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Back to School!
Notwithstanding the difficulties being faced at the Ministry of Education,
where the lack of funds is leaving some schools and classrooms with a
shortage of desks and inadequate services, the 2004 school year begins
today.
Back to school are more than one million students, 55.000 teachers in 6.250
public and 662 private schools that are part of the Ministry of Education (MEP)
system. Thousands of students that attend private schools that are not part
of the Education Ministry system have a different school year and program,
though they must follow the basic guidelines set out by the MEP.
Transit officers will be out in full force as the Ministerio de Obras
Publicas y Transporte (MOPT) had announced earlier last week that they will
be looking out for the safety of school children by ensuring that all
approved school vehicles are in a good working order and have seat belts
installed for every passenger. Transit police will also be be near schools
to slow down traffic.
Javier Chaves, Minister of Ministerio de Obras
Publicas y Transporte said that the Transit police will be implementing a
"back to classes" program that will use no tolerance between 6:30am and
7:30am and after 5:00pm.
As a custom adopted some time back, officials of the Fuerza Publica - the
national police force - will also be present at all schools at the beginning
of the school day, lunch periods and end of the day to ensure the safety of
all near or around the public schools.
Casinos Under Fire
A plan to reduce casino hours to 11 hours a day from the current 24 hours of
operation is finding opposition from the Casino Association of Costa Rica
(La Asociación de Casinos de Costa Rica).
The government has unveiled a plan to regulate the operations of casinos
that will include the hours of operation. Armando Jiménez, president of the
Association, says that if the plan is adopted it will see many casinos
closing and more than 2.000 people out of work. According to Jiménez, from
the current 35 casions, he estimates there will only be 10.
The government plan is to restrict the hours of casinos to between 6pm and
5am and be located only in hotels that has a minimum of 60 rooms. On
Weekends and Holidays, casinos will be allowed to open from 12 noon.
Currently, casino operations can only be hosted in a licensed hotel no
matter of the number of rooms. There are only a couple of casinos that do
not operate in a hotel, namely the Colonial on Avenida 1, downtown San José.
Last week, in a similar move, all walk-up sportsbooks were shut down by
officials. It has not been clear and sportsbook operators are not talking
about the closure, save that they have their lawyers working on getting
re-opened.
The government plan with in addition to hours of operation is to ensure that
the games are not fixed and win or loss is purely on chance; all coin
machines have the certificate of the manufacturer and will only be allowed
in casinos; the creation of a national regulatory body for casinos; prohibit
the entrance of minors and to prohibit the entrance to anyone who is under
the influnce and/or carrying a firearm; casino employees are to be licenses
to work the games; and, an a tax that would equal to 3.000.000 colones
annually per game table and 930.000 colones per year for each coin machine
and 720.000 colones per year for each computer that takes online bets
(virtual gambling).
Nobel Prize Winners
to Meet in Costa Rica
In unprecedented event, tomorrow (Tuesday), Nobel prize winners former Costa
Rican president Oscar Arias, Rigoberta Menchú y Adolfo Pérez, will meet in
Costa Rica to discuss the challenges faced to reach world peace.
The event will be opened by President Abel Pacheco at the Hotel Ambassador
in San José and will include the attendance of the Archbishop de San
Cristóbal de las Casas, Samuel Ruiz and members of the Nobel organization.
The forum is being called "La Memoria Comparatida" and is a pre-event to the
upcoming "Foro Universal de las Culturas" which will be held in Barcelona,
Spain, during the months of May to September this year.
Costa Rica is
Honeymooners Destination of Choice
American magazine Modern Bride has labeled Costa Rica the number-one
destination for honeymooners in the category of Best Adventure, according to
an annual poll taken among travel agencies from that Central American
country, the Costa Rican Tourism Institute informed.
The selection was based on actual honeymoon sales made worldwide by the
different destinations. The magazine describes Costa Rica as the country any
couple that loves nature can dream of, chiefly based on its humid tropical
forest and impeccable coastlines.
Furthermore, Modern Bride explains that a quarter of the country is
protected and the nation ranks 22nd in beach assessment.
Tourism Minister Rodrigo Castro won the Overall Best Entertainment Country
during the International Cities Festival held last June on the Cayman
Islands.
A total of 23 nations took part in the contest, including such world-class
destinations as Mexico and Brazil.
U.S. to Seek
14-Country Trade Deal Within FTAA
U.S. trade officials said on Saturday they planned to negotiate a high-level
trade agreement with 13 other countries in the Americas, after efforts to
craft a free trade pact covering 34 countries in the Western Hemisphere
suffered a setback this week.
A U.S. trade official, speaking on the condition he not be identified, said
the United States hopes the negotiations among the 14 countries would spur
Brazil and other members of the Mercosur trade bloc offer more concessions
in the 34-nation Free Trade Area of the Americas talks.
FTAA negotiators meeting in Puebla, Mexico, this week were unable to agree
on a framework for moving the negotiations forward. But rather than declare
the meeting a failure, they decided on Friday to "suspend" it and return to
the resort town in early March for another stab at reaching agreement.
The FTAA negotiations, which the United States still hopes will conclude by
January 2005, took a complicated turn in December when top trade officials
from the 34 nations agreed in Miami on a two-pronged approach for concluding
the deal.
The new approach crafted by the United States and Brazil abandoned the idea
of crafting a single high-level agreement covering all nine areas of the
negotiation, including agriculture, manufactured and consumer goods,
services, investment, government procurement and copyright protections.
Instead, they agreed on an approach that requires all 34 countries to agree
on a minimum level of commitments in the nine negotiating areas, but allows
countries that want to do more in some areas to negotiate separate pacts to
do that.
The Puebla meeting was intended to further define the "balanced and common
set of rights and obligations" that would apply to all 34 countries and to
outline procedures for countries to negotiate higher-level pacts.
Instead, the U.S.-led group of 14 countries insisted that Mercosur's demand
for low levels of ambitions in services, government procurement and
intellectual property rights protection be matched by similarly modest goals
in agriculture and goods, the U.S. trade official said.
"We're willing to negotiate on every item, but frankly if we're not going to
get anywhere near significant improvement in market access for services, why
should we be expected to give everything on market access for merchandise?"
he added.
Negotiators were unable to resolve that impasse, but the United States and
13 other countries that make up the bulk of Western Hemisphere trade did
agree to launch higher-level talks that will cover market access, services,
government procurement and investment, the U.S. official said.
Those negotiations are expected to begin after the resumed Puebla meeting in
March. The other countries are Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador,
Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, Chile, the U.S. official said.
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Chavez names Paris envoy as foreign minister
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday named Jesus Perez, the
current ambassador to France, as the country's new foreign minister, local
media reported.
Perez, now in Paris, will take over the post in the next few days, Chavez
said during his weekly "Hello President" television program.
Perez, who served as an environment minister from 1999 to 2000,will replace
Roy Chaderton, who was appointed as foreign minister in May 2002, shortly
after a failed coup d'etat in an attempt to oust Chavez.
Chaderton might take up the ambassador's post in Paris, the local press
reported.
However, Chavez gave no explanation in announcing the decision.
Perez will return to Venezuela in a few days and could assume his new post
before the 12th Group of 15 (G-15) summit to be held by the end of this
month in Venezuela.
The G-15 summit was originally planned for 2002, but a short-lived coup in
April that year and a subsequent 63-day strike organized by the opposition
from December 2002 to February 2003 forced the long postponement.
Rome, Milan ban
cars on Sunday to reduce pollution
Cyclists cruised and families strolled around the centers of
Italian cities of Rome and Milan on Sunday, as cars were banned in moves to
reduce pollution in the two main cities.
Milan's no-car day was planned in the autumn as part of a wider strategy
against smog, whereas the car ban in Rome was an emergency measure taken on
Friday after fine particle pollution had exceeded safety levels for five
days running, official sources said.
In Rome, the ban on cars was in force from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in a "green
area" of some 150 square kilometers. The pollution levels of Rome had
reportedly returned to safe levels Sunday, thanks partly to the traffic ban,
and partly to the light rain last night that washed some of the fine
particle pollutants away.
The initiatives have, as usual, drawn both applause and criticism.
Supporters stressed the fun and leisure the ban brough to piazzas which were
usually clogged with traffic, while critics argued that traffic bans alone
were useless unless coupled with structural action.
FAO
provides emergency aid to China for bird flu control
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has approved an
emergency assistance project to China for the control of bird flu, according
to the China Office of the FAO here.
Gamal Ahmed, the FAO's Chinese representative, said that the FAO will
allocate up to 390,000 US dollars to allow two international consultants and
two Chinese consultants to do field work in China. The FAO will also provide
necessary equipment and training to help China combat the epidemic.
China confirmed its first bird flu outbreak in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous
Region on Jan. 27 this year. So far, the country has reported 23 bird flu
outbreaks, including five confirmed ones and 18 suspected ones. The spread
of bird flu has been brought under control, and no case of transmission to a
human being has been found so far.
"The quick actions taken by the government are appropriate, and the FAO is
impressed by what the government has done so far," said Ahmed. "The FAO
stands ready to assist and cooperate with China in the matter."
Ahmed said that, following the first outbreak confirmed in China, the FAO
has cooperated closely with the Ministry of Agriculture. Ahmed said that the
ministry has kept him updated about the epidemic situation in China.
Meanwhile, the FAO and the Ministry of Agriculture have agreed to hold
meetings once a week on the bird flu issue.
Ahmed also called for regional cooperation in combating the cross-boundary
epidemic. "Governments should openly share data and information about their
control campaigns in view of the regional dimension of the crisis," he said.
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