Are you due for a U.S. passport renewal in 2017? If so, better get going on it soon. The U.S. State Department is expecting a tsunami of applications for either renewals or new passports this year. Why the hordes of people? No, it’s not due to the Trump presidency. U.S. passports last for ten years, and it was ten years ago that rules were changed requiring Americans traveling by air to Mexico,...

According to the United States Embassy, there are currently 100,000 U.S. Citizens living in Costa Rica, 4,000 of them collecting their Social Security checks here – Baby Boomers in paradise. The Canadian Embassy reports 10,000 of their countrymen are currently residing in Costa Rica. Add to that the 1.5 million or so Anglophone tourists who visit Costa Rica annually, and you have one healthy po...

Photos by Bryan Fabio Herrera "If there's no chocolate in heaven, I'm not going." -- Jane Seabrook There have been dire predictions recently from the International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), and others, that the world is running out of chocolate. Said the Washington Post, “We are in the midst of what may be the longest streak of consecutive chocolate deficits in more than 50 years.” Experts...

Olive Ridley Sea Turtle Bacardi, the world’s largest privately held spirits company, announced on March 22, World Water Day, that it launched an in-house initiative to remove plastic straws and stirrers at company events, with the hope that this practice will extend to bars and restaurants around the world. Commented Mike Gibaldi of the environmental group Surfrider, “As a large corporate c...

Wikimedia Commons According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which we all learned in school as a way of understanding how gravity works, bodies moving through space are affected by deformation, or warping.  Amazingly, last Thursday a team of scientists announced that they had recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light years away, thereby providing scientific pro...

Enoc and Dr. Rosemary SylvesterBradley of ChocoPrisma. Photo: Bryan Fabio Herrera By Carol Blair Vaughn This interview was conducted on January 29th, 2016, at Bazookas Restaurant in Perez Zeledon, after a meeting of a club for English speakers (CCRC), at which Enoc Jimenez was the guest speaker.  The Ngobe Indigenous straddle the Costa Rica – Panama border, and trace their lineage back to a...

Pixabay Commons SplashData, a password management company headquartered in Los Gatos, CA, has released their top 25 most-hacked passwords from 2015 – do you use any of these? If you do, you should change them immediately, according to Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData. You should change them to avoid major damage to your personal records. Says Slain, “As always, we hope that with more publici...

Wikimedia Commons A pair of 1963 Washington, D.C. license plates, which were on the limousine carrying John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie on the fateful day of his assassination on November 22, 1963, were sold at a recent week. The asking price was $40,000, but the final sale price was $100,000, sold to an anonymous Kennedy memorabilia collector. $80,000 went to the seller, Jane Walker, and $...

A Kidnapper’s Favorite Currency: Bitcoin On October 22nd, 2015, Hong Kong tycoon Wong Kwan (known as Wong Yuk-Kwan to his family) was released from captivity after his family reportedly paid the kidnappers $13 million in Bitcoin – a far cry from the $70 million the kidnappers had requested. Kwan is the chairman of Pearl Oriental Oil, and had been in captivity for 38 days. He was in rough sha...

By Carol Blair Vaughn Who’s Happy in Costa Rica? Forbes Magazine asked on November 13, 2014, “Want to Be Happy?  Move to Costa Rica.” Their conclusions were based on the results of a UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center Qualtrics Survey of 40,000 students from around the world in which Costa Rica emerged as – Numero Uno on the Happiness Index. So why do 50-60% of Americans who move to...