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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 209 | |||||||||
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 U.S. National Hurricane Center graphic
Yellow sections are low-pressure
areas.Despite sunshine
Thursday
another system is on the way By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The dose of sunlight in many areas of the country Thursday was more a tease than an indication of the days to come. Another low-pressure area has sprung up like a mushroom in the southern Caribbean, and weather forecasters say this will influence conditions later today and over the weekend. Meanwhile, there still are predictions for high winds generated by a high-pressure area over the Yucatan peninsula. The Instituto Meteorológico Nacional said that the winds also intensify rain in the Caribbean coast and the northern zone. In the afternoon and evening the Pacific and the Valley Central will see rain, it said. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said that the broad low-pressure area is about 150 miles east southeast of the Honduras-Nicaragua border. Further development of the system is expected to be slow,in part because the air is dry. However, conditions are expected to be more conducive for development in a few days as it drifts southward. There is another patch of disturbed air heading west in the mid-Atlantic. Forecasters have their eye on this, too. The Consejo Nacional de Vialidad said that officials were forced to close a 55-kilometer section of Ruta 239 between Santa Marta and Salitrales Thursday afternoon. The Interamericana Sur was still closed at Casa Mata. The Consejo reported advances in trying to reopen the stretch. Much of the roadbed collapsed into an adjacent ravine. The Consejo said that utility poles were being moved and workers were excavating the shoulder opposite the collapsed part to create a traffic lane. Even when the job is done, only one lane will be available, said officials Pipelines also have to be rebuilt in new locations, and gutters and other systems for carrying off rain water have to be built, they said. As of 10 p.m. Thursday there still were roads closed by slides, flooding or damaged pavement in the Nicoya peninsula, Santa Bárbara de Heredia, Parrita, Acosta, Puriscal, Desamparados, Turrubares and Pérez Zeledón. In all, there were 22 roadways closed and 93 where traffic was either one way or facing some other delays. The Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Transportes said it had resolved 163 problem areas. The telephone lines for road conditions still is active. The numbers are 2202-5577 and 2202-5567. The national emergency commission was continuing its alert for Guanacaste. Emergency officials said they expected the nearly 1,000 persons in public shelters to begin returning to their homes Thursday as the water continues to recede. The commission said that its priority for Friday was to continue to provide food and water. It said that Santa Cruz and Carrillo in Guanacaste were key points because many sections had been cut off by flooding.
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 209 | |||||||||
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| New U.S. reporting rule is roadmap to
assets of expats |
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By Daniel Woodall
Special to A.M. Costa Rica Individuals who are required to file federal tax returns, and who have financial assets in Costa Rica will soon face a new requirement coming in IRS Tax Form 8939. The latest drafts of the form and its instructions have been published on the Web site of the Internal Revenue Service. Foreign banks will also be obligated to assist the IRS in the hunt for financial assets under the requirements of federal law known as FATCA signed by President Barack Obama March 18, 2010. Expats should not confuse the proposed IRS tax form with the long standing Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts or FBAR that must be filed with the U. S. Treasury Department once a year for bank accounts that exceed $10,000. IRS Form 8939 is much more detailed, and is nothing short of a complete roadmap to the entirety of a person’s foreign financial holdings. The current draft requires calculating the values of financial assets that it defines as bank accounts, stocks, securities, interests, and financial instruments. Detailed information about the assets such as names of trusts, corporations, and account numbers must also be provided. Thresholds for unmarried taxpayers who are required to file the form vary between $50,000 and $200,000 depending on residence. Those who actually live abroad full time get a bit of a break as their threshold is the higher one. Thresholds also have nothing to do with income so even those with unproductive or inactive assets would fall within its requirements. America’s tax collectors are also getting a new weapon to track the foreign financial assets of tax filers. The same federal law that authorizes the new tax form also places requirements on banks worldwide to forward the details on the accounts of U.S. tax filers. The current time frame |
requires every bank in the world
defined as foreign financial institutions to sign the
agreement with the IRS by June 30, 2013. The IRS will in 2014 begin to order banks in the United States to withhold assets for foreign financial institutions that fail to sign the agreement. Institutions that enter into the IRS agreement will be required to turn over details of account holders with U.S. filing requirements on an ongoing basis. Slipping through the cracks in Costa Rica with a corporate bank account is not likely to succeed. Local banking regulations have for years required corporate account holders to identify beneficial owners and the IRS rules would ensnare any company with 10 percent ownership or more held by a United States person. Since the requirements are being applied worldwide, expats who leave Costa Rica or shift their assets elsewhere could expect to encounter the same requirements. Those who have amassed substantial foreign assets and have failed to pay the required taxes in previous years could also face problems. At the very least the IRS will be able to quickly determine who has failed to file financial reports with their individual tax returns for active corporations earning income in Costa Rica. Dual citizenship in Costa Rica is also likely to be of little value in escaping FATCA. The law requires the banks to turn over information for any “United States person,” The legal definition includes those with dual nationality, as well as citizens of Costa Rica who hold legal residency in the United States. Those who visit the U. S. Embassy in Costa Rica will notice there is a bin for residents to deposit the required form I-407 to abandon their United States residency. Renouncing United States citizenship is a more complicated process that requires getting current with the tax returns for previous years. |
 Photos by Steve Harrington
A woman makes a sign and others
listen to speeches Saturday in San José |
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| Crimes
of supremacy enter the lexicon of the 99 percent |
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| First it was free trade
going global, then the corporations went global, able to operate from
any country in the world that offered the best location for profit,
then the real estate financing bubble and credit spree went global
followed by a global recession, and now the protests from those who
call themselves the 99 percent, and OWS (Occupy Wall Street) have gone
global. Even in Costa Rica, people, in support of the OWS, and with their own dissatisfactions, met in the Plaza de la Cultura Saturday. At least 200 gathered to listen to others and hold up signs. While I was there, no one had a bull horn or microphone, so we circled six or seven deep to hear impromptu speakers. And just as on Wall Street, the crowd raised its arms and wiggled its fingers to silently applaud the speakers. Some people came with signs, others printed them there. Even the children got involved. It was so cordial and peaceful, at least while I was there, that the two policemen stationed nearby looked bored to tears. Also last week, Hunter College in New York City, held a conference to honor the 20th anniversary of Anita Hill’s testimony at the congressional hearing to ratify the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. It was the first time that a woman nationally accused someone in a position of power of sexual harassment. She gave many women who, since then, have endured sexual harassment or rape the courage to speak out. They’ve lost their fear. Gloria Steinem gave a brilliant overview of the history of sexual harassment and abuse over the years. Whether it has been domestic violence, rape, or sexual harassment in the employment place, she has called them “crimes of supremacy.” The term right now, of course, does not exist as a crime. Historically, she said, these crimes, were committed mainly by certain white males who had been brought up to believe either through the advantage of birth, or the accumulation of wealth or because they were in positions of authority, that they were superior. (And as such, had a right of a master over others.) They controlled through fear. When a rebellious woman or uppity inferior got out of line, the ‘entitled’ punished them to put them in their place. This thinking has not disappeared. |
While greed often possesses the powerful so that they lose their sense of humanity, their victims are paralyzed by fear . . . not only of pain, but fear of losing all freedom, fear of not being able to make a living, fear of the loss of their own human dignity, even fear of dying. Then there came the tipping point. And, as Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Soon, in country after country in the Middle East, where unpunished crimes of supremacy, often committed by the leaders, are so prevalent, men and women, and even children were no longer afraid of the alternative. And elsewhere, for the first time, corporations, like people, are having their crimes of supremacy, if not punished, at least revealed, as are those of the governments that have been in their thrall. Now hundreds of thousands of the little guys are protesting publicly and persistently, the injustice. Much of what the people all over the world are saying was in a paragraph of a flyer handed to me in the Plaza de la Cultura. “In the new global reality, only a framework that considers the happiness and well being of everybody equally, will we have a sustainable and prosperous world. We need to build a new system and a new society together, founded on the principle of mutual help.” (My translation). But we must be cautious. You need not be white or even male to be guilty of a crime of supremacy. Being born into wealth, privilege, or of a certain religion, race or sex, or even wearing a uniform, does not give anyone the right to abuse, sexually or otherwise, another being. So beware that you are not both part of the 99 percent and guilty of a crime over someone just because you feel superior to them. |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 209 | |||||||||
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| Young inventors gain honors at Intel's
engineering exposition |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Some 56 students or teams of students from ninth to 12th year brought their creations to the ExpoINGENIERÍA which is run by the Intel Corp. The five top projects have the chance to compete in January to attend the Intel Science and Engineering Fair in the United States. The top creation was by three students from the Colegio Técnico Profesional Don Bosco: Melina Jiménez Porras, Angie Marín Acuña and Maylín Valverde Torres. They developed a system for ambulances so that the emergency technician can consult with physicians while en route with a patient. This is an informational software system that uses a cell phone. Information can be exchanged between the hospital and the ambulance. The winner in the electrical engineering category was José Miguel González of the same school who developed a machine that prints in braille. In the electromechanical category, Luis Gerardo León Vega of the Colegio José María Gutiérrez in Guanacaste was the winner for an intelligent device or robot that can help persons with disabilities. The robot can interpret facial movements or eye movements as commands. Two students from the Colegio Vocacional Monseñor Sanabria, de Desamparados took the mechanical engineering category with a device that can be used in a gasoline station that captures the evaporated fuel from the air and condenses it for reuse. The device has an environmental benefit as well as a financial one. |
 In the final top category, the winners were Ana Victoria Solís García and Karen Zúñiga Calvo of the Colegio Técnico Profesional Don Bosco, who created a tiara-like device that is worn on the head. Head movements can control a computer like a desktop mouse. There were a host of other winners in various categories. |
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| Readers can pick finalists for name for
sloth mascot |
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Ready to vote for your favorite name that we will award the tourism institute's new mascot? You can see a list of names HERE! The mascot is the animated sloth that promotes the trip giveaway raffle being run by the Instituto Costarricense de Turismo. A.M. Costa Rica has taken it upon itself to find a name for the spokes sloth because neither the institute nor its advertising agency in Atlanta, Georgia, did. |
Readers submitted a long list of
creative names, and some also listed
their reason. But some also reported that they had problems Tuesday
sending in their choices of the top three names because of email
problems. That situation has been remedied. The top five selections will be presented again for a final vote by readers. |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 209 | ||||||||||
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| Study-abroad programs try to be more challenging By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Each year, about a quarter of a million Americans study abroad. For many of them, a summer or a semester in a foreign country involves more than just sitting in classrooms and hanging out with other American students. Instead, they are required to be involved in the local communities where they are studying. On his first morning in Beijing, one American study-abroad student was dropped off in a distant part of the Chinese capital with $5 and instructions to find his way back home on his own. It took a while, but he made it. That’s one example of how American students are being pushed out of their comfort zone in order to fully experience another culture. “It’s absolutely crucial that they know something about how people in other parts of the world live and think and how they behave," says William Finlay, head of the sociology department at the University of Georgia. “Often those students go in large groups. They hang around each other. We felt that they really weren’t getting to know the local inhabitants as well as they could.” In 2008, he co-founded a study abroad program with South Africa’s Stellenbosch University. It combines traditional academic in-class learning with community involvement. The program partners with a local non-profit organization which runs daycare centers for children of working parents and a library with computers available for patrons to use. "Our students typically work either with the little kids in the daycares or they work in the library and teach basic computer skills to mostly young adults,” said Finlay. The three-week program proved to be a transformative experience for Hillary Kinsey. “It was interesting to learn the history of the area and the recent development with democracy and that sort of thing," she says, "and then talk to these people and see what the social dynamics were, what the ethnic divisions were, how certain groups felt about other groups.” When the international affairs major returned from South Africa a few weeks ago, she and other students in the program established a non-profit. “We called it Ubuntu, which is a South African concept coined by Desmond Tutu," she explains. "It means ‘I am, because we are.’ The idea is based around the relationships within the society and what generates prosperity for all. We took that notion and translated it into a larger international community.” The group hopes to contribute to advancing education and development in South Africa. “We have a lot of people that did not go to South Africa, but they are interested in this," she says. "And one of the purposes of our organization is that we hope to raise money and awareness for the situation of these people and try to facilitate building daycares there and helping to promote any sort of educational development we could through donations and fundraisers and that sort of thing.” While many study abroad programs focus on helping Americans learn foreign languages, others take a more intensive approach. “In all of our locations, we place students with local roommates," says Mark Lenhart, executive director of CET Academic Programs. The organization sends more than 1,000 students to China, Jordan, the Czech Republic and other countries each year. He says American students benefit from such one-on-one interactions, in spite of the challenges they face. “Not just in terms of language learning, but they also find the local culture can present challenges, and perhaps misunderstandings," Lenhart says. "They have to adjust to local life. It’s no longer okay just to have a little Chinese, for instance. If the student is studying Chinese, they want to come home from a program like this fluent in Chinese. So this will enable students to become more employable when they graduate.” Preparing American students to be more competitive in the global job market is one of the goals of the recent trends in study abroad. Allen Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, which promotes educational exchange, says study abroad also prepares young people to become global citizens. “You really can’t have that global citizen perspective by just reading a book or just connecting to someone who lives in Egypt on the Internet," Goodman says. "You have to go and see the reality of another place. That’s what study abroad promotes.” He predicts study abroad programs will continue to evolve and attract more students who find it to be a unique and valuable opportunity to learn about themselves and the world in which they live. Venezuela's Chávez says he has beaten his cancer By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, 57, says he has beaten cancer. Chávez returned home Thursday after traveling to Cuba for medical testing. He told reporters in La Fria the tests show he is now free of illness. Chávez spoke before a planned pilgrimage to La Fria's Catholic shrine. Chávez underwent surgery in Cuba to remove a cancerous tumor from his pelvic area in June followed by chemotherapy treatments. The type of cancer he suffered from has not been made public, but the socialist leader has vowed to be well enough to win another six-year term next year. President Chávez has been in power since 1999. |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, Vol. 11, No. 209 | ||||||||||
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Latin America news |
Tourism chamber honors leaders of the industry By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
For four years Cámara Nacional de Turismo has recognized the merit of companies and employers through the Premios a la Industria Turística or the tourism industry awards. The event was at the Hotel Costa Rica Marriott and attended by over 300 entrepreneurs, including President Laura Chinchilla. The process of being nominated began with an online survey. The seven requirements for nomination included: being a legally constituted operation; at least five years of operation; having demonstrated efforts for Certification for Sustainable Tourism, having a blue flag, subscribing to the code of conduct and holding ISO certification. Winners also had to have direct involvement in corporate social responsibility programs, contributed to sector development and be affiliated with the chamber and/or other similar organizations. From the requirements, 66 people and businesses were nominated. Out of 14 varying fields these were awarded by the chamber: City hotel – Radisson in north San José; Beach hotel -- Hotel Punta Leona north of Jacó; Mountain hotel -- Hacienda Pozo Azul in the Sarapiquí valley, Rural Inn -- El Manantial Lodge in San Gerardo Tour Operator -- Ríos Tropicales, San José; Travel Agents – Fast Travel in San José; Airlines -- Sansa Regional; Rent a car -- Mapache Rent a Car; Restaurants – Jurgen’s in Los Yoses; Region tourism chambers – Guanacaste; Medical tourism -- Clínica Bíblica; Journalism – Imagazinetur.com; Social responsibility -- Red Costarricense de Reservas Naturales; Touristic entrepreneurship -- Rafael Gallo. Business chamber cites difficulty of starting business By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Nine out of 10 business operators report great difficulty in starting a new business in Costa Rica, according to the Unión de Costarricense de Cámaras y Asociaciones del Sector Empresarial Privado. The chamber blamed the problem on the Costa Rican obsession with pushing papers. The organization called it tramitomanía. The chamber did a survey and 84 percent of the respondents cited the difficulty of opening a new business due to the many licenses, permits and other approvals needed. The results coincides with the World Economic Forum index that said one of the problems is an inefficient bureaucracy, said the chamber. Tramite is the Spanish word for some kind of encounter with officialdom, such as filing a sales tax report or seeking a business license. Costa Rica is known for the time needed to establish a corporation. That can be up to 10 weeks and requires the efforts of a lawyer. |
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