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Costa Rica is in the top 5 of countries that are leading the way into renewable resources. It might seem small but it has a really big environmental impact. Since 2014 the country’s energy has been coming from 99% renewable sources, and it has been running on 100% renewable energy for over two months twice in the last two years. Then, since June 2017 they have been set on eradicating single-use plastic by 2021. The first be the first country in the world to do this. And most recently, in the summer of 2018, the country announced its aims to become completely carbon-neutral by the year 2021 – The first completely carbon-free country in the whole world.

Earlier this year, Carlos Alvarado Quesada was elected as Costa Rica’s new president. His first act in the office was to take a giant leap forward into reducing carbonization. During his inauguration as a world leader he announced his initiative to ban fossil fuels and become the world’s first decarbonized society.

The plastic dilemma came next. So, last year on World Environment Day the country announced its new national plan to eradicate all single-use plastics by 2021. From that day on, plastic has to be replaced by alternatives that are 100% recyclable or biodegradable and not petroleum-based.

But about 5,000 Cuban migrants have been stranded in Central America for the last month because two countries

Nicaragua and Guatemala, have refused to give them free transit through their territory.

Cuba has recently eased travel restrictions, allowing many in the island nation to travel for the first time in decades.

Few of the 500-odd residents of the fishermen’s village will ever forget the freezing night of Jan. 13, 2012, when the Costa Concordia shipwrecked, killing 32 people and upending life on the island for years.

In no time, Giglio residents hosted thousands of journalists, law enforcement officers and rescue experts who descended on the port

“Get back on board!” a Coast Guard officer shouted at Mr. Schettino when he understood that the captain was in a lifeboat watching people scramble to escape, audio recordings of their exchange later revealed. “Go up on the bow of the ship on a rope ladder, and tell me what you can do, how many people are there and what they need. Now!”

there are no federal laws governing schools like those built on the World Wide model. A 2011 Congressional bill that would have banned physical abuse and the withholding of food at such schools died in committee after it was opposed by lawmakers reluctant to impose new federal standards on a matter often regulated by states.

Instead, states oversee the facilities variously as camps, boarding schools or residential treatment facilities, and state regulators often hesitate to step in because the programs exist in an ill-defined area of the law. For example, private boarding schools are not regularly inspected and are not required to be licensed or accredited, according to the federal Department of Education.

Daily life is highly structured, with limited free time. Students, who are required to wear uniforms, generally perform schoolwork at their own pace for about five hours a day, though many students and parents say the curriculum is far less rigorous than that of local public schools. While some of the programs have gyms, usually only those who have earned enough points for good behavior can use them. Former students say those points can be rescinded quickly after months of hard work. Violating rules often leads to being placed in isolation, or being “restrained” — held on the floor for as long as an hour by staff members, who students say twist their limbs in painful positions until they stop resisting. Other punishments at World Wide programs have included pepper spraying, handcuffing, being forced into dog cages and being made to sit or stand in uncomfortable positions for hours, according to former students and claims in lawsuits.

Cubans Still Fleeing Castro While They CanIf Cubans try to float to the U.S., they’re sent back. So they take a great circle route overland that eventually funnels them across the M

In the humid heat of Tapachula in southern Mexico, a group of 40 Cubans relax on a sea of mattresses in a migrant shelter usually filled with about 15 Central American migrants.

“I left Cuba because the economy is in bad shape and I’m searching for a better life,” said 24-year-old Erick Fernández Márquez, sitting on a couch in the shelter.

If added to the White House legal team, Flood would be tasked with helping Trump handle Justice Department inquiries. Flood reportedly spoke with Trump about potential White House positions, as well as the possibility of being associate attorney general, Washington Post reporter Robert Costa tweeted Sunday.

In response to the report, Trump tweeted Sunday that he wasn’t adding another lawyer to “help out” and accused the Times of intentionally writing a “false story.” 

Spain’s crisis has demonstrated that one symptom of the virus, by now as persistent as the fevers, aches and labored breathing it brings, has been the tendency of one government after another to ignore the experiences of countries where the virus has struck before it.

as in most nations, the Spanish authorities initially treated the virus as an external threat, rather than considering that their country could be the next domino to fall.

The epidemic has now forced Spaniards to confront the kind of struggle that could be recalled only by those old enough to have lived through the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

In November 2020, CIA Director Gina Haspel warned Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley: “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.” Haspel’s comments came amid general worry during the transition period that Trump would start a war as a way to distract from his loss in the presidential election, or to foment a crisis big enough so that he would somehow stay in power.

On Jan. 8, acting out of what the book reportedly describes as shock and fear due to the

insurrection, Gen. Milley purportedly gathered a group of senior military officers to “review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons.” The President had the authority to order a launch, but Milley also had to be involved, the book reports the JCT chair as saying. Milley reportedly looked each officer gathered in the eye and asked them to confirm that they understood. By law, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff does not have command authority.

In The Divider, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser write that Milley believed that Trump was “shameful,” and “complicit” in the January 6 attack. They also reported that Milley feared that Trump’s “ ‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’ ”

A plain reading of the record shows that in the chaotic period before and after the 2020 election, Milley did as much as, or more than, any other American to defend the constitutional order, to prevent the military from being deployed against the American people, and to forestall the eruption of wars with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries

Along the way, Milley deflected Trump’s exhortations to have the U.S. military ignore, and even on occasion commit, war crimes

SANTIAGO, Chile — The Chilean courts have long been after Ray E. Davis, a former American Navy captain, accusing him of being involved in the murder of two Americans decades ago that inspired the award-winning 1982 film “Missing.”

But it turns out Mr. Davis may have been right under their noses all along, living in a nursing home in an upscale part of the Chilean capital. Any attempts to haul him into court may now be too late; documents show that he recently died here as well.

The death of Mr. Davis, former commander of the United States Military Group at the embassy in Santiago, would leave many unanswered questions about the possible roles played by United States officials in the killings of the Americans Charles Horman, 31, and Frank Teruggi, 24, while in military custody shortly after the 1973 military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. It was the Horman case that is depicted in the film “Missing” by the director Costa-Gavras.

Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system. Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the fertilizers and chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of the food system’s energy use is even lower, about 8 percent. The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.

The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or Costa Rica.

Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months

s they motored across the lagoon in the Marshall Islands, deep in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the policemen stared at the specimen laid out on the deck before them.

Salvador Alvarenga, a 36-year-old fisherman from El Salvador, had left the coast of Mexico in a small boat with a young crewmate 14 months earlier. Now he was being taken to Ebon Atoll, the southernmost tip of the Marshall Islands, and the closest town to where he had washed ashore. He was 6,700 miles from the place he had set out from. He had drifted for 438 days.

Women Have Very Little Political Power Anywhere In The World

When Canada's new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, announced he had appointed women to half of his government's cabinet positions, many people asked him why.  "Because it's 2015," he replied. 

A new report on global gender equality by the World Economic Forum, the Geneva-based nonprofit most famous for its uber-elite economic conference in Davos, Switzerland, shows that while women are inching toward global parity in education, health, and to a lesser extent economic outcomes, they are still woefully underrepresented in national governments. 

A UK national has died in Spain and a number of Britons have been arrested, the Foreign Office has confirmed.

It comes amid reports of a man being stabbed in the neck with a broken bottle in a fight in a bar used by expatriates in a Costa Blanca resort.

"We can confirm the death of a British national in Alicante, Spain on 16 January 2016," a spokeswoman said.

whenever I can, I take the boy along with me. He is excellent company and possesses the key virtue of any co-traveler — the ability to roll with the punches.

I’ve taken him to Central America and the Middle East and Africa and Europe, and everywhere it is the same, an inspection of ephemerality. “Look at that bird,” I say, pointing to a white cotinga in Costa Rica. “Look before it goes.”

It is a fleet thing coursing through the mangrove forest, soaring over the black branches, out of view. I hold back a word. I do not say, “Look before it goes extinct.” But that is what I mean.

António Guterres, the former Portuguese prime minister, will be the next UN secretary general, after the security council agreed he should replace Ban Ki-moon at the beginning of next year.

In a rare show of unity, all 15 ambassadors from the security council emerged from the sixth in a series of straw polls to announce that they had agreed on Guterres, who was UN high commissioner for refugees for a decade, and that they would confirm the choice in a formal vote on Thursday.

The abrupt end to the UN leadership race came as a surprise. Many observers had expected the selection process to go on late into October as the major powers struggled to promote their favourite candidates.

El MAS en su emergencia en el escenario político es la condensación de lo nacional popular que el ciclo neoliberal, con sus luces y sombras, había marginado y excluido. Su fuerza sale de la Bolivia profunda, que no tiene tradición democrática y que como toda expresión popular tiene la confrontación y la pelea como método de lucha.

Esta visión se refuerza porque su núcleo duro viene de la lucha sindical campesina. Y de la aparición de El Alto como factor de decisión política. El MAS se convierte en el catalizador de las fuerzas que vencen al neoliberalismo, no por la fuerza de las urnas sino en las calles y encarna la posibilidad de instaurar un ciclo político distinto al neoliberalismo, que en ese momento, es lo que la gran mayoría de la sociedad boliviana reclama.

El discurso democrático es solo un medio para lograr su objetivo. Y las mayorías nacionales así lo entienden y le dan todo el respaldo para que tenga la hegemonía política y así, desarrolle su proyecto

President Joe Biden has finalized his plan to distribute millions of coronavirus vaccines worldwide after months of deliberation, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans.

"In a few short days, in fact possibly as early as tomorrow, the President is going to announce in more detail the plan that he's put together to push out 80 million vaccines around the world that we have at our disposal or soon will have at our disposal," Blinken said Wednesday at the US Embassy in Costa Rica.

"Among other things, we will focus on equity, on the equitable distribution of vaccines, we will focus on science, we'll work in coordination with COVAX and we will distribute vaccines without political requirements of those receiving them."

Tensions continue to rise on the streets of the Bolivian administrative capital La Paz, with angry crowds accusing authorities of fraud in Sunday's presidential election.

Protesters and the opposition claim electoral authorities manipulated the vote count in favor of President Evo Morales, the nation's longtime socialist leader.

But opposition groups and international observers grew suspicious after election officials stopped the count for 24 hours Sunday without any explanation. When counting resumed, Morales's lead had jumped, making him certain to be an outright winner.

n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.

Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.