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José, Costa Rica, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2015, Vol. 16, No. 169
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 Servicio Nacional de Salud Animal
photo
The small hive beetle
(Aethina tumida)Beetle that
damages bee hives turns up
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Animal health workers have found a beetle that is new to Costa Rica in La Cruz. But unless people are beekeepers, they do not have to worry. The creature is the small hive beetle (Aethina tumida), and it mainly affects ailing bee hives. The larva of the beetle dig through the honey combs and cause discoloration of the honey. The Servicio Nacional de Salud Animal said its workers collected 20 of the bugs from hives at an apiary in the St. Cecilia area of La Cruz. The agency said that the beetle is known further north in Nicaragua and La Cruz is close to the border. The affected apiary has been quarantined, said the agency. Sweep of stores leads to confiscations By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A handful of government agencies confiscated meat, food products and other items at just eight stores, they reported Wednesday. The outlets were mainly Asian groceries, and one of the principal complaints is that the labels were not written in Spanish as the law requires. The report comes from the same series of inspections in July that resulted in the closing of one store for health reasons. The total of confiscated goods does not count those from that store. Workers from the Ministerio de Salud, the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Comercio, the Policía Municipal de San José, the Dirección General de Migración y Extranjería, the Policía de Control Fiscal, the Dirección General de Tributación, the Fuerza Pública, and the Servicio Nacional de Salud Animal all participated in the inspections. The inspectors looked at meats, alcoholic drinks, medicines, cosmetics, hygiene products and cigarettes. A total of 182,455 cigarettes were confiscated, the agencies and ministries said Wednesday. In addition to products with labels in a foreign language, the inspectors also said they found products that were not registered for sale in Costa Rica. Other labels were false and some products were out of date. The animal health workers confiscated 600 kilos of beef and fish, the report said. Detention of Cuban activist deplored Special to A.M. Costa Rica
The Human Rights Foundation has called for the release of Cuban graffiti artist and activist Danilo Maldonado Machado, best known as El Sexto, who has been imprisoned for eight months in the Valle Grande prison, located west of Havana. El Sexto was arrested on last Christmas while he was on his way to put on a performance art piece called “Rebelión en la Granja,” the title in Spanish of George Orwell’s classic "Animal Farm." The performance included two pigs decorated with the names Fidel and Raúl. El Sexto was charged with contempt, a crime punishable by up to three years in prison. This past May, El Sexto was awarded the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent for his bravery and ingenuity in peacefully advocating for individual rights in Cuba. Said the Human Rights Foundation president, Thor Halvorssen: “El Sexto is in prison for satirizing a family dynasty that for 57 years has ruled Cuba with absolute power. The Castro regime arrests and imprisons those who are critical of the government regardless of how harmless that expression may be. What is most ironic is that Fidel and Raúl Castro’s reaction to the 'Animal Farm' skit confirmed El Sexto’s underlying point. "The Castros reacted precisely how Napoleon, the porcine dictator depicted in George Orwell’s satire, would respond when met with criticism,” “Just like the barnyard dwellers in Orwell’s novel, Cuban artists like Danilo Maldonado, Tania Bruguera, or Gorki Águila are methodically punished for refusing to abide by the capricious rules of a totalitarian regime that lacks a sense of humor and represses even the slightest expression of freedom,” Halvorssen added. Chinese economic data generates doubts By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Some investors say China's wild stock market gyrations have been made worse by worries about the reliability of that nation's economic data. Critics say the reports can mislead investors by painting an unrealistically strong picture of the economy. Some economists doubt the official growth figures because other data, such as passenger travel and electric power generation, seem too low to be consistent with strong growth. But China scholar Nick Lardy of the Peterson Institute for International Economics says Beijing is not manipulating the numbers, but the economy is evolving quickly from smokestack industries to services, and the ways of tracking new economic activity are falling behind the change. China is the world's second-largest economy, a huge trading nation and a massive importer of everything from advanced machinery to commodities. So economic weakness in China affects trading partners and stock markets around the world. Stock prices in Shanghai and elsewhere have been plunging or swinging wildly recently, in part because of fears that China's economy is not growing as fast as some investors expected. On Wednesday for example, Shanghai's key index gained and lost 3 percent, to end the day with a loss. U.S. stocks have gone from sharp falls to strong gains over the course of a few days. Economic weakness and uncertainty worries investors. When many frightened investors sell stocks, it drives down prices. The fears are sharpened by worries that the reality is even worse than the official data show. New York Stock Exchange trader Ben Willis says many investors thought the Chinese economy was growing at 7 percent a year. But now he thinks "It’s probably only growing at half that. So a 50 percent reduction means you need to reprice, and that’s what you’re seeing going on in the stock markets and in the commodity markets.” Vast expansion of major industries was part of unprecedented economic growth in China, and Peterson China scholar Lardy says Beijing is better than most emerging economies at the relatively straightforward task of measuring industrial output, particularly from state-owned enterprises. But Lardy says much of China's economic growth is now coming from the services sector, which is largely made up of smaller, more diverse and harder-to-track private companies. He says services include "Everything from retail and wholesale, restaurants and hotels, financial services, including banking insurance, securities, asset management. Lardy says restaurants are a good example of the growing services sector. "When I first went to China, there were practically no restaurants. Now there are millions and millions of restaurants," he said. "Collecting the data on all these small firms in the restaurant business is very, very labor intensive. " Lardy says better data would help Chinese leaders make better informed decisions on economic issues. But he says the group of workers collecting data in China is teensy in comparison to the $10 trillion size of the huge, diverse and fast-changing economy.
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| San José, Costa Rica, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2015, Vol. 16, No. 169 | |
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Central America, the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico were very different 18,000 years ago at the peak of the last Ice Age. Mean sea level was at least 110 meters below the present level, some 360 feet. Cuba may have been connected to the Yucatan by a land bridge, the Gulf of Nicoya was pasture and the U.S. state of Florida was much wider, as this U.S. government map shows. |
 U.S. National Centers for Environmental
Information map
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| Average sea level has risen three inches since 1992,
scientists say |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
and wire service reports As Costa Rica struggles to reach its goal of carbon neutrality in the next decade, not much is being said about sea level rise, which is inevitable. Sea levels worldwide have risen an average of nearly 3 inches (8 centimeters) since 1992, the result of warming waters and melting ice, a panel of scientists said Wednesday. In 2013, a United Nations panel predicted sea levels would rise from 1 to 3 feet (0.3 to 0.9 meters) by the end of the century. The new research shows that the sea-level rise most likely will be at the high end of that range, said University of Colorado geophysicist Steve Nerem. Sea levels are rising faster than they did 50 years ago and it's very likely to get worse in the future, Nerem said. A rise in global sea levels of more than a meter is unavoidable, scientists say, but they are not sure exactly when, where or how much it will be. National Aeronautics and Space Administration experts, working with European scientists, say such major cities as |
Tokyo and
Singapore, the U.S. state of Florida and a number of island nations
could disappear. The scientists say current data suggest a rise in ocean levels of at least 1 meter is a certainty in the next 100 to 200 years. But they say it could be much more depending on rate of loss of the polar ice sheets around Greenland and Antarctica. According to Tom Wagner, the cryosphere program scientist at NASA, the paleoclimate record shows that sea levels can rise as much as 10 feet (3 meters) in a century or two, if the ice sheets fall apart rapidly. "We're seeing evidence that the ice sheets are waking up, but we need to understand them better before we can say we're in a new era of rapid ice loss," he said. Eric Rignot, glaciologist at the University of California-Irvine, said that as the planet warms, there is no reason to expect that ice sheets will melt at the same pace as they did in the past. According to the laws of physics, they will deteriorate faster. And they already are. Sections of Costa Rica that are in danger are Puntarenas Centro, the entire Pacific coastal area and Limón Centro and much of the Caribbean coast. |
| Lawmakers consider effect of imposing tax on sales of
lottery tickets |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Lawmakers are considering a bill that would change the law that exempts certain transactions from sales tax. That is why Delia Villalobos, president of the Junta de Protección Social, testified Wednesday that sales of lottery tickets should continue to be exempt. The current sales tax is 13 percent, but the central government is trying to win passage of a value-added tax that would be 15 percent in two years. The Comisión de Asuntos Hacendarios is considering the exemption bill, No. 19.531. Government officials point out |
that there
are many transactions that are exempted from the current
sales tax. The administration of former president Laura Chinchilla even issued a decree that imposed sales tax on food items but exempt certain low-budget products, such as rice and cheaper cuts of meat. Ms. Villalobos argued that the lottery agency would lose money that it uses for social purposes if it had to remit sales tax. About 70 percent of the lottery proceeds go to prizes, but 12 percent goes to 395 government programs and social organizations, she said. The lottery agency estimates that sales tax would cost 2 billion colons a year, nearly $4 million. |
| Two
arrests made in attempted murder of
Escazú expat in March |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
This story originally appeared Wednesday afternoon Judicial agents have detained two men who are accused of trying to kill U.S. expat Jason Feinman last March 18. Feinman, the operator of a call center and other business activities, suffered multiple gunshot wounds when two men on a motorcycle approached him and one opened fire in the Paco section of San Rafael de Escazú. |
The two suspects were the
target of a raid about 5 a.m. Wednesday in La Sabana, according to the
Judicial Investigating Organization. The crime was not a robbery, and speculation at the time suggested a contract shooting. The pair face allegations of attempted murder. Feinman was shot nine times with four of the bullets impacting the chest region, agents said at the time of the crime. |
| You need to see Costa Rican tourism information HERE! |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2015, Vol. 16, No. 169 | |||||
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| Experiments with arsenic cause unexpected results in unborn
mice |
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By the National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences
news staff Female mice exposed in the womb to low levels of arsenic through drinking water displayed signs of early puberty and became obese as adults, according to scientists from the National Institutes of Health. (The study is important to Costa Rica because many communities, mainly in Guanacaste, have arsenic naturally in the drinking water.) The finding is significant because the exposure level of 10 parts per billion used in the study is the current U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standard or maximum allowable amount for arsenic in drinking water. The study, which appeared online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, serves as a good starting point for examining whether low-dose arsenic exposure could have similar health outcomes in humans. Scientists from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences divided pregnant mice into three groups. The control group received no arsenic in its drinking water, while the two experimental groups received either the EPA standard of 10 parts per billion of arsenic or 42.5 parts per million of arsenic, a level known to have detrimental effects in mice. One part per billion is a thousand times smaller than one part per million. The mice were exposed during gestation, between 10 days after fertilization and birth, which corresponds to the middle of the first trimester and birth in humans. "We unexpectedly found that exposure to arsenic before birth had a profound effect on onset of puberty and incidence of obesity later in life," said reproductive biologist and co-author Humphrey Yao, "Although these |
 National Institute of Environmental Health
Sciences photo
Mice: no arsenic, 10
parts per billion, 42 parts per millionmice were exposed to arsenic only during fetal life, the impacts lingered through adulthood." The impacts Yao is referring to are obesity and early onset puberty, particularly in female mice. The researchers did not examine in this study whether males also experienced early onset puberty, but they did confirm that male mice exposed to arsenic in the womb also displayed weight gain as they aged. Both the low and high doses of arsenic resulted in weight gain. According to lead author and biologist Karina Rodriguez, the research team performed the experiment in three separate batches of mice, each containing a control and two experimental groups, and achieved similar results. She said although the biological process responsible for these effects remains unknown, the study highlights the need to continue researching long-term impacts of what mothers eat, drink, and breathe during pregnancy on the welfare of the offspring. |
Here's reasonable medical care
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth news page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2015, Vol. 16, No. 169 | |||||||
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| Republicans rip China's Xi as his Washington visit nears By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Republican presidential candidates are escalating their rhetoric against Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of his first state visit to the United States in the wake of the global stock market plunge following China's currency devaluation. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker urged President Barack Obama to cancel Xi's visit and White House dinner next month. "I think China, as others in the world, would actually respect some leadership once and for all from the United States," Walker said on Monday as U.S. stock markets took a nose dive. "Part of our problem right now is that they don't respect us," he said. The comments come as the White House announced U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice will travel to Beijing later this week to discuss a range of issues with Chinese officials. In a statement, Walker cited a list of grievances against America's biggest Asian trading partner. "Given China's massive cyberattacks against America, its militarization of the South China Sea, continued state interference with its economy, and persistent persecution of Christians and human rights activists, President Obama needs to cancel the state visit," he said. Walker's comments follow those of Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who has made attacks on China, as well as Mexico, key pieces of his campaign. "Markets are crashing — all caused by poor planning and allowing China and Asia to dictate the agenda. This could get very messy! Vote Trump" tweeted the real estate mogul on Monday. U.S. presidential contenders have long used China as a lightening rod for criticism of whomever was occupying the White House. Killer of two during TV show described as off-kilter loner By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Long before he filmed himself gunning down a TV reporter and cameraman during a live broadcast Wednesday in Virginia, the man identified as the killer traced a volatile career path that saw him fired from at least two stations for conflicts with co-workers, leaving memories of an off-kilter loner. Vester Flanagan, 41, a former employee of the television station where the slain man and woman worked, fatally shot himself later in the day when confronted by police on a highway outside Washington, authorities said. Flanagan had opened fire on reporter Alison Parker, 24, and photographer Adam Ward, 27, as they interviewed a local business leader at Smith Mountain Lake, near Roanoke, about 375 kilometers (230 miles) southwest of Washington. Flanagan was known professionally as Bryce Williams. Two social media accounts linked to that name were used after the shooting to publicize images from the scene. Among them, a video from the shooter's point of view showed him walking up to the unsuspecting news crew, raising a gun at Parker and firing several shots. She stumbles away before the screen goes dark. Several more gunshots are then audible. At the time of the attack, the WDBJ-TV crew was interviewing Vicki Gardner, head of the community's Chamber of Commerce, for a business story. Gardner was shot in the back but survived. An executive at WDBJ said the crew was working on a routine news interview when the gunman walked up. A WDBJ anchor told viewers: "They were out covering a feature story. They were not out covering protests or demonstrations." The shooting began about 6:45 a.m. during a live broadcast. Ward was able to briefly capture an image of the shooter before he and the camera fell to the ground. ABC News said its New York office received a 23-page suicide note attributed to Bryce Williams between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. In what the network called an often rambling manifesto, the writer said that the racially motivated killings of eight black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in June prompted Wednesday's rampage. "The church shooting was the tipping point … but my anger has been building steadily ... I’ve been a human powder keg for a while … just waiting to go BOOM!!!!" it said. According to ABC, the writer also referred to Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at the university in 2007, and the Columbine High School massacre of 1999. WDBJ officials said Flanagan worked at the Roanoke station for less than a year before he was fired in February 2013. He had to be escorted out of the building by local police "because he was not going to leave willingly or under his own free will,'' the station's former news director, Dan Dennison, said in an interview with a Hawaii station, Hawaii News Now. Flanagan had "a long series of complaints against co-workers nearly from the beginning of employment at the TV station,'' said Dennison, now an official with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources. "All of these allegations were deemed to be unfounded.'' Though the claims were along racial lines, he said, "we did a thorough investigation and could find no evidence that anyone had racially discriminated against this man.'' Several posts after the shooting addressed the victims specifically. "Alison made racist comments," the account alleged. "Adam went to HR on me after working with me one time!!!" The poster then directed users to another account, writing, "I filmed the shooting. See Facebook." The accounts have since been suspended. India's Jains rally for right to die by starvation suicide By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
In India’s Supreme Court, Jains have challenged a Rajasthan state high court order earlier this month that said santhara, a Jain religious ritual of fasting to death, is tantamount to suicide and thus illegal. Sthanakvasi Jain Shravak Sangh, a Jain religious group, said in its petition filed to the Supreme Court Tuesday that the ancient tradition of santhara is an integral part of Jainism, and that the court cannot interfere with its religious practice in a secular country. Tens of thousands of Jains on Monday took to streets across India, protesting the high court order. For many centuries, Jain monks as well as ordinary people have chosen to commit santhara, a spiritual way of fasting to death by giving up food and water, usually because of old age, when they feel their purpose in life has been served, or because they are terminally ill. While Jains claim that santhara is the most ideal and satisfying mode to death, and they have a constitutional right to do it, many others argue the practice is nothing but suicide that many elderly Jains are forced into performing by their relatives and others. Movie theater killer gets thousands of years in prison By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A judge in Colorado has sentenced movie theater gunman James Holmes to 12 life sentences and the maximum 3,318 years in prison for his deadly rampage at a movie theater near Denver three years ago. Survivors and family members erupted in applause as Arapahoe County District Court Judge Carlos Samour announced the sentence Wednesday. "It is the court's intention that the defendant never set foot in free society again. If there was ever a case that warranted the maximum sentences, this is the case," the judge said. Samour ordered Holmes to serve 12 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole, one for each of the people he killed in the July 20, 2012 attack on a crowded movie theater. He then added another 3,312 years for 70 convictions of attempted murder, and six years for an explosives charge. A jury last month found Holmes, a 27-year-old former neuroscience graduate student from California, guilty of the massacre in a suburban theater during a showing of the Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises." Obama to tout solar energy and effects of global warming By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Geoff Mirkin climbs up to the top of a small, unassuming building in Elkridge, Maryland, about 50 kilometers outside of Washington and points to the solar panels that line the roof. “We get 70 percent of our electricity from these panels," Mirkin said. In the six years since co-founding Solar Energy World, he has seen the solar-panel installation company grow from just three employees to more than 50. “The economics work. We can finance programs for people, we can make it so that solar can beat utility and the bigger thing is that there is a lot of job creation,” Mirkin said. President Barack Obama highlighted this growth in the solar industry during Monday’s National Clean Energy Summit, noting the United States generates 20 times as much solar power as it did in 2008. “The world’s largest solar installation came online last year, with 9 million solar panels, generating enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes with clean, renewable energy – not in Germany, not in China, not in Saudi Arabia – right here in the United States of America,” Obama said. Just a day after returning from his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, Obama was on a plane to Las Vegas where he announced initiatives aimed at making renewable energy sources, including solar, more affordable for American households. And as the Iran nuclear debate and the U.S. presidential campaign heat up, the U.S. leader is keeping his focus on the fight against climate change, an issue he has long called the greatest threat to national security. Just weeks after announcing an ambitious plan to cut carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, Obama is rebuffing opponents in the Republican Party and fossil fuel industry who say such measures hurt the economy, and embarking on a climate change tour that takes him from Nevada to New Orleans to Alaska. Obama will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit Alaska's Arctic region next week, where he will highlight the effects of global warming. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest says during the president's visit to New Orleans Thursday, he will not only focus on the remarkable revival of the city 10 years after Hurricane Katrina, but the need to make infrastructure more resilient to climate change, as more and more coastal areas deal with rising sea levels. Evolutionary link for lizards found in Brazilian fossil By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The missing link in lizard evolution has been found in Brazil. Paleontologists from the University of Alberta discovered the 80-million-year-old fossil remains of a lizard more closely related to the chameleons and bearded dragons, the Old World lizards found in Africa and Asia. The Old World lizards are acrodontal, meaning their teeth are fused to the top of their jaws. The teeth of New World iguanas are not. The new specimen is the first acrodontan iguanian ever found in South America. Michael Caldwell, one of the study's authors, said it is "pretty good evidence to suggest that back in the lower part of the Cretaceous, the southern part of Pangaea was still a kind of single continental chunk." The supercontinent Pangaea began to break apart into the current continents about 175 million years ago, as the land masses drifted apart so did the plants and animals that lived there. As Millenia passed the animals evolved separately into new species. The study, published in Nature Communications, concludes "after the break up, the acrodontans and chameleon group dominated in the Old World, and the iguanid side arose out of this acrodontan lineage that was left alone on South America." "It answers a few questions about iguanid lizards and their origin," noted Caldwell. New cavity repair technique eliminated need for drilling By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
For over a hundred years, dentists have been repairing cavities by removing the decayed tooth tissue with a drill and filling the hole with metal or plastic material. Depending on the cavity’s depth, this method can be unpleasant to downright painful for the patient, and it has to be repeated periodically. “You're really in that cycle of repair and replacement for the rest of the tooth's life,” said Rebecca Moazzea, senior lecturer at King's College in London. A damaged tooth’s enamel can be replaced naturally, but the process is too slow to stop the work of bacteria that build up in tiny cracks. Now, a British company called Reminova has developed a method for speeding up this natural remineralization of early-stage cavities. “We've just found a way to make that a much faster process," said Jeff Wright, Reminova's chief executive officer. "Driving healthy calcium and phosphate minerals into your enamel, and through a natural process, it will bind on and add to the enamel that's there." Here's how it works: After cleaning the early-stage cavity with a method that does not require drilling, the dentist covers it with a mineral solution and applies an electrical current that is too weak for the patient to feel. The deposited mineral quickly hardens, completely filling the cavity. Researchers say this method could be especially useful for children. “If children have a better experience of going to the dentist, so they haven't had necessary drilling and injections for routine fillings, then they'll be much more positive in later life and probably become much more regular patients," said Barry Quinn, a consultant at King's College. Dentists point out that the new method is most efficient on early-stage cavities, which makes regular dental checkups essential. The whole treatment lasts about as long as a regular drill-and-fill procedure. Researchers say they are confident that the new method can be further developed for treating later-stage cavities. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's sixth news page |
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 Judicial Investigating Organization
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Judicial agents
confiscated wads of cash and a number of clonedcredit cards when they detained a Russian and three Bulgarians Wednesday in La Sabana. The victims also are Europeans, and the thefts via automatic tellers is about 13 million colons, said agents. Solis' allegations seem to have fizzled By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
When President Luis Guillermo Solís gave a speech 100 days into his presidency he listed a series of 14 findings that were what he called corruption, wasteful spending and other ills that he inherited form the previous administration. The Spanish language La Nacion and television stations reported Wednesday that none of these allegations have solidified into criminal cases. Casa Presidencial was quick to go on the offensive. Sort of. The bulk of a statement issued Wednesday night was a summary of the steps that the administration has taken to eliminate problems. However, the statement also said that just because there has been no prosecution does not mean that the crime did not happen, only that prosecutors have been unable to obtain sufficient evidence. Former military leaders reject Iran deal By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A group of nearly 200 retired, high-ranking American military officials is urging U.S. lawmakers to reject the Iran nuclear deal, arguing it will not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. "Removing sanctions on Iran and releasing billions of dollars to its regime over the next 10 years is inimical to the security of Israel and the Middle East," said the letter, addressed to leaders in both houses of Congress. It comes a little more than a week after another letter, sent by 36 retired senior military officers, expressed support for the deal. "America and our allies, in the Middle East and around the world, will be safer when this agreement is fully implemented," the officers said. The U.S. Congress has until Sept. 17 to approve or reject the agreement, which lifts international sanctions in exchange for Tehran scaling back and allowing monitoring of its nuclear program. The pact would also allow for what the Obama administration has defended as a rigid system of inspections to ensure that Iran does not cheat and secretly develop nuclear weapons. The letter, published by the Washington Post and dated Tuesday, said that inspections process has no credibility and that the agreement reached in July is unverifiable. "The agreement as constructed does not 'cut off every pathway' for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons," it read. "To the contrary, it actually provides Iran with a legitimate path to doing that simply by abiding by the deal." Republicans in Congress, and an increasing number of lawmakers in President Barack Obama's Democratic Party, have come out against the deal. President Obama has vowed to veto any rejection of the deal, and appears likely to have enough votes in Congress to sustain that veto. |
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| From Page 7: Asian stocks recover, and U.S. market soars By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Asian stocks rose today, following a surge on Wall Street that came after hints the U.S. Federal Reserve is backing off an interest rate hike. U.S. stocks snapped a week-long losing string Wednesday with key indexes up about 4 percent. The Dow Jones Industrials, which had suffered double digit declines over the last five sessions, soared 619 points Wednesday, the third-highest point gain in its history. Global stocks have been in a freefall for the past two weeks on worries about China’s slowing economy. China’s central bank, which raised interest rates Tuesday to pump more money into the economy, helped stabilize Chinese stocks but only briefly. Today China's benchmark Shanghai Composite Index was up around 1.5 percent near midday. Trading was also higher in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and Seoul. Traders at the New York Stock Exchange say it’s not China’s slowing economy as much as it is China’s lack of transparency that’s making investors nervous. Trader Stephen Guilfoyle said that investor psychology has been more about caution than panic. And Alan Valdes at DME Securities blames the market volatility on lower volumes typical of the summer months, coupled with uncertainty and eroding confidence about Beijing’s monetary policies. Most analysts predict the volatility will continue until at least September. That’s when many economists believe the U.S. Federal Reserve will start raising interest rates, which have remained near zero since 2009. Lower interest rates help stimulate the economy. Despite improving U.S. employment and housing data, a voting member of the U.S. central bank raised doubts Wednesday on the timing for a rate hike. William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told reporters that recent turmoil in global markets makes the idea of raising rates next month less compelling. |
