At the height of the dry season, Amanda Black awoke in her hotel room to another radiant blue sky. She started the morning of Feb. 28, 2013, walking Jacó beach on Costa Rica’s central Pacific coast with her father and sister, followed by a dip in the hotel pool. At 10 a.m., a beautician showed up to do her makeup, and the photographer arrived an hour later. At noon, Black met her extended family in the lobby of the Hotel Club del Mar, and they all boarded a bus.
Even for a children’s book, “The Manatee’s Big Day” (Zona Tropical Press) is goofy. For the first few pages, Erin Van Rheenen’s animal adventure looks like a story of zoological teamwork: There’s a shark in the jungles of Tortuguero on Costa Rica's northern Caribbean coast, and the animals are all freaked out. Instead of fearing each other, the rival species band together against their common enemy.
Before she begins her 1,100-kilometer swim, Renate Herberger always sings a song to the African goddess Yemaya, who watches over the sea. A self-described Pagan, Herberger asks Yemaya for permission to enter the endless Pacific. On Monday, Jan. 27, she will sing that song again.
Costa Rica's Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court ordered the Judicial Investigation Police – accused of spying – to allow the daily Diario Extra access to public information relevant to the case and to not to take any action against the newspaper. A court spokeswoman, Vanilly Cantillo, communicated the information in a Friday statement.
“These results confirm that with the organization and the size of PLN, we are guaranteed a triumph in the first round,” Johnny Araya's campaign manager said. But is that what the poll showed?
The Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) alerted its customers this week about fraudulent text messages sent to Kolbi cellphones that automatically added charges to the accounts of those who responded.
Work on expanding the Panama Canal will continue through at least next week after the construction consortium officially extended the deadline until Feb. 1 to resolve a dispute over $1.6 billion in cost overruns. The deadline had been set for this past Monday.
