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A.M. Costa Rica's Second news page |
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San
José, Costa Rica, Friday, Dec. 5, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 241
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By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
In an unusual development, a Korean businessman approached the central government Thursday with a plan for installing a network of LED lights throughout the country along with free wifi and closed circuit television. The businessman is DaeWoo Kim, identified by Casa Presidencial as the CEO of Wells Communication, Inc. Casa Presidencial said the businessman proposed putting the more efficient LED lights on existing utility poles and also installing the wifi system that could be accessed for free by anyone within half a kilometer. The Korean met with Melvin Jiménez., minister of the Presidencia. A Web site for a Korean firm called Wells Communication, Inc., says that "although Wellcom is a newly established venture company, developed one year ago, its staff has more than ten years experience with LEDs and have been involved in multiple domestic and international projects." The firm is based in Seoul. The Korean offer includes providing 70 percent financing, said Casa Presidencial. Jiménez was quoted as saying the firm may build a plant in Costa Rica.  Teletón 2014
graphic
Televised event includes a lot of
variety acts.Street
solicitations are for Teletón
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
If the person presenting a small bucket for loose change at an intersection looks more clean-cut than normal, there is a reason. Instead of the usual crack addict, the collectors probably are members of the Club Activo 20-30 that is putting on the Teletón this weekend at the Ciudad Deportiva en Hatillo. The bucket is so marked and the individuals have identification. This is the weekend the club hopes to raise 703 million colons, a bit more than $1.3 million. The money will go to buy equipment at the Hospital Nacional de Niños and medical centers at San Carlos and Turrialba. This is an annual event that is televised. There is large corporate support and a lot of public participation. The televised event runs through Sunday and features many local and international acts. State firm promises to hold line on power By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad has promised not to raise rates at least until Dec. 31, 2015. Casa Presidencial relayed this pledge Thursday. The electrical generating firm says it has not done so since July 1. The statement appears to be countering a news story to the contrary. The firm uses mostly hydro power, but when the water is low, bunker fuel is used to five thermal generators. Since petroleum prices have plummeted, the company probably will not need an increase. Making electrical rates stable was a campaign pledge by President Luis Guillermo Solís. Recently his government came out against private power generating, something that favored the state firm, the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad. Animal adoption fair is this Saturday By the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The Asociación Animales de Asís plans an animal adoption fair Saturday at the Pet Café Veterinario in San Antonio de Belén from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The location is 300 meters west of the San Antonio de Belen church. Dogs, cats, puppies and kittens will be available. All are vaccinated and castrated, said the organization. A donation is requested.
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A.M. Costa Rica Third News Page |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Dec. 5, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 241 | |
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| High-flying president will dump the Range Rover in vehicle
trade |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
The nation's president appeared to be stung by television reports that he was traveling internationally on a top-of-the-line Beechcraft King Air confiscated from drug smugglers. The day after Repretel aired the story, the president, Luis Guillermo Solís, announced he was trading in the Range Rover for three less luxury vehicles. An announcement from Casa Presidencial said that the trade would not cost the country anything. The announcement said that a Range Rover was donated to the Óscar Arias administration and the next president, Laura Chinchilla traded for a newer model. |
The Repretel
television segment said that the president was taking
international trips at $75,000 each with the King Air. Rival station Teletica aired a segment on the aircraft a day later, but made no mention of the president's use of it. Casa Presidencial said the trade of the vehicles was being done with Motores Británicos. The Range Rover was valued at 74.5 million colons, about $139,000, said the announcement. The three vehicles being received are two 2015 Discovery cars and a 2008 Freelander. The president still will not have trouble getting around. There are other vehicles in the Casa Presidencial garage, and if they are out of service, the foreign ministry had a handful of luxury sedans. |
 A.M.
Costa Rica photo
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Tradition or religion? Although there is a bill in the legislature to designate the country pluralistic and multicultural, the Christmas traditions, like this portal or nativity scene at the Teatro Nacional, endure. Just about every government office hosts a portal this time of year. Even if they are not religious, most public employees will take advantage of the holiday, which begins for them the evening of Dec. 18. Work resumes Jan. 5. The portals are just part of the celebration. There are parties and music in most offices. Then after the holiday is over, there will be a series of prayer services when the infant Jesus is removed from the nativity scene. |
| Culture ministry hosts another book fair this weekend at la
Aduana |
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By
the A.M. Costa Rica staff
Another book fair opens for the weekend in San José today. It is the I Festival de Librerías y Editoriales 2014. The location is the Casa del Cuño, the glass-walled exposition area just east of the la Aduana on Calle 23. The exposition is seen as a continuation of the Feria Internacional del Libro that was held earlier in the year, organizers at the |
Ministerio de
Cultura y Juventud said. Also sponsoring is the Cámara Costarricense del Libro. Among the firms with displays are Librería Francesa, Liberia Jurídica Expolibros, Librería San Pablo, Librería Central, Librería Internacional, Librería Andante, Libros Duluoz and Librería Lehmann. Also there is the Imprenta Nacional and representatives from a number of local publishing houses, including those at universities. |
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Dec. 5, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 241 | |||||
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 Vanderbilt University/ Kenneth Catania
Cartoon illustrates how the
electric eel uses its ability to create high-voltage signals to find
and then paralyze its prey. |
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| Amazon eels use their electric personality like a Taser,
professor finds |
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By
the Vanderbilt University news staff
The electric eel, the scaleless Amazonian fish that can deliver an electrical jolt strong enough to knock down a full-grown horse, possesses an electroshock system uncannily similar to a Taser. That is the conclusion of a nine-month study of the way in which the electric eel uses high-voltage electrical discharges to locate and incapacitate its prey. The research was conducted by Kenneth Catania and is described in the article “The shocking predatory strike of the electric eel” published in the journal Science. He is a professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University. People have known about electric fish for a long time. The ancient Egyptians used an electric marine ray to treat epilepsy. Michael Faraday used eels to investigate the nature of electricity, and eel anatomy helped inspire Volta to create the first battery. Biologists have determined that a six-foot electric eel can generate about 600 volts of electricity, five times that of a U.S. electrical outlet. This summer scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced that they had sequenced the complete electric eel genome. Until now, however, no one had figured out how the eel’s electroshock system actually worked. In order to do so, Catania equipped a large aquarium with a system that can detect the eel’s electric signals and obtained several eels, ranging up to four feet in length. As he began observing the eels’ behavior, the biologist discovered that their movements are incredibly fast. They can strike and swallow a worm or small fish in about a tenth of a second. So Catania rigged up a high-speed video system that ran at a thousand frames per second so he could study the eel’s actions in slow motion. Catania recorded three different kinds of electrical discharges from the eels: low-voltage pulses for sensing their environment, short sequences of two or three high-voltage millisecond pulses (called doublets and triplets) given off while hunting and volleys of high-voltage, high-frequency pulses when capturing prey or defending themselves from attack. He found that the eel begins its attack on free-swimming prey with a high-frequency volley of high-voltage pulses about 10 to 15 milliseconds before it strikes. In the high-speed video, it became apparent that the fish were completely immobilized within three to four milliseconds after the volley hit them. The paralysis was temporary. If the eel didn’t immediately capture a fish, it normally regained its mobility after a short period and swam away. “It’s amazing. The eel can totally inactivate its prey in just three milliseconds. The fish are completely paralyzed,” said Catania. These observations raised an obvious question: How do the eels do it? For that, there was no clear answer in the scientific literature. “I have some friends in law enforcement, so I was familiar with how a |
Taser works,” said
Catania. “And I was struck by the similarity between the eel’s volley
and a Taser discharge. A Taser delivers 19
high-voltage pulses per second while the electric eel produces 400
pulses per second.” The Taser works by overwhelming the nerves that control the muscles in the target’s body, causing the muscles to involuntarily contract. To determine if the eel’s electrical discharges had the same effect, Catania walled off part of the aquarium with an electrically permeable barrier. He placed a pithed fish on the other side of the barrier from the eel and then fed the eel some earthworms, which triggered its electrical volleys. The volleys passed through the barrier and struck the fish, producing strong muscle contractions. To determine whether the discharges were acting on the prey’s motor neurons, the nerves that control the muscles, or on the muscles themselves, he placed two pithed fish behind the barrier: one injected with saline solution and the other injected with curare, a paralytic agent that targets the nervous system. The muscles of the fish with the saline continued to contract in response to the eel’s electrical discharges but the muscle contractions in the fish given the curare disappeared as the drug took effect. This demonstrated that the eel’s electrical discharges were acting through the motor neurons just like Taser discharges. Next Catania turned his attention to the way in which the eel uses electrical signals for hunting. The eel is nocturnal and doesn’t have very good eyesight. So it needs other ways to detect hidden prey. The biologist determined that the closely spaced doublets and triplets that the eel emits correspond to the electric signal that motor neurons send to muscles to produce an extremely rapid contraction. “Normally, you or I or any other animal can’t cause all of the muscles in our body to contract at the same time. However, that is just what the eel can cause with this signal,” Catania said. Putting together the fact that the eels are extremely sensitive to water movements with the fact that the whole-body muscle contraction causes the prey’s body to twitch, creating water movements that the eel can sense, Catania concluded that the eel is likely using these signals to locate hidden prey. To test this hypothesis, Catania connected a pithed fish to a stimulator. He put the fish in a clear plastic bag to protect it from the eel’s emissions. He found that when he stimulated the fish to twitch right after the eel emitted one of its signals, the eel would attack. But, when the fish failed to respond to its signal, the eel did not attack. The result supports the idea that the eel uses its electroshock system to force its prey to reveal their location. “If you take a step back and think about it, what the eel can do is extremely remarkable,” said Catania. “It can use its electrical system to take remote control of its prey’s body. If a fish is hiding nearby, the eel can force it to twitch, giving away its location, and if the eel is ready to capture a fish, it can paralyze its muscles so it can’t escape.” |
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A.M. Costa Rica's Fifth
news page
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| San José, Costa Rica, Friday, Dec. 5, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 241 | |||||||
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| Republicans pass measure on immigration shielding By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The U.S. House of Representatives Thursday passed a bill that would bar President Barack Obama from using an executive order to shield nearly five million undocumented immigrants from deportation, but the measure was largely viewed as a political message to the president. Obama's recent immigration action angered most Republican lawmakers, who said he had overstepped his constitutional authority. They took to the House floor to urge support for the bill, introduced by Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida. Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican, said Obama had triggered a constitutional crisis by taking unilateral action. “If this president is allowed to stand, it will render meaningless the separation of powers and the checks and balances that comprise the fundamental architecture of our Constitution,” he said. The White House said Obama was acting well within his constitutional authority to defer the deportations of the parents of U.S. citizens and permanent resident children in order to keep families together. It issued a statement saying if the House bill were to reach the president’s desk, he most likely would veto it. On the Senate side, Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada has said he will not bring the bill up for a vote. Democratic lawmakers note that former president Ronald Reagan, a Republican, also took executive action to shield undocumented immigrants, and that he was not accused of causing a constitutional crisis. Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois stood on the House floor beside a life-size paper cutout of Reagan and faulted House Republicans for not passing immigration reform like the Senate did in 2013. “Apparently the majority prefers to take symbolic votes instead of legislating real and lasting solutions,” Gutierrez said. Analysts said Thursday’s vote was a way to let frustrated Republican members vent their anger so they can go ahead and approve a government funding bill next week. House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, indicated he would rather postpone another big budget showdown until the next Congress arrives in January. “Next week, the House will work to keep the government open, while keeping our leverage, so that when we have reinforcements in the Senate, we are in the strongest position to take additional actions to fight the president’s unilateral actions," the Ohio Republican said. Republicans will take majority control of the Senate in January. But before this Congress leaves for its holiday recess, both the House and Senate have to pass funding bills to avoid another partial government shutdown, like the one that lasted 16 days in October 2013.  Voice of American photo
A re-enactment unit parades
in GettysburgRe-enactments
at Gettysburg
are more than just dressup By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The echo of the American Civil War of the 1860s still resonates in the United States. The descendants of those who made history come together every year to remember the greatest battles and to discuss the military campaigns of the war that almost divided the nation. The re-enactment of one of the war's most significant battles takes place each year on the streets of the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. To the naked eye, the view of this little Pennsylvania town looks like a flashback to the past. The only difference is these soldiers and officers of the Union and Confederate armies are not on a battlefield, but peacefully discussing the military campaign of 1863 that took place over a three-day period here, 150 years ago. The people who do this call it living history. They come together every year to re-create and commemorate the Battle of Gettysburg. Each re-enactor has a role. There is the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. And also the heroes of the Battle of Gettysburg, the regimental and battalion commanders, and the ordinary soldiers from both the Union and Confederate armies. President Abraham Lincoln of course is center stage. In an interview, he repeats the message of his famous Gettysburg address delivered at the dedication of a cemetery four-and-a-half months after the battle. "This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," said the actor portraying Lincoln. Many participants in this re-enactment say the Battle of Gettysburg, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, decided the future of the United States and preserved the country. "The Eagle flag has a banner that says in Latin 'E pluribus unum,' which means 'Out of many, one'. That is what we are. We are a lot of people from different countries in one nation," said one of the re-enactors. Confederate troops advancing on Gettysburg hoped to defeat the Union forces, take Washington and force the president to recognize the rights of the Southern states. Instead, they were forced to retreat. The Civil War is largely seen as a dispute over slavery. But there was also disagreement on other issues such as taxes, tariffs and internal improvements, as well as states’ rights versus federal power. Re-enactor Jim Getty said he thinks that even if the South had won, the country eventually would have come back together. "I think by now we would be one nation. We would have reunited by World War I and World War II. We would have settled our differences shortly after the war. We could not remain divided and survive," said Getty. For many Americans, historical reconstructions like these are not just a hobby, but also an opportunity to pay tribute to their ancestors, to remember the heroes who fought to create present-day America. Probe to Pluto getting wake-up call this Saturday By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Saturday, the U.S. spacecraft New Horizons is set to wake up in preparation for a six-month encounter with the dwarf planet Pluto, on the outer edge of the solar system. The NASA space probe New Horizons, launched in January 2006, is in the final stretch of its mission to the small rocky frozen dwarf planet at the far end of the solar system. Now some 4.8 billion kilometers from home, the spacecraft has spent two-thirds of its journey in slumber to preserve instrumentation that will be used to closely study Pluto during a brief 22-hour fly-by next year. Sometime this Saturday afternoon, U.S. east coast time, the probe will be awakened. Alice Bowman is New Horizons mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. She says a sleep-and-wake-up cycle has been a regular feature for the highly unusual mission. “This is the 18th hibernation that we have had the spacecraft in since launch. I know nothing in space exploration is routine, but for us, putting the spacecraft into hibernation and then having it wake up as planned, it is somewhat routine for us," said Ms. Bowman. New Horizons is so far away from Earth, it takes approximately four-and-a-half hours for a command to reach the probe and several more hours for New Horizons's confirmation to return to mission control. So Ms. Bowman and the other New Horizons scientists will not know until nighttime for sure whether the space probe fully emerged from its slumber. During hibernation periods, the spacecraft has been zipping unpowered through deep space, at times traveling as fast as 22 kilometers per second following a gravity assist from Jupiter. New Horizons is traveling so fast, it took nine hours to reach the Moon, a distance that the manned lunar missions took three days to cover. Onboard flight computer monitors keep watch over the spacecraft’s health, sending back a weekly beacon-status tone. And three onboard instruments have been passively collecting data along the way. That information will be downloaded to Earth once New Horizons becomes fully awake. At that point, the spacecraft will be only 260 million kilometers from Pluto. The temperature on the icy rock is estimated to be minus 229 degrees Celsius, meaning its atmosphere, if it has one, is frozen. Eventually, scientists like Ms. Bowman expect that Pluto will have drifted so far from the sun, any atmosphere it has will collapse on itself. “I think everyone is beginning to realize that Pluto and objects like it are more the norm in our solar system than the rocky planets and the gas giants that we are all so familiar with," she said. New Horizons’ first encounter with Pluto, which is 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth, is slated to begin on Jan. 15. The actual fly-by will last for just over 20 hours, beginning on July 14th. The probe will also train its instruments on Charon, Pluto's large moon. After that, scientists plan on using New Horizons’ remaining propellant to guide it out into the Kuiper belt, a region of space beyond the planets of our solar system, for further exploration. Internet censoring grows, Freedom House reports By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
A growing number of nations are increasingly censoring parts of the Internet and passing laws to allow for greater surveillance of what people do and say online, according to a new report issued by Freedom House. The report released Thursday and titled “Freedom of the Net 2014,” is an annual survey of 65 governments and their policies regarding the filtering or censoring of online content. It also looks at the types of electronic surveillance they conduct and how they may punish citizens whose online activities they disapprove of. “The most dramatic declines were in Russia, Turkey and Ukraine,” said Laura Reed, a Freedom House research analyst and co-author of the report. “And similar to past reports, the countries that really rated the worst overall again are Iran, Syria and China.” Of the 65 nations surveyed, 36 were rated lower on measures of Internet freedom than in the previous year, while only 12 saw their measures of freedom tick upward. Among those nations seen to be doing better were Myanmar, Tunisia, Cuba, and India. Iran also was rated marginally more free because of a slight easing of censored content, despite the author’s conclusions that Iran remains one of the worst offenders globally of violating users' free expression and privacy. Nations deemed to be less free than previously include chronic rights offenders such as Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe and Vietnam, as well as the United States, where the report authors charted minor increases in limits of content and violation of user rights. The conflict in Ukraine, beginning last year with the Euromaidan protests, were seen as the major causes for both Russia's and Ukraine’s significant slide in allowing free online expressions. In Ukraine, the surveillance of protesters by the Yanukovych regime, as well as the targeting of journalists publishing work on the web, made that nation significantly less free online, Ms. Reed said. Meanwhile, she said, Russian authorities have significantly stepped up the censorship of critical voices and independent media. “In March, they used a new law that was actually passed in December,” Ms. Reed said. “This new law allows the prosecutor general to issue orders to block online content related to extremism or calls for unsanctioned public protests. "So this law was then used quite quickly to block independent media outlets within Russia that were either reporting on events in Ukraine or that had been critical of the Kremlin,” she said. The question of Turkey, say the authors, balances on specific domestic debates about the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his professed hatred of social media. "The sharp decline in freedom mirrors the rise of social media as a tool for rallying protests and documenting government abuses," said Freedom House analyst Adrian Shahbaz. Over the past year, the the Turkish justice and development party has led a concerted strategy to demonize and discredit social media, with Erdogan famously labeling Twitter "the worst menace to society," he said. "Just weeks before the March 2014 municipal elections, we saw the blocking of Twitter, YouTube and a host of other social media platforms for their role in disseminating leaks that implicated top government officials in corruption or national security scandals," Shahbaz said via email. "The constitutional court overturned the blocks, but only after the AKP strolled to victory in the elections," he said. "Throughout the year, opposition news sites were hit by cyber attacks, online journalists were assaulted while covering protests, and numerous social media users were charged with defaming the prime minister." Asia and the Middle East were generally rated in the study as significantly less free than the Americas and Europe, with Africa presenting a mixed bag of both offenders, such as Ethiopia and Sudan, as well as nations with relatively free online expression, such as Kenya and South Africa. Among the new and more worrisome trends in this year’s report is a notable increase in the number of arrests of people for their online activities, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, where arrests increased in 10 of 11 countries studied. Other new trends include the targeting of gay or lesbian web users, as well as new laws designed to limit privacy and allow for greater governmental surveillance, with nearly 30 percent of nations surveyed passing measures to increase electronic monitoring. Another trend, Ms. Reed said, is increasing pressure against independent media outlets online. “In countries where the traditional print or broadcast media is very restricted and controlled by the government, the online sphere has really been the only place for independent or critical voices," she said. "And now we’re seeing governments crack down on those online independent voices online in very worrying ways." |
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2014 and may
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 Poder Judicial photo
This stack of toys at the
judicial offices will be delivered today to theAsociación de Obras del Espíritu Santo for distribution throughout the country. Judicial workers chip in each year to provide toys for disadvantaged youngsters. Venezuelan opposition leader denies role in any murder plot By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado says charges she was involved in a plot to kill Venezuela's president are an attempt to silence her and critics of the government. In an interview Ms. Machado said "the government has decided again to increase repression and persecution in Venezuela against every single citizen who defends and speaks out with the truth." Thursday morning, Ms. Machado met with prosecutors who told her she would be charged with conspiracy for involvement in a plot to kill Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The charge carries a maximum of 16 years in prison. Ms. Machado says the government "has no proof, because it's absolutely false." In March, government authorities announced an investigation into a plot against Maduro and other government officials involving Ms. Machado and other opposition figures. One of her attorneys says the government has yet to provide any specific proof of a link between Ms. Machado and the alleged plot. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said the charges against Ms. Machado "raise concerns once again about Venezuela's arbitrary use of prosecutorial power to silence and punish government critics." Ms. Harf repeated U.S. calls for the release of political prisoners, including a dozen students detained during government protests. So far, Ms. Machado has not been detained, but she is not allowed to leave the country. Ms. Machado is a former member of the Venezuelan national assembly. She said that she has "no fear and the truth will prevail once again and I am absolutely convinced that we are moving ahead in the transition to democracy and peace in Venezuela." |
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| From Page 7: U.S. employment picture is getting better By the A.M. Costa Rica wire services
The U.S. job market is getting stronger, according to economic studies published Thursday. The government reported that the number of newly laid-off workers signing up for unemployment insurance fell by 17,000 last week to a nationwide total of 297,000. The number has now been lower than 300,000 for 11 out of the last 12 weeks. Economists said that is a relatively low number and might be evidence that hiring is continuing to pick up. A survey of more than 800 financial executives who play key roles in running companies across the nation showed that more of them were confident the economy is improving. The study by the American Institute of CPAs also found that nearly one-fourth of firms were ready to hire, while just 13 percent were seeking new workers at this time last year. Institute member Jim Blake said, "The economy is doing much better, especially on the retail side." "People are spending money," he added. "They are feeling a little bit more comfortable with their situation." Today government experts will publish the unemployment rate for November. Economists surveyed by the Bloomberg financial news service predicted that the jobless rate would remain at a six-year low of 5.8 percent and that the economy would have a net gain of 230,000 jobs. |
