There is a steady business in smuggling alcohol from Panamá, and over the weekend the Fuerza Pública confiscated two such shipments.

Both police actions took place at the same location and about the same time.

A vehicle with 660 cans of beer was the first case. The driver was on a back road in Osa.

A short time later police spotted a parked microbus not far away. The two occupants had fled into the brush, officers said. The vehicle contained more than 5,500 cans of beer, mostly Milwaukee's Best.


Major newspaper tells why
U.S. citizens become expats


The authoritative Christian Science Monitor has published a glowing report with a video on U.S. citizens moving to Latin America. The emphasis was on countries where Americans had been hesitant to go, such as Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras.

The 3,265-word article gave case studies of satisfied expats with just one case of a woman who was being forced to return home from rural Honduras by finances and crime.

The news article mentions nothing about the legalities of moving to another country, such as the need for residency. And it suggests that learning Spanish is optional.

'Many Americans have settled in areas with large expat communities or ones that cater to outsiders, and they can get along without learning Spanish, said staff writer Daniel B. Wood.

Still the article does include Costa Rica as one of the prime locations for retirees. It also noted that the number of Social Security checks sent to Costa Rica has jumped 32 percent from 2005 to this year.

The article calls Latin America the new sun belt, a reference to what some of the U.S. southwestern states have been called because they are meccas for retirees.

The article correctly outlines the reason for retirees considering Latin America: The economic impact in the last few years on the finances of those approaching retirement age.


Playa Naranjo-Paquera road
is in line to get asphalt


The national road agency says that the gravel road from Playa Naranjo to Paquera on the Nicoya peninsula will be asphalted.

The agency also said that a new contract has been issued to the Grecia construction firm Grupo Albosa for maintenance on the 26-kilometer (about 16-mile) stretch.

The job includes putting down 11 kilometers of gravel, which will become a base for the future asphalt job.

The asphalt job depends on legislative approval of a loan from the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. The project also includes drainage, inprovement of bridges and channeling of water, said the Consejo Nacional de Vialidad.

This roadway is a key link but it is usually in disrepair. Sometimes, mainly in wet weather, it cannot be traversed.


System seeks to diminish
gender gap in employment


The national women's institute and the Instituto de Normas Técnicas  will be presenting what is being called the system to promote equality and equity of gender Tuesday.

The session is in the Hotel Aurola Holiday Inn in downtown San José.

The institute is the same organization that seeks to measure the carbon footprint of companies.

Among those speaking will be María Isabel Chamorro Santamaría, the executive president of the agency for women, the Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres.

An announcement said that diverse studies show the persistence of gaps between genders. The new norm or system will permit organizations to develop policies and take action to diminish the gaps between men and women in their employ, said the announcement.


Marital success is determined
by those pre-nuptial gut feelings


Before you walk down the wedding aisle, listen to your gut.

Researchers at Florida State University say people can tell if their marriage will be happy or not, even if they’re not able to verbalize the reasons why.

The research revealed two things: First, people’s conscious attitudes, or how they said they felt, did not always reflect their gut-level or automatic feelings about their marriage. Second, it was the gut-level feelings, not their conscious ones, that actually predicted how happy they remained over time.

“Everyone wants to be in a good marriage,” said James K. McNulty, a psychology professor. “And in the beginning, many people are able to convince themselves of that at a conscious level. But these automatic, gut-level responses are less influenced by what people want to think. You can’t make yourself have a positive response through a lot of wishful thinking.”

McNulty and his colleagues studied 135 heterosexual couples who had been married for less than six months and then followed up with them every six months over a four-year period. They found that the feelings the study participants verbalized about their marriages were unrelated to changes in their marital happiness over time.

To conduct the experiment, the researchers asked the individuals to report their relationship satisfaction and the severity of their specific relationship problems. The participants also were asked to provide their conscious evaluations by describing their marriage according to 15 pairs of opposing adjectives, such as good or bad, satisfied or unsatisfied.

To test gut feelings, the study participants were briefly flashed pictures of their spouses on a computer screen for one-third of a second. Immediately after,  they were shown a positive word like awesome or terrific or a negative word like awful or terrible. The individuals simply had to press a key on the keyboard to indicate whether the word was positive or negative. The researchers used special software to measure reaction time.

“It’s generally an easy task, but flashing a picture of their spouse makes people faster or slower depending on their automatic attitude toward the spouse,” McNulty said. “People who have really positive feelings about their partners are very quick to indicate that words like awesome are positive words and very slow to indicate that words like awful are negative words.”

People with positive gut-level attitudes were really good at processing positive words but bad at processing negative words when those automatic attitudes were activated. The opposite was also true. When a spouse had negative feelings about their partner that were activated by the brief exposure to the photo, they had a harder time switching gears to process the positive words.

These experiments were performed only once, but the researchers checked in with the couples every six months and asked them to report relationship satisfaction. The researchers found that the respondents who unwittingly revealed negative or lukewarm attitudes during the implicit measure reported the most marital dissatisfaction four years later. The conscious attitudes were unrelated to changes in marital satisfaction.

“I think the findings suggest that people may want to attend a little bit to their gut,” McNulty said. “If they can sense that their gut is telling them that there is a problem, then they might benefit from exploring that, maybe even with a professional marriage counselor."