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San
José, Costa Rica, Wednesday,
Sept. 3, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 174
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Day for
children will be Tuesday
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Next Tuesday is the Día de los Niños y las Niñas in Costa Rica, and nearly every child is aware of this. Some parents will celebrate the day Sunday with a gift and perhaps an outing. The Parque Zoológico y Jardín Botánico Nacional Simón Bolívar in North San José already announced a special Sunday program with performances by Circo Moving, acrobats, jugglers and other performers. The show starts at 11 a.m. There is an admission. The Museo de los Niños has a program from Thursday through Sunday promoting protection of the sea. It is called El Misterio del Gran Pez, "The Mystery of the big Fish." It is described as a 30-minute show featuring the museum characters Museito and Museita as well as the Isla del Coco. Municipalities embark on trash programs By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Two municipalities are embarking on programs to handle waste. In the Municipalidad de Montes de Oca plans to promote alternative handling of waste grease from restaurants. Mayor Fernando Trejos B. said the project was an alliance with the Universidad Nacional Estatal a Distancia. The plan is to keep the waste grease out of the sewer system and convert it into biodiesel, he said. The central canton of Heredia also will be participating in the Gestión Integral de Residuos Sólidos, inspired by a new law. Municipal officials will begin this month with a campaign to encourage residents to generate less trash. Each person now generates an average of a kilo a day, the municipality said. That's 40,000 tons a year, said an announcement. The first event is the showing of a U.S. environmental film, "Trashed: No place for waste." That will be Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in the Centro Cultural Omar Dengom, the former Escuela República Argentina.  Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
graphic
Color-coded
waves demonstrate that the coral surface is driving the flow.
Coral far more
active than thought
By the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology news service
Conventional wisdom has long held that corals whose calcium-carbonate skeletons form the foundation of coral reefs are passive organisms that rely entirely on ocean currents to deliver dissolved substances, such as nutrients and oxygen. But now scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have found that they are far from passive, engineering their environment to sweep water into turbulent patterns that greatly enhance their ability to exchange nutrients and dissolved gases with their environment. “These microenvironmental processes are not only important, but also unexpected,” says Roman Stocker, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and senior author of a paper describing the results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When the team set up their experiment with living coral in tanks in the lab, “I was expecting that this would be a smooth microworld, there would be not much action except the external flow,” Stocker says. Instead, what the researchers found, by zooming in on the coral surface with powerful microscopes and high-speed video cameras, was the opposite: Within the millimeter closest to the coral surface, “it’s very violent,” he says. It’s long been known that corals have cilia, small threadlike appendages that can push water along the coral surface. However, these currents were previously assumed to move parallel to the coral surface, in a conveyor-belt fashion. Such smooth motion may help corals remove sediments, but would have little effect on the exchange of dissolved nutrients. Now Stocker and his colleagues show that the cilia on the coral’s surface are arranged in such a way as to produce strong swirls of water that draw nutrients toward the coral, while driving away potentially toxic waste products, such as excess oxygen. “The general thinking has been that corals are completely dependent upon ambient flow, from tides and turbulence, to enable them to overcome diffusion limitation and facilitate the efficient supply of nutrients and the disposal of dissolved waste products,” said Orr Shapiro at the Weizmann Institute, who spent a year in Stocker’s lab making these observations.
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A.M. Costa Rica Third News Page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 174 | |
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| Anti-pregnancy campaign shows that the problem is home-grown |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Time was when government officials and child protection agency workers saw the arrival of single male tourists as the major threat to underage Costa Rican women. There were campaigns by such organizations as the non-profit Fundación Paniamor and the government"s Patronato Nacional de la Infancia. The U.S. government coughed up funds and still does to offset the national guilt over the bad behaviors of its male citizens here. The airports were draped with warnings. In the United States even the Federal Bureau of Investigation set up fake sex tourism Web sites offering introductions with children, even though some lawyers considered this entrapment. In a couple of key court cases, expats received long prison terms for corrupting or attempting to corrupt the morals of minors in both Costa Rica and the United States. A lot of time passed before the agencies, organizations and bureaucrats realized that their problem was home-grown. Now they are trying to do something about it. An example is the campaign by the Patronato Nacional de la Infancia that says there are age limits for intimate relations between youngsters and adults. The agency points out that 88 percent of the underaged pregnant women got that way as a result of a relationship with an adult male. The campaign is Para el amor si hay edad, translated as "For love there is an age." The agency hired an ad firm to create a television commercial. The video features an adult man talking by cell telephone to his schoolgirl sweetheart, encouraging her to ditch classes and join him on a drinking spree to celebrate his birthday. Of course the man is speaking loudly in public, and those around |
 Patronato Nacional de la Infancia video
Man with cell phone is
confronted by someone who overheard.him cannot help but to understand what is going on. Some challenge him. The video is HERE! What would you do if you heard an adult seducing a minor, the Patronato asks. The answer, of course, is to dial 911. The agency notes that such relationships frequently involve an abuse of power and authority. The agency also is in the process of setting up a special Web site for young mothers. It is www.Olakease.cr. The goal is to encourage interaction and to urge the young women to continue with their studies. Most expat tourists realize by now that there are severe penalties for being involved with a minor. And the most recent arrests involve Costa Ricans running prostitution setups in rural areas. |
| Insurance institute loaning Caja's Hospital México
operating rooms |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Instituto Nacional de Seguros is loaning staffers at Hospital México in its Hospital del Trauma. That means physicians will have two more operating rooms for high priority patients. The 17 operating rooms at Hospital México are being redone as an emergency because the electrical system failed. Operations have taken place at other local hospitals, and one woman had to petition the Sala IV constitutional court for a cancer operation. The trauma hospital is close to Hospital Mexico. Many expats do not know that the state insurance agency operates its own medical facilities for those injured on the job. Those who are covered by the |
institute's
workman's compensation policies are supposed to take their injuries to
its hospital whenever possible. The Instituto Nacional de Seguros also is loaning recovery bed space. The institute said that the priority operations would include those for cancer, brain injuries, spinal injuries and similar. Hospital México officials will provide the staffing. Some expats who have obligatory medical coverage with the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social have complained that they were unable to obtain needed surgical procedures. The operating rooms at Hospital México have been in a deteriorating state for years, and there is an effort to refurbish them fully. |
| You need to see Costa Rican tourism information HERE! |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's Fourth News page | |||||
| San José, Costa Rica, Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 174 | |||||
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| Bilingual infants demonstrate better thinking than
monolinguals in study |
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By
the A*Star Agency for Science, Technology and Research.
news staff A team of investigators and clinician-scientists in Singapore and internationally have found that there are advantages associated with exposure to two languages in infancy. As part of a long-term birth cohort study of Singaporean mothers and their offspring called GUSTO, 6-month old bilingual infants recognized familiar images faster than those brought up in monolingual homes. They also paid more attention to novel images compared to monolingual infants. The findings reveal a generalized cognitive advantage that emerges early in bilingual infants, and is not specific to a particular language. The findings were published online in the scientific journal, Child Development. The research involved A*STAR’s Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences, KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital and the National University Hospital. Infants were shown a colored image of either a bear or a wolf. For half the group, the bear was made to become the familiar image while the wolf was the novel one, and vice versa for the rest of the group. The study showed that bilingual babies got bored of familiar images faster than monolingual babies. Several previous studies in the field have shown that the rate at which an infant becomes bored of a familiar image and subsequent preference for novelty is a common predictor of better pre-school developmental outcomes, such as advanced performance in concept formation, non-verbal cognition, expressive and receptive language, and IQ tests. The past studies showed that babies who looked at the image and then rapidly get bored, demonstrated higher performance in various domains of cognition and language later on as children. Bilingual babies also stared for longer periods of time at the novel image than their monolingual counterparts, demonstrating novelty preference. Other studies in the field have shown this is linked with |
improved
performance in later IQ and vocabulary tests during pre-school
and school-going years. Associate Professor Leher Singh, who is from the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and lead author of this study said, “One of the biggest challenges of infant research is data collection. Visual habituation works wonderfully because it only takes a few minutes and capitalizes on what babies do so naturally, which is to rapidly become interested in something new and then rapidly move on to something else. Even though it is quite a simple task, visual habituation is one of the few tasks in infancy that has been shown to predict later cognitive development.” A bilingual infant encounters more novel linguistic information than its monolingual peers. A 6-month old infant in a bilingual home is not just learning another language; it is learning two languages while learning to discern between the two languages it is hearing. It is possible that since learning two languages at once requires more information-processing efficiency, the infants have a chance to rise to this challenge by developing skills to cope with it. “As adults, learning a second language can be painstaking and laborious," said Singh. "We sometimes project that difficulty onto our young babies, imagining a state of enormous confusion as two languages jostle for space in their little heads. However, a large number of studies have shown us that babies are uniquely well positioned to take on the challenges of bilingual acquisition and in fact, may benefit from this journey.” In comparison to many other countries, a large proportion of Singaporean children are born into bilingual environments. This finding that bilingual input to babies is associated with cognitive enhancement, suggests a potentially strong neurocognitive advantage for Singaporean children outside the domain of language, in processing new information and recognizing familiar objects with greater accuracy. |
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth
news page
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| San José, Costa Rica, Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 174 | |||||||
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| Ban condemns beheading of newsman by Islamic State By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
U. N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has condemned the apparent beheading of a second U.S. hostage by Islamic State militants. During a speech today in New Zealand, Ban called attention to the group's brutal killings of civilians. "This is totally unacceptable, such kind of inhuman, brutal crimes, which is a crime against humanity. Those perpetrators must be brought to justice. And this is the firm policy of the United Nations," said Ban. The extremists released the video Tuesday showing what appears to be the beheading of journalist Steven Sotloff. A masked figure in the video also issue a threat against a British hostage, a man the group named as David Haines, and warned governments to back off "this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State," the SITE monitoring service reported. The purported killer addresses President Barack Obama, saying Sotloff's death was in retaliation for U.S. air strikes against the militants. The militant says, "Just as your missiles continue to strike our people, our knife will continue to strike the necks of your people." U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said officials are checking into the video's authenticity. If it's genuine, Ms. Psaki said, "we are sickened." The images follow last month's video release of the gruesome beheading of U.S. freelance journalist Jim Foley. A source familiar with the matter said that while U.S. officials have yet to formally confirm the validity of the video, it appeared to be authentic. Iraq's outgoing foreign minister Hoshiyar Zebari, condemned what he called "this savage killing...an example of savagery and evil," and he said this was evidence of the need for Iraq and the West to defeat the Islamic State. "We have a common enemy and the whole world is moving in the right direction to stop this savagery and brutality," said Zebari. "The whole world is standing united against IS. They must be defeated so these horrid scenes will not be repeated." Iraqi Shi'ite Muslim politician Sami Askari, who is close to outgoing Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said, "They are trying to scare the Americans not to intervene. I don't think Washington will be scared and stop. This is evil. Every human being has to fight this phenomenon. Like cancer, there is no cure. You have to fight it." White House spokesman Josh Earnest could not confirm the execution, but told reporters "our thoughts and prayers" are with Sotloff's family. British Prime Minister David Cameron called Sotloff's murder disgusting and despicable. Sotloff was taken captive in Syria in August 2013, roughly a year after Foley was taken hostage. He worked for Time and Foreign Policy magazines. The video has clear echoes of Foley's murder. As with Foley, Sotloff appears in an orange jumpsuit; his killer is dressed in black, his face hidden. Like Foley, Sotloff is forced to kneel in what appears to be a strip of desert before being beheaded. It was unclear when the video was shot. The Islamic State group has seized a large swath of land across eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq, declaring the area a caliphate. The United States has been conducting air strikes in coordination with Iraq's government against the group since early August. Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby said Tuesday the U.S. would continue air strikes to disrupt the Islamic State group's ability to harm U.S. personnel and facilities. The raids also support further humanitarian aid to those persecuted by the extremist group. Amnesty International on Tuesday said it had evidence Islamic State militants are conducting a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Iraq, carrying out war crimes that include mass summary killings and abductions. U.S. Reps. Ed Royce and Eliot Engel condemned the killing and called for the formation of an international coalition to defeat the extremist group. "If we don't disrupt and defeat it," Engel warned, its members "will attack homelands all over the world." The U.S. lawmaker is the ranking Democrat of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Royce, the committee's chairman, issued a statement saying he was "disgusted by what appears to be another horrendous killing of an American journalist at the hands of ISIS." He used that acronym for the group, adding his sympathies to Sotloff's family. "Sadly, ISIS is bringing this barbarity across the region — beheading and crucifying those who don’t share their dark ideology," said Royce. "The threat from this group seems to grow by the day. Working with key allies, the United States needs to be acting urgently to arm the Kurds on the ground who are fighting them, and targeting ISIS from the air with drone strikes.” Royce said his committee will hold a hearing on the threat posed by the Islamic State after Congress returns next week. Engel said that after the 60 days allotted in the War Powers Act is over, President Obama should come to Congress to ask for the authorization of more air strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq. A Sotloff family spokesman said it is aware of the video and is grieving privately. Aug. 27, Sotloff's mother, Shirley Sotloff, issued a video plea to Islamic leader during which she described her son as an honorable man who should not be punished for U.S. government actions. "I've learned that Islam teaches that no individual should be held responsible for the sins of others," she said on the video posted on YouTube. "Steven has no control over the actions of the U.S. government. He is an innocent journalist. I've also learned that you, the Caliph, can grant amnesty. I ask you to please release my child." Obama sends more troops to Baghdad for security By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
President Barack Obama is ordering another 350 U.S. military personnel to Iraq to protect American diplomats and facilities in Baghdad. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf says the additional forces will not take on a combat role, but because diplomatic officials made the request for more security. The United States has been targeting Islamic State militants in Iraq with air strikes. Obama has said U.S. forces will continue such action to protect American interests in Iraq from the militants. The Islamic State group has seized large parts of northern Iraq and Syria, and has threatened to overrun the Iraqi capital. President Obama was on his way to a NATO summit in Wales. He will consult with U.S. allies on an international coalition to implement a strategy in the fight against Islamic State. Earlier Tuesday in Baghdad, angry relatives of Iraqi soldiers abducted by Islamic State militants in June stormed parliament, demanding information. Many of the relatives plan to attend a special session of parliament Wednesday when lawmakers will discuss the matter. Amnesty International accuses the Islamic State of "ethnic cleansing on a historic scale," in a bid to wipe out non-Arabs and non-Sunni Muslims. The report says the systematic campaign includes hundreds of mass killings and perhaps thousands of abductions that have terrorized all of northern Iraq, and fueled sectarian tensions in the region. Survivors quoted in the report say some people severely wounded in the massacres were left where they were shot, doomed to suffer a slow and agonizing death. The report said the militants have been shooting men to death but are also kidnapping hundreds of women and children. The United Nations has issued a similar warning about minority persecution at the hands of the Islamic State group. Islamic State grew for years even while U.S. was in Iraq By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The Islamic State’s rise seems sudden. It caught the U.S. by surprise this summer when it captured large portions of northern Iraq and spread its wings in neighboring Syria. But many analysts contend that the group, which grew out of al-Qaida in Iraq, has been rebuilding for years. Even before U.S. forces left Iraq in 2011, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) was forging a professional military force, stoking Sunni unrest, mounting brutal bombing campaigns and barbaric killings. It boasts of 50,000 fighters in Syria and 30,000 in Iraq while recruiting 6,000 more last month alone. This is a group whose cruelty alarmed even al-Qaida, but is successfully exploiting the Syrian civil war and sectarian rule in Iraq to assemble arms, wealth and influence at great speed, says David Kilcullen, the architect of the Iraq War troop surge in 2006. Kilcullen currently heads CAERUS, a security and intelligence strategy firm in Washington. He says the Islamic State has overshadowed al-Qaida. “It is much more capable militarily, it’s much richer, it controls territory, it controls key infrastructure and it is really a much more dramatic threat than we have seen from al-Qaida," Kilcullen said. "They have literally made millions of dollars by kidnapping and ransom. They are now the richest terror group in the world, north of $500 billion worth of resources,” he said. Both in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State is creating embryos of governance following the path of Hezbollah, which operates as a state-like entity in Lebanon. “We are even seeing them now in the towns and the cities that they are occupying, both in Iraq and in Syria, actually taking on a lot of the functions of the state," said Jorge Benitez, a senior fellow at the influential Washington-based Atlantic Council. "They are actually engaging in what we would call hearts and minds strategies.” “They are levying taxes, they’re running bakeries and they are allowing people to go to school," said David Kilcullen. "They’re running a court system, and they are also running hospitals and public works.” Many experts claim it is the military success of the Islamic State that draws other groups to it. But others argue that the Islamic State has not been truly battle-tested. Brian Jenkins, a senior advisor at the global policy think tank, RAND Corp., says Iraq’s predominantly Sunni area was easy prey. “It wasn’t so much that ISIS was this formidable fighting force and defeated the Iraqi military; it’s that simply the Iraqi military folded and left a vacuum that ISIS was able to fill,” he said. “The big news was that they were defeated and lost control over the Mosul dam," Benitez said. "That was their first serious setback. That’s a good sign. Now, if the publics in these countries can see that they are losing militarily, a lot of their support will start to wither away.” Jenkins cautions that the sands have permanently shifted in the Middle East. He says Iraq and Syria have irreversibly ceased to exist. “Syria now is a mosaic of government-held territory; territory held by this group, by that group, by another group," he said. "That will continue in a kaledoscopic fashion. Iraq has been de facto partitioned into Sunni areas, Shi’a areas, Kurdish areas.“ Many experts see the rise of the Islamic State as the most significant development in international jihadism since Sept. 11, 2001. Observers note that the Islamic State has taken over the mantle of leadership of global jihadist terrorist networks against the West. Major radical movements - from Abu Sayyaf and Jamaat Islamiyya in East Asia to Boko Haram in Africa - have switched their allegiance from al-Qaida to this new ruthless terrorist organization. Ebola epidemic is called losing battle without help By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The international medical aid group Doctors Without Borders says the world is losing the battle against ebola and warns the deadly virus will not be stopped unless wealthy nations dispatch specialized biological disaster response teams to West Africa. The organization's president, Joanne Liu, said Tuesday that her group, which has treated more than 1,000 ebola patients in West Africa since March, is completely overwhelmed by the disease. "In Sierra Leone, infectious bodies are rotting in the streets. Rather than building a new ebola care center in Liberia, we are forced to build crematoria," said Ms. Liu. Her warnings were echoed Tuesday by the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Tom Frieden, who said the situation is now the world's first ebola epidemic, given how widely it's spreading. He cautioned that while there is a window of opportunity to fight the disease, the window is closing. Meanwhile in Liberia, a missionary organization announced that another American doctor has become infected. Serving in Mission said the obstetrician was not treating ebola patients at the hospital in Monrovia. It did not elaborate how he contracted the virus. Also Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama joined the fight against ebola, recording a message for West Africans on how to avoid and treat the deadly disease. In a video released by the White House, Obama warns people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone not to touch the blood, sweat or other body fluids of ebola patients, and to avoid contaminated items such as used needles. He warned that those killed by the disease remain contagious. "When burying someone who has died from this terrible disease, it’s important to not directly touch their body. You can respect your traditions and honor your loved ones without risking the lives of the living," said Obama. The West African ebola outbreak, which has now spread to Senegal as well, has killed more than 1,500 people this year. The United Nations says the West Africa outbreak has put harvests at risk and sent regional food prices soaring. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization issued the warning Tuesday in a special alert for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three countries most affected by the outbreak. The agency said that in those three countries, quarantine zones and restrictions on people's movement aimed at combating the virus have seriously curtailed the movement and marketing of food. The agency said this has led to panic buying, food shortages and major price increases for some commodities. The agency also warned that labor shortages on farms due to movement restrictions and workers leaving for other areas will seriously impact farm production and jeopardize the food security of many people. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's sixth news page |
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Rumor of second wave of illegals aired
By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
In Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, Methodist pastor Jaser Davila said if the Central American migrants he meets daily in this border city are right, more travelers are on their way to the U.S from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Davila's humanitarian relief group is anticipating another influx like the one that has brought tens of thousands of unaccompanied children to the U.S. since last October, twice the number as the previous year. At the makeshift migrant shelter Davila helps to run, the migrants tell him theyknow people who are en route, or that they hope their families will be able to join them as soon as possible. He’s heard the information so often, he's taking it seriously. “Basically, it’s gone down a lot,” Davila said. “But the people we’re in touch with said more people are coming, more families, etc. So maybe for now it’s gone down a little, but the expectation for them is that the number of people en route to here will increase again.” The number of Central Americans apprehended at the border peaked in June. Detention centers were so full, a steady stream of undocumented adults and unaccompanied minors who were arrested by border patrol or turned themselves in were given an immigration court date and released. Despite a drop in apprehensions in July, farther south on the border, in McAllen, Texas, Sister Norma Pimentel has been busy for months dealing with the Central American influx. The relief center she runs for Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley saw 70 migrants arrive in one day last week. But Sister Pimentel said that unlike what Pastor Davila is hearing on the Mexican border, there has been no word from the travelers she meets that more migrants are on their way. "They don't know when people are coming and we don't know either. It could very well be that in October or later on we might have a great number of people. I think Border Patrol expects numbers to increase in the near future, but we have no clue as to what's going to happen," said Sister Pimentel. Shelter and humanitarian workers speculate about the variables that drive crossings at certain times of the year. They trade anecdotes and theories. Weather. School schedules. Gang recruitment cycles. Still, none of them anticipated this year's wave. Sara Melendez, a spokeswoman with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol whose work district includes Laredo, said her office isn't aware of an imminent second wave similar to this year. "That's not to say things won't change," Melendez said. "Right now it's just business as usual." Officials will try to stem tax exodus By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The White House says it has no timeline for executive action on so-called corporate inversion deals in which companies are essentially renouncing their U.S. headquarters to avoid paying taxes. However, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday that if Congress refuses to act, the Obama administration is looking at possible options to respond to the problem of corporate deserters. Some American companies are buying foreign companies to reincorporate abroad, which the White House believes is not fair to their American competitors or the American taxpayer. The practice is legal and brings added income for not just the companies, but bankers and others involved in the structure. The White House's comments on inversion deals come ahead of Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew’s speech next Monday on the topic. Some experts suggest the administration and Treasury could slow the current pace of corporate inversion deals by counting a company’s U.S.-issued debt as equity. The change would make it harder for companies to achieve the necessary majority foreign equity ownership required for reincorporation abroad in an inversion deal. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, has also said companies that do inversion deals should not be allowed to compete for federal contracts. Some Republicans and former U.S. President Bill Clinton say the inversion deals are a symptom of the larger problem, which requires comprehensive tax reform to resolve, and President Barack Obama has agreed to discuss major tax reform. |
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| From Page 7: Industrial chamber urges use of solar By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Cámara de Industrias is encouraging its members to use solar to lower their electrical costs. The chamber noted that electrical rates have increased 19 percent just this year, and chamber members are big users. The chamber put on an expo for members Tuesday in which it urged solar as an alternative. The chamber also noted that in April the national rate setting agency issued a decree that gave electrical users a way to generate power and even sell some back to the utilities. The chamber received technical advice from the Universidad Técnica de Munich and from the Asociación Costarricense de Energía Solar. |
