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A.M. Costa Rica's Second news page |
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José, Costa Rica, Friday, Oct. 24, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 211
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Palmares
plans Yule parade Dec. 6
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The folks in Palmares want the country to know that the municipality has a lot of activities for Christmas, including a parade called "Una luz en Navidad" Dec. 6. The Municipalidad de Palmares said that some 20 bands are expected. There also will be floats. The parade is a week before the one in San José. One float will contain members of the Club de Leones de Palmares, the Comité Tutelar de la Niñez de Calle Vargas and the Equipo de Rugby. They will be collecting gifts for disadvantages children. The municipality also is planning a big dance Dec. 31 with fireworks to welcome the new year. Postal service to handle apostilles By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Correos de Costa Rica will set up a kiosk in the foreign ministry to handle rapidly the mailing of documents that require an apostille or signature validation. Costa Rica adopted an international convention on apostilles in 2011. Since then the Departamento de Autenticaciones of the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriories y Culto has issued 182,621. The proximity of the postal service representative is expected to speed the process, said the general manager of Correos, Alvaro Coghi. The apostille process requires fewer signatures than the former system. For expats seeking residency, the process validates incoming documents with just two signatures instead of the chain of signatures that use to include a Costa Rican consul. Two London Theater shows planned By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Teatro Eugene O´Neill plans to show the London National Theater production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" tonight at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 11 a.m. This is the Tennessee Williams masterpiece that will be subtitled in Spanish, said the Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano. Appropriately, the centro is showing Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein" the night of Oct. 31, Halloween, at 7 p,.m. and the following day, Saturday, at the same time. This also is a London Theater production with well-known actors. The centro and the theater are in Los Yoses. Art exposition inaugurated tonight By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Museo de Arte Costarricense and the Teatro Popular Melico Salazar are inaugurating tonight “Catarsis” by artist Ricardo Alvarado in the Galería Dinorah Bolandi, at 7 p.m. The gallery is on the second floor of the theater. The artist is presenting 14 works, and the exposition will run until Nov. 30, said an announcement Mother clueless why son shot soldier By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The mother of a man who Canadian police say killed a soldier in Ottawa Wednesday before shooting up the halls of Parliament said she has no explanation to offer for what her estranged son did. Susan Bibeau told the Associated Press that part of her wants to hate Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, 32. Authorities identified the Montreal native as the lone gunman who carried out a rampage in the capital before a security officer fatally shot him. In an email, Susan Bibeau said "I am mad at our son." The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Thursday that Zehaf-Bibeau arrived in Ottawa from Vancouver earlier this month to sort out a passport issue. Police said he wanted to travel to Syria and "may have held extremist beliefs." After fatally shooting a military reservist at the National War Memorial in central Ottawa, surveillance video released by police Thursday shows the gunman parking a car in front of Parliament. Dressed in black, he sprints from the vehicle toward the building with a weapon in his hand. Bystanders scramble out of his way. A security officer inside Parliament fatally shot Zehaf-Bibeau as lawmakers hid in offices and Prime Minister Stephen Harper was moved to safety. Despite early reports of accomplices at the scene, authorities now believe the assailant acted alone. Members of Parliament on Thursday gave an extended ovation to Canada's sergeant-at-arms, Kevin Vickers, who is credited with killing Zehaf-Bibeau. There is no indication from authorities that the Ottawa attack is linked to the slaying of a soldier near Montreal earlier in the week.
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A.M. Costa Rica Third News Page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Oct. 24, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 211 | |
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| Caribbean cacao
growers gear up for the annual chocolate festival By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A week from today is the start of the 2014 Puerto Viejo Chocolate Festival. It runs three days, Oct. 31 through Nov. 2. Expats who want to see how their chocolate gets from the tree to the palate will have resources from 39 vendor and producers. Most already know that chocolate bars are not picked right off the tree and that the production of fine chocolate is an elaborate process. "The mission of the Puerto Viejo Chocolate Festival is to unify local organic farmers, chocolate makers, and chocolatiers, while bringing national recognition to the cultural, historical, and economic value of Costa Rican cacao," said an announcement. That tradition goes back at least 3,000 years because chocolate in many forms was well developed long before the Spanish arrived. The textbooks say the first chocolate beverages were brewed in the Valley of México, but current knowledge of ancient times is spotty. Chocolate drinks could have been invented right there is Puerto Viejo! Costa Rica's chocolate makers are working in partnership with the Association of Talamanca for Eco Tourism and Conservation to host Puerto Viejo's festival, said organizers. The cacao fruit is turned into a variety of products, most prevalently, chocolate, it added. The festival is free. There also are a number of activities for which tickets are required. The festival Web page is HERE! Alexia Maizel of Samaritan Xocolata, a sponsor, said that on Nov. 2, a Sunday, visitors will be able to take tours of chocolate growing operations. |
 A.M.Costa Rica photo
Theere is a long road from the
tree to these delights. |
| In Costa Rica there is an added reason for an expat's
chronic cough |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Several expats are complaining of a chronic cough. The sufferers include a new arrival in Escazú and a longtime expat on the central Pacific coast. The Pacific coast expat said that he had been dosed with enough antibiotics to kill a bacteria colony the size of Escazú over the last four months and then given a seven-day antibiotic drip. The problem is that the medical literature online says that only 10 percent of acute coughs are from bacteria. The antibiotics have little effect on viruses or environmental causes. Harvard Medical School said the leading causes of a chronic cough are postnasal drip, asthma, gastroesophageal reflux disease, chronic bronchitis and treatment with ACE inhibitors used for high blood pressure. Costa Ricans can add another cause: The rainy season. Some of these coughs can last weeks, months or even years, said Harvard. Allergies also can be a cause, according to online sources. These include sensitivity to mold and also cockroaches and other insects that might be nearby but unseen. Of course, smokers get a continual smokers cough, but when the symptoms become more than a morning throat clearing, the suffered is inclined to give up smokes. There are some reports that marijuana causes a prolonged cough. The literature is consistent in suggesting a doctor's visit if a cough last for more than a couple of weeks. |
 A.M. Costa Rica grphic
Usually not life threatening but
a real pain. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's Fourth News page | |||||
| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Oct. 24, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 211 | |||||
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| Easter Island genetic work suggests early contact with the
Americas |
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By
the Cell Press news service
People may have been making their way from Easter Island to the Americas well before the Dutch commander Jakob Roggeveen arrived with his ships in 1722. New genetic evidence shows that the Rapanui people living on that most isolated of islands had significant contact with American populations hundreds of years earlier. The findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology Thursday 23 lend the first genetic support for such an early trans-Pacific route between Polynesia and the Americas, an impressive trek of more than 4,000 kilometers (nearly 2,500 miles). The findings are a reminder that "early human populations extensively explored the planet," says Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas from the Natural History Museum of Denmark's Centre for GeoGenetics. "Textbook versions of human colonization events — the peopling of the Americas, for example — need to be re-evaluated utilizing genomic data." On that note, a second article that will appear in the same issue of Current Biology by Malaspinas along with Eske Willerslev and their colleagues examined two human skulls representing the indigenous Botocudos of Brazil to find that their genomic ancestry is Polynesian, with no detectable Native American component at all. Archaeological evidence had suggested that 30 to 100 Polynesian men, women, and children first landed on Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, around 1200 A.D., arriving in two or more double-hulled canoes. After settling on the isolated island, the Rapanui famously built giant stone platforms and over 900 statues, some weighing as much as 82 tons. While it may have taken weeks for Polynesians to reach even the closest nearby islands, there are hints of contact with the larger world. For example, there is evidence for the presence of crops native to the Americas in Polynesia, including the Andean sweet potato, long before the first reported European contact. Genome-wide analysis of 27 native Rapanui now confirms |
 Cell Press/Natalia Solar
The Rapanui are famous for
building stone platforms and statues.significant contact between the island people and Americans sometime between approximately 1300 and 1500, 19 to 23 generations ago. The Rapanui population began mixing with Europeans only much later, in about 1850. The ancestry of the Rapanui today is 76 percent Polynesian, 8 percent Native American, and 16 percent European. The new evidence about the Rapanui suggests one of two scenarios: either Native Americans sailed to Rapa Nui or Polynesians sailed to the Americas and back. The researchers say that it seems more likely that the Rapanui successfully made the trip back and forth, given simulations presented in previous studies showing that "all sailing voyages heading intentionally east from Rapa Nui would always reach the Americas, with a trip lasting from two weeks to approximately two months." On the other hand, the trip from the Americas to Rapa Nui is much more challenging, which would have made it likely to fail or miss the island completely. From the Americas, Rapa Nui is indeed a small target, which might also explain why it took Europeans so long to find it. |
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Oct. 24, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 211 | |||||||
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 The University of Texas/ Yoel Stuart
The left hind foot of the green
anole after evolution. Toe pad measurements were taken on the expanded
scales at the end of the longest toe. Scientists find
adaptation
was quick for little lizard By
The University of Texas news service
Scientists working on islands in Florida have documented the rapid evolution of a native lizard species in as little as 15 years as a result of pressure from an invading lizard species introduced from Cuba. After contact with the invasive species, the native lizards began perching higher in trees, and generation after generation, their feet evolved to become better at gripping the thinner, smoother branches found higher up. The change occurred at an astonishing pace: Within a few months, native lizards had begun shifting to higher perches, and over the course of 15 years and 20 generations, their toe pads had become larger, with more sticky scales on their feet. "We did predict that we'd see a change, but the degree and quickness with which they evolved was surprising," said Yoel Stuart, a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the study appearing in today's edition of the journal Science. "To put this shift in perspective, if human height were evolving as fast as these lizards' toes, the height of an average American man would increase from about 5 foot 9 inches today to about 6 foot 4 inches within 20 generations — an increase that would make the average U.S. male the height of an NBA shooting guard," said Stuart. "Although humans live longer than lizards, this rate of change would still be rapid in evolutionary terms." The native lizards studied, known as Carolina anoles or green anoles, are common in the southeastern U.S. The invasive species, Cuban anoles or brown anoles, are native to Cuba and the Bahamas. Brown anoles first appeared in South Florida in the 1950s, possibly as stowaways in agricultural shipments from Cuba, and have since spread across the southeastern U.S. and have even jumped to Hawaii. This latest study is one of only a few well-documented examples of what evolutionary biologists call character displacement, in which similar species competing with each other evolve differences to take advantage of different ecological niches. A classic example comes from the finches studied by Charles Darwin. Two species of finch in the Galápagos Islands diverged in beak shape as they adapted to different food sources. The researchers speculate that the competition between brown and green anoles for the same food and space may be driving the adaptations of the green anoles. Stuart also noted that the adults of both species are known to eat the hatchlings of the other species. "So it may be that if you're a hatchling, you need to move up into the trees quickly or you'll get eaten," said Stuart. "Maybe if you have bigger toe pads, you'll do that better than if you don't." Doctor returns to New York and develops ebola symptoms By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A New York City doctor who recently treated ebola victims in Guinea has become the first person in the U.S. city to be diagnosed with the virus At an evening news conference, Mayor Bill de Blasio confirmed the case, saying Craig Spencer has been placed in isolation and there is no cause for alarm. "Ebola is an extremely hard disease to contract. It is transmitted only through a contact with the infected person's blood or other bodily fluids - not through casual contact. New Yorkers who have not been exposed to an infected person's bodily fluids are not at all at risk," said de Blasio. Spencer Thursday notified the medical charity Doctors Without Borders where he worked hat he had a high fever and was nauseous; two symptoms of Ebola. Officials are now looking for anyone who may have had contact with Spencer. He would be the fourth person diagnosed with Ebola on U.S. soil, and the first in New York. Earlier Thursday, the West African nation of Mali reported its first case of Ebola, in what many warn could be another major setback to efforts to contain the disease. Health Minister Ousmane Kone said on state television the patient is a 2-year-old girl who was brought to a hospital from neighboring Guinea. "I can say it's a two-year-old girl who traveled accompanied by her grandmother. It is possible that these two people arrived at a time when the symptoms were not detectable, but that the illness evolved," said Kone. Kone said the young girl's condition is improving thanks to quick treatment. She is in the western town of Kayes. The ebola outbreak is concentrated in three West African countries, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. It has killed close to 4,900 people, including victims in the United States and Spain. There are almost 10,000 confirmed or probable cases. U.S. government health officials are ordering travelers from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to monitor their health for 21 days and give local health departments daily reports. The monitoring program starts Monday in six eastern states, Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, where the majority of those travelers would visit. They will be given an ebola kit when they arrive at airports, including a thermometer. In the latest case in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Spencer was familiar with symptoms and handled himself accordingly once he experienced symptoms. Cuomo said the city is "as ready as one can be for this circumstance" and has been preparing for weeks to handle a possible ebola case. The earlier ebola cases in the U.S. include a Liberian man who died in a Dallas, Texas, hospital two weeks ago. Two nurses who treated him are currently hospitalized, but are said to be doing well. U.S. intelligence failures blamed for Mideast mess By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Concerns about the capabilities of U.S. intelligence agencies have been steadily rising, sparked in part by comments from President Barack Obama that they underestimated the rise of the group known as Islamic State. But far from an intelligence failure, insiders and analysts warn the furor is symptomatic of larger problems that could haunt the U.S. in years to come. For weeks, Islamic State militants have besieged Kobani, the majority-Kurd Syrian city at the doorstep of NATO partner Turkey. Yet for weeks, U.S. military leaders said Kobani was not the focus of anti-Islamic State strategy. Even as the U.S. authorized airdrops of aid to the town’s Kurdish defenders, and air strikes against Islamic targets in Kobani intensified, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said this week that the aid didn’t represent a shift in policy. For critics of U.S. efforts to check the expansion of the Islamic State, the question is a resounding “why not?” More importantly, they ask, why has the U.S. government been, by its own admission, behind the curve of events unfolding in Syria and Iraq. Some critics of the U.S. administration have been quick to blame the problem on President Barack Obama and what they see as a weak foreign policy. Others have called it a failure of the U.S. intelligence community. But some, including former members of the intelligence community and ex-government officials, see the crisis as symptomatic of larger problems not likely to go away in what promises to be a long battle against the Islamic State and groups with similar ambitions. “I think it is fair to say the intelligence community was well aware of the problems,” said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “I suspect their basic analysis of ISIS was sufficient.” Gerecht previously served as a Middle Eastern specialist at the CIA's Directorate of Operations and argues U.S. intelligence could have been better had Washington maintained a military presence in Iraq. Yet he contends the main problem, as it pertains to the Islamic State, was political. “The White House has a certain narrative it wants to take about the Middle East, about jihadism, about al-Qaida, those that give allegiance to al-Qaida or to ISIS, so I think that narrative got in the way of the analysis,” he said. That administration narrative, Gerecht said, included the view that the Islamic State was not the main threat. And while it was an outgrowth of al-Qaida in Iraq, eventually splitting with al-Qaida’s leadership, President Obama at one point compared the Islamic State to a junior varsity sports team, not in the same league as other, still loyal al-Qaida affiliates. Obama later said that his junior varsity reference had been taken out of context, with the White House clarifying that he was talking not specifically about the Islamic State but about Islamist groups in general. But it was not just the Obama administration that may not have been paying attention to the warnings. “Republicans and many in the military that had been central to the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, frankly, kind of wanted to claim success,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation and a fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. “There was no real constituency in Washington for this sort of information.” Even those focused on the region were often sidetracked by the conditions that allowed the Islamic State to thrive. U.S. politicians determined to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad often overlooked the more dangerous elements within anti-Assad forces. Others, bent on distancing the U.S. from the sectarian policies of Iraq's then-prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, provided a vacuum that helped Sunni discontent to grow. Publicly, though, much of the blame has fallen on the U.S. intelligence community. President Obama told reporters in August that the advance of the Islamic State group across Syria and Iraq was more rapid than the intelligence estimates. On CBS’ "60 Minutes" last month, Obama said, "I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.” Yet since at least February, top intelligence officials were sharing stark assessments of the threat posed by the Islamic State. In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper put the number of fighters across Iraq and Syria at 20,000. Then-Defense Intelligence Agency director, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, also warned that the Islamic State “probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength,” going on to say that the group “has exploited the permissive security environment to increase its operations and presence in many locations.” Despite such warnings, the response by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the president’s comments seem conciliatory, with top officials publicly admitting they underestimated the Islamic State’s will to fight while overestimating the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces. For some former officials, like Sarah Chayes, the mea culpas ring hollow. “I don’t believe that you can’t gauge people’s willingness to fight,” she said Ms. Chayes served as a special adviser to former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and said the political climate in Iraq made Sunni Arab sympathy, and support, for the Islamic State nearly inevitable and something the intelligence community should have seen coming. “When you have Shi’ite militias acting as death squads and these developments seem to be increasing, not decreasing, people are going to be fighting for their survival. How could you possibly underestimate peoples’ willingness to fight under those circumstances?” asked Ms. Chayes. According to intelligence officials, such information was, and continues to be, readily available to top policy makers. “Our experts routinely provide insights that explain the deeper context behind issues, illuminate underlying factors that drive developments, and identify patterns and trends,” CIA spokesman Todd Ebitz said. “We have never lost sight of our mission to provide consumers of our intelligence with a big picture understanding of key national security challenges.” But the impact of such intelligence was muted, in part, because while it talked about the potential threat posed by the Islamic State, policy makers had their eye on threats deemed more immediate. “ISIS and its predecessors at that time didn’t fall under that category,” the New America Foundation's Fishman said. “As a result, the intelligence community was focused on the sort of primary needs of policy makers… terrorist groups that posed a more direct threat to the United States.” Despite such criticism, U.S. intelligence officials say the community continues to work at an intense tempo on numerous global crises. Nor are intelligence officials taking the failure to properly assess the will to fight of both the Islamic State and the Iraqi security forces lightly. The CIA says it continues to track a wide-range of terrorist groups, according to agency spokesman Todd Ebitz, watching for signs any one group may be “shifting its focus or increasing its capabilities in a way that threatens the United States.” But that is of little comfort to analysts like Fishman, who say designating only groups “actively and directly trying to attack the United States” as threats is a serious misstep. “Groups like this can pose a major threat to U.S. interests, even if they’re not focused on attacking the United States,” Fishman said of the Islamic State “The growth of this organization in Syria and Iraq poses a very serious destabilizing threat in the Middle East in a way that could really disrupt what has been considered core U.S. interests for decades.” Like Fishman, Ms. Chayes puts part of the blame on efforts to reform the U.S. intelligence community following the 9/11 terror attacks against the United States. She said while the changes did help improve intelligence by increasing communication between agencies, the changes also aimed U.S. intelligence in the wrong direction. “What you had is a drift of the intelligence community toward essentially being a paramilitary organization,” Ms. Chayes said, “the intelligence gathering and analysis being in support of that sort of paramilitary activity: basically finding and fixing targets.” Former CIA specialist Reuel Marc Gerecht is even more blunt in his assessment of just how much the U.S. missed by downplaying its own intelligence when it comes to the Islamic State. “The problem of the Islamic State is certainly greater than the problem of the Taliban in 1998,” he said. Haitians bring their case on cholera to U.S. court By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A U.S. District Court judge heard oral arguments Thursday in a lawsuit brought by victims of Haiti’s cholera outbreak who are seeking compensation from the United Nations. The plaintiffs blame a contingent of Nepalese peacekeepers for bringing the disease to their nation after the 2010 earthquake. The suit was filed on behalf of five Haitians and Haitian-Americans whose family members died of the water-borne disease or who were infected with it. They allege that U.N. peacekeepers who were sent to the country after the devastating 2010 earthquake contaminated a branch of the Artibonite River with cholera. The river is the country’s main water source for tens of thousands of Haitians. The United Nations has never taken responsibility for the crisis and is claiming immunity in this lawsuit. In July, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited Haiti and spoke to survivors and families of those who died, telling them he believed that “the whole international community, including the United Nations, has a moral duty” to stem the further spread of cholera. It will be up to the judge to decide whether plaintiffs can pursue the case in a U.S. court. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's sixth news page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Oct. 24, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 211 | |||||||||
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High
altitude early man site found
By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A research team led by an assistant professor at the University of Maine in Orono has uncovered what are now the world's highest known Ice Age settlements. Professor Kurt Rademaker reported the discovery in an article that appeared Thursday in the journal Science. The article describes settlements 4.5 kilometers above sea level in the southern Peruvian Andes that were inhabited at least 12,000 years ago. The site is about 14,700 feet in elevation. According to Rademaker, researchers have found artifacts, including stone tools, animal bones, food remnants and primitive artwork. The location of the two sites is within 160 kilometers of the Pacific coast and roughly west of Lake Titicaca in southern Peru. Rademaker said the tools found include scrapers for working animal hides and implements for cutting and butchering. The professor added, "A lot of the stone tools seem to be all about hunting and processing of animals." Rademaker said he doubts people lived there year-round because the rainy season at that altitude brings rain, sleet and snow from December to March. The art on the walls of the rock shelters includes red ochre pictographs of animals with some entire wall sections painted red. Some experts think people need to make genetic adaptations over many thousands of years to withstand such altitudes. this site may suggest otherwise. Mexican governor quits over students By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The governor of the Mexican state of Guerrero resigned Thursday, nearly one month after the unresolved disappearance of 43 students that is linked to politicians, police and drugs cartels. Ángel Aguirre Rivero said on social media that he was confident he had made the responsible decision in stepping down. He added that a regional parliament would choose his replacement. The students from a rural teachers training college went missing after a confrontation with police in the town of Iguala on Sept. 26. The circumstances that led to the violence remain unclear. However, six people were killed at the scene and dozens were wounded after police and armed civilians opened fire on three buses filled with students. Authorities have ordered the arrest of Iguala's mayor, his wife and an aide, alleging the trio were the masterminds behind the attack. Dozens of local police and members of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang have been detained in connection with the case. There has been no word on the missing men. Initial DNA testing shows the charred bodies found in several mass graves in Iguala are not the students. Ongoing protests around Mexico demand answers from the government, which is under international criticism for human rights abuses committed by security forces. |
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