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A.M. Costa Rica's Second news page |
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José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 208
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Rey
Curré festival is this weekend
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The residents of Rey Curré are planning a big party Thursday through Saturday at the community in southwestern Costa Rica. The event is the XXII Festival Cultural Indígena Rey Curré 2014. The Museo Nacional is even loaning three of those famous stone spheres for the gathering, which will be steeped in Boruca culture. The ancestors of the Boruca are presumed to be the fabricators of the spheres, which are believed to have been used for status purposes. The community is 32 kilometers south of Buenos Aires de Puntarenas on the Interamerican Sur. Rey Curré is the most accessible Boruca community. Thursday locals will be making a bull costume to participate in the Danza del diablitos, a traditional Boruca vs. Spanish theme. Usually the community holds the Diablito event in the first days of January. But for this festival there is a special abbreviated showing of the dance and interplay of forces Saturday at 1 p.m. The spheres are supposed to arrive about 3 p.m. Thursday. For the rest of the weekend there is food, cultural activities, dancing and music. Oktoberfest is Saturday in San Ramón By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Community Action Alliance in San Ramón plans its Oktoberfest Saturday at La Colina From 1 to 5 p.m. The service organization promises homemade bratwurst, sauerkraut, German potato salad, dessert, and German music. There is an admission and prior reservations are requested to events@actionalliancecr.com. Proceeds will go to the organization's Gift of Love project supporting local social action causes, the organization said. Sabana area to lose power today By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Government agencies are warning that the power company will be cutting electricity in Sabana Sur, Este and Oeste today for most of the day. The Departamento de Control de Armas y Explosivos of the security ministry is closed for that reason as is the economics ministry. The Museo de Arte Costarricense also said it would be closed. The Compañía Nacional de Fuerza y Luz has said the outage will be from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Drill today to affect 1,200 workers By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad says it will be having a drill today at 9 a.m. at one of its buildings in Mata Redonda. Some 1,200 persons are supposed to be affected by the drill. They have to evacuate the 16-floor building.
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A.M. Costa Rica Third News Page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 208 | |
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cuda been a contender!
 To give the fatal blow |
 Ministerio de Gobernación,
Policía y Seguridad Pública photos
Bird raisers take their work
serious and compete for trophies
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| Turnout is minimal for union march against 2015 budget cuts |
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By
the A.M. Coda Rica staff
A march by union members against budget cuts Monday was a bit of a bust with an estimated gathering of from 150 to 200 persons. Still the Asociación Nacional de Empleados Públicos y Privados, backed by a handful of other unions, presented grievances to the Asamblea Legislativa. One of the problems of the protesters was the lack of specifics in what the budget cuts will do. The legislative budget committee chopped 3.8 percent from the executive branch's 2015 budget. But the cuts are fairly abstract. The public employees union suggests that salaries will be cut, but that is not part of the legislative action. In fact, nothing is certain because the full legislature has yet to act. |
Even when it does,
the cuts would be amounts of money in certain
categories. Then it would be up to the executive branch to allocate the
cuts. Still the pubic employees union said the cuts were irresponsible and lacked reflection and objective analysis over the direct impacts. The statement also came very close to saying that the nation's debt should be ignored in favor of salaries and governmental operations. The deficit is due to debt, the statement said, noting the the amount due in 2015 is 1.7 trillion colons in debt service. That is about $3.1 billion. The union statement also asked who ran up this debt in the first place. The unions also blamed tax evasion and predicted failures of private firms and social unrest. The statement continued to push for what was called transforming the tax structure. That basically means more taxes on corporations and high earners. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's Fourth News page | |||||
| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 208 | |||||
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| Researchers find antibiotic residue in samples of
farm-raised fish |
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By
the University of Arizona news service
Antibiotics — one of modernity’s great success stories — are charms that come with a curse. Their overuse in human and animal populations can lead to the development of resistant microbial strains, posing a dire threat to global health. In a new study, Hansa Done, a doctoral candidate, and Rolf Halden, researchers at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute, examine antibiotic use in the rapidly expanding world of global aquaculture. Ms. Done and Halden measured the presence of antibiotics in shrimp, salmon, catfish, trout, tilapia and swai, originating from 11 countries. Data showed traces of 5 of the 47 antibiotics evaluated. The research findings and a discussion of their implications appear in the current issue of the Journal of Hazardous Materials. The menace of germs bearing resistance to the best medical defenses is reaching crisis proportions. Each year, resistant microbes sicken some 2 million people in the U.S. alone and kill about 23, 000, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Sept. 18. President Obama proposed the first governmental steps to address the problem, establishing a task force to be co-chaired by the secretaries of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Agriculture. The new initiative to rein in antibiotic overuse has been welcomed in the medical community, though many believe that much more needs to be done to safeguard society. The chief complaint is that the proposed measures largely ignore the largest consumers of antibiotics — animals farmed for human consumption, including fish. “The threat of living in a post-antibiotic era cannot be avoided without revising current practices in the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry, including in aquaculture,” says Halden. Halden, who directs the Biodesign Institute’s Center for Environmental Security, is a leading authority on the human and environmental impact of chemicals, particularly their fate once their useful life has ended. In previous research, he has explored the intricate pathways from production to post consumption fate of anti microbials and the risks posed. The new study examines the persistence of antibiotics in seafood raised by modern aquaculture. The research area is largely unexplored, as the primary focus of studies of antibiotics has been on drugs used in human medicine. The current research is the first to evaluate previously unmonitored antibiotics. It represents the largest reconnaissance conducted to date on antibiotics present in seafood. Aquaculture has undergone rapid growth to meet the burgeoning global demand, nearly tripling over the past 20 years to an estimated 83 million metric tons in 2013. The large increase has led to widespread antibiotic use, applied both to prevent and treat pathogens known to infect fish. The broad effects on health and the environment associated with these practices remain speculative. |
Several natural
mechanisms exist to help pathogenic microbes evade
immune responses or develop drug resistance over time. The
overuse of
antibiotics, whether for human ingestion in hospitals or for
agricultural or aquacultural use, can seriously exacerbate this
problem, enriching microbes that bear particular genetic mutations,
rendering them antibiotic resistant. In a biological arms race,
antibiotics applied to combat disease run the risk of producing
multi-drug resistant organisms that are increasingly difficult to kill.
In the new study, 27 seafood samples were examined for the presence of antibiotics. The samples represent five of the top 10 most consumed seafood varieties in the U.S.: shrimp, tilapia, catfish, swai, and Atlantic salmon. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration acquired the samples from stores in Arizona and California. Five antibiotics were present in detectable amounts: oxytetracycline in wild shrimp, farmed tilapia, farmed salmon and farmed trout; 4-epioxytetracycline in farmed salmon, sulfadimethoxine in farmed shrimp, ormetoprim in farmed salmon, and virginiamycin in farmed salmon that had been marketed as antibiotic-free. Oxytetracycline, the most commonly used antibiotic in aquaculture, was the most prevalent in the study samples. Surprisingly, the study also detected this antibiotic in wild-caught shrimp imported from Mexico, which the authors suggest may be due to mislabeling, coastal pollution from sewage contamination or cross-contamination during handling and processing. On the bright side, all seafood analyzed was found to be in compliance with U.S. Food and Drug Adminstration regulations. Antibiotics also have the potential to affect the animals themselves, producing alterations in how genes are turned on or off and physiological anomalies. Proper monitoring of antibiotic residues in seafood is particularly critical, due to the fact that many antibiotics used in aquaculture are also used in human medicine, for example amoxicillin and ampicillin, common therapeutics for the treatment of bacterial infections, including pneumonia and gastroenteritis. The use of antibiotics in aquaculture can produce a variety of unintended consequences in addition to antibiotic resistance, including antibiotic dissemination into the surrounding environment, residual concentrations remaining in seafood, and high antibiotic exposure for personnel working in aquaculture facilities. Changes in aquaculture are needed to ensure the practice can be carried out on a large scale in a sustainable manner, the researchers concluded. Currently, massive aquaculture operations threaten the health of seas, due to large volumes of fish waste emitted, containing excess nutrients, large amounts of pathogens, and drug resistance genes. The current study offers a warning that antibiotics present at levels well below regulatory limits can still promote the development of drug-resistant microorganisms. |
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth
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| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 208 | |||||||
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| Health workers are uneasy with ebola care procedures By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Although there have only been three cases of ebola diagnosed in the United States, unease about contracting the disease has spread across the country. At the same time, nurses are asking President Obama to mandate uniform procedures for dealing with ebola in all U.S. hospitals, where they say preparations are, for the most part, far from adequate. Public officials are supporting these requests. Houston's U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee came together with doctors and nurses demanding all U.S. hospitals provide adequate protective clothing for healthcare workers who may encounter ebola. “This is the type of equipment that should be utilized by any medical professionals, including nurses and others that are dealing with the bodily fluids, to assure that they have the ability to be protected,” said Rep. Lee. The congresswoman said she supported the call for President Obama to use his executive authority to set uniform ebola procedures nationwide National Nurses United called for better training and equipment. “Even today, in the hospitals, nurses have not been trained on how to use this equipment and, in some hospitals, do not have this equipment,” said Melinda Markowitz, the union group's vice president. Her organization blames sloppy procedures at the Dallas hospital that treated the first ebola patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, who infected two nurses who treated him. Ms. Markowitz said National Nurses United has been asking for better preparation since the ebola outbreak began in West Africa in March. “We have been going to the hospitals and saying, ‘This is happening in Africa, what are you doing to prepare the healthcare providers and the nurses if this should come to the United States?’” said Ms. Markowitz. And how did they respond? “Well, ‘Oh, we are prepared; we are prepared for any infection.’ And we know that is not true,” Ms. Markowitz recalled. A recent National Nurses United survey showed that 85 percent of U.S. hospitals have inadequate ebola training and many lack proper equipment and waste disposal systems. Nurse Gwendolyn Agbatekwe who works at a hospital in Austin, Texas, said it is unacceptable that the nurses in Dallas became infected while doing their job. “I am grievously saddened by these two nurses contracting the ebola virus and I know that they were doing the best that they could do to work with their patients,” said Ms. Agbatekwe. Nurse Kelly Miller stressed the need for teamwork when using protective suits that become unbearably hot to wear for more than half an hour. She said at least two people are also needed to avoid dangerous mistakes. “The reason you work in teams is to have the other person help you with the protocol to make sure you haven’t missed something,” said Ms. Miller. The other matter that healthcare professionals say needs to be addressed is public education about ebola, which Rep. Lee said could prevent unnecessary panic and help save lives. 'Sit down, have a coffee, and let's talk about death' By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
It’s hard to imagine that death was once an intimate part of American life. That was the case during the Civil War, this nation’s bloodiest, which killed more than 600,000 people. Grainy, black-and-white photos of 1860s battlefields littered with corpses give a glimpse of the scale of death. Proportionately, it would be like losing 7 million, or 2.5 percent, of the country’s current 319 million residents. "Almost everyone lost a loved one or knew someone who lost a loved one," historian and Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust said last year at a commemoration of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. "People saw death with an intensity and a scale that had been unimaginable previously." But in modern America, death is a topic to be avoided. "Many of us have bought into the truth that a conversation about death is about as impolite as sexual dysfunction," said Theresa Gale of the Kittamaqundi Community Church in Columbia, Maryland, which recently hosted a Discussion on Death. It’s a simple idea: A group of people get together in a coffee shop, a restaurant, a church, or even a cemetery, and talk about death and dying. The hope is that talking about these taboo topics will make the final moment less terrifying to face. The so-called death cafe movement started several years ago in London by Jon Underwood, who was inspired by the writings of Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz. Since then, more than 1,100 cafes have been held, mainly in Europe and Anglophone countries, according to Underwood’s Death Café Web site. He’s planning to open a permanent death café in the British capital. At the Kittamaqundi church, in a suburb between Baltimore and Washington, the gathering was called a Discussion on Death. The participants, sitting in a circle and sampling tea and cake, talked about why they came. "I’d like to have control over my own death," said one woman. "I would like to be more accepting of however, whatever happens," said another. Then they passed the microphone to Ruth Anne Celtnicks. "I would like some pointers as to how I can go out saying, ‘Bye-bye!' " she said, laughing. Ms. Celtnicks’ smiling optimism was surprising, given that she was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. "You start dying from the moment you are born," she said in an interview afterward. "I’m 72 year’s old. Good lord, how long do I need" to go on living? Most of the discussion centered around the feeling that much of what people do in life falls far short of preparing them for death. "Death is the one thing promised to us," said Pat Cochran Engelbach, the meeting's organizer and author of "Last Rights: Taking Care of Your Final Journey." "I think that for this culture, especially, we have so many distancers between ourselves and death," Ms. Engelbach said. "We’re too successful, we’re too good-looking, we have too many toys. These are all distancers between ourselves and the earth." She blames in part the funeral industry, which emerged to help Americans deal with the carnage of the Civil War. Embalming, mainly practiced by doctors until then, made it possible for thousands of the corpses to be preserved so they could be sent back to their families. Caleb Wilde, a sixth-generation funeral director in Pennsylvania, says his profession helped remove death from the home. "I think the funeral industry has been responsible for the American death denial," he said. "We have taken the responsibilities away from the community, from families, and we’ve been paid to be the shield from the reality of death." Wilde has attracted national attention by doing something rather unusual in his trade: writing a blog. Many of his posts have been self-critical, but he also believes that Americans need to take more responsibility over their own demise. "Here in America, we like to think that we’re immortal. We stand on top of the pinnacle of the world and we’ve pursued … wealth or status and we like to think that we will continue to live on indefinitely," he said. "We all die and we haven’t given much thought to that." Ex-Nazis still getting benefits from the other type of SS By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Suspected Nazi war criminals collected millions of dollars in U.S. Social Security benefits after being forced to leave the United States, according to the Associated Press. Among those receiving Social Security were armed SS guards of Nazi concentration camps where millions of Jews perished, a rocket scientist who used slave labor to advanced his research, and a Nazi collaborator who masterminded the arrest and execution of thousands of Jews in Poland. The AP says the payments were distributed as part of a deal used by the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigation, which was created in 1979 to circumvent lengthy deportation hearings. Reportedly, the condition was that if the accused voluntarily left the country or fled before deportation, they could keep receiving their Socials Security benefits. Government records reveal heated objections from the State Department and Social Security Administration over the deal with Nazi suspects, who would lose their citizenship and voluntarily leave the United States to keep their Social Security benefits. Subsequently, the practice known as Nazi dumping was suspended, but the benefits loophole was not closed. U.S. lawmakers have been working to close the loophole. Since 1979, at least 38 of 66 suspected Nazi war criminals were forced to leave the United States. World Series starts tonight with Giants facing Royals By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Baseball's World Series, sometimes referred to as the Fall Classic, begins tonight with the American League champion Kansas City Royals hosting the National League champion San Francisco Giants. It's a best-of-seven game series, with the first two in Kansas City before the teams travel west to San Francisco for games three, four and, if necessary, five. If a game six or seven is needed, they would be back in Kansas City. The Royals get the home field advantage because the American League won this season's All-Star game against the National League. Kansas City has only been to the World Series twice since it joined Major League Baseball in 1969. The last appearance for the Royals was in 1985, when they won their only championship. San Francisco has won two recent World Series, in 2010 and 2012, and the Giants have eight current players who were on both of those championship teams. Both teams finished the regular season as wild card playoff teams, finishing with one of the two best records after the three divisions winners in each league. So they needed success in three playoff rounds just to reach the World Series. In one-game playoffs against the other wild card teams, Kansas City rallied to beat the Oakland Athletics in 12 innings, 9-8, and San Francisco shut out the Pittsburgh Pirates, 8-0. Both then upset the teams in their respective leagues with the best regular season records - the Royals swept the Los Angeles Angels in their best-of-five division series, 3-0, and the Giants knocked off the Washington Nationals, 3-1. Then in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series, Kansas City swept the Baltimore Orioles, 4-0, and San Francisco beat the St. Louis Cardinals, four games to one. Now to open the 110th World Series, before their home fans, the Kansas City Royals will take on the San Francisco Giants and try to extend the Major League record eight-game winning streak they set to begin this season's playoffs. Oscar de la Renta leaves a legacy of dressing well By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Iconic designer Oscar de la Renta died Monday, leaving behind a legendary career as one of the most recognized names in fashion. He was 82. Spanish-language television network Univision reported that de la Renta died after a 10-year battle with cancer. The designer, who was born in the Dominican Republic, rose to international prominence in the 1960s dressing first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. In the decades since, his fashion house was best known for voluptuous gowns that made their way from the runway to the red carpet. Most recently, de la Renta was credited with designing the gown that lawyer Amal Alamuddin Clooney wore to marry actor George Clooney in Italy last month. In a 2013 interview with Britain’s The Telegraph, de la Renta said style is "a discipline." The designer added, "if you don't dress well every day, you lose the habit. It's not about what you wear, but about how you live your life." De la Renta is survived by wife Annette Engelhard and an adopted son, Moises, as well as stepchildren and step-grandchildren. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's sixth news page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 208 | |||||||||
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More
downpours expected for today
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Another round of afternoon downpours is predicted for today, and weather experts are saying this is typical for October. The skies really opened up Monday with the Instituto Meteorológico Nacional reporting totals of 50 millimeters (2 inches) or more in many areas. The lights went out in a section of Escazú due to lighting strikes, residents there said. A compounding factor Monday night was fog that began to gather after suppertime and gave the lighted streets a Londonish look. The heaviest rain is predicted for Guanacaste today, also the northern part of the Central Valley and the northern zone. More fog is predicted for tonight. In a 7 p.m. bulletin, the weather institute predicted more rain overnight on the Caribbean coast. Public bus overturns on route to Tilarán By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Cruz Roja said that 27 passengers on a Tilarán-bound bus suffered some form of injury when the bus overturned Monday morning. The Cruz Roja said that three passengers were hospitalized in guarded condition in the Hospital de Cañas. Five other persons also were hospitalized. The remainder suffered bruises or nervous distress from the mishap, said the rescue agency. Some were in the Clínica de Tilarán. The accident was in a location known as Tanque de Oxilación about 6:50 a.m.. The bus trip originated in Parcelas de Quebrada Azul. López case concerns U.N. rights official Special to A.M. Costa Rica
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, expressed serious concern Monday at the continued detention of Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López, as well as more than 69 other people who were arrested in the context of public protests that took place across Venezuela over several months starting in February this year. "The prolonged and arbitrary detention of political opponents and protestors in Venezuela is causing more and more concern internationally," Zeid said. "It is only exacerbating the tensions in the country." According to information received by the U.N. Human Rights Office, over 3,300 people, including minors, were detained for brief periods between February and June, and more than 150 cases of ill-treatment, many of them torture, were reported. At least 43 people were killed during the protests, including one public prosecutor and nine members of the security forces. Journalists and human rights defenders have also reported threats, attacks and intimidation. Last month, the Working Group on arbitrary detention stated its opinion that the detention of Leopoldo López, as well as that of former mayor of San Cristobal Daniel Ceballos, was arbitrary. The high commissioner met Leopoldo López's wife, Lilian Tintori, in Geneva, Switzerland, Friday, and discussed the situation of all the detainees and their families. He said he deplored the continued reports of threats and intimidation directed at people working to defend human rights in Venezuela, and urged that they be allowed to pursue their work and speak up without fear for their safety. “My office is extremely concerned about the current situation, and we will continue to monitor it very closely,” he added. |
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| From Page 7: European bank secrecy will be history soon By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
European Union finance ministers have reached a breakthrough agreement that will make it more difficult for tax cheats to hide their money. The new legislation, which had been blocked for years by countries with a reputation as tax havens, was approved last week after Luxembourg and Austria agreed to lift their vetoes. But, it doesn’t mean tax cheats have run out of places to keep their money hidden. In countries like Luxembourg, where bank secrecy used to be the norm, Europe’s top tax official, Algirdas Semeta, says depositors will no longer be able to hide their money from the prying eyes of governments. “The revised directive promises full and lasting tax transparency in Europe," he said. "Bank secrecy is dead, and automatic exchange of information will be applied in its widest form.” Luxembourg agreed to share bank information with member countries starting in 2017 with Austria signaling similar intentions by 2018. Analyst Jacob Kirkegaard at the Peterson Institute for International Economics calls the agreement a milestone in global efforts to stop tax evasion. “This is a very significant development and it’s really the culmination of what at least in the EU has been a decade-long struggle by some governments - in France, Italy and Germany - to really curb this longstanding practice of anonymous, offshore, if you like, bank accounts in other EU countries," he said. Decades of bank secrecy helped establish Luxembourg as one of Europe’s biggest financial centers where bank deposits are currently valued at more than 10 times the nation’s annual GDP. Switzerland, once among the world’s largest tax havens, ended bank secrecy last year, after intense legal pressure from Europe and the United States. While tax cheats still can hide their money in less-developed countries where regulations are less stringent, Kirkegaard says the options and the benefits for doing so are shrinking. “Well, you can go to places like Dubai, some have mentioned Singapore, but Singapore has also recently joined these efforts, so it becomes increasingly difficult to keep your money at a place at which they are readily available,” he said. Some economists estimate that as much as 8 percent of the world's financial wealth, more than $7 trillion, may be hidden in tax haven countries. If all this illegal money were properly reported, conservative estimates say global tax revenues would grow by more than $200 billion a year. |
