Anti-drug Efforts
Delegates from law-enforcement agencies from Colombia, Central America, Mexico, and the United States met at the city of Puntarenas, on the Costa Rican Pacific, to coordinate actions and strategies to fight drug-trafficking.

The Minister of Public Security of Costa Rica, Rogelio Ramos, asserted that the outlook for the coming year is not a bright one, since some 1,100 tons of cocaine will be produced in Colombia. Minister Ramos pointed out that this fact is a major challenge for the law-enforcement agencies, whose coordination and confidence will be tested in the coming months.

Central America is a bridge linking the largest producer, Colombia, and the largest consumer of drugs, the U.S., analysts agree; therefore the efforts to fight the smuggling of the illegal substances through the isthmus, which last year amounted to 600 tons.
 

More Women Unemployed
During the last year, more women than men of the economically active population were unemployed.

While 8 out of every 100 women are unemployed, the figure for men is less than 6 per every 100.

This means that 52,000 of the 612,000 active women are not earning a salary.

According to data from the International Labor Organization, unemployment among Costa Rican males decreased from 6.1 percent last year to 5.8 percent in 2004, while the figure for females went from 7.6 percent to 8.2 percent.

According to analysts, a crisis in the textile sector is one of the main reasons for more Costa Rican women to be unemployed this year.
 

Calling Nicaragua? No Answer? The Problem Isn't Your Telephone.
Well, it seems the dispute between the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE) and the Telecomunicaciones de Nicaragua (Enitel)  is still going on and as such Enitel has blocked all incoming calls from Costa Rica.

The dispute is over tariffs. A call to Nicaragua from Costa Rica costs us$0.40 per minute during peak times and us$0.28 per minute during evening hours (10pm to 7am).

There are about 1.2 million calls from Costa Rica to Nicaragua each month which grosses ICE some us$462.000.

The dispute is over an additional payment of us$0.12 per minute Enitel wants to calls made to it's cellular network, ICE is refusing.

The numbers affected are those beginning with:

600 to 608
610 to 611
613 to 618
623 to 629
805 to 807
820
821
830 to 840
841
843 to 848
850 to 856
860 to 889
893 to 899

 

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Chang-Diaz First Naturalized Astronaut By Julie D. Soo I grew up with a fairly strong Asian upbringing,” said Franklin Chang-Diaz of his childhood in Costa Rica and Venezuela. “I’m one-quarter Chinese and three-quarters Costa Rican/Spanish. My paternal grandfather immigrated to Costa Rica from Southern China - Guangchow. I still have a large number of family members there.” Chang-Diaz said that he has the Chinese characters of his grandfather’s name, Win Tin Chang, a revolutionary who sympathized with Sun Yat Sen in 1910, the founder of modern China. As with the names of other Chinese immigrants, the family name evolved from Chen to Chang, using the same Chinese character. The oldest APA astronaut, Chang-Diaz was born in 1950 before there were astronauts. He recalled his introduction to the Space Age in 1957 with Russia’s Sputnik 1. “My mother made clear that human beings could travel to other planets. I became fascinated with space, characters in science fiction and space explorers.” There was no military in Venezuela then, so he never envisioned himself being a military person in order to be associated with space exploration. His family had defined astronauts as scientists to him. “I wanted to be just like my father,” said Chang-Diaz of his adventuresome father who took the family from Costa Rica to Venezuela during the big-oil-business days to become a construction foreman building major infrastructure for the country. “He taught me about a strong work ethic: to be honest and to be on time.” Graduating from high school in 1967, Chang-Diaz worked for eight months and saved $50 before landing on the doorstep of some relatives in Hartford, Conn. “The language barrier was hard,” recalled Chang-Diaz, who at the time spoke only Spanish and French. “I almost failed my classes, but things picked up two to three months before the end of the school year.” NASA’s Apollo rekindled his sense of purpose in immigrating to the United States. He received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in applied plasma physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. “All of the astronauts before me were U.S.-born white males with mostly military backgrounds,” Chang-Diaz explained. “I am Asian/Hispanic and foreign-born, but I felt the sentiment [underlying astronaut selection] might change.” In 1977, he became a U.S. citizen. He felt ready to become an astronaut: “I was a citizen, I had a science background, I was in good physical condition and I was in good health.” Chang-Diaz submitted an application to NASA’s shuttle program in 1980. He was selected in May and became an astronaut in 1981. “I began to break the mold,” he said. Chang-Diaz became the first non-U.S.-born astronaut. As a veteran of seven space flights, he understands his family’s worry. “Ten days after coming back from my first mission, the Challenger [disaster] happened. By luck my crew was shifted to the earlier shuttle. It was a realization of fragility that I didn’t recognize my first time in space. The first time felt fun, indestructible. I approached my second flight with a scar. I was no longer a rookie; I had battle scars that hurt.” His most recent mission in the summer of 2002 was the one right before the Columbia disaster. “My wife is a physician with the space program, and it’s a hard moment when we need to part. There’s now been two accidents, and my wife says, ‘Don’t push your luck.’ It’s hard on my mother; she takes everything in stride. I have all the fun up in space, and they have all the worry.” Chang-Diaz is also director of the Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory at Johnson Space Center. He’s working on plasma rockets to Mars and believes human travel to that planet will happen in this lifetime. Travel now takes 10 months; Chang-Diaz is working to reduce it to one month. “It will make old rockets look like horse and buggy,” he exclaimed.

Insidecostarica.com will also be closed for the holiday season from December 21 to January 4. Our last regular publication for the year 2004 will Sunday 19 December. We will publish a special edition on Thursday December 30. We wish you all a happy holiday season, wherever you may be.

Virus Alert!

"Happy holidays": a good intention disguised as a virus.

Zafi.D sends itself out in email messages that pass themselves off as Christmas greetings.

According to data gathered by the free online antivirus Panda ActiveScan, the Zafi.D worm, which appeared just yesterday, is already the most frequently detected virus around the globe, mainly in South America and Europe.

This worm spreads in a file attached to email messages containing the text Happy holidays! As we are in the run up to Christmas, users are sending millions of greetings via email, which is helping Zafi.D to spread widely and rapidly.

To prevent this worm from continuing to spread, especially through computers that do not have adequate anti-malware protection installed, Panda Software has released its free PQREMOVE utility, which detects and eliminates Zafi.D from all the computers it may have infected. This tool can be downloaded from:

http://www.virusportal.com/
com/downloads/utilities/.