 |
 |
Costa Rica Your daily |
 |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
|
|
 |
 |
|||||||||
| A.M. Costa Rica's Second news page |
|||||||||
| Home |
Tourism |
Calendar |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About
us |
|
|
|
|||||||||
 |
| Costa Rica Expertise Ltd http://crexpertise.com E-mail info@crexpertise.com Tel:506-256-8585 Fax:506-256-7575 |
 |
 |
|
for Tico agricultural policy By Dennis Rogers
Special to A.M. Costa Rica The new agriculture plan for the Laura Chinchilla administration places considerable stock in institution-building and plans to take a longer range perspective, beyond her four-year term to 2021. She said “we had abandoned the long-term vision” and called on private agro industry to work on making Costa Rica more competitive and productive. Ms. Chinchilla also mentioned “food security.” Attempts to promote local agriculture and reduce imports during the Oscar Arias Sánchez administration drew the ire of international trade bodies. According to Gloria Abraham Peralta, agriculture minister, presently agriculture makes up about 14 percent of gross national product. It maintained a positive international balance of payments through the recent economic crisis in rich countries. The rural population makes up 41 percent of the national total, and has been steady in recent years with a reduction in migration to the Central Valley metropolitan area. Rural poverty remains at 14 percent, with 5 percent in extreme poverty, the traditional $1 per day measure, she said. Officials met on agricultural policy Thursday. Increasing agricultural competitiveness is a priority, but with practical steps. Ms. Abraham said the administration will pull the researchers out of the laboratory and send them out to the field to talk to people who need answers to their problems. “Agro-biodiversity” is another new field, and Ms. Abraham noted the efforts of Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad in that direction. Another initiative borrows from programs in Tegucigalpa and Guatemala which have recorded information for farmers to confirm what middlemen are saying about prices, styled as 800-TOMATE. As cell phones penetrated into India and Bangladesh, access to such information was hailed as one of the great impacts of technology. In general Ms. Abraham described the situation as one of stale institutions and how the government hopes to use public spending as a detonator for expectations. Correa rescued by troops after police confrontation By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Ecuadorean troops stormed a hospital in the capital, Quito, late Thursday and rescued President Rafael Correa, who had been holed up surrounded by renegade police protesting government austerity measures. The soldiers escorted Correa out of the hospital following a shootout with the rebellious police. The gun battle between loyalist troops and rebel police lasted about 35 minutes. At least one security force member was reported wounded in the rescue operation. Later, the embattled president addressed a large crowd of supporters from the balcony of the presidential palace. He thanked them for their support and said he believed the uprising was an attempted coup d'etat. Correa had been hospitalized earlier in the day after being shoved and attacked with tear gas as he tried to talk with protesting police outside their barracks in Quito. The protesters are upset over budget cuts that would eliminate some bonuses and promotions. Correa is defending the budget cuts as necessary and says the entire government is affected. Thursday, highways were blocked by police burning tires, and the international airports in Quito and Guayaquil were temporarily shut down by strikers. Ecuadorean schools were dismissed at noon Thursday and classes canceled for Friday. Correa took power in 2007. He is an ally of Venezuela's socialist president Hugo Chávez and has been critical of U.S. policy in Latin America. Ecuador has had a history of political instability. In Costa Rica, President Laura Chinchilla spoke personally with Correa and promised her full support. Support came from a number of countries on all sides of the political spectrum. However, there was confusion as to what really happened. Correa was affected by tear gas and was rushed into the police hospital by aides. They gave him a gas mask. Later there were reports that rebelling police were trying to break into the hospital section where the president was. He appeared to be surrounded by loyal guards. Some 800 troops showed up to rescue him, Ecuadorian sources said. It was Correa who raised the issue of a coup, although the actions against the president did not seem to rise to that level. Officials in the Western Hemisphere are nervous about coups after many described the ouster of José Manuel Zalaya in Honduras with that word. Pancake benefit in Liberia By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Coco Animal Rescue and Education will benefit from an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast Saturday at the Hidden Garden Art Gallery 5 kilometers west of the Liberia airport. Serving starts at 9 a.m. and continues until noon. Tickets are available at the door. or by calling 2670--0269, 2670-1646 or the gallery at 2670-0056.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This is reserved for your commercial message |
|
| Home |
Tourism |
Place
classified ad |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About
us |
|
| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
| The contents of this page and this Web site are copyrighted by Consultantes Río Colorado 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 and may not be reproduced anywhere without permission. Abstracts and fair use are permitted. Check HERE for details | ||||||
 |
| A.M. Costa Rica third newspage |
 |
||||||||
| Home |
Tourism |
Calendar |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About
us |
|
|
|
|||||||||
| Ostional residents are
depicted incorrectly as turtle egg thieves in an uncritical posting on
the Internet and in mass e-mail. |
 Unattributed Internet mailing
|
| Ostional e-mail turtle hoax moves at the speed of a rabbit |
|
|
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A doctoral student in Hawaii has published a definitive rebuttal to that perpetual e-mail entitled "World Shame Costa Rica." The e-mail shows photos of Ostional residents collecting turtle eggs on a local beach, and most expats in Costa Rica get a forwarded e-mail once in awhile. The implication of the e-mail is that lax Costa Rican officials let residents pillage turtle nests. That impression is advanced because the individuals pictured seem happy and smile as they carry off sacks of turtle eggs. "Please distribute widely. The turtle eggs are stolen to be sold," says the e-mail which is not attributed to anyone. A.M. Costa Rica gets one or two of these messages a week along with scornful statements that the newspaper is deliberately keeping this environmental tragedy secret. One Canadian who forwarded the e-mail denied he had any responsibility to check out the facts before forwarding such inflammatory messages to a large number of people. He said he received the photos from a Costa Rican woman. The doctoral student, Christie Wilcox, approached the issue in academic fashion and cited references to three studies, including one by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and another contained in a book published by the University of Chicago Press. Each discussed the management of the olive ridley sea turtles that nest at Ostional on the Pacific coast of the Nicoya peninsula. The turtles are thriving. There is no doubt that the theft of turtle eggs is a problem and a crime in Costa Rica. There are occasional arrests on the Caribbean coast involving eggs of threatened species. |
But Ms. Wilcox correctly summarizes
the situation this way on her Internet
site: "Around three million eggs are harvested every year. While that sounds like a lot, that's only what the people can collect in the short timeframe when harvesting is legal: the first 36 hours of the nesting season. Nine times that many eggs are left to hatch on their own. Furthermore, since they have a stake in the eggs, the local community tends to protect these beaches from other predators, and with the flood of turtle eggs entering the market legally, their price is kept low enough to discourage poachers." She also points out that the nests of early arriving turtles are destroyed by the many turtles that come later. Ms. Wilcox says on her Internet site that she is a graduate student in cell and molecular biology studying fish population genetics and venom biochemistry. She also is a science writer. The Ostional turtle egg harvest is discussed widely in Internet postings. A search of "World Shame Costa Rica" generates as the first item a site called hoax-slayer.com that also says the e-mail with photos is grossly exaggerated. However, there are other sites that publish the photos and commentaries uncritically. This includes a site registered in India called eface.in. Another site, the Costa Rica Conservation Network's Blog, published the photos and asked the illogical question: Did you know it’s legal to poach sea turtle nests? Presumably the word poach here means to steal illegally rather than a cooking direction. The Instituto Costarricense de Turismo weighed in on another site to say: ". . . the images actually represent a model of sustainable development in the Ostional community, approved in 1990 by executive order . . . ." |
| To move or not to move, that is the question |
|||
I have been
nicely settled for two years in a comfortable apartment near Sabana
Park but now I find myself looking at apartments in the city.
This should not really surprise me; I was looking through my journal of
February 1993 when I had been in Costa Rica just seven months and I say:
|
home. He was surprised that in the U.S. windows were not heavily curtained for privacy. (My only view will be the window above my stove, or if I go up to the roof.) Later that year:
All of this was due to a medium earthquake that didn’t do much damage elsewhere in San Jose. I learned later that the reason the apartment building had so few tenants was that it had been earthquake damaged before and was supposed to be repaired before it was liveable. So far my present apartment has survived two earthquakes with no structural damage, only a broken wall mirror, and in spite of the rain, all of my windows open to great views. I have no complaints; I just have wanderlust. So I think I will stay put. |
||
 |
| You need to see Costa Rican tourism information HERE! |
| Home |
Tourism |
Place
classified ad |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About
us |
|
| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
| The contents of this page and this Web site are copyrighted by Consultantes Río Colorado 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 and may not be reproduced anywhere without permission. Abstracts and fair use are permitted. Check HERE for details | ||||||
| A.M. Costa Rica fourth news page |
 |
||||||||
| Home |
Tourism |
Calendar |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About
us |
|
|
|
|||||||||
 |
xx |
 |
| Analysis says plants, too, face a high
extinction rate |
||
|
By the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew
A global analysis of extinction risk for the world's plants, conducted by the Royal Botanical Garden at Kew together with the Natural History Museum, London and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, has revealed that the world’s plants are as threatened as mammals, with one in five of the world’s plant species threatened with extinction. The study is a major baseline for plant conservation and is the first time that the true extent of the threat to the world’s estimated 380,000 plant species is known; announced as governments are to meet in Nagoya, Japan, in mid-October 2010 to set new targets at the United Nations Biodiversity Summit. "For the first time we have a clear global picture of extinction risk to the world’s known plants. This report shows the most urgent threats and the most threatened regions. This study confirms what we already suspected, that plants are under threat and the main cause is human-induced habitat loss, said Stephen Hopper, Director, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Scientists carried out the sampled red list index assessments, a representative sample of the world’s plants, in response to the United Nations' International Year of Biodiversity and the 2010 Biodiversity Target. The work relied heavily on the vast repository of botanical information held in Kew’s herbarium, library, art and archives, which includes some eight million preserved plant and fungal specimens, on specimens held in the Natural History Museum’s own extensive herbarium of six million specimens, on digital data from other sources and on collaboration with Kew’s network of partners worldwide. “This study confirms what we already suspected, that plants are under threat and the main cause is human-induced habitat loss," said Hopper, adding: “For the first time we have a clear global picture of extinction risk to the world’s known plants. This report shows the most urgent threats and the most threatened regions. In order to answer crucial questions like how fast are we losing species and why, and what we can do about it, we need to establish a baseline so that we have something against which to measure change. The sampled red list index for plants does exactly that by assessing a large sample of plant species that are collectively representative of all the world’s plants.” “The 2020 biodiversity target that will be discussed in Nagoya is ambitious, but in a time of increasing loss of biodiversity it is entirely appropriate to scale up our efforts. Plants are the foundation of biodiversity and their significance in uncertain climatic, economic and political times has been overlooked for far too long," he said, adding: “We cannot sit back and watch plant species disappear. Plants are the basis of all life on earth, providing clean air, water, food and fuel. All animal and bird life depends on them and so do we. Having the tools and knowledge to turn around loss of biodiversity is now |
 Royal Botanical Garden photo
Blushing bride (Tillandsia ionantha) is found from
Mexico to Central America. This plant species is rated as near
threatened.more important than ever and the sampled red list index for plants gives conservationists and scientists one such tool.” The study revealed: • About one third of the species are insufficiently known to carry out an assessment. This demonstrates the scale of the task facing botanists – many plants are so poorly known that scientists still don't know if they are endangered or not. • Of almost 4,000 species that have been carefully assessed, over one fifth (22 percent) are classed as threatened. • Plants are more threatened than birds, as threatened as mammals and less threatened than amphibians or corals. • Gymnosperms (the plant group including pines) are the most endangered group. • The most threatened habitat is tropical rain forest. The current rate of loss of tropical forest accounts for 20 percent of global carbon emissions. • Most threatened species are found in the tropics. • The most threatening process is man-induced habitat loss, mostly the conversion of natural habitats for agriculture or livestock use. In the future, the project will involve reassessments at regular intervals which will chart the changing fortunes of the world’s plants, much like a stock exchange index shows the ups and downs in the value of shares, the researchers said. The study used 7,000 plant species drawn from the five major groups of plants: bryophytes (mosses and liverworts), pteridophytes (these are land plants, such as ferns, that produce neither flowers nor seeds and reproduce via spores), gymnosperms (such as conifers and cycads), monocotyledons (one of the major groups of flowering plants including orchids and the economically important grass and palm families) and legumes (the pea and bean family), as representative of the other flowering plants. Both common and rare species were assessed in order to give an accurate picture of how plants are faring. |
|
| Home |
Tourism |
Place
classified ad |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About
us |
|
| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
| The contents of this page and this Web site are copyrighted by Consultantes Río Colorado 2010 and may not be reproduced anywhere without permission. Abstracts and fair use are permitted. Check HERE for details | ||||||
| A.M. Costa Rica fifth news page |
|
|||||||||
| Home |
Tourism |
Calendar |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About
us |
||
|
|
||||||||||
 |
 |
| Home |
Tourism |
Place
classified ad |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About
us |
|
| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
| The contents of this page and this Web site are copyrighted by Consultantes Río Colorado 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 and may not be reproduced anywhere without permission. Abstracts and fair use are permitted. Check HERE for details | ||||||
| A.M. Costa
Rica sixth news page |
|||||||||
| Home |
Tourism |
Calendar |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About us |
|
|
|
|||||||||
Latin American news Please reload page if feed does not appear promptly |
Cuba's
offshore oil plan raises concern in U.S. By the A.M. Costa Rica wires services
A Spanish energy company is planning to help Cuba drill for oil off the island's northern coast, about 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) south of the U.S. state of Florida. Repsol spokesman Kristian Rix says the company has drilling rights to a 4,500-square-kilometer area in the Straits of Florida but would not give a timeline on when oil exploration would begin. Cuba currently imports most of its oil and gas from Venezuela, but oil experts say there could be significant offshore reserves. A study earlier this year by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that Cuba might be able to access 4.6 billion barrels of oil. The plans by Cuba and Repsol to drill for oil are raising concerns in the United States because of the proximity to the Gulf of Mexico, where an explosion aboard a BP oil rig in April led to the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, is urging the White House to pressure the Cuban government to abandon its offshore drilling plans. Scientists warn any oil from a spill off Cuba's north coast could reach the southeastern United States within days. And experts worry difficult relations between the U.S. and Cuba's Communist government could hurt efforts to respond to a potential disaster. The U.S. State Department says U.S. companies can be licensed to provide oil spill prevention and clean-up support to Cuba. There are also concerns that the U.S. trade embargo is complicating Cuba's efforts to safely drill for oil. The embargo calls for sanctions against companies that supply more than 10 percent of the parts for any vessel operating in Cuban waters. To get around the embargo, Spanish energy firm Repsol has been working with an Italian company to build an oil exploration rig in China. The rig is expected to arrive in Cuba early next year. Despite the concerns, a Cuban official visiting the U.S. says he is confident Cuba can drill for oil safely. Luis Alberto Barreras Canizo of Cuba's ministry of science, technology and the environment said that Cuba's environmental framework is very progressive. Barreras was in Sarasota, Florida, this week for a meeting with American and Mexican officials on marine research and conservation. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports some U.S. officials see Cuba's oil ambitions as a chance to loosen the trade embargo and allow U.S. energy companies to pursue more opportunities in Cuba. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson told The Times he believes the Obama administration will move forward with potential changes following mid-term elections in November. Separately, a Cuban delegation visiting Azerbaijan this week raised the possibility of cooperation between the two countries in the oil and energy sectors. |
| Latin American news feeds are disabled on archived pages. |
|
| Home |
Tourism |
Place
classified ad |
Classifieds |
Entertainment |
Real
estate |
Rentals |
Sports |
About
us |
|
| What we published this week: | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Earlier |
| The contents of this page and this Web site are copyrighted by Consultantes Río Colorado 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 and may not be reproduced anywhere without permission. Abstracts and fair use are permitted. Check HERE for details | ||||||
