Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff.  By Britt Nelson The 15th sad anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy has come and gone, while Hillary Clinton is making excuses for her ‘deplorable’ comments about Trump supporters and Trump continues his rise in national polls. All this just as th...

By Wendy Anders EFE reported today on a CNN report that John Hinckley, the man who tried to assassinate U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981 - wounding the president and three other people in the process - was released from a Washington, D.C., psychiatric hospital on Saturday. Hinckley was released from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, CNN said, Attorney Barry Levine, who had earlier c...

Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff.  By Britt Nelson Wednesday night’s ‘Commander-In-Chief’ Forum in New York between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump did little to change minds about which candidate would best serve as the next president of the United States. Neither Clint...

Mao Zedong declares the founding of the modern People's Republic of China, October 1, 1949. Wikipedia. Mao is not an easy family name to carry in China, and a great-nephew of the epochal Chinese leader Mao Zedong, seems to understand that well, and acknowledges the importance his family attaches to maintaining their ancestor's good name. Mao Anping, 72, spoke about his great-uncle's life an...

By Wendy Anders Japan yesterday opened its 'scientific whaling' season on the north coast of country, during which it expects to capture 51 minke whales, said the Japanese Fisheries Agency to the Spanish newswire EFE. The season will end late October in the North Pacific, and it’s stated aim is to help manage maritime resources based on an analysis of the stomach contents of captured whales. ...

Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff.    By Britt Nelson Politics or religion -- take your pick – both can boil your oil faster than anything else, bursting gaskets, and causing humanity to come apart at the seams. Both have been the basis for unending wars throughout the world li...

Brasilia, Aug 31.- Brazil's Senate voted 61-20 on Wednesday to remove President Dilma Rousseff from office over budget irregularities. Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff smiles as she attends a meeting with jurists at Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, March 22, 2016. REUTERS/Adriano Machado The decision means that Michel Temer, who became interim president May 12, will serve the remaind...

Cartoon by Clay Jones Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will head to Mexico on Wednesday to meet with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, the Mexican president and Trump confirmed today. "I have accepted the invitation of President Enrique Pena Nieto, of Mexico, and look very much forward to meeting him tomorrow," Trump tweeted Tuesday night. The Mexican presidency had ind...

Cartoon by Clay Jones By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. All these Clinton emails are a slow bleed that cannot be stopped: drip, drip, drip... they keep coming. Hillary doesn’t have enough fingers to plug all the holes in the dike. Will her campaign sink, swim or sail to t...

Flickr Commons MIAMI, Florida (August 26, 2016)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today said it views with concern a series of actions taken against media and journalists in Costa Rica, Honduras and Venezuela in recent weeks that it said impair press freedom in the Latin American region. In Costa Rica, on August 18 a preventive embargo was filed against radio station Radio Columbia ...

FEALAC archive photo Laos and Venezuela presented their candidatures to co-chair the Forum for East Asia-Latin America Cooperation (FEALAC), the only body exclusively meant to enhance dialogue and cooperation between countries of the two regions. Their candidatures - to replace current co-chairs Guatemala and South Korea, whose term ends in 2017 - were one of the few outcomes of the 17th FE...

Wikimedia Commons Roger Stone, a notorious political strategist and lobbyist from the United States who initially managed the Donald Trump presidential election campaign, could soon relocate to Costa Rica. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Mr. Stone lashed out against presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and envisioned a dystopian future for the U.S., where Muslim thugs will...

Cartoon by Clay Jones By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. Reading America’s political pulse this year is kinda like trying to find a survivor at the county morgue. Likely voters repeatedly are saying the overall direction of the United States of America is pretty much de...

African migrants in Costa Rica; OAS As a nation of relative prosperity, safety and stability in Central America, Costa Rica has long attracted large numbers of migrants from the region. In recent years, it has drawn a growing influx from several Caribbean countries as well as from Africa and Asia, including some 22,000 Cubans seeking a route to the United States in 2015. The more than 400,0...

By Wendy Anders Police on duty in Limón on Costa Rica’s Atlantic coast may feel more like environmentalists than public safety workers lately. Since leatherback sea turtle eggs they have held in a protected area started hatching a few days ago, the officials have been busy getting the hatchlings to the beach in the evening and night hours for their entry into the sea, reported the Ministry o...

By Wendy Anders This afternoon, the Washington Post reported from Havana, Cuba that an agreement was reached by the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leftist rebel group to end the continent’s longest conflict after after 52 years of fighting. After nearly four years of negotiations and a ceasefire announced in June, “'We have finished fighting with w...

Wikimedia Commons Social networks users have expressed their outrage on Wednesday in support of two women on the beaches in Nice and Cannes, who were confronted by French police and made to remove some of their clothing as part of a controversial ban of the burkini, the full-body swimsuit. U.K. newspapers published pictures on Tuesday night of one of the two women being surrounded by four m...

By Wendy Anders Over the past month, leaders from about 20 unions and civic groups have held a series of meetings to define a common agenda to defend the rights of the country’s public sector employees, announced the Communication and Energy Industry Employees Union (ASDEICE). After their third meeting yesterday at the Ambassador Hotel in San José they announced a protest planned for Thursda...

Cartoon by Clay Jones By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. In a surprising turn of events, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has a 2-point nationwide lead over Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton, according to a new poll released Sunday by the L.A. Times and t...

Cartoon by Clay Jones Since the 18th century, news readers have found some of the most incisive, acerbic and brutally honest commentary about current affairs in the form of political (editorial) cartoons. Regrettably, political cartoons in the 21st century have been in a state of demise that many believe is related to the death of printed newspapers; however, the death of editorial cartoons...

Source: Liam Stack Twitter New York City authorities on Thursday removed a life-size, naturally-colored statue of a completely naked Donald Trump from Union Square in downtown Manhattan.   The statue is the work of a group of artists known as Indecline, which by placing the figure of the Republican presidential nominee in the middle of a heavily traveled square were aiming to protes...

Wikimedia Commons By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. Expats living in Costa Rica, who grew up in the United States of America, can say goodbye to the Pledge of Allegiance that was recited daily by schoolchildren everywhere beginning in 1945. For most Americans, Executiv...

By Wendy Anders The country’s Ombudsman’s Office (Defensoría de los Habitantes, in Spanish) felt the need to intervene in a troubling situation in which 12 ocelots have been killed on Costa Rica’s roads since January, pointing out that there are also human risks involved with wild animals crossing roads. Although the need for special passageways for wild animals to cross highways has been cl...

By Wendy Anders La Carpio, an impoverished neighborhood in the San Jose metro area. (ICR-CRS Archive) The Ministry of Public Security and the Costa Rican Nutrition and Health Research and Teaching Institute (Inciensa) signed an agreement today to work together on projects in vulnerable areas of the country. The primary goal of the initiative, said ministry officials today at a press conf...

Washington, D.C. - The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) welcomes the progress made in recent months with regard to the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex persons (LGBTI), particularly in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, the United States, and Uruguay. With regard to non-discrimination within the family s...

By Wendy Anders Last Wednesday August 10 at Germany’s Federal Foreign Ministry Office, Costa Rica and Germany celebrated the ratification of the establishment of legal instruments as part of an agreement to eliminate double taxation of income and assets, stated Costa Rica’s Ministry of Foreign Relations in a press release Friday. The agreement aims to provide clear guidelines for both co...

Cartoon by Clay Jones By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. Everywhere you look you these days you keep hearing why can’t voters come up with better candidates for president of the United States? Here we are, stuck with establishment-backed Democrat Hillary Clinton and her de...

ISIS fighters in Iraq. (Wikimedia Commons) The Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, said today that the current president of the United States, Barack Obama, is "the founder" of the Islamic State (IS). During a campaign rally in Sunrise, west of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Trump criticized Obama's counterterrorism strategy and said he is "the founder of IS" and that his rival in the ...

By Wendy Anders Costa Rica’s Ombudsman’s Office (Defensoría de los Habitantes) exhorted the government yesterday to continue strengthening indigenous education in order to reduce the gap between them and other students. The country’s current over 14,000 students enrolled in indigenous educational programs. Indigenous groups continue to face a gap in the quality and access to education in Cos...

President Duterte, Wikimedia Commons By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. Angry citizens and angry voters in the United States of America have only to look to the Philippines to see what can happen when certain elements of society get so out of control the government no long...

Police officers stand guard at the entrance of the Mossack Fonseca law firm office in Panama City April 12, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso American Joseph Stiglitz, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, has quit an expert commission the Panamanian government created on April 30 to evaluate the country's financial system in the wake of the Panama Papers leak, officials said. Swiss e...

Trumpoleon. Cartoon by Clay Jones By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. Just the other day a thrill-seeking sky diver jumped out of a perfectly good airplane at 25,000 feet without a parachute and survived. Donald Trump just did the same thing; but, will he survive a 15-point...

By Wendy Anders Wikimedia Commons Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega ousted 28 opposition lawmakers in July in advance of the country’s November elections, and the rocky road towards his probable reelection continues with no opposition candidates in the field. The former Independent Liberal Party (PLI) legislators are expected to appeal to the OAS for support for their removal which occu...

African migrants in Costa Rica; OAS The United Nations Refugee Agency, UNHCR, welcomes the San Jose Action Statement released today where nine countries from North and Central America  vowed  to work together to strengthen protection of refugees fleeing Central America, a landmark step ahead of UN and US summits next month on refugees and migrants. “It is vital and immensely gratifying to s...

Wikimedia Commons President Daniel Ortega will seek re-election to a third consecutive term in November, this time with his wife, Rosario Murillo, on the ticket as vice president in a contest from which Nicaragua's main opposition was pushed aside by government maneuvers. The 70-year-old Ortega filed papers Tuesday with the national elections commission to run for a fourth term as president...

The more than 2,000 Cuban migrants who have congregated in the northwestern Colombian border town of Turbo near the Panamanian border and who want to continue their journeys to the United States, will be deported to their home country or to the country they came from to illegally enter Colombia, President Juan Manuel Santos said Monday. According to what Santos told local media, Colombian autho...

Cartoon by Clay Jones By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. Every four years, the Olympics of American politics gets underway and this year is no exception. The primaries have come and gone as well as both national political conventions. Now there are two contenders; both are...

Source: Boss Tweed, Flickr Commons The New York Post published nude photographs Sunday of Melania Trump, wife of billionaire developer and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, that were taken in the 1990s. The photos were taken during a 1995 modeling session in Manhattan and were published by defunct French men's magazine Max, the tabloid reported. "This was a picture taken fo...

(CRS Archive) A group of 28 opposition lawmakers who were unseated by Nicaragua's electoral authority said they had been the victims of a "coup." "The mass ouster of opposition lawmakers is an unprecedented move in Nicaraguan history, and with it (President) Daniel Ortega ... is staging a coup on the legislature," the unseated lawmakers said Friday in a statement read by the now-former lead...

Cartoon by Clay Jones By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. Now that both the Republicans and the Democrats have held their national conventions, not much has changed. Republican New York billionaire Donald Trump and Democrat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have acc...