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| A.M. Costa Rica Second newspage |
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| Costa Rica Expertise Ltd http://crexpertise.com E-mail info@crexpertise.com Tel:506-256-8585 Fax:506-256-7575 |
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 Obvservatorio Vulcanológico y
Sismológico graphic
This readout came from a seismograph
in Heredia
Early morning 6.2 quake
was felt all over country By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
An earthquake that was estimated at a magnitude 6.2 struck at a point on the Panamá-Costa Rica border at 12:12 a.m. today. The epicenter appeared to be a few kilometers inland from the peninsula that both countries share. The location was listed by the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center to be 55 km (35 miles) west-southwest of David, Panamá, 45 km (30 miles) south-southeast of Golfito and 220 km (135 miles) southeast of San José. The quake was felt in San José as a short and a long tremor. The duration may have been as much as a minute. The area of the quake, Punta Burica, and nearby Puerto Armulles in Panamá are a frequent location for such events. There have been no reports of injuries or damage yet, the magnitude of the quake is in the danger range. Online seismographs at the Obvservatorio Vulcanológico y Sismológico de Costa Rica showed that the quake was felt all over the country. A quake hit the same area early Dec. 25, 2003, and killed two persons and damaged at least 70 homes. That quake was registered as a 6.3 magnitude.  U.S. Geological Survey,
National
Red dot shows estimated location of quakeEarthquake Information Center Gunman kills woman lawyer in restaurant execution By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Someone lured a woman lawyer to her death Tuesday night in Desamparados. The woman died when a gunman shot her three times while she was waiting in a restaurant. The dead woman was identified informally as Ana Santiesteban Álvarez. A police officer said investigators found a carnet in her pocket that showed she was a lawyer. She was seated in the Sea Food restaurant in San Rafael Abajo in Desamparados shortly after 6 p.m. when a man entered the establishment, walked up to her and shot her. He fled on a motorcycle. Police were looking for a man with a white motorcycle helmet. Employees at the restaurant said that the woman was not a regular and that they did not know her. Police suggested that the killing might be a crime of passion or a contracted hit.
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| A.M. Costa Rica third newspage |
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Cold front causes chills,
some rain and a weather alert
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A cold front swept through Costa Rica north to south Tuesday and early Wednesday, leaving rain and disturbed weather in its wake. The national emergency commission issued an alert mainly for the northern zone and the Caribbean slope. Some rain fell in San José Tuesday night. The Comisión Nacional de Prevención de Riesgos y Atención de Emergencias said that some homes had been flooded in the canton of Matina in the Provincia de Limón. Most of the flooding was reported in the community of Cochen, and emergency evaluators were on the scene, the commissions said. The front also brought chilly and windy weather to the country. The Instituto Meteorológico Nacional said such |
conditions would continue for
today along with cloudy skies and some rain. The front is massive, running from the Pacific Ocean in a crescent to the mid-Atlantic. The front passed over San José between 9 and 11 p.m. The alert covered the cantons of Upala, San Carlos, Los Chiles and Guatuso and all of the Provincia de Limón, the emergency commission said. This is the time of year when the weather switches and the rains become more frequently on the Caribbean coast while the rest of the country enjoys the dry season. The emergency commissions said that tides were expected to be pushed about two meters higher by the winds, slightly more than six feet. The commission also said that the wind gusts would be from 35 kph (22 mph) to 54 kph (33.5 mph). |
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Chinese firm is low bidder
for third generation cell phones
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad got three bids Tuesday to install the third generation of cell telephones in the country. The bid opening is just the first step in a prolonged process, and officials said that the delivery of the system probably would not be until the second half of 2009. The bid opening was a repeat. Only one firm, Huawei Technologies Co., entered a bid last time, and representatives of other companies challenged the specifications. Huawei Technologies, a Chinese firm, was the low bidder this time and offered to do the job for $245 million. ZTE |
Corp. bid $446.9
million,
and Consorcio Ericsson big $340.9 million. All the bids are good for 90 days, according to the offers, but they are too complex to judge based on the total sum alone. For example, each company offered different amounts of financial guarantees. The telephone company, known as ICE, said its Junta de Adquisiciones now has 70 days to study the proposals. Any contract must also be reviewed and approved by the Contraloría de la República, the financial watchdog agency. The project envisions 950,000 new 3-G lines that will allow users to operate their cell telephones as if they were computers hooked to the Internet. |
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October was a record-setting
month in three categories for A.M. Costa Rica
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
A.M. Costa Rica had another record month in October. Statistics from an independent source show that 61,545 unique visitors viewed 1,632,755 pages during the month. This activity generated 5.1 million hits at the newspaper's server. The total hits, the number of pages delivered and the total visits, some 152,196, are records. The number of unique visitors is exceeded only by the 64,090 logged in the month of May. The total number of visits is verified by another statistical program under the control of the newspaper staff which logged 167,101 total visits during the month. The different numbers are the result of slight differences in the configurations of the statistical programs. By comparison, the number of pages read by visitors in October is 164 percent greater than those read in October 2005. A.M. Costa Rica maintains its monthly statistics in public for the benefit of readers and advertisers. A full list is HERE! Most advertisers are aware of the volume of readership by the favorable responses to their ads. The statistics report is important because it demonstrates continued interest in Costa Rica by those outside the country, despite challenging economic times. The newspaper is read in at least 90 countries every day Monday through Friday, and an average of 51 percent of the readers are in the United States. Unique visitors are those who are counted just once no matter how many times they visit the newspaper Web site |
in a 24-hour period. A hit is generated every time a file, text, photo or other graphic, is sent from the server to a reader's computer. Some Web sites are set up to generate excessive numbers of hits because readers have to click four or five times to read a news story. A.M. Costa Rica is not designed that way, and news stories are served up with each page. The newspaper continues to receive praise from readers because of its extensive coverage of Costa Rican news and of news elsewhere related to Costa Rica. Advertisers also have expressed their pleasure because of their marketing results and because they do not have to spend 50 percent or more of their ad budget to purchase newsprint. They also have said they appreciate the interactivity of their advertising and the instant responses they receive electronically from potential customers. A.M. Costa Rica is free and on the Web Monday through Friday by 2 a.m. San José time. Nearly 3,000 readers keep in touch with the daily headlines via the separate daily digest that is sent with appropriate links as an e-mail each morning. Readers can subscribe HERE! |
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Chemical cocktails shown to cause decline in some frogs
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The decline of some frog species in Costa Rica may be related to pesticides and herbicides. That is suggested by the reports of two recent studies. Jason Rohr of the University of South Florida and colleagues revealed that chemical pollution can increase often deadly parasitic flatworm infections in the northern leopard frog, a declining amphibian species. They zeroed in on atrazine, a widely used herbicide, and phosphate. In the University of Pittsburgh, researchers said that 10 of the world's most popular pesticides can decimate amphibian populations when mixed together even if the concentration of the individual chemicals are within limits considered safe. Such “cocktails of contaminants” are frequently detected in nature, the paper notes, and the Pitt findings offer the first illustration of how a large mixture of pesticides can adversely affect the environment. Rohr published his findings in the journal Nature at the end of October. According to Rohr, identifying the main risk factors and predictors for disease in amphibians is important. This study showed that atrazine and phosphate concentrations in the Minnesota wetlands they investigated were the best of over 240 plausible predictors of trematode abundance in frogs. In a manipulative experiment conducted in outdoor, 300-gallon tanks, Rohr and colleagues verified that atrazine increased snail abundance, caused amphibian immuno-suppression, and elevated the number of parasitic trematodes in amphibians. Like canaries used to gauge the safety of air in coal mines, amphibians are thought to be the canaries in freshwater environments. Reductions in their health can warn of subsequent species declines and degradation of ecosystems, said a South Florida press release. "Atrazine and fertilizers might not be the only chemicals affecting disease risk," said Rohr. "Many chemicals can be immuno-suppressive, and standard toxicity tests used to register chemicals in the United States and Europe are conducted on isolated individuals, ignoring interactions with other species, such as their parasites. Thus, our findings are likely the tip of the iceberg for pollution-induced disease emergence in both humans and wildlife." At the University of Pittsburgh, Rick Relyea, an associate professor of biological sciences, also experimented with atrazine and other chemicals. He exposed gray tree frogs and leopard frog tadpoles to small amounts of the 10 pesticides that are widely used throughout the world. In addition to atrazine, Relyea selected five insecticides: |
 Photo by Neal Halstead, University of South Florida
Leopard frogs figured in both studiescarbaryl, chlorpyrifos, diazinon, endosulfan, and malathion and four
other herbicides: acetochlor, glyphosate, metolachlor, and 2,4-D.
Relyea found that a mixture of all 10 chemicals killed 99 percent of leopard frog tadpoles as did the insecticide-only mixture; the herbicide mixture had no effect on the tadpoles. While leopard frogs perished, gray tree frogs did not succumb to the poisons and instead flourished in the absence of leopard frog competitors. Relyea also discovered that endosulfan, a neurotoxin banned in several nations but still used extensively in U.S. agriculture, is inordinately deadly to leopard frog tadpoles. By itself, the chemical caused 84 percent of the leopard frogs to die. This lethality was previously unknown because current regulations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency do not require amphibian testing, Relyea said. His results showed that endosulfan was not only highly toxic to leopard frogs, but also that it served as the linchpin of the pesticide mixture that eliminated the bulk of leopard frog tadpoles. “Endosulfan appears to be about 1,000-times more lethal to amphibians than other pesticides that we have examined,” Relyea said. “Unfortunately, pesticide regulations do not require amphibian testing, so very little is known about endosulfan's impact on amphibians, despite being sprayed in the environment for more than five decades.” His study was published Nov. 11 in the online journal Oecologia. In addition to chemicals and trematode or flukes, the decline of some Costa Rican frog species has been blamed on certain fungus, global warming, loud noise, habitat destruction and competition from other creatures. |
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Jonestown mass suicide tragedy in Guyana jungles took place 30 years ago
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
It was 30 years ago Tuesday that more than 900 members of a religious cult lost their lives during a mass suicide known as the Jonestown massacre. The tragedy took place at a commune in the jungles of Guyana, where the mostly American followers of cult leader Jim Jones went to live and work. Jones had promised his followers heaven on earth, but escapees described the compound as a prison camp. A U.S. congressman from California who went to investigate Jonestown, Leo Ryan, was shot to death by |
cult members
on an airstrip Nov. 18, 1978, along with a church defector and three
members of the media. Back at the compound, Jones, backed by armed guards, forced his followers to drink juice laced with cyanide in a suicide ritual. Elderly people and children were among the hundreds killed that day. Jones was found shot in the head, though it is not clear if he killed himself or if someone else did. Survivors and relatives of the victims are marking the 30th anniversary of the massacre with a ceremony at a cemetery in California, where hundreds of victims are buried. |
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by local incubator group By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Are entrepreneurs born or made? A Costa Rican non-profit is betting on the latter as it joined at least 76 other countries in celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week. The Costa Rican organization is Parque Tec, a non-profit that helps startups, other firms and people with ideas to gain a market foothold, sometimes by providing space and assistance. The international entrepreneurship week ends Sunday, and Parque Tec is having a conference Saturday at 6:30 p.m. in the Hotel Radisson. The organization said its workers will outline how the business incubation process works. They also are inviting entrepreneurs to nominate their projects for help. The organization is on the Web at www.parquetec.org, and can be reached at incubadora@parquetec.org. The deadline for application is Dec. 10, the organizxation said. It added that it now hosts 15 companies. It is financed by the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. Worldwide the week's big name supporters include Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, Singaporean President S.R. Nathan, Californian Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, King Mohammed VI of Morocco, Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Aníbal Cavaco Silva President of Portugal. Global Entrepreneurship Week, the world’s first-ever celebration of enterprising behavior, comes at a time of massive economic change. Organizers said they aim to connect enterprising young people with their counterparts all over the world, and ultimately create a global movement of entrepreneurial people. Globally more than 13,000 events are taking place in 77 countries involving an estimated five million people, from Bolivia to Bulgaria and Mexico to Mozambique, organizers said. Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the sonsoring Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation said: “For seven days, millions of young people around the world will be introduced to entrepreneurship and encouraged to think about how innovation can take them anywhere, no matter their location on the map. Young people can talk to others around the world in the forums at www.unleashingideas.org. |
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