Three women shot to death
in separate weekend incidents


A woman died on the Nicoya peninsula in a murder suicide Friday. A woman passenger in a taxi died when the taxi came under fire. And a woman bar owner died when she tried to close the door when a man was shooting at the business.

The murder and suicide in Casitas, Nicoya, took place about 10 a.m. Investigators may never know why for sure. The victim, identified by her last name of Gómez, was at work when a man arrived and without saying a word shot her in the chest, said the Judicial Investigating Organization. She died at the scene. She was 36.

Two hours later, Fuerza Pública officers found the body of the prime suspect some 900 meters from the murder scene. He appears to have killed himself with a shotgun, said agents. They speculated that there had been some type of relationship between the two individuals.

In Limón a 49-year-old woman with the last name of West was the victim of an ambush as she arrived near her home in Limoncito about 9 p.m. Friday. Gunmen fired at least 24 bullets into the pirate taxi. The woman died at Hospital Tony Facio. The driver, identified by the last name of Cortés, was badly injured, judicial agents said.

Agents speculated that the weapons used were an AK-47 rifle and a .38-caliber pistol.

The bar shooting was early Sunday in Barrio Moracia de Liberia.
Judicial agents said that shortly after midnight a man got into a dispute with another customer. The man left and went to his home nearby and returned with a firearm, they said.

From outside he began firing randomly at the building containing the bar. The co-owner tried to close the front door but was hit in the neck by one of the bullets, said agents. A 28-year-old suspect was detained at his home later in the morning, agents said.


Pavlov would have enjoyed
the black Friday extravaganza


The promotion was supposed to be the lowest prices of the year, but even the parking guard giggled when he repeated the phrase and said he would put the statement in quotes.

Still Walmart was crowded Saturday night and shoppers searched for those promised deals. There was beefed up security, and even the entry hall was filled with stuffed toys and youngsters' bikes.

In Costa Rica black Friday was last weekend. Walmart Escazú starting its marathon Friday night. The store was open until 12:30 a.m. Sunday to accommodate shoppers. Other stores did similar.

Typically black Friday in the United States is the day after Thanksgiving, but in Costa Rica retailers wanted an early start on the holiday madness. And Ticos do not observe Thanksgiving.

The day is completely a marketing ploy. Although the term originated in the 1960s, there was a span of some years before retailers exploited it.

The black, of course, refers to the bottom line of the merchants who employ the discount delusions with loss leaders and all those social psychological tricks to capture the shoppers money.

Still one cannot help to be impressed by the boldness, including 50 feet of Barbie dolls linked up even before shoppers enter the store proper. Even some of the not-so-little girls were attracted to the display,

Perhaps the poster family of black Friday are the parents and two children trying to get a seven-foot long flat screen television carton into a six-foot wide back seat of a car. They may be there until White Christmas.


DNA research on Caribbean
catalogues genetic difference


Carlos Bustamante led a team that examined patterns of genetic variation in Caribbean populations.

Those who want to learn about their ancestors — who they were, where they came from and how they mingled (or didn’t) with others around them — often turn to historical records or elderly family members for answers. But a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine indicates that the answers can also be found within the genes.

The researchers compared patterns of genetic variation found in populations in and around the Caribbean, which has had a particularly tumultuous past since Christopher Columbus stumbled into the Bahamas in 1492. Not only did they identify an influx of European genes into the native population that occurred within a generation of Columbus’ arrival, but they also discovered two geographically distinct pulses of African immigration that correspond to the beginning and height of the transatlantic slave trade.

The study demonstrates how deciphering genetic echoes from the distant past can illuminate human history. But it also helps explain why some populations, like Latinos, who may be classified by medical researchers as a single group, display marked differences among populations in susceptibility to diseases or responses to therapeutic drugs.

“If we don’t understand the origin of our genetic variants, we won’t be able to design personalized, or even population-level, medicine,” said Andres Moreno-Estrada, a physician and life sciences research associate at Stanford. “Until recently, Latinos have been considered as a single group of people, when in fact they are very heterogeneous. We wanted to know what are the roots of the Caribbean people. Where do they come from? Clearly the population history of the region is very complex.”

Moreno-Estrada is the lead author of the study, published Thursday in PLOS Genetics. Bustamante, a professor of genetics at Stanford, shares senior authorship with Eden Martin of the University of Miami.

“Until recently, researchers have tried to extract this type of information from ancient DNA, which can be very difficult to find and to analyze, and can’t show the full range of Caribbean diversity,” Moreno-Estrada said. “We wanted to approach the question from the other end — starting from the present day and going back in time.”

The group, led by Bustamante and Martin, documented genetic variants found in 251 people of Caribbean descent — representing Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Colombia — living in South Florida, and 79 Venezuelans representing three native South American tribes. They then compared the genetic variants with those found in more than 3,000 Native Americans, Europeans and Africans.

“For us, this is a very important project,” Bustamante said. “Hispanic/Latinos, are the second-largest ethnic group in the United States, with people tracing their national origins to more than two dozen countries. Yet they are largely under-represented in medical genetic studies. An often-cited reason for this is that we do not know enough about genetic differences within and among groups to effectively design multi- and trans-population studies."

To conduct the research, the team devised a new way of analyzing DNA to infer genetic ancestry at a fine geographic scale. Using this approach, they were able to estimate not just what proportion of each individual’s genome was derived from each continent, but also to determine the closest ancestral group at a more-regional level.

The research confirmed much of what is known about the history of the Caribbean islands. But it also answered some long-standing questions about the ancestry of native Caribbean people, the impact of European colonization, and the timing and geographic origins of forced African immigration.

The researchers found, for example, that the Caribbean was first populated by people from inland South America about 2,500 years ago. Their DNA mirrors that of Amazonian tribes in the interior of the continent, and this flow of genes matches what is known about how language spread across the region during that time.