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| A.M. Costa Rica Second newspage |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009, Vol. 9, No. 214 | |||||||||
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Judicial police
planning
a big show for telethon By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
There will be some funny business going on at the main headquarters of the Judicial Investigating Organization today. But it is for a good cause. The normally staid judicial policemen are welcoming in magicians, singers, clowns, comedians and others for what is being called a mini-telethon for the benefit of the trauma center at the Hospital Nacional de Niños. The goal is to raise 4.5 million colons, about $6,000. The event is being staged from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the agency's auditorium on the first floor of the headquarters in the San José court complex. A number of national performers will participate, the agency said. In addition to donations there, the agency has set up two bank accounts at Banco de Costa Rica: 152-0100102767066-5 and 001-0276706-6. Plus donations are being accepted at every Judicial Investigating Organization office in the country. The televised telethon in Costa Rica is Dec. 4 and 5. The organizers, the Club Activo 20-30 Internacional de San José, hopes to raise 500 million colons, about $860,000. The money donated today will go toward that goal, the Judicial Investigating Organization said. Tico said to be cartel aide linked to crash of helicopter By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Investigators and anti-drug agents have detained a Costa Rica who, they say, is the logistical arm of the Sinaloa drug cartel in this country. He was identified as Luis Enrique Barrantes Benevides. They said he was linked to the drug shipment that caused a helicoptero crash near Cerro de la Muerte May 1. The Policía de Control de Drogas detained the man early Wednesday in Urbanización Campos Verdes in Guápiles de Pococí in the province of Limón. The man had purchased a house for cash there for his girlfriend, agents said. Barrantes has been on the run since Oct. 14 when two men on a motorcycle, believed to be representing the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, tried to kill him. He suffered two superficial wounds, and his vehicle sustained bullet damage. The vehicle was recovered in Alajuela. The Colombian terrorist drug trafficking organization is believed to be contesting control of certain smuggling networks in Costa Rica. Investigators became aware of Barrantes as they investigated the crash of the helicopter. The pilot was a former aviator for the Ministerio de Gobernación, Policía y Seguridad Pública. He was Edgar Arguedas Alfaro, and he died in the crash as did a Mexican citizen who was flying with him. The crash was blamed on bad weather and overloading with the estimated 400 kilos of cocaine. that the craft carried. Most of that was found in the wreckage. The helicopter was en route from Drake Bay on the Osa Peninsula to Turrialba where Barrantes had negotiated the purchase of a hotel for his Mexican employers. That was the Cerro Alto Pochotel. The five Mexican nationals who were awaiting the arrival of the cocaine fled the country when they learned of the crash, security officials said. Wednesday investigators confiscated four vehicles used by Barrantes. They conducted searches at a home in Villa Bonita, Alajuela, and of a used car dealership in San Joaquin de Flores in Heredia, as well as a property in Golfito. Agents said that Barrantes owned the Alajuela home as well as the dealership. He also owns properties in Sámara, they said. Barrantes also is listed as an officer of corporations that also have some Mexican partners, agents said. Doctors treated Barrantes after he was shot, but he left the local hospital before agents arrived. Gasoline going down a bit By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The national regulating agency is cutting the price of gasoline by some 11 colons per liter. That's a bit less than 2 U.S. cents. This is the sixth time this year that gasoline declined in price. The price is subject to monthly fixing, so what is charged the consumer changes each month. The new price is based on the period from Sept. 24 to Oct. 8 and includes a calculation of the value of the colon vs. the U.S. dollar. Super goes from 575 colons per liter to 564, and plus goes from 558 colons to 547. Diesel increased 4 colons. Liquid petroleum gas was unchanged.
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| A.M. Costa Rica third newspage |
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Protesting
contract drivers shut down transportation system
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Many of the 10,000 contract drivers in Costa Rica staged a nationwide protest for more than three hours Wednesday morning and stopped transportation in the country. Drivers even pulled cars onto the tracks of the San José-Heredia train forcing passengers to abandon their seats and walk to their destination. Elsewhere, a man forced to walk fell and fatally damaged his skull on the sidewalk in Guadalupe. An ambulance had difficulty reaching him because of the tieups. He was going to his first day of work at a local hospital. Protests took place all over the country, including Liberia and Santa Cruz, said a spokesman for the porteadores, as the drivers are called. They are protesting a proposal in the legislature that would ban their activities, which are now marginally permitted by the commercial code. Porteadores are not licensed as taxi drivers. They are supposed to pick up an individual from one point and take them to another under a formal written contract. They are not supposed to engage in picking up passengers on the street, although many do. The Movimiento Libertario and the Partido Acción Ciudadana are sympathetic to the porteadores although |
perhaps not to the road blockades. All major roadways in the Central Valley were blocked, including the Autopista General Cañas that connects San José with Juan Santamaría airport. Spokesmen for the protesting drivers said they would stage more blockades next week. Many motorists called on the Óscar Arias Sánchez administration to clear the roads, but police and traffic officers did nothing. The blockade was similar to the protests during the Abel Pacheco administration. Those protests were mainly against the U.S.-Central American free trade agreement. The blockades took a heavy toll on workers. Many were late to their places of employment, and some will face pay deductions. School children also were stranded in traffic. The Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social said that some 300 medical appointments had to be rescheduled. The protesters began to clear the roads by 10 a.m. The protesters prefer legislation that would create more taxi licenses or at least assure them that their work would continue to be legal. Some porteadores fail to carry accident insurance like the Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Transportes requires formal taxi drivers to have. Drivers of licensed taxis also have staged protests against exactly what the porteadores are seeking. |
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Investigation
launched of Teatro Nacional box office
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Teatro Nacional said Wednesday that it has launched a financial investigation of its box office. The parent Ministerio de Cultura, Juventud y Deportes said that the probe followed complaints of supposed irregularities in the management of the ticketing operation. The Dirección General del Teatro Nacional has asked for a full internal audit. The audit is supposed to be finished later this week. |
Theater officials said they would
make no comments until the investigation is concluded. Although the irregularities cited by the theater officials might be totally financial, the Judicial Investigating Organization has a case under way in which a private ticket supplier, Special Ticket, was compromised. Its own employees are suspected of using company devices to clone tickets to popular events. Arrests have been made but there have been no formal charges. |
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1,000 expected
to dance in three-day Nandayure festival
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
More than 1,000 dancers are expected to participate in the VI Festival de Danza: Jóvenes Bailarines Guanacaste 2009 in Nandayure Friday through Sunday. The object of the event is to pass on the Guanacaste dance tradition, said organizers. More than 50 groups are scheduled to participate, including dancers from ages 3 to 35. Groups are expected from Nicaragua, Honduras and |
Guatemala. The groups are members
of the Central American dance network
that was formed to share experiences to strengthen the dance tradition,
said organizers. Entrance to the various presentations is free. The three-day program begins with an inauguration tonight and then with parade of the participants at 1:30 p.m. Friday at the Centro Cultural de Nandayure, Parque Central de Carmona. The community is in the middle of the Nicoya Peninsula. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica fourth news page |
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| Scientists
find that migrating birds stop to breed in México |
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By
University of Washington News and Information
Biologists for the first time have documented a second breeding season during the annual cycle of five songbird species that spend summers in temperate North America and winters in tropical Central and South America. It was known that these species, which migrate at night when there are fewer predators and the stars can guide their journey, breed during their stay in temperate regions of the United States and Canada. But it turns out that they squeeze in a second breeding season during a stopover in western Mexico on their southward migration, said Sievert Rohwer. He is a University of Washington professor emeritus of biology and curator emeritus of birds at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the university. "It's pretty much unheard of to have a nocturnal migrant with a second breeding season. It's a pretty special observation," Rohwer said. "We saw these birds breeding and we were completely surprised." Migratory double-breeding has been observed in two Old World bird species on their northward migration, but this is the first documented observation of migratory double breeders in the New World, and the first anywhere for the southward migration, Rohwer said. The scientists traveled to the lowland thorn forests of coastal western Mexico to survey and collect songbirds that had raised their young in the United States and Canada and then immediately migrated to Mexico to molt, or shed and replace their feathers. But during July and August in three consecutive summers, 2005 to 2007, the researchers found individuals from five species — yellow-billed cuckoos, orchard orioles, hooded orioles, yellow-breasted chats and Cassin's vireos — that were breeding rather than molting. They found evidence that the birds had, in fact, bred earlier that year. Females of all five species examined in July had dry and featherless brood patches, indicating they had bred earlier that summer. To more efficiently transfer heat to eggs, the abdominal brood patch becomes featherless and thickened with fluid when females are incubating, but as the young mature it dries out and remains featherless. In the Mexican breeding ground, there was a complete absence of young birds, indicating the females had not bred in the area of the thorn forests. Active nests were found for two species and males of all five species were singing and defending territories or guarding females, behaviors associated with breeding. In |
addition, isotopic
analysis of the birds'
tissues showed that many had recently arrived in west Mexico from
temperate areas farther north. Rohwer is lead author of a paper describing the findings, published this week in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. The observation is much more than an oddity in bird behavior, Rohwer said. He noted that orchard orioles might raise a first brood in the Midwestern and south-central U.S. and a second on Mexico's western coast, yet both sets of offspring find the same wintering area in Central America. The question is how both groups find the right place, since they must travel in different directions. Then there is the yellow-billed cuckoo, once commonly seen throughout the western United States and as far north as the Seattle area but now seldom seen along the West Coast. Disappearing habitat in the U.S. is usually cited as the reason. But Rohwer believes the real problem could be the transformation of thorn forests of southern Sonora and Sinaloa, states in northwestern Mexico, into irrigated industrial farms. That loss of habitat, he said, could mean not enough young are produced in the second breeding season to sustain the populations previously seen on the U.S. West Coast. "It turns out that many of those migrants, both molt migrants and the newly discovered migratory double breeders, are dependent on the low-altitude thorn forests that become very productive during the monsoon," Rohwer said. The thorn forests lie in an arid and forbidding scrubland that springs to life with the monsoon lasting from June through August. The monsoon brings virtually all of the area's annual rainfall. The small trees leaf out and insects become abundant, making an ideal stopover for migrating songbirds. However, with plenty of biting insects, temperatures often at 100 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity hovering near 100 percent, it is a difficult place for researchers to work, so there has been little previous documentation of life in the thorn forest. The new findings could spur more work there. "For western North America, the conservation implications are pretty serious," Rohwer said. "Biologists know theoretically that they should pay attention to these migration stopover sites, but they've been largely ignored for their conservation implications." |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009, Vol. 9, No. 214 | |||||||||
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Latin American news Please reload page if feed does not appear promptly |
Proposed
U.S. bill would bar searches of bookstore data By
the International Freedom of Expression Exchange
The Campaign for Reader Privacy has welcomed a new House bill that will restore reader privacy protections that were eliminated eight years ago by the USA Patriot Act. The USA Patriot Amendments Act of 2009 (H.R. 3845), introduced Oct. 20 by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan and Committee members Jerrold Nadler of New York and Bobby Scott of Virginia, prohibits the use of Patriot Act Section 215 searches to obtain documentary materials from a library or bookstore that contain personally identifiable information about a patron or customer. The provision would effectively bar the government from engaging in fishing expeditions to identify people who are reading "suspicious" books. All of the lawmakers are Democrats. Section 215 allows the FBI to secretly obtain any "tangible thing," including any business records that are "relevant" to an investigation. It can be used to search the records of people who are not suspected of any criminal acts. Congress is now debating changes in Section 215 and other provisions of the Patriot Act that expire in December. Oct. 8, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved S. 1892, which reauthorizes Section 215 for four years. The bill contains additional protections for the privacy of library records but fails to extend that protection to bookstore records. The introduction of H.R. 3845 means that the House will give serious consideration to protecting reader privacy in both libraries and bookstores. "Notably, the bill would allow Americans to use libraries and bookstores without fear that their choice of books will be monitored by overzealous federal agents," Nadler said in a press release Wednesday. The Campaign for Reader Privacy was organized in 2004 by the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers, and PEN American Center. Its goal is to ensure that Americans can purchase and borrow books without fear that the government is reading over their shoulders.
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