Archive for June 13th, 2008
Friday, June 13th, 2008
Costa Rica’s national soccer team will play Grenada tomorrow in a qualifying match for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.
The Ticos traveled yesterday to the Caribbean country with a heavy burden, failing to have won a game all year. And after 11 non-wins, hotly contested coach Harnán Medford was not overly optimistic ahead of tomorrow’s match.
We’re facing a club that beat the best team in the Caribbean, Jamaica (in a friendly 2-1). Let me say it again: It won’t be easy, Medford told reporters yesterday.
Costa Rica’s 20-strong roster includes Rolando Fonseca, considered the country’s all-time best striker, who plays for Guatemalan club Comunicaciones.
Tico strongmen also include striker Bryan Ruiz and midfielder Randall Azofeifa, both of Belgium’s Gent club, as well as Chicago Fire defender Gonzalo Segares and Danish team Odense Boldklub’s midfielder Cristian Bolaños.
The Costa Rica-Grenada rematch is set for June 21 at Ricardo Saprissa Stadium in the northern San José district, Tibás.
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Friday, June 13th, 2008
The Foreign Trade Promoter (PROCOMER in Spanish) aims at selling fruit pulp in the Chinese market as one of the options to diversify Costa Rican exports to that Asian nation. The intention is the Chinese use the pulp as the base for fruit juices, explained Cynthia Arias, PROCOMER economic analyst. She added that, so far, coffee and decoration plants have led exports to China.
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Friday, June 13th, 2008
Great Britain will donate $2.3 million to fund a study of the economic impact of climate change in Central America, the British ambassador to Costa Rica Thomas John Kennedy disclosed. The study will last some 15 months and it aims at showing the region’s nations the cost of not acting now and supporting a joint mitigation strategy. In 2006, Britain disclosed the Stern Report, which showed that it is necessary to invest 1 percent of the world Gross Domestic Product to mitigate climate change, and that otherwise the world would live a recession amounting to 20 percent of the global GDP.
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Friday, June 13th, 2008
Endangered scarlet macaws born in captivity are reproducing in the wild for the first time on Costa Rica’s southern Pacific Coast.
The ZooAve Center for the Rescue of Endangered Species has released 100 of the birds into the wild in the last decade. But biologists didn’t spot offspring until last year, biologist Laura Fournier said.
Since then, they have recorded 22 chicks born in the wild, and four more scarlet macaw couples have laid eggs, Fournier said.
The parrots once occupied all of Costa Rica. But hunting and poaching dramatically cut their population, and they now are found only in two national parks along the coast.
The biologists’ goal is for 200 birds to populate an isolated coastal area.
Chicks are hatched at the ZooAve center in La Garita northwest of the capital, San Jose. At six months, they take a 200-mile trip to the southern city of Golfito, then travel by boat to a beach and finally the isolated San Josecito conservation center far from human settlements. There they spend up to three more months in captivity before being released.
The parrots, which live up to 80 years, can start reproducing at age 7. Of ZooAve’s 86 scarlet macaws, 54 are in the reproduction program.
Many parrots in the breeding program were confiscated by environmental authorities or turned in by their former owners. Some can’t leave the sanctuary because they don’t know how to survive in the wild.
“Many don’t even know how to feed themselves,” Fournier said.
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Friday, June 13th, 2008
The Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid actor has been suffering from the potentially fatal disease for several months and just weeks ago had to pull out of directing a big-screen adaptation of John Steinbeck’s book Of Mice and Men.
A friend of the actor – who used to be a chain-smoker – told the National Enquirer magazine: “We have known he is seriously ill for several weeks but his loved ones are being very protective and saying very little.”
The legendary actor was reportedly diagnosed with the cancer at the New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a few hours drive from his Connecticut home, where he lives with his wife Joanne Woodward.
In March, a cancer patient claimed he had regularly seen Newman at the hospital.
He said: “He’s been there a lot, he’s even worked out in the waiting room, doing the squat thrusts. Last time, he was in there he had a long beard. Joanne is there waiting for him and being very sweet with the assistants.”
However, his spokesperson played down his hospitalisation, saying Newman was “being treated for athlete’s foot and hair loss”.
Newman has previously denied reports he has cancer.
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