Early Friday the winds were about 120 miles per hour, the center said. The storm is expected to cause strong waves and heavy winds, but is not expected to make landfall. Dora is the fourth named storm of the Pacific hurricane season, which lasts roughly from May through November. Meanwhile weather experts are tracking yet another tropical wave that is still in the mid-Atlantic but might have implications for Central America's weather by early next week. Southern Chile struggles under even more snow By the A.M. Costa Rica wires Services
Chilean officials have declared a catastrophe in eight southern districts where heavy snowfall has left an estimated 6,500 people isolated. Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said the declaration will free up more resources to aid those who need help in the mountainous Auracania region. Days of bad weather have left some areas buried under nearly three meters of snow and without power. Officials say they have sent some 400 boxes of supplies to the affected villagers, but snow-covered roads are making it difficult to get the supplies to their destination. Emergency crews have been working to clear the roadways. Some residents also say the situation has left them without cellphone service or radio communication. More snow is forecast for the region. U.N. agency concerned as Haiti closes some camps Special to A.M. Costa Rica
United Nations human rights officials today urged Haitian authorities to ensure that the closure of camps for people displaced by last year’s catastrophic earthquake is done in a planned way as part of a broader plan to improve access to adequate housing. The statement from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights follows last weekend’s closure of a camp inside the Sylvio Cator Stadium in Port-au-Prince, where more than 400 families had been living. Each of the evicted families was given the equivalent of about $250. The relocation proposed by the mayor does not respect the right to adequate housing, the commissioner said in a press release, noting that the lack of basic services and the poor-quality shelters means that the former camp residents will be much more vulnerable than they were in the camp. “A successful reconstruction and a secure and long-term stabilization of the country will depend in part on the realization of the right to adequate housing,” the U.N. agency stressed. It noted that the Haitian government had been repeatedly urged to take a holistic approach regarding the closure of camps – many of them makeshift collections of tents – to allow for a reasonable time as well as alternative accommodation to be found. As many as 2.3 million people, or about a quarter of the national population, were displaced from their homes as a result of last year’s quake, while more than 200,000 others were killed. Quake hits offshore By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A quake estimated at 5.2 magnitude took place in the Pacific off the coast of the Osa Peninsula and Panamá at 1:55 p.m. Thursday, said the Observatorio Vulcanológico y Sismológico de Costa Rica. The observatory said the location was 50 kilometers, about 31 miles, southwest of Puerto Jiménez, which is on the east coast of the peninsula. The observatory blames the shaking on the subduction of tectonic plates. The quake was felt in some but not all of the country. |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, July 22, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 144 | ||||||||||
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Latin American news Please reload page if feed does not appear promptly |
permission to tie up here By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The U.S. hospital ship Comfort finally got permission to tie up in Costa Rica. The legislature approved the visit Wednesday. The Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía y Seguridad Pública requested the legislative approval as is required by the Costa Rican Constitution. But it said a vote July 18 did not include giving official protection to the medical crew on the boat. The Comfort is ending a five-month series of humanitarian missions to Latin countries. The U.S. Embassy said last week that plans call for delivering some $200,000 in medicines, school supplies and other items to the Puntareanas area. The boat is expected to arrive Aug. 1. The boat was on the Caribbean coast April 8 at the start of its mission. Some Costa Rican health professionals are part of the staff. Nacional mourning halts Archivo National festivities By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Correos de Costa Rica and the Archivo Nacional have canceled a celebration today because the nation is in a period of mourning. The Archivo Nacional is celebrating 130 years. The postal service is issuing a special postmark. It still will do so but at Correos offices. A presentation with a band and other festive activities will not be held, both agencies said in a release. President Laura Chinchilla decreed three days of national mourning to honor teenagers in San Ramón who died when hit by a car early Wednesday and a teen who was shot by an acquaintance while at school in Orotina Monday. Meanwhile, the Poder Judicial said that a judge ordered the driver in the San Ramón accident to be held for four months preventative detention while the case is investigated. He has the last names of Chavarría Alvarado. Thief takes extinguishers at public clinic in Parrita By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Someone pretended to be a technician and made off with two fire extinguishers from the Clinica de Parrita Wednesday. Health officials said the man arrived on the pretext of changing out the extinguishers. Each is worth about 230,000 colons, said clinic officials. That's about $460. As a result of the thefts, the clinic has put in electronic locks in some areas, officials said, adding that the same thief or a colleague had committed the same crime in other public offices in the area, including that of the Instituto Nacional de Acueductos y Alcantarillados, the water company. |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, July 22, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 144 | |
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James
DeRoy
