Costa Rica’s internet structure is showing signs of stress. 

The ADSL high-speed service offered by the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, known as ICE, was out much of Monday.

Amnet admits to serious problems with its connection with Radiográfica Costarricense S.A., RACSA, the principal internet provider and subsidiary of ICE.

Message delivery has been spotty since Friday, although hard facts are difficult to get. 

Public employees at ICE have been known to pull the plug on the high-speed Internet service for political reasons. And Tuesday is the day for a major demonstration against corruption and a litany of other situations.

Downloading Web pages was less affected, although the speed of refreshing a page has dropped in the last three days.

E-mail messages may take 12 hours to reach their destination across town. Some never arrive at all.

A chief technician for Amnet, the cable television and Internet provider, said Monday that a modem that connects the company’s lines to the RACSA server was functioning badly. He predicted incorrectly that the situation would be remedied by late afternoon.

Technicians at RACSA, on the other hand, discounted reports of any problems in telephone conversations Monday.

Although RACSA technicians said there were no problems, a test message Monday night sent via a direct connection to the RACSA server to a RACSA e-mail address took seven minutes to arrive. Usually the speed is that of light.

The problems with the high-speed Internet were most obvious at a downtown Internet cafe where employees had been in contact with ICE all day without much success. Users of that system say it did not work much of the day, although some improvement took place about 5:30 p.m.

The high-speed Internet hookup, or ADSL, has been restricted to a test area downtown until recently when the company decided to offer it to a much wider area.  ICE uses existing telephone lines to make the connections to Internet servers.

Amnet uses a type of cable used also for television transmissions.

Legion post planning
Thanksgiving dinner

The American legion will hold its Thanksgiving dinner Nov. 20 at the Castillo Country Club in Heredia.

The legion post, the SFC Raymond Edison Jones Post 16 Costa Rica, will gather at 11 a.m. for a 12:30 dinner. A traditional turkey feast is planned. The cost is 7,000 colons for adults and 3,500 for youngsters under 12. The adult charge is about $15.50.

The purpose of the event is to socialize, and to meet new friends, said the organization in a release. Reservations are available with Ken Johnson, 591-1695, James Longshaw, 386-6572, Jim Young, 836-2328, and Don Roberts, 290-0167. Reservations are required.

Day of three cultures
preempts Columbus

Today is Columbus Day, although U.S. citizens celebrated the day Monday so many public employees could get a three-day weekend.

Columbus is not as hated in Costa Rica as he is elsewhere, such as México and the Southwestern United States. But the day has not been called that. The title Día de la Raza gave way to Día de las Culturas to recognize the mestizo roots of most Costa Ricans: Indian, African and Spanish.

To some extent the day is designed to impress on Costa Ricans the varied backgrounds of their ancestors. However, many Costa Ricans do not accept this view and insist that they are pure Spanish.

This year the day is being dominated by an anti-corruption march.

Youthful burglar shot

A youngster tried to get into a house in San Felipe de Alajuelita Monday and the resident shot him.

The 14-year-old suffered a wound in the chest and then went to the hospital under police guard.

The man in the house had a .38-caliber pistol that police confiscated.

Just when Costa Ricans were getting bored with corruption and who got the money, El Diario Extra publishes a photo of the country’s ambassador to Russia reclining on the bed with Russian women.

The only problem was that the photo was more than a year old, as was a complaint published in a Russian weekly against the man, Plutarco Hernández. Someone named Zolotkina claimed in a public reader forum that the ambassador invites women to his home and then traps them into being sexual slaves.

The newspaper pointed out that the ambassador, 60, married a 21-year-old Russian woman 13 months ago.

The foreign mininstry here quickly said it would investigate the case.

The newspaper never said why it was publishing information a year old, but recent allegations of official corruption probably encouraged the newspaper to report the strange case of Hernández.

The newspaper also dreged up what it says was a dark page in Costa Rican history. The ambassador, it turns out, was a member of a group in 1969 that tried to bust out an inmate from an Alajuela prison. A policeman died in the firefight, and the assailants were caught.

Three years later fellow terrorists hijacked a plane to force the Costa Rican government to free Hernández and his associates.  The newspaper recounted how Hernández fled to Mexico and then to Russia. Hernández was pardoned during the

administration of Rodrigo Carazo Odio when the fugitive’s cousin, Rafael Ángel Calderón Fournier, was foreign minister. Later Hernández took a job at the Costa Rican embassy in Moscow and rose up the ranks.

Calderón is one of the key figures in the current corruption scandals.

Pablo Cob, the executive president of the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, said Monday that he has opened up his personal bank accounts to investigators and the fiscal general.

The institute, known as ICE, was the organization that purchased hundreds of thousands of cellular telephone lines from the French firm Alcatel. Some of Cob’s associates are under investigation because Alcatel is accused of making payoffs after it won the $260 million contract.

In a letter to employees, Cob said that he opened 

He told employees that the Grupo ICE with the effort and work of everyone will get out of the situation much stronger.

The disclosure means that Cob, too, is under investigation by prosecutors, although he did not say if investigators had requested the disclosure or if he had done so voluntarily.

José Miguel Echandi said Monday that a transparent network among government agencies will be a tool to control the corruption in the public sector. Echandi is the Defensor de los Habitantes.

He will recommend that all public institutions open their accounts and inform citizens of their expenses, suppliers, contractors in a form that would let the public observe, understand and evaluate the decisions being made by public officials.

According to Echandi, his Defensoria will take the first step and in about a month will start to show 

The Defensoria defends transparency to the public and requires institutions to inform citizens, said Echandi. He envisions an interinstitutional network of information that citizens or anyone chance check.

Another measures that the Defensoria considers important is to coordinate with universities and the Ministerio de Educación Pública a national plan for incorporating ethics in the classroom. He also wants to strengten anti-corruption laws.

What's your favorite way to prepare chicken? Whether you grill, fry, roast or bake it, as long as you cook it thoroughly, you'll kill any Campylobacter jejuni food-poisoning bacteria that may be on or in it. 

But raw chicken juice, or raw or undercooked chicken, could harbor this microbe and lead to campylobacteriosis food poisoning. In fact, Campylobacter is thought to be the leading cause of food poisoning worldwide.

To foil Campylobacter, Agricultural Research Service scientists in Albany, Calif., and their colleagues at The Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, Md., have decoded the sequence, or structure, of all of the genes in a specially selected Campylobacter jejuni strain. 

Investigations of these genes may lead to the discovery of faster, more reliable ways to detect the microbe in samples from food, animals, humans and water.

What's more, the gene-based research opens the door to simpler, less-expensive tactics for distinguishing look-alike species and strains of Campylobacter and its close relatives, so that culprit microbes in food poisoning outbreaks can be fingered more quickly. 

Finally, the studies may lead to innovative, environmentally friendly techniques to circumvent the genes that make Campylobacter jejuni strains so successful in causing human gastrointestinal upset and, in some cases, paralysis or even death.

The research represents the first time that a Campylobacter jejuni strain from a farm animal — 

in this case, a market chicken — has been sequenced. That farm-animal origin is important, because chicken is the leading source of this bacterium in food. Earlier genome sequencing, done elsewhere, was based on a specimen from a gastroenteritis patient and was lacking key features, such as the ability to colonize chickens. 

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — In Haiti, armed gangs loyal to former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide took to the streets Monday, looting shops and burning cars. Two people died in gunfights. U.N. troops and national police are struggling to restore order throughout Port-au-Prince.

Heavy gunfire was heard throughout the city Monday, as Brazilian troops and Haitian police patrolled the downtown area in armored vehicles, trading fire with gunmen hiding in alleyways.

The newest wave of violence in the Haitian capital began on Sept. 30, when Mr. Aristide's supporters mounted violent protests over his ouster. Saturday, a Brazilian peacekeeper was shot and slightly wounded in a downtown slum. A few hours later an Argentine soldier was shot in the northern city of Gonaives.

Local officials have criticized the U.N. peacekeeping mission, saying it has not done enough to stem the violence. But U.N. spokesman Damien Cardona insists that the Haitian government, and not the

"The troops, they are not occupation forces, they do not have the mandate to arrest people, to be the police of this country, they are here to support the Haitian government and the police," he said. "So the leading actor, the one that does the arrests, that has to lead the country, and really knows the country is the local government, the national government and the national police."

Over the past week, clashes between police and criminal gangs have killed 45 people. Six people have been beheaded, three of them police officers. Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue has blamed the beheadings on Aristides supporters, saying they are behind a campaign known as Operation Baghdad.

Yet Aristide supporters say that police and anti-Aristide gunmen are responsible.

The U.S. State Department issued a new travel warning Friday, advising Americans against travel to Haiti except for emergency reasons.