Minister Fabius, left, and Chancellor Gonzalez. The first formal diplomatic visit to France by representatives of the administration of President Luis Guillermo Solis took place on Monday, October 6th. Chancellor Manuel Gonzalez met with his counterpart Laurent Fabius, French Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Development. At the meeting, both officials made plans to strengthen the ...

K-9 officers of the Narcotics Control Police in Costa Rica (Spanish initials: PCD) recently detected the presence of 83 kilograms of cocaine concealed under the floorboards of a bus headed to El Salvador. PCD agents noticed a certain pattern in the colorful packaging of the various confiscated bricks; some were branded with logos while others had interesting designs and packaging. What is the logi...

Alleged Greenwashing by Infinito Gold The controversial Canadian company at the center of the Crucitas open pit mining scandal stands to lose the land it acquired in San Carlos after a series of courtroom defeats. By order of the First Civil Circuit Court of Costa Rica, Infinito Gold must forfeit the land it purchased years ago near the San Juan River. The six plots of land are being held by t...

For 15 years, Joseph Floyde DeArmond lived the quiet life of a United States expat in Costa Rica. That serenity, alas, came to an abrupt end last year when field agents acting on orders from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) apprehended him, took him in custody and put him on a plane back to his native North American country.   Source: Wikimedia Commons According to a p...

  Diplomats andresearchers in Hamburg. The Ambassador of Costa Rica to the Federal Republic of Germany, Jose Joaquin Chaverri, recently visited the prestigious Technical University of Hamburg, an institution of research and higher learning that is considered a global leader in the fields of technology, environmental science, and nanotechnology. This university teaches more than 6,500 s...

Source: The United Nations The Human Rights Council, the highest body of the United on the important issue of human rights, today completed its twenty-seventh session with the adoption of 32 resolutions, 15 decisions and four presidential statements, notably including the proposal of Costa Rica on the World Program for Human Rights Education.   The following text comes from communiq...

French Mirage fighter jet In a recent institutional communication issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the government of Costa Rica reiterated its most emphatic condemnation of everything that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) stands for. This reaffirmation of repudiation was made in the wake of the killing of French citizen Hervé Gourdel in Algeria by a splinter cell that has p...

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: Ministry of Foreign Affairs The new ambassadors of India, Shamma Jain; the Vatican, Nuncio Antonio Arcari; Turkey, Ali Findik; Armenia, Grigor Hovhannissian; and Germany, Ingo Winkelmann, recently presented their diplomatic credentials to President Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera of Costa Rica.   The President received the diplomats in the Golden Hall of the Casa Amari...

  Source: Wikimedia Commons Independence may have been averted in Scotland, but the polling results of the historic referendum to separate the country from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are inspiring and motivating secession movements around the world. From Flanders to Texas and from Okinawa to the Basque Country, people who support their region's independenc...

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...

Au Pair in the Netherlands. Source: Wikimedia Commons As of July 15th of next year, parents in the Kingdom of the Netherlands who contract the services of foreign au pairs will not only be expected to pay for the cost of Dutch language classes; they will also be prohibited from scheduling their temporary live-in nannies for more than 20 hours per week. This government ruling has come under hea...

Ronaldinho with former Prtesident Lula. Wikimedia Commons. Football fans, public officials and politicians in Mexico reacted swiftly to brazen, racist comments made by a former Secretary of Social Development in the populous State of Querétaro. Carlos Manuel Treviño no longer has a political future after he posted a Facebook update calling Brazilian football star Ronaldinho a “simian.” The mor...

Source: Flickr Commons A German scientist from the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg believes that reaction to the latest Ebola epidemic in Liberia and Sierra Leone has come too late, and that these two nations could now face a severe public health emergency that may spread elsewhere in the western region of the Dark Continent. In a recent interview with the Spanish edi...

Source: Minister Gamboa's Twitter Current support for the War on Drugs is, at best, tenuous and waning. Just a few days after the Global Commission on Drug Policy called for a widespread decriminalization of as many drugs as civil societies are able to permit and tolerate, the Commanding Officer of the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) rushed to Costa Rica to meet with top officials and urge ou...

Source: Bing commercial use Sexy escorts from Costa Rica and Chile are at the center of a financial scandal exposed by Honduran news outlets such as El Heraldo and reported in nearby El Salvador by La Pagina. It all started when a beautiful and well-known model from Honduras was alleged to have swindled her country's Social Security coffers in excess of $435,000. The September 2nd headline in ...

Frozen in Time: A damaged wall clock at the station marks the time of the explosion. Source: TVN The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Costa Rica has extended a message of condolence and solidarity to the Republic of Chile in light of the terror attacks that rocked the majestic capital city of Santiago on September 8th. The Ministry's communique number 3096 was issued just hours after press repor...

  Source: Ocearch Beamer was a blue shark that used to enjoy swimming in the chilly waters off Montauk, New York. Last year, Beamer began swimming south towards the Caribbean and made it to the eastern Antilles by Christmas. The shark then made a straight swim towards Puerto Limon in Costa Rica; alas, Beamer ended up hooked on  the lines of a commercial fishing boat somewhere between P...

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: Pixabay CC When it comes to creative espionage, nobody does it better than the United States. Amidst press reports and allegations about U.S. spooks (undercover intelligence operatives) underhandedly using Costa Rica as a launching platform to secretly snoop on Cuba, our Directorate of Intelligence and Security (Spanish initials: DIS) is not willing to simply let its North American all...

  Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs Seven years ago, Costa Rica hosted the regional meeting of the Convention on Cluster Munitions for Latin America and the Caribbean. These days, Costa Rica is the leading member state in this noble effort. Speaking before representatives from 115 nations, President Luis Guillermo Solis called on Central American leaders to comply with the directives...

A Lynx unit on patrol in Panama. Source: Wikimedia Commons A practitioner of the black arts and a drug smuggler were prevented from entering Costa Rica this past weekend by officers from the Lince (Lynx) motorcycle law enforcement section of Panama's National Police. According to a news release from the EFE Spanish news bureau published by Primera Hora of Puerto Rico, the duo were attempting t...

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 ...

Ten members of two organized crime outfits operating in the United Kingdom have been sentenced by the crown court to serve more than 100 years in prison for their participation in a scheme that involved smuggling cocaine from Costa Rica to the Portsmouth Docks in the southern coast of England. Due to the logistics of the thwarted operation, this smuggling group was often referred to as the “pineap...

Prime Minister Netanyahu The State of Israel can thus far claim a military victory in Operation Protective Edge, the 2014 offensive launched by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) against Hamas and the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine. Nonetheless, when it comes to Israel's public relations (PR), foreign affairs and social media efforts, Israel's recent blunders undermine the overwhelming force...

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 ...

Source: Pinterest The embassies of Spain in Costa Rica and around the world are bracing for a wave of applications for citizenship after an article by Dina Siegel Vann in New York Jewish Week described a legislative proposal before Spain's Parliament that would grant naturalization to those with Sephardic heritage. The news propagated after a March luncheon at the headquarters of the American ...

Source: Paul Watson Facebook Timeline Paul Watson, the controversial founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and star of the popular reality television show Whale Wars of the Animal Planet cable network, recently left an interesting status update on his Facebook Timeline. Mr. Watson mentioned Ariel Bustamante, the captain of a commercial fishing vessel who was allegedly caught poachin...

General John F. Kelly, USMC. Source: Wikimedia Commons Even warriors get the blues. Looking somber, tired and perhaps a bit frustrated, United States Marine Corps General John Francis Kelly recently testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and gave a frank assessment of the Drug War as it pertains to nations such as Costa Rica, which are located between a rock (the cocaine-produ...

Source: Wikimedia Commons The frantic search for Malaysia Airlines passenger flight MH370, which never reached its Beijing destination after taking off from Kuala Lumpur, has turned into a hijacking investigation as Prime Minister Najib Razak stated that the Boeing 777-200ER may have been deliberately diverted off course. Hopes of finding the aircraft remain strong; alas, aviation history in C...

Macau, a former Portuguese colony that now operates as an autonomous region of China, is one of the most profitable gambling spots of the world. With a labor force that is less than 350,000 strong, Macau produced a GDP of $43 billion in 2011. In recent years, Macau has become ground zero for smuggling money out of China through a merchant debit card system that may soon become operational in Costa...

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...

A typical abandoned home in Detroit. The National Stadium in La Sabana, hundreds of patrol cars and the National Police Academy: These are some of the most significant donations given to Costa Rica by the People's Republic of China (PRC). Costa Rica is hardly the only country in the region to receive major aid from China; the Costa Rica Star has previously reported on the work of the PRC in th...

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. ...

Photo of prisoners at Guantanamo BayThree Chinese men unlawfully detained by the United States at the controversial Guantanamo Bay detention camp in the island of Cuba were recently cleared for release to the Slovak Republic in Central Europe. At one point, however, these Muslims were ready to start a new life in Costa Rica, at least until the People's Republic of China (PRC) got in the way. A...

Officials from the Bagaces canton in the province of Guanacaste are evaluating a nimble method of garbage collection utilized in the Free and Sovereign State of San Luis Potosi, Mexico. This curbside trash pick-up method does not involve the traditional dump truck contracts, which are often plagued by issues such as inadequate staffing, broken down vehicles, labor strikes, and subcontractor disput...