Archive for July 17th, 2008
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
Here’s a thought: Rig all the stationary bikes in fitness centers across San joe to generate wattage from their drive-trains and feed it into the grid. Exercisers burn calories, loose weight, generate electrical power. Wattage produced can be monitored by magnetic-strip cards issued that the user puts in card reader at the bike station.
Then, get a leader board that keeps track of high-wattage producers. Recognize with accolades, gifts, whatever, the top wattage generator of the session, day, week, month, year.
Wattage created can be sold by exercisers to offset gym costs, and even could be credited to the exerciser’s home address, or donated.
What are we talking about? Hundreds of thousands of stationary bikes in gyms across the country? Every day that would amount to a lot of generated electrical power, day after day.
Someone ought to invent a conversion pack to retrofit on the stationary bikes, and we’d be cookin’.
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
Mexican sailors ride on top of a seized drug smuggling submarine off the coast of the Pacific resort city of Huatulco.
Mexico’s navy seized a homemade submarine carrying a drug shipment off the Pacific coast on Wednesday and arrested its four-man crew.
Similar vessels carrying cocaine have been discovered off Colombia and Central America, but navy spokesman Capt. Benjamin Mar said the seizure is a first for Mexico.
The 30-foot (10-meter) makeshift submarine was detected heading north about 200 miles (322 kilometers) off the southern state of Oaxaca, Mar said.
The green-topped, arrowhead-shaped vessel was intercepted when it surfaced hours later, and the crew was taken into custody without resistance.
The suspects were flown by helicopter to the city of Huatulco, where they told reporters they left the Colombian coastal town of Buenaventura a week ago.
The crew members said they were fishermen forced to make the journey by drug traffickers who threatened to harm their families.
“We didn’t know what was on board because we never saw it. It was sealed,” said one of the four, Jose Felix Enriquez.
The navy said in a statement that the sub was apparently packed with cocaine, but authorities were still determining how much was on board.
Colombia’s drug cartels have been known to use home-built submarines to smuggle large amounts of cocaine past U.S. and Colombian patrol boats to Central America en route to the United States.
Colombian authorities have discovered at least nine such vessels over the past three years. Last August, U.S. forces intercepted a submarine-like vessel packed with tons of cocaine off the coast of Guatemala.
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
When you think of Costa Rica, you automatically think of how beautiful the destination is. Boasting some of the most stunningly beautiful beaches, thousands of tourists flock to Costa Rica each year in order to relax and get away from it all. However, there is more to Costa Rica than its nice sandy beaches. In fact there is a whole lot of adventure to be found if you look under the surface.
You can experience horseback riding, hiking and whitewater rafting to name just a few of the activities on offer. So if you want a combined holiday of adventure and relaxation then Costa Rica just may be the destination to suit you. (more…)
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Thursday, July 17th, 2008
Costa Rica is most often thought of as a country with pristine coastlines, emerald mountains, and a relaxed vibe to vacation in. What is not often thought of are paramilitaries, assassins, and rouge police officers.
In the last several decades the government of Costa Rica has sent at least 2,600 police officers to be trained at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA). On Wednesday, May 16, Costa Rican President Óscar Arias, an ’86 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said that he would withdraw the current enrollees from the school that June and vowed that no more would be sent in the future. While the country has no standing army, at the time of his decision, there were reportedly three police personnel training at the school.
“We must understand that this decision does not in any way contradict our alliance with the United States in the struggle against crime and neither does it impede cooperation in security programs to professionalize our police,” Arias said. As with most Central American countries, Costa Rica does have close ties to the U.S. in its continued struggle against illegal drug smuggling and continues to be a partner in this realm.
Although Arias is considered by some in the U.S. to be a leftist, who then to try to lump his policies in with those of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez or Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, he is rather free trade minded (he has worked very hard to push DR-CAFTA in Costa Rica which he put to a popular vote in October) and can be seen as politically very centrist. However, a move such as this is not surprising given Arias’ past work on arms reduction and his attempts to unify the countries of Central America in common cause for peace and justice. (more…)
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