By Wendy Anders Every year in July, the National Census Institute (INEC) sends surveyors to a sample of homes throughout Costa Rica to provide updated demographic and economic data to policy makers. Starting today, the survey, known in Spanish as La Encuesta de Hogares, aims to reach an estimated 13,5000 homes with questions on income, poverty, equality, access to good and services, land use...

Wikimedia Commons By Wendy Anders Convergys, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based customer and information management company, announced another expansion of operations in Costa Rica today in a press statement. After adding 500 jobs in February, the company has had another boost in their growth and will add 500 more positions at their Ultra Park site in Heredia. The Heredia Ultra Park II shared...

Thousands of Cuban migrants remain in shelters across Costa Rica. (CIDH/Twitter) By Wendy Anders After months of behind the scenes meetings and dialogue, the eight Central American Integration System (SICA, in Spanish) members met last week on Roatán Island, Honduras and welcomed Costa Rica back. At the June 28-30 meeting, leaders agreed to a forward-looking agenda that convinced Costa R...

By Wendy Anders New Costa Rica Marine Fuel Dock Nears Completion The Costa Rican State Oil Refinery (Recope) announced the completion of 85 percent of the work on a new marine terminal for receiving petroleum at the Moín, Limón port on the Caribbean coast. Last week, the construction of the dock’s five arms was completed, said Recope. Engineer Reina Naranjo who is in charge of the proj...

Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome [email protected]://wellcomeimages.org By Wendy Anders As of 7:00 pm today the National Children’s Hospital has closed their general emergency services until further notice due to a saturation of services by children with a virulent sinus infection. Dr. Olga Arguedas told the press that the Children’s Hospital is only accepting chi...

By Wendy Anders After investigations into electoral irregularities by Austria’s interior ministry, the country’s highest court called for a presidential rerun at a date still to be determined, reported Alexei Korolyov today from Vienna, Austria in a special report for USA Today. The investigations were requested by the New Freedom Party (FPÖ), a far-right populist party, who lost to Green Pa...

By Wendy Anders The BBC confirmed today that a German tourist died yesterday while purportedly posing for a photo of himself leaping off a cliff as he toured the 15th-century Peruvian Incan citadel of Machu Picchu. Oliver Park, 51, said the BBC, “ignored safety signs and warnings from wardens and went into a restricted area close to the edge of a cliff on Wednesday, according to local offici...

Lifeguard Seco Herrera. Source: Facebook By Wendy Anders Waves in the Caribbean are predicted to reach up to 8 1/2 feet tomorrow, Friday, and over 9 1/2 feet on Saturday, dropping on Sunday, and then rising again next Tuesday, said the University of Costa Rica’s Ocean Sciences Investigation Center (CIMAR) in an alert today. Likewise, small crafts under 24 ft. are warned that rough Pacific ...

https://vimeo.com/171124011 Meet Andre Moreno Hamm, an elite skier who aims to represent Costa Rica at the 2018 South Korea Winter Olympics. A Costa Rican skier? That’s right. This 20-year-old slope style skier for the Costa Rican Olympic Committee will embark on the World Cup circuit in January to qualify for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. Raised in Boulder, Colorado, Andre divides hi...

Guanacaste local drug group structure. Courtesy of Ministry of Public Security. By Wendy Anders Cocaine might be harder to come by these days in Guanacaste, especially from your local seller. Liberia, capital of the Guanacaste province of Costa Rica, was the scene of a large drug bust this morning when Drug Control Police (PCD in Spanish) captured three ring leaders and several underling...

ARCHIVE / ILLUSTRATIVE (Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Public Security) By Wendy Anders Over the weekend, Costa Rican immigration police cooperated in a regional sting operation, El Operativo Mesoamérica, to detain alleged human traffickers, reported Radio Monumental yesterday. At least 25 arrests were made in Guatemala, El Salvador, Panamá, Honduras, and in Costa Rica, where eight we...

Copyrights [email protected] By Wendy Anders Edwards Lifesciences Corporation (NYSE: EW), the Irvine, California-based world leader in heart valve technologies and hemodynamic monitoring, announced today they are expanding operations to set up a heart valve manufacturing plant in Cartago, Costa Rica. Located in the La Lima Free Zone in Cartago, the company is currently looking to fill abo...

Bathroom with lights on. By Wendy Anders Yesterday, the Public Services Regulatory Agency (Aresep) announced changes to electricity rates which will be in effect from July through September. The agency cited a 6.64 percent increase in energy production costs due to the use of fossil fuels to meet the growing energy demand earlier this year, mainly to cover industrial and commercial energ...

By Wendy Anders From 7:00 am to 3:00 pm today and tomorrow everyone is asked to bring old tires, electronic waste, plastics, aluminum waste, glass, and tetra-brik packages for disposal at the Jacó Gollo. The activity is part of an ongoing community effort to eliminate mosquito breeding areas and to reduce the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases. The Jacó-Garabito area of Costa Rica’s ...

Costa Rica Railway with Passenger Train By Wendy Anders You aren’t alone in feeling there’s been lots of talk and little action on urban trains; the law to modernize the sector that finally passed the Legislative Assembly on April 26 has been under discussion since 2011. It appears that some concrete changes might actually start to take place soon, as the law has already passed scrutiny ...

By Wendy Anders Cleaning out your closets might provide you with some trade opportunities; bartering, human’s oldest form of economic transaction has gone digital. A new App, available for both iOS and Android, facilitates bartering in Costa Rica. Over the past four months the platform has aided close to 6,000 transactions. “Su Canje” currently has some 7,000 App users and over 22,000 lik...

By Wendy Anders You may want to take a trip to the gas station today or tomorrow. An increase in gas prices recently approved by the Public Services Regulatory Agency (Aresep) will take effect later this week.  It more than doubles the decrease that went into effect this past March. In the past such hikes have caused long lines at stations as people stock up to save a little before prices go ...

By Wendy Anders While business owners, legislators, and government offices alike consider a host of measures to alleviate commute times and its stress on workers and families, the vehicles keep pouring in. Car imports for the first five months of the year are up 26 percent over last year’s same time-frame as reported today by CentralAmericaData.com. And car sales in March, as reported in ...

File photo By Wendy Anders The Costa Rican Chamber of Restaurants (Cacore, in Spanish) today filed with the Civil and Adminstrative Disputes Court for an injunction against the State Treasury Department (Hacienda). They request that the Treasury Department desist from what they consider to be illegal withholding practices on debit and credit card transactions at establishments with table an...

By Wendy Anders Last year’s mid-term July school vacations were dampened by 12 deaths, over 536 traffic accidents, and over 4,500 other accidents in just a 2-week period, stated the Ministry of Public Works and Transportation in a press statement today. This year, Transit Police will have 744 officials conducting intensive preventive operations from Sunday, July 3 - Sunday, July 17. In ad...

By Wendy Anders Costa Rica became a signatory to the new global Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS at the 2016 High Level Meeting on Ending AIDS held in New York, June 8-10. With this, the country committed to increase AIDS prevention activities to significantly reduce transmission over the next five years, and to become the second country in Latin America after Cuba to eliminate mother-to-ch...

By Wendy Anders Since 2009, Costa Rica’s gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and trans-gender movement has shown its colorful pride on the city’s streets. Today, march organizers on their Facebook site estimated 45,000 flocked downtown to celebrate an increasingly supportive climate in the socially and culturally conservative Catholic nation. In advance of the march, Costa Rica’s Labor and Social Se...

By Wendy Anders Zurich, Switzerland is the latest European destination to offer a direct flight to San José, Costa Rica’s Juan Santamaria International Airport (SJO). Starting May 2017, Edelweiss Air will offer twice-weekly non-stop service on Tuesday and Friday, the airline stated in a press release last week.  Edelweiss is a member of the Lufthansa Group and an affiliate of Swiss Internati...

American Staffordshire Terriers, or pit bulls, are becoming more popular in Costa Rica, rising from 9th place in 2011 to 4th place in World Animal Protection’s recent survey on dog ownership. Staffords, along with poodles, schnauzers and others, still only represent a small portion of Costa Rica’s estimated 1.3 million dogs, with mutts or “zaguates” making up nearly half. “We were surprised ...