An announcement has been made of a Brazilian investment of $25 million to install a brewery in San Jose. An article in Nacion.com reports that Rui José Prudencio is the president of Grupo Mix, a company in Costa Rica dedicated to importing Brazilian products through its distributor Dibras. Rui Prudencio announced that a Brazilian consortium is to develop the beer Colônia in Costa Rica ...

Source: NASA SAN JOSE – Starting at 11:00 PM on Sunday, August 5th (0500 UTC/GMT on Monday, August 6th), TV viewers in Costa Rica will be able to watch live coverage of the latest United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission to Mars on Teletica channel 7. The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft is currently just a few hours away from the Red Planet. This space vehicl...

SAN JOSE - Bangalay came to Costa Rica by accident. He arrived while travelling from his native Côte d'Ivoire, heading towards what he believed was the United States. However, the ship he boarded left him in Panama and after being detained for some time, he managed to take a bus to Costa Rica, where he sought asylum. This explains how the 17-year-old came to be seated in a Spanish class cre...

Expressing its concern at the deterioration of the rule of law in Nicaragua, and the 337 cases of claims by American citizens that their property had been confiscated, the United States today approved a so called property waiver, which in practice means that it will support international agencies which the Nicaraguan government seeks loans from. An article in Noticias.terra.com.co, reports ...

A group of 100 health professionals affiliated with the International Medical Alliance are traveling from California to spend 10 days treating very low-income patients in Nicaragua. Antonio Gonzalez, a dental surgeon with the IMA, told Efe that an initial group of 12 medical professionals began traveling to Tujunga, Ecuador, to perform such work in 2000. More than a decade later, scores ...

An agency that monitors the U.S.-Mexico boundary is agreeing to a U.S. proposal to build border fence segments in a South Texas flood plain, a move Mexico opposes. The decision by the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission comes despite objections from its Mexican counterpart. Mexico argues the fence would deflect floodwaters to its side of the Rio Grande and violate a bi-national...

Source: Flickr News media reports in Costa Rica and Germany indicate that a high court in the state of Hesse has issued an arrest warrant for Paul Watson, the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and star of the reality television hit show Whale Wars. Mr. Watson has failed to appear this week before court-appointed German officials assigned to his bail supervision while he awaited ex...

Hollywood star Darryl Hannah and Paul Watson in 2008. Source: Flickr SAN JOSE – Paul Watson, the contentious environmentalist and founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, may have left Germany -according to a news report written by Hulda Miranda of prominent newspaper La Nacion. Mr. Watson had been in Germany since May 13th, after he was arrested in Frankfurt by law enforcement officers...

The State Government is offering a $100,000 reward for information about the suspected murder of a Huskisson teenager more than a decade ago. Kathleen Harris, 15, was last seen at her home by friend Clinton Hanlon about 9pm on May 31, 1999. She had planned to meet with friends the following day but never arrived and was reported missing by her father and Mr Hanlon. Mr Hanlon was a member ...

A shipping container filled with rubber duckies was lost at sea in 1992, and the bath toys are still washing ashore today. In 1992, a shipping crate containing 28,000 plastic bath toys was lost at sea when it fell overboard on its way from Hong Kong to the United States. No one at the time could have guessed that those same bath toys would still be floating the world's oceans 20 years later. ...

The South African Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Ms Tina Joemat-Pettersson recently led a delegation, including the Transvaal Agricultural Union, the African Farmers' Association of South Africa (AFASA), National African Farmers' Union of SA (NAFU) and AgriSA on a study trip of the small-scale farming initiatives run by Walmart in Costa Rica. The Minister attended as part of h...

Once revered for their freedom, entrepreneurship and credibility of the US dollar, American citizens are now becoming second class citizens in the eyes of the world. The restrictions set forth by the new US law, FATCA, are so repulsive to some foreign institutions that they have elected to simply stop doing business with Americans. Several European banks have elected to no longer serve America...

SWAT team members in Costa Rica practice rappelling. Source: Fuerza Publica Costa Rica has various characteristics that make her unique: biodiversity, ecotourism, strong democratic roots, a commitment to environmental protection, and the lack of a military force. Costa Rica's constitutional abolishment of the military took place in 1949 after a bloody civil war, and since that time the country h...

OTTAWA — Two-thirds of Canadians think the law should be changed so that people caught with small amounts of marijuana no longer face criminal penalties or fines, a new poll has found. The nationwide survey for Postmedia News and Global TV, which examined the state of Canadian values, revealed that the public is distinctly offside with the Harper government on the issue. Earlier this spring,...

Coffee farmers in the world's top producer, Brazil, have been shielded to some extent from the sharp fall in arabica prices by rising yields, traders said on Thursday. Lower prices are compensated by much higher yields, said Carlos Brando, director at P&A Marketing International, the speciality coffee and coffee machine exporter. P&A data shows that average Brazilian coffee yields have nearly ...

Source: Sea Shepherd It has been nearly six weeks since Paul Watson was arrested by German authorities based on criminal charges filed by prosecutors in Costa Rica more than 10 years ago. Mr. Watson is the controversial founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and the star of Whale Wars, the popular Animal Planet reality television show that follows him and his crew as they disrupt whali...

Enrique Castillo, Chancellor and Minister of Foreign Affairs in Costa Rica, has issued a formal statement of disapproval with regard to the lightning-fast impeachment of former President Fernando Lugo in Paraguay. Chancellor Castillo was still at the somber Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development with President Laura Chinchilla when the impeachment took place in Paraguay. Cost...

The 2012 Happy Planet Index (HPI) was issued earlier today, and Costa Rica tops the list as the happiest country on Earth. The HPI is compiled and release by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), an independent think tank based in the United Kingdom that focuses economic well-being. The NEF describes the HPI as a report that measures and focuses on what really matters: sustainable well-being and how...

Can the capital city of Costa Rica be transformed into an approximation of a New York city neighborhood? More specifically, can the metropolitan park of La Sabana mirror parts of the swanky Central Park district of Manhattan. According to an article in Diario Extra, which cites El Nuevo Herald from Miami and the Spanish EFE news agency as sources, a future presidential candidate in Costa Rica thin...

It's just going to be a short, two-hour commuter flight to your business meeting. But that will give you plenty of time in the air to polish up your presentation on your laptop, right? Sounds like a good idea until your seatmate arrives, armed with hundreds of pictures of the grandkids that will be unceremoniously shoved in your face despite your efforts to discourage it. So what to do? Try to ...

*Important note: this is an opinion article written in the Blog section* The voice of the vast majority of ocean users is heard and they are not catch and release billfishers. Fishers should always have access to most of the worlds oceans, not just for sport but to eat! But the world does need some places in the ocean to be free of nets and lines. Catching and releasing endangered billfish...

June 29th will see the opening of Singapore's newest park - Gardens by the Bay - and is comprised of three separate areas - Bay East, Bay South and Bay Central. This massive, 101 hectare park came to fruition with a price tag of over $1 billion dollars. A most interesting feature about this particular project is that it is adding over 220,000 different species of plants from around the world. E...

Just to hear the title of the movie 'Scent of a Woman' makes one automatically think of the dance scene with Al Pacino and Gabrielle Anwar. Even blind, Pacino's character brought out the lusty qualities of the dance. Tango is to dancing what musk is to fragrances. It is earthy, sensual and has a most interesting history. Present day tango is inextricably connected to Buenos Aires, Argentina whe...

Earlier today, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon made the following comment in a press release ahead of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) that will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 20 to 22 June: “Sustainable development is an idea whose time has come. It is the future we want.” At the Rio+20 summit, world leaders will be paying close attention t...

The National Center For Education Statistics released a report on numbers of foreign students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities. Not surprisingly, 61% of those students were from Asia with the largest percentages enrolling from China and India. The number of Chinese undergraduate students in the U.S. has doubled in just the past couple of years, jumping from around 10,000 only five yea...

Initially it did not occur to Vaughn Spethmann and Dustin McBride that their 2004 university field trip to Zambia would become a generative event. But the two friends unwittingly embarked on the journey of a lifetime. As impressed as the two young men were with the kindness and hospitality of the Zambian people they met, their initial first impression was marred by the reality of the stark livi...

Honduras will be working on revamping their entire judicial system and national police force. No small task to be sure. But the need for such widespread measures is necessary according to many local people in the aftermath of recent U.S. backed Honduran raids against drug trafficking cartels along the Mosquito Coast. The raids, targeting drug cartel activity, instead were directed at innocent ...

No one fails to admire the beautiful and often times intricate embroidery designs on those soft 100% Indian cotton shirts. Frequently embellished with hand-sewn beading, these skirts, shirts and accessories are largely sought after by the back-to-nature crowd wanting clothing made of natural fiber fabrics. But just where they come from and at what cost are questions that many people are startin...

Fanm, (Creole for ‘Womens’ Rights’) is a fine art exhibition focusing on women and currently showing at Kaz Zanana Restaurant in the Seychelles capital of Victoria. The island country’s newly formed ARTerial Seychelles Network is the organizer of this show. The group is hoping that this will become the first of many such exhibitions to highlight local talent. The paintings of local artists Geo...

Paul Watson and Julian Assange are two controversial activists who currently share a few things in common. They are both in Europe awaiting extradition proceedings related to criminal charges, they have captured news media headlines, they have managed to stir up polarizing opinions with regard to the significance of their work, and they have also called attention to the possibility of political mo...

Can you spot the mispeled word in this sentence? There is an error of contest in this sentence. And a typpo in this one. The answers are: misspelled, context and typo. If you correctly guessed all of them, you might be able to safely turn off the auto-correct feature on your computer or smartphone. The rest of us are in desperate need of spellcheck and auto-correct, and according to a recent ar...

When Thomas Warth went to Africa in 1988, he was focusing on visiting a friend in Uganda and climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. His goal was a bit higher, so to speak, than constantly thinking about books, even though books were his passion and life’s work. Warth noticed during that fateful trip which included a visit to a local Ugandan library, that books there were practically non-existen...

It was five years ago that former President and Nobel Peace Laureate Oscar Arias Sanchez officially announced that Costa Rica was breaking diplomatic relations with Taiwan and initiating talks with the People's Republic of China (PRC). Many Ticos received the announcement with a certain level of guarded apprehension in 2007, and now Costa Rica is the only country in the Central American isthmus th...

Many people have never heard of Chagas Disease. Unless they contract it. Also known as American Trypanosomiasis, the majority of people who have been infected live in Central and South America and currently number more than 8 million. There have been about 300,000 cases reported in the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control, CDC, report about 20,000 deaths annually. Because Chagas has some simila...

Long the bane of worldwide travelers, the problem of electrical plug adapters seems to be a thing of the past according to electrical product manufacturer, Wonpro in Xiamen, Fujian, China. Wonpro reports that it has obtained patents on a new type of plug socket from 50 other countries and that it will accept more than 20 different types of plugs from every corner of the globe. They are currentl...

As more details are turning up in relation to the horrific attack that a homeless man suffered in Miami at the hands and teeth of an ethnic Haitian man turned cannibal who was shot to death by police, many people are pointing to drug-induced psychosis as the possible motive behind the gruesome and unprovoked assault. Given the ethnicity of the attacker and the community where the events unf...

Support groups, Chess Club, Tuesday bridge groups, addictions support groups along with a plethora of fraternal organizations – the list is endless. Throughout the ages people have gathered to share opinions, council, interests, hobbies and beliefs. The world of the internet is no exception. What used to require traveling to a meeting hall, church or someone’s living room is now accomplished w...

Aging and frail-looking, a group of South Korean women, along with a large number of supporters, held their weekly Wednesday gathering in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, South Korea. It was the 1000th such rally held since 1992 in protest of the Japanese government’s maltreatment of them during World War II. The embassy keeps its blinds shut during the protests and does not comment. The...

Hugo Jose Sanchez thought he had it all figured out. The 57-year old man from the United Kingdom planned to establish a business in the burgeoning 3G computer graphic imaging (CGI) and animation industry in Costa Rica. Working as a web developer for music retailer HMV was not cutting it, and he longed for the success of companies such as the Morpho animation studio in San Jose. Perhaps he thought ...

Miami is often considered the Latin American capital of the world, and it is home to glamour, crime, corruption, trigger-happy cops, and the strangest stories. Two recent Miami news reports exemplify why the Magic City is as unusual as it is alluring. The first report comes from the Miami Herald. Several reporters contributed to a story that juxtaposed the hedonism and party atmosphere that is ...