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A.M. Costa Rica's Second news page |
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José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 228
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Heredia gets a new
theater this month
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A new theater is opening this month in Heredia's Centro Comercial Paseo de las Flores. The operators are architect Remberto Campos and award-winning actress Andrea Oryza. The theater is called La Fortina after the Heredia landmark structure the Fortín. The theater is on the second floor of the commercial center and can seat 170 persons. The theater opens Nov. 27 with its first show, "Fuego en el sótano," described as a comic satire.  Ministerio de Obras Públicas y
Transportes
Some of the vehicles are
in pretty sad shape.217 cars
are just a drop in the bucket
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Transportes said it donated 217 vehicles to the Asociación Obras del Espíritu Santo to support its work with children. The ministry still has about 14,000 vehicles to go. The vehicles all were put in the custody of the ministry before Feb. 28, 2010. Some were involved in accidents. Others have outstanding traffic tickets. They range from twisted and torn metal to a pristine Mercedes. The traffic laws provide for donations to public agencies, educational institutions and social welfare organizations. The confiscated car lots are all over the country. The ministry estimated that it will take eight years to donate all 14,000 vehicles. Robbers were just too flashy with guns By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A good rule for professional stick-up artists is to keep the gun under wraps until you enter the place you seek to rob. The alternative is what happened Sunday afternoon in Desamparados. The Fuerza Pública said that officers were on routine patrol Sunday afternoon when officers spotted three men with guns headed for a fast-food outlet. Once they saw the presence of police, the three men attempted to flee on motorcycles, but they were detained. All have police records for the same type of crime and others. Officials off to China for refinery talks By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Two Costa Rican officials are off to China to negotiate with the China National Petroleum Co. for the modernization of the state petroleum refinery. They are Edgar Gutiérrez, minister of Ambiente y Energía, and Sara Salazar, executive president of the Refinadora Costarricense de Petróleo, the state fuel company. They will be joined by Costa Rican officials already in China The Contraloría General de la República raised questions about the original deal that was formulated during the Laura Chinchilla administration. Bus fare cut through negotiations By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Autoridad Reguladora de los Servicios Públicos says it cut the fare by 50 colons on bus service to and from Concepción de La Unión, de Cartago because local associations and the operator of the line, Transportes Hermanos Chacón S.A., agreed. The associations appear to have negotiated with the bus operator and then brought the request to the Autoridad. The reduction is about nine U.S. cents. The fare now is 300 colons, about 55 cents.
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A.M. Costa Rica Third News Page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 228 | |
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| Government says it will support plans for Mega Terminal of
the Atlantic |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The central government said Monday that it is supporting plans for a second giant container terminal in the Limón port of Moín. This is the private project of the America’s Gateway Development Corp. The role of the government will be to advance the paperwork to create a trust to permit the first steps of the development. The project is being called the Mega Terminal of the Atlantic. The firm is a subsidiary of AMEGA Holdings Barbados, Inc. That firm is Canadian, American and Costa Rican, the Ministerio de Comercio Exterior said. The post will be a competitor to the $1 billion container handling facility being planned as a government concession and developed by APM Terminals, a Dutch company. America’s Gateway's terminal also is seen as the eastern terminus of a proposed dry canal, a rail line, across the northern zone of Costa Rica to the Pacific. The firm Empresa Tren Interoceánico Continental is involved in that project. America’s Gateway has been promoting the project since 2008. Right now the project is in the feasibility planning stage. For the global maritime industry, the AMEGA terminal offers a high speed, efficient deep-water port in a strategic geographical location that fully leverages the opportunity inherent in the Panama Canal expansion, the firm said. The channel will be 19 meters, about 62 feet. For North American freight consignees and government, the terminal offers a high-security environment where containers from multiple incoming ports will be pre-scanned for immediate customs clearance into the United States and Canada reducing both risk and transit time, the firm added.. |
 America’s Gateway Development Corp. graphic
This is a rendering of the
proposed Mega Terminal of the Atlantic.The
terminal is estimated to cost about $900 million.
"There is support for AMEGA from all sectors and we look forward to working collaboratively with the government, the private sector, non-governmental agencies and the people to make the project a success," the firm said on its Web site.. "America’s Gateway will bring great economic and social benefits to the Limón region and put Costa Rica firmly on the map as a leading global player in container shipping and related economic activities." Work is about to commence on the second stage of the concession process, with the aim of taking the terminal to public bidding early in 2016. The APM Terminal project has run into strong opposition from workers on the public docks in Moín who fear they will lose their jobs. |
| Government outlines its goals for the next three and a half
years |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Luis Guillermo Solís administration laid out development plans Monday night that filled a 560-page document. The Teatro Nacional was the forum where the plans were outlined. According to Solís, the priorities for the next three years will have impact through 2030. There are three pillars of the plan: • Stimulation of the economy and the creation of quality employment • Combating poverty and reducing inequality, and • Maintaining an open and transparent government that fights against corruption. Casa Presidencial said that a new aspect of the development plan will be a system of evaluation. |
Specifically, the
plan calls for economic growth of 6 percent in the
next three and a half years and 8 percent by 2030, a reduction in
unemployment from 8.6 to 7 percent in three and a half years and down
to 4 percent in 2030 and bringing 42,000 families out of extreme
poverty. The president said he wants to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. He also wants to improve the country's rating on an index of perception of corruption. Extreme poverty is defined as not having enough money for three meals a day. The plan will be put into practice by some 164 programs and projects, said the government. Each administration publishes a development plan put together by the Ministerio de Planificación. The current one is a product of about five months of work by many government agencies. |
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| A.M. Costa Rica's Fourth News page | |||||
| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 228 | |||||
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| International student numbers soar — and not just in the
United States |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Close to 900,000 international students are studying at American universities and colleges, more than ever before. About half of them come from Asia, mostly China. The United States hosts more foreign students than any other country in the world, and its foreign student population is steadily growing. A new report from the Institute of International Education says that in the academic year 2013-2014, more than 886,000 foreign students enrolled in U.S. higher education institutions, an increase of 8 percent over the year before. There are now twice as many international students in the U.S. than only a decade ago. That trend is driven to a large extent by incoming undergraduate students from China. "In the U.S. they emphasize class discussions, and your opinion, and the capacity to debate with others, such as professor or teacher, and that is an atmosphere I want to experience," said Eric Xu, a Chinese student studying at Columbia University, in New York. While the enrollment of Chinese students continues to grow, the past academic year saw a significant increase in students from Kuwait, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and even Iran. More than 4 percent of the students in U.S. higher education institutions are foreigners. Educators say the presence of foreign students in American schools is beneficial, and that about 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities can accommodate more. "We know that international students contribute significantly to U.S. classrooms and campuses through their global perspectives and by |
providing
international exposure to those American students who may
never have the opportunity to study overseas," said Rajika Bhandari,
vice president of the Institute of International Education. Enrollment of students from abroad also adds to the U.S. economy. "This year, $27 billion was contributed to our economy at the local state and national levels, through payments for tuition, housing and other costs," said Evan Ryan, assistant secretary of State for education. The U.S. State Department and the Department of Education also promote study abroad for U.S. students. "We believe that study abroad can increase American competitiveness by enabling U.S. students to acquire language skills as well as the regional and global perspectives necessary to succeed in the 21st century," said Ryan. About 290,000 U.S. students went to study abroad in 2012-2013 for academic credit. Europe, especially Britain, remains the number one destination for American students, but the latest report shows that more students now choose to go to Latin American countries and China. "China now is the number five host country for U.S. students, hosting over 14,000 American students," said Christine Farrugia of the International Institute of Education. While U.S. schools continue to attract young people from all over the world, student exchanges among other countries also are on the rise. |
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth
news page
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| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 228 | |||||||
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| Ferguson shooting raises possibility of new policies By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
That a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager in a central U.S. city on Aug. 9 is undisputed. More than three months later, however, whether Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson, Missouri, by police officer Darren Wilson will or should bring about new policies related to race and diversity remains undecided. “The case is seen very differently whether you’re African-American or whether you’re white,” said Debbie Hines, a former state prosecutor turned trial lawyer who blogs about the case. And the numbers support Hines. Eighty percent of black adults surveyed for the Pew Research Center in August in the weeks after the shooting believed the case raised important issues about race. Only one third of white respondents agreed. Tension surrounding the case racheted up again Monday, when Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency before a grand jury decision expected later this month about whether Wilson will be charged in Brown's fatal shooting. Nixon said the order would activate the National Guard to assist state and local police in case of violence in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, when the grand jury's decision is announced. Those who see race as a key issue in the teenager's death point to systemic problems. They want discrimination addressed on a national level. A civil rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has asked the U.S. Justice Department for wholesale policy changes to address police violence against black Americans. The week after Brown’s death, the organization's Legal Defense Fund wrote a five-page letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, detailing 13 cases of what it called the “unjustified use of lethal and excessive force by police." Among the demands: more racial, ethnic and gender diversity in law enforcement, and more police officers who are members of the community they serve. Holder has ordered an investigation into whether the Ferguson police department was involved in racial profiling and how the force handled the protests which turned violent after Aug. 9. Authorities are also looking into how the force was trained. But for now, it excludes looking at the hiring practices that made the Ferguson police department into an almost exclusively white force in a majority black city. Elsie Scott, who has researched the interaction between police and minority communities, worked to increase the number of minorities in the New York City Police Department as deputy commissioner of training. She believes expanding the diversity of law enforcement agencies around the country is key to mending the rift communities of color feel separates them from police. "Even when a cop is not violating the law, because of this distrust and this disconnect between the black community and the police, you can still end up with a major incident if you have not engaged your community, or if you do not have black people in your police department," said Ms. Scott, now director of the Ronald W. Walters Leadership and Public Policy Center at Howard University in Washington. For her, treating cases like Brown's as isolated incidents stands in the way of understanding larger issues across the country. "I think a lot of people will dismiss this and say, ‘well my city is not like Ferguson. We don’t have the prejudice that seems to be there in Ferguson, we have proper protocols,'" Ms. Scott said. "And I think that’s a disservice because if you think your city doesn’t have problems, then you’re going to be somewhat like Ferguson if you end up with an incident like this." Bill Johnson heads an umbrella organization in Washington that represents about a quarter-million police officers and their unions through the National Association of Police Organizations. He sees the shooting primarily as a question of whether Wilson was defending himself, therefore justified in his use of force against Brown, who was shot at least six times after an altercation with the officer. "Like it or not, regardless of the color of the people involved, regardless of the socio-economic standards or regardless of the history of the police department, for an individual officer, if his or her life is threatened, or if they reasonably believe it’s threatened, they have the right to use force," said Johnson. He disagreed with Ms. Scott that putting more police from minority communities in areas similar to their cultural or racial background is a solution to bridging the perceived gap seen by communities of color between them and the police. "If you pursue that and it goes too far down that road, it really ends up with a kind of insidious discrimination that’s there. And I think that...doesn’t solve the problem," said Johnson. "I think if you send a message also that, to a community of color, you can’t trust the white officer. You can’t trust the Anglo officer. We’re sending people of color into a community because we can’t - you know, that’s really the only people you can trust," he added. Instead, Johnson supports training and the creation of community liaisons on the police force, where officers get to know the area they patrol by interacting more with residents. The wait to see whether Brown’s death will change what some Americans believe is an unacceptable status quo may take a lot longer than the grand jury decision expected by the end of November. "There’s a lot of healing that’s going to have to come about," said Scott, who recalled the civil rights protests of the 1960s that eventually lead to policy reforms. "It’s not going to happen overnight." Obama's immigration action might close U.S. government By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The dust has barely settled from the 2014 midterm elections, but it’s clear that the next great political battle is already here: immigration reform. President Barack Obama is expected to take executive action soon to protect millions of immigrants who entered the country illegally from being deported. That would please Hispanic political activists, but also set the stage for a major confrontation between the president and newly empowered Republicans in Congress. In light of sweeping Republican victories Nov. 4 that won a Senate majority and expanded their majority in the House of Representatives, you might have expected a more humble response from the Obama White House. Instead it appears that the president is about to double-down on the immigration issue and follow through on his threat to take executive action in light of growing Republican opposition in Congress to taking up comprehensive reform. After initially sounding a note of hopeful bipartisanship in the wake of the election results, incoming Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he and his fellow Republicans were concerned with the post-election stance of the Obama White House. “I had maybe naively hoped the president would look at the results of the election and decide to come to the political center and do some business with us,” McConnell said. “I still hope he does at some point but the early signs are not good.” The immigration gambit is also exposing cracks within Republican ranks between mainstream congressional leaders who now want to demonstrate that their party can govern in a responsible way and Tea Party and other conservative adherents that may be willing to shut down the federal government in a bid to prevent Obama from taking unilateral action. Immediately after the midterm election, both Sen. McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner were quick to rule out any government shutdowns in the weeks ahead. But the president’s expected action on immigration has fired up the Republican base, especially in the House, to the point that Boehner now says that all options are on the table. Boehner told reporters that House Republicans will fight the president tooth and nail if he continues down this path. Some conservatives raised the idea of trying to block the presidential action on immigration by linking it to upcoming congressional action on the budget. Congress needs to act by December to keep the government running and a confrontation over immigration raises the possibility that some Tea Party activists and other conservatives will use the issue to push for a government shutdown. Republicans leaders were hoping to enact a budget resolution that would have kept the government funded at current levels through next September. But Tea Party activists may now demand a shorter term funding bill as part of an effort to fight the president on immigration. Republican congressional leaders also said after the election that impeaching the president was off the table, a response to a small group of House conservatives who have raised the possibility in the past. If things really get bad over the next few weeks, one has to wonder if some conservatives might be tempted to raise the issue anew under the theory that unilateral action by the president would be seen by many of them as a violation of the Constitution, something the Obama White House would vehemently push back on. Democrats are also going through their own post-election soul-searching and many are concerned about what they see. Republicans effectively cast the midterm election as a referendum on President Obama and his policies. They also had some success in targeting Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid. Reid was re-elected leader by Senate Democrats but there were some notable defections, especially by Democrats in Republican-leaning states who grew tired of trying to defend the president and his policies. House Democrats have been in the minority for the past four years and are well aware of their limitations in trying to have a voice in legislation. The rules of the Senate give the minority a greater say than in the House, but now Senate Democrats will have to adjust to their new status as Republicans prepare to take the majority in January. That could set the stage for more presidential vetoes, since the Democratic Senate blocked numerous bills from House Republicans before they could reach the president’s desk during his first six years in office. How the immigration struggle plays out in the coming weeks could have a major impact on the early battle lines for the 2016 presidential race. Unilateral presidential action would no doubt please immigration activists and give Hispanic voters a reason to come out in force for Democratic candidates two years from now, something they did not do in this year’s midterm elections. It could also be a boon to whichever Democrat tries to succeed Obama in the presidency, beginning with the current favorite for the party nomination, former secretary of State Hillary Clinton. State Department says no classified info lost By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Despite last month’s suspected attack on the U.S. State Department’s email system and Web site, there’s no reason to believe classified information was compromised, a spokesman said. The department had revealed that a portion of its email system and public Web site were shut down over the weekend weeks after authorities detected suspicious activity believed to be the work of an outside hacker. "The State Department, like any other large organization that has a global span, is a constant target of cyberattacks," spokesman Jeff Rathke told reporters Monday at a routine daily briefing. He said the department, after detecting activity of concern several weeks ago, developed a response with cybersecurity experts from the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies and is "implementing carefully planned improvements to the security of our main unclassified network." Rathke, in explaining why parts of the email system weren’t disconnected until this weekend, said the action was part of previously planned maintenance. He said he had no information to share on the source of the attack, which remains under investigation. The intrusion happened about the same time the White House announced several of its unclassified computer systems were hacked into by an outside intruder. In that case, officials were quick to lay blame on Russian hackers, possibly working in cooperation with the Kremlin. Cyber-attacks on U.S. and Western governmental and military assets have been on the uptick lately. Just in the last few weeks, Chinese hackers reportedly dug into 800,000 employee records at the U.S. Postal Service, breached weather forecast systems at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and compromised the computers of G20 finance ministers by promising nude photos of former model Carla Bruni ahead of the G20 summit. To be sure, such hacks are embarrassing and troublesome. But of potentially greater threat is what now appears to be a sustained Russian hacking campaign targeting the U.S., German, and Ukrainian governments as well as computer networks at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters. "It’s fair to assume that the Russians can compromise any network that the Chinese can compromise," said Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and now partner at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson. "The Russians are at least as talented as the Chinese, and far more stealthy." Baker said he’s not the least surprised that Russian hackers, possibly working with elements of the government there, were hacking into sensitive U.S. computers. What’s surprising, he says, is that they did so in such a public fashion. "The Russians may have made a deliberate decision to be less stealthy, either because it’s easier or because they’re sending us a message," he said via email. “Either way, it’s a sign that our lack of effective response to past foreign government hacks is encouraging more hacks and more willingness to advertise the foreign government hand behind the hacks.” |
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2014 and may
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| A.M. Costa Rica's sixth news page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 228 | |||||||||
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Unused language
found hidden in brain
By the McGill University news service
An infant’s mother tongue creates neural patterns that the unconscious brain retains years later even if the child totally stops using the language, as can happen in cases of international adoption, according to a new joint study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital and McGill University’s Department of Psychology. The study offers the first neural evidence that traces of the lost language remain in the brain. “The infant brain forms representations of language sounds, but we wanted to see whether the brain maintains these representations later in life even if the person is no longer exposed to the language,” says Lara Pierce, a doctoral candidate at McGill University and first author on the paper. Her work is jointly supervised by Denise Klein at Montreal Neurological Institute and Fred Genesee in the Department of Psychology. The article is in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences. The Montreal Neurological Institute conducted and analyzed functional MRI scans of 48 girls between nine and 17 years old who were recruited from the Montreal area through the Department of Psychology. One group was born and raised unilingual in a French-speaking family. The second group had Chinese-speaking children adopted as infants who later became unilingual French speakers with no conscious recollection of Chinese. The third group were fluently bilingual in Chinese and French. Scans were taken while the three groups listened to the same Chinese language sounds. “It astounded us that the brain activation pattern of the adopted Chinese who lost or totally discontinued the language matched the one for those who continued speaking Chinese since birth. The neural representations supporting this pattern could only have been acquired during the first months of life,” says Ms. Pierce. “This pattern completely differed from the first group of unilingual French speakers.” The study suggests that early-acquired information is not only maintained in the brain, but unconsciously influences brain processing for years, perhaps for life, potentially indicating a special status for information acquired during optimal periods of development. This could counter arguments not only within the field of language acquisition, but across domains, that neural representations are overwritten or lost from the brain over time. The implications of this finding are far reaching, and open the door for questions relating both to the re-learning of an early acquired, but forgotten, language or skill, as well as the unconscious influence of early experiences on later developmental outcomes. Second-hand pot smoke has impact, too By the American Heart Association news staff
Breathing second-hand marijuana smoke could damage heart and blood vessels as much as secondhand cigarette smoke, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2014. In the study, blood vessel function in lab rats dropped 70 percent after 30 minutes of exposure to second-hand marijuana smoke. Even when the marijuana contained no tetrahydrocannabinol, a compound in marijuana that produces intoxication, blood vessel function was still impaired. Reduced blood vessel function may raise the chances of developing atherosclerosis and could lead to a heart attack. Atherosclerosis is the disease process that causes plaque build-up in the arteries which narrows them and restricts blood flow. “Most people know second-hand cigarette smoke is bad for you, but many don’t realize that secondhand marijuana smoke may also be harmful,” said Matthew Springer, senior author of the study and cardiovascular researcher and associate professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco’s Cardiology Division. |
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| From
Page 7: New taxes put Japan into recession By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Japan's economy, the world's third largest, has fallen into recession. New data show the economy shrank at a 1.6 percent annual rate in July, August and September, after an even sharper decline in the previous quarter. Textbooks often define recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. The shrinking economy follows a tax increase that apparently discouraged spending by consumers and businesses. Stories in the financial press say the bad economic news makes it likely that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will delay another planned tax hike and call an early election. Abe took office promising to improve the slumping economy through massive public stimulus spending and reforms. The plan often is called Abenomics. The shrinking economy surprised experts who mostly predicted modest growth for Japan. News of the recession caused stocks to decline in Tokyo and some other major markets. |
