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| Costa Rica Expertise Ltd http://crexpertise.com E-mail info@crexpertise.com Tel:506-256-8585 Fax:506-256-7575 |
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 Ministerio de Gobernación,
Policía y
Seguridad Pública/Humberto Ballestero Fuerza Pública officers accept
youngsters' toy weapons.
Youngsters exchange war toys
in Fuerza Pública program By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Fuerza Pública was in one of Desamparados' poorest and most dysfunctional sections Tuesday asking school children to exchange their toys of war for notebooks, shirts and other school supplies. The police officers not only got toy weapons, but real ones, including machetes, knives, BB guns and sharp instruments. The shirts the youngsters received said "Armas? No Gracias," Dozens of youngsters participated, officials said. The event was in the Los Guidos communal hall. The toys consisted of water pistols, guns, plastic grenades and even swords. The program is being conducted by the Ministerio de Justicia y Gracia and the Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía y Seguridad Pública, in an effort to create a culture of peace among school children. The idea was to offer a preventative message, according to Capt. Omar Chavarría, head of the Fuerza Pública in Desamparados. Los Guidos is a settlement of persons in transit, many from the countryside. There is a lot of crime there and the infrastructure is not well developed. Court decision advances move to OK in vitro use By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A 48-year-old Santa Ana woman won a court challenge Tuesday to a prohibition against in vitro fertilization, but the case certainly will go to the Sala IV constitutional court. The Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, the agency that runs the hospitals, declined to provide the procedure for the woman based on a decision in 2000 by the Sala IV. However, the Tribunal Superior de lo Contencioso y Civil de Hacienda said Tuesday that advances in medical science may have made the Sala IV decision moot. The question in 2000 revolved around the creation of multiple embryos of which the bulk would be destroyed. The procedure involves fertilizing the mother's egg with the husband's sperm outside the body and then implanting the living embryo in the mother's womb. The woman is Ileana Henchoz Bolaños. The Latin phrase in vitro means within the glass or in this case fertilization within a test tube. The Caja based its case on the prohibition issued by the Sala IV in 2000. The high court voided a government decree authorizing the process but providing regulations. The court decision was broad. It ordered the Caja to do medical examinations and diagnoses with the goal of determining the viability of using assisted reproductive methods including in vitro fertilization. If after a medical evaluation in vitro fertilization was indicated, the Caja was ordered to do so within the framework set out by the 2000 Sala IV decision. The decision seems to order the Caja to expand its services for infertile couples beyond the case of the woman who brought the case to court. Tourism plan for islands suffers legislative setback By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A plan to set up a process to provide tourism concessions of the islands in the Gulf of Nicoya got turned down by lawmakers Tuesday. The rejection came from the Comisión de Turismo which was considering the measure. Members said the bill contains a number of deficiencies, including possible unconstitutionality. To provide tourism concessions on the Nicoya Gulf islands would require a modification of the Zona Marítimo Terrestre law, said lawmakers.
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| A.M. Costa Rica third newspage |
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New Osa radio station was a
real challenge for expat DJ
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By Elyssa Pachico
of the A.M. Costa Rica staff After three years of wrestling with contractors, some inconveniently placed mangrove trees and that infamous Tico attitude towards time, the expat-themed radio station Radio Pacifico Sur is making some waves across San Buenaventura. But owner and DJ Stephen Petretti now has a warning for other aspiring Gringo entrepreneurs: the bureaucratic struggles in Costa Rica are not to be underestimated. “I had to get rid of my Gringo hustle-and-bustle attitude and just accept that things are going to take their natural slow course here,” he said. “It's that whole Tico time factor.” Radio Pacifico Sur at AM 1480, based in the the Cantón de Osa in southern Puntarenas, mixes daily English and Spanish language programing, broadcasting in an approximately 20 to 40 kilometer radius from Coronado to San Pedrillo. The station was supposed to be up and running in May, but costly delays and endless red tape meant that now it probably will not be broadcasting in full capacity until mid-November, said Petretti. “There's been a lot of problems,” said Eddy Torres, a DJ and assistant manager at the radio station. “A lot of people messed around with us. They kept throwing the ball from one side to another.” A 54-year-old single parent of two children ages 12 and 13, California native Petretti previously worked as a DJ for four years in Phoenix, Arizona, and San Diego, California. He first came down to Costa Rica in January 2006, after becoming disgusted with what he described as the country's “lack of free speech” and “jerk president.” “When I came down to San Buenaventura, there was no common media down here,” he said. “There's nowhere businesses can advertise their products, and CDs don't work in your car because the roads are too bumpy.” He immediately started working on building his own radio station. Radio Pacifico Sur hopes it will stand out not because Spanish language rock bands like Maná will be played alongside the Rolling Stones, but because its programming will be firmly based in San Buenaventura. “We're going to emphasize news and events in this area, not from San José,” said Petretti. “We want to keep the station community oriented, and advertise events in churches and schools and tamale sales and cabalgatas.” Upon arriving to San Buenaventura, it took Petretti six months before he tracked down an AM frequency for sale. Because the Costa Rican government no longer issues them, aspiring radio broadcasters must look to families and churches, who, if they own frequencies, are usually unwilling to sell, he said. Petretti eventually ended up buying a 5,000-watt Elcore transmitter from Marco Afaro, the owner of Radio Puntarenas. But the secondhand equipment turned out to be less than ideal: the transmitter currently works only at one-fifth of its supposed capacity. “The machine's obsolete,” said Torres. “It was like buying an old car that the owner hasn't checked on for a really long time and wasn't too sure if it was still running, but he sold it anyway.” After buying the frequency by selling some real-estate assets that he owned in the United States, Petretti decided to build the radio station on two hectares of land that he owned near Coronado. It is mushy, swamp-like land surrounded by mangrove trees, conveniently placed exactly where it was necessary to set two utility poles to carry the station's power lines. It took a year to secure the permits necessary to cut down some of the trees. In the meantime, Petretti hired a local architect, William Martínez, to start drawing up plans for the station building. He also contracted local company Constructadores y Electricidad Mora y Mora to start building the tower that would support the station's antennae. After starting work in October 2007, Martinez waited |
 Antenna of new station
 Stephen Petretti in his previous life in
the States.
until December before informing Petritti that before construction could continue, they were legally required to do a soil contraction test on the site. Likewise, contractors at Mora y Mora, who began laying down groundwork for the antennae in February, waited until May before telling Petretti that he needed the government's environmental agency to inspect the land for ecological damage before he could start broadcasting. “I was just like, why didn't you tell me any of that earlier?” said Petretti. “Every little department had its own little hurdles. We had to jump through, and once we finished with one, we had to go through another.” Torres said it's especially tough for an expat to navigate around the country's seemingly endless red tape or even to know where to start. “You need to know who to talk to,” he said. “I feel like Don Steve started backwards in a way. What had to come first was obtaining all the permits and then buying a frequency. He climbed the branches before the tree trunk, as they say down here.” Petretti estimates that he has spent between $3,000 and $5,000 on the radio station so far. Even now, the station's ambitious programming schedule – which includes sit-down interviews with the local mayor once a week and a children's show on Saturday mornings – has yet to see the light of day. Petretti said he goes on air from time to time, in between picking up and dropping off his kids at school, but for most of the day the radio broadcasts a preprogrammed playlist from a computer in his house. “At this point we just have to use the frequency just for the sake of using it, so that we don't lose it,” said Torres, citing a Costa Rican law that says that radio stations will lose the right to their allocated frequency if it goes unused for more than six months. The station will likely begin its planned programming in mid-November, if all goes well. Petretti will host his own evening talk show, a spin on the politically charged program he used to broadcast in San Diego, under the pseudonym Dr. Meno. “My disclaimer is I'm not a real doctor, I just have a lot of patience,” he said. “But if you ask me, anyone who spends two and a half years in Costa Rica trying to build a radio station deserves a doctorate.” |
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Major weather systems are
moving away from country
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A tropical depression developed into Hurricane Omar over Tuesday, but the good news is that the storm appears to be heading to the northeast and away from Central America. The hurricane, which is a category 1 storm on the international scale, had been Tropical Depression 15. The hurricane is centered off the north coast of Venezuela. Meanwhile, a depression that passed over the northeastern coast of Costa Rica is now officially Tropical Depression 16 but not yet a tropical storm or a hurricane, according to the U.S. Hurricane Center. The storm has moved north along the coast to Honduras, and it is expected to pass over that country and Guatemala before making landfall again on the Mexican Yucatan. Officials here think that this path might generate more rain for Guanacaste. Both storms are a good distance from Costa Rica, which is why the weather was not rainy Tuesday in most of the country. An exception was in Guanacaste where residents in the community of Dimas were flooded out by a local river. |
The commission
said 49 persons were in shelters. That is in the canton of La Cruz in
extreme northwest Costa Rica. Emergency officials are continuing to total up the damage from the heavy weekend rains. The Comisión Nacional de Prevención de Riesgos y Atención de Emergencias said that 38 roadways have been affected by the storms, which were a product of dueling low pressure areas, one from the west and one from the east, that met over the country. The highest weather alert had been in force for the cantons of Quepos, Parrita, Desamparados, Oreamuno, Paraíso, El Guarco and Cartago Centro. Nearly 300 homes had suffered some form of damage, said the commission. Officials said they were able to open up the Interamerican Sur highway that had been closed by a slide since Sunday. Officials reported that a handful of bridges in the southern part of the country had been damaged and three dikes had suffered some form of damage. |
| You need to see Costa Rican tourism information HERE! |
| A.M. Costa Rica fourth news page |
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| Researchers have created a
gecko-inspired adhesive with 10 times the stickiness of a gecko's foot
by combining vertically aligned nanotubes with curly spaghetti-like
nanotubes. |
 Zina Deretsky, National Science
Foundation after Liangti Qu et al., Science 10/10/2008
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Scientists inspired by
gecko's foot create super adhesive
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By the National Science Foundation
and the A.M. Costa Rica staff The gecko's amazing ability to stick to surfaces and walk up walls has inspired many researchers to manufacture materials that mimic the special surface of a gecko's foot. The creature, an immigrant probably from Asia, is best known as the chirping insect hunter (Hemidactylus frenatus) in many Costa Rican homes. The secret behind the gecko's ability to stick so well is a forest of pillars at the micro level on the underside of the gecko's foot. Because there are so many pillars so close together, they are held tightly to the surface the gecko is walking on by a molecular attraction called the Van der Waals force. This relatively weak force causes uncharged molecules to attract each other. In an unprecedented feat, Liming Dai at the University of Dayton and colleagues report in the Oct. 10 issue of Science successful construction of a gecko-inspired adhesive that is 10 times stronger than a gecko, at about 100 newtons per square centimeter. The newton is a measure of the force required to accelerate a one kilogram mass one meter per second per second. |
The researchers constructed their
adhesive out of two slightly
different layers of multi-walled carbon nanotubes. The lower layer is composed of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, while the upper segment — which comes into contact with the surface it is sticking to — is curly, like a mess of spaghetti. The adhesive sticks best when it is pulled down parallel to the surface to which it is sticking. This is called shear adhesion. This action arranges the tips of the curly nanotubes so they have maximum contact with the surface, thereby maximizing the Van der Waals force. Pulling the adhesive off in a motion perpendicular to the substrate is much easier. At this angle the sticking force is 10 times weaker. In this way, the adhesive has strong shear adhesion for firm attachment and relatively weak adhesion for detachment perpendicularly to the surface. Just like a gecko, the adhesive can stick to a wall when needed and then lift off easily to take the next step. This breakthrough, supported by the National Science Foundation, will have many technological applications. |
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but fails to get majority By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Canada will once again have a minority Conservative government, based on votes totaled Tuesday night. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his ruling Conservatives got 143 seats and 5.2 million votes or 37.6 percent of those votes cast. The Liberal party got 76 house seats and 26.2 percent of the vote. The Bloc Québécois got 50 seats and 10 percent of the vote. The New Democratic party got 37 seats and 18.2 percent of the vote. The Independent Party managed to get two seats. The results from Election Canada were with nearly all of the 69,000 polling places reporting. But the totals are not official. They were phoned in. Harper carried his own district, Calgary Southwest, with 72.9 percent of the popular vote. Liberal leader Stéphane Dion carried his Saint-Laurent—Cartierville district with 61.7 percent of the vote. Jack Layton of the New Democratic party carried his Toronto—Danforth district with 45 percent of the vote, and Gilles Duceppe of Bloc Québécois carried his Laurier—Sainte-Marie district with 50.3 percent of the vote. There are 308 seats in the upcoming 40th Canadian Parliament. Some 13.9 million votes were cast. Harper called early elections in hopes of getting a majority in the house. He fell short but did manage to pick up 16 seats from the previous parliament. He needed 155 for a majority. Municipalities told to give access for the disabled By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Municipaiidad de San José has to provide disabled access to its office of highway control within six months, according to a Sala IV constitutional court decision reported Tuesday. And the Municipalidad de Santa Cruz has to provide disabled access to its second floor offices in the same amount of time, said a companion decision. Both cases were brought by residents who said they were hampered in their conduct of municipal business because of the barriers to the disabled. New call center opened by Sykes in Moravia By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Sykes Enterprises, Inc., has opened another call center, this one in Moravia. The location is expected to employ some 500 bilingual individuals. The location is the former Sony Music building. The 30-year-old company is in 19 countries and features employees who speak 30 different languages. Several thousand of the firm's 29,500 employees are in Costa Rica. |
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