Source: Tri-Hard (TRAVPR.COM) USA - April 28th, 2015 - Unlimited Vacation Club (UVC) by AMResorts continues its rapid expansion with the recent news that it will open eight new properties in Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean over the next three years. Upon completion, these latest additions will bring the total of UVC hotels to 45 with a combined 17,087 rooms in 23 destinations across Me...

EFE file Madrid, Apr 23 (EFE).- Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said here Thursday that Spain has no intention of breaking off diplomatic relations with Venezuela, adding that he hopes for "democratic stability and economic prosperity" in the Latin American country. Garcia-Margallo made these remarks in his speech at the Leaders Forum, organized by EFE and KPMG, where he introd...

A massive Corinthians club flag,. Wikimedia Commons Sao Paulo, Apr 19 (EFE).- Armed men gunned down eight members of a radical fan group for Corinthians, one of Brazil's most popular soccer teams, although police on Sunday ruled out linking the massacre to a fight among rival teams' supporters. The killings occurred after 11 p.m. on Saturday in front of the Pavilhão Nove group's headquarter...

THE HAGUE (ICJ Press Release) -- During the public hearings due to open on Tuesday 14 April 2015 at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, experts have been called by the Parties in the joined cases concerning Certain Activities carried out by Nicaragua in the Border Area (Costa Rica v. Nicaragua) and the Construction of a Road in Costa Rica a...

Source: Wikimedia Commons WASHINGTON (DOJ) —Brian Karl Brimager, 37, prior boyfriend of murdered Los Angeles woman Yvonne Baldelli, was indicted by a federal grand jury in San Diego, California, today on first degree murder charges. Brimager was arraigned in court on the superseding indictment and pleaded not guilty. Brimager has been in U.S. custody since June 2013 on charges of obstructio...

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, Apr 16 (EFE).- At least 37 tons of dead fish have been removed over the past week from this Brazilian metropolis' Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, one of the venues for the 2016 Rio Olympics, officials said Thursday. Employees of the Comlurb municipal waste management company were continuing to use nets to remove the silvery fish, called twaite shad, many thousands ...

Wikimedia Commons Caracas, Apr 7 (EFE).- Some 13,000 doctors have emigrated from Venezuela in recent years, the president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation, Douglas Leon Natera, said Tuesday, while warning that "the crisis" in the sector has a "tendency to gradually get worse."   "Around 13,000 doctors have gone" from the nation's 300 private and state hospitals, specifically "7,...

Source: Flickr Commons Sao Paulo, Mar 30 (EFE).- A Brazilian man strangled his pregnant 16-year-old girlfriend, decapitated her and turned himself into police two days later after riding across Sao Paulo in a bus with her head in a plastic bag, local media reported Monday. The situation unfolded in the Pedreira neighborhood in the extreme southern part of Brazil's largest city, when handyma...

Jinotega (in red). Wikimedia Commons They call him the “Butcher of Jinotega.” Basil Edsel Givner is an expat from the United States who was convicted of the gruesome murder of Harley Silva Soza, a 34-year old man who was found decapitated and cut into eight parts in Jinotega, a coffee-producing region of Nicaragua. According to a news report by S. Ruiz of La Prensa, a major daily newspaper ...

One of Ishiguro's robots. Source: Wikimedia Commons Managua, Mar 21 (EFE).- Japanese scientist Hiroshi Ishiguro presented in Nicaragua two robots he calls "humanoids," which he developed with systems of cognitive intelligence, and which are capable of walking, talking and interacting with people. Ishiguro is director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory of the Upper School of Engineering ...

Supporters of President Maduro rally in Caracas EFE/AGENCIA VENEZOLANA DE NOTICIAS/ Washington, Mar 19 (EFE).- The Obama administration's designation of the situation in Venezuela as a threat to U.S. national security may herald a military intervention, the Venezuelan foreign minister said Thursday at the Organization of American States headquarters in this capital. "History has shown that ...

Flickr Commons A 30-year suspect allegedly tried to rape a Canadian woman who was walking down the beach of Los Brasiles Island in Poneloya, a coastal community in the Pacific seaboard of Nicaragua. Poneloya is in the district of Leon. According to a news story published by national newspaper La Prensa, the Canadian woman was all alone when Gerson Uziel Cuadra Vargas, a known felon, jumped ...

EFE file New York, Mar 17 (EFE).- Venezuela on Tuesday took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to ask the U.S. government to immediately cease its "hostile actions" against Caracas and to retract the executive order declaring the South American nation to be a threat to its national security. Entitled "Venezuela is not a threat," the ad takes the form of a letter directed at the Americ...

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, Mar 10 (EFE).- Brazil's professional soccer clubs will be penalized in the standings for failing to pay players on time, the Brazilian Soccer Confederation, or CBF, announced Tuesday. Under the CBF's "labor fair play" initiative, offending clubs will lose three points for every match played with salaries in arrears. Only players, their attorneys and the pla...

Obama imposes sanctions, declares emergency over Venezuelan threat to U.S. EFE Washington, May 9 (EFE).- U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday ordered the sanctions recently approved against top Venezuelan officials to be implemented and declared a "national emergency" over the "extraordinary risk" that, he said, the Venezuelan situation poses for U.S. security. In an executive order, Obama...

EFE Madrid, Mar 6 (EFE).- Agencia Efe on Friday denied having sent out any reports on a supposed "self-coup" staged by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and has notified authorities in Venezuela of its surprise at some statements made by the president in this regard.   In an address delivered on Thursday, the Venezuelan president said: "And the stupid people at Agencia Efe, that's...

Supporters of President Maduro rally in Caracas EFE/AGENCIA VENEZOLANA DE NOTICIAS/ Caracas, Feb 28 (EFE).- Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday ordered the United States, whose government he accuses of conspiring against him, to immediately reduce the staff of its Caracas embassy from approximately 100 to a level similar to the 20 that his government has in Washington.   ...

Brazilian law enforcement agents said the cocaine was hidden in a truck and they had acted on a tip from a taxi driver who apparently was a member of the band of drug traffickers. EFE/File .- Brazilian police seized about 1.5 tons of cocaine in an operation in Mato Grosso do Sul state, which borders on Paraguay and Bolivia, the largest confiscation of the drug in the past 10 years in Brazil, a...

Preferred weapon of guerrilla fighters. A daily tabloid from Costa Rica and an online publication run by journalists from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have recently published troubling reports of guerrillas operating in northern Nicaragua. Although both reports present some discrepancies, they both stress the issue of obfuscation by the Nicaraguan government, thereby leavin...

Source: Wikimedia Commons In a video statement broadcast by Noticias 24 in Venezuela, one of many state-owned media outlets in the troubled South American nation, President Nicolás Maduro affirmed that a group of terrorists have traveled to Costa Rica with the intention of threatening him. Such was the report published by online news daily CRHoy.com earlier today. President Maduro is one of...

Tactical police units and soldiers from the Nicaraguan Army clashed against farmers who amassed in protest against one of the most controversial, convoluted and quixotic civil engineering projects of the 21st century, the Grand Interoceanic Canal of Nicaragua. According to Mexican newspaper AM Queretaro, the violent demonstrations have left dozens wounded and two or three in critical condition. ...

The booming voice of play-by-play broadcaster Mario McGregor is well-known by football fans in Costa Rica who enjoy listening to live matches on the radio. When Mr. McGregor, who is an Afro Costa Rican from the Caribbean province of Limon, takes the microphone of Radio Columbia 98.7 FM, he gives it to you with as much love and emotion as he can muster.   While broadcasting from Brazil d...

On Thursday, November 25th, the Ambassador of Costa Rica to Nicaragua, Don Javier Sancho, officially inaugurated a library located in a public school serving the community of Ciudad Sandino. According to institutional communique 4099 of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the new library is about 15 minutes away from the populous capital city of Managua, and it holds many volumes of literature relate...

Source: Wikimedia Commons Dozens of environmental activist organizations in Managua met on Saturday and lodged a strong peremptory request to the government and to the Chinese company HKND Group to postpone their plans to begin construction of the quixotic and highly controversial Nicaragua Canal project. As published by online news daily El Pais and reported by Spanish news agency EFE, the...

Source: Flickr CC If you find traffic jams in Costa Rica exasperating, you may not want to drive in Rio de Janeiro, ever. This magnificent and populous Brazilian megacity is among the most beautiful in the world, but gridlock has been tarnishing Rio's facade; particularly after news media reported on the horrible traffic conditions during the FIFA World Cup earlier this year as well as during ...

President of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega Members of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) have issued a resolution that calls for the immediate cessation of all activity related to the construction of the controversial Nicaragua Canal, a quixotic project to build an interoceanic waterway to rival the Panama Canal. The ATBC resolution is based on what the organization estimat...

Although Costa Rica is considered by many cash-strapped expats to be the most expensive country in Latin America, data compiled by popular online travel site TripAdvisor indicates that the lovable city of San Jose is a bargain for tourists. Even when compared to Managua, the populous capital city of Nicaragua, San Jose still comes up cheaper. How did TripAdvisor arrive to this peculiar conclusion?...

Part of the San Juan River Strong warnings by scientists, a sobering maritime navigation analysis and the sudden death of a Chinese engineer are among the latest news coming from the controversial and quixotic Nicaragua Canal project, which appears to moving away from the San Juan River and Costa Rica's northern border. However, some analysts believe that the move may be temporary. The Nica...

Source: Flickr Commons Security is a major concern for the million-plus international visitors who arrive in Costa Rica every year as well as for the hundreds of thousands of expatriates who have chosen this country as their new home. This being the case, tourists and expats will probably be surprised to learn that the 2013 Gallup Law and Order Index puts Nicaragua and Panama as the safest nat...

Source: Bing Creative Commons The administration of President Daniel Ortega has granted oil exploration and drilling permits to a couple of European firms. According to a report by Radio Columbia in Costa Rica, Nicaragua's official news media outlet 19 Digital made the announcement during a meeting between Francisco Lopez, president of state-owned energy giant Petronic and representatives from...

Source: CONCACAF As widely expected, the National Men's Football Team of Costa Rica, affectionately known as La Sele, shutout their Nicaraguan counterparts by a score of 3-0 at the Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Stadium in the District of Columbia. This was the first match for both teams in the Tigo Central American Cup (UNCAF), a regional tournament that is being played as a warm-up to the upcoming ...

Source: Revista Paquidermo Creative Commons On the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Panama Canal, a special situation was being scrutinized by intelligence and special operations analysts at the secretive United States Combined Air and Space Operations Center located within Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Master Sergeant Kelly Ogden wrote the following account for the U.S. Defense ...

The Panamanian / Costa Rican border is in constant flux. The most recent change occurred quietly over the last few weeks. Panamanian border officials are now entering your ticket details into the computer to validate if your flight is a valid outbound flight. Due to perpetual tourism in Costa Rica (a practice where a person without residency lives in Costa Rica by renewing their tourist visa every...

Source: Wikimedia Commons The National Men's Football Teams of Costa Rica and Mexico have chosen their respective training facilities ahead of the FIFA 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Although both teams will be hosted by Santos FC, Mexico chose the magnificent Rei Pele (Pele the King) training center, which features a state-of-the-art gym and two modern pitches. Costa Rica, on the other hand, will ...

A petition by Costa Rica before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to determine clear maritime boundaries on the issue of international borders with Nicaragua goes beyond the intentions of President Daniel Ortega to build a transoceanic canal. It is the possibility of oceanic exploration for sources of oil and methane by Nicaragua that has Costa Rica worried. A recent article by Pablo Roj...

Crater Dome at Poas Volcano. Source: RSN Volcano tourists rejoice: The Central American portion of the Ring of Fire is currently on fire, and volcanoes in Costa Rica and Nicaragua are showing off their natural beauty and power with sulfur emissions, red-hot glowing walls, phreatic (ground water eruptions), and even seismic events from deep within. The colossi in question are the Poas and Turri...

President of Nicaragua Daniel OrtegaA few years after the turn of the century, Costa Rica stopped being the darling destination for long-term visitors, expats and retirees. Around the time the housing bubble in the United States was about to burst, jaded (and broke) expats started looking for a Shangri-la known as “the next Costa Rica,” a place many believed could be found in the ultra-cheap neig...

This Sora Mountain estate overlooks the Pacific Ocean in Panama. As the cost of living in Costa Rica continues its steady and relentless climb, the real estate market is responding in sync. In 2012, the Inter-American Development Bank labeled San Jose as the city with the most expensive real estate in Latin America, and luxury housing construction in Guanacaste shows no signs of slowing down. ...

For the past nine years, downtown Nicoya has been lit up during the month of December with the Festival of Light celebration. The main day of this year’s festival, Nicoya Shines 2013, will be on Saturday, December 7th. On that date, the program includes the presentation of 15 bands from Costa Rica and Panama to commemorate the 165th anniversary of the Canton of Nicoya, which was established as ...

Source; ACG Costa Rica As marine biologists and members of the National Coast Guard Service of Costa Rica scramble to investigate the mysterious massive death of dozens of green tropical sea turtles off the Pacific coast of Guanacaste, disheartening news reports are arriving: 23 marine turtle carcasses have washed in Playa La Flor in Nicaragua, and many of them are showing inscrutable signs of...