FARC guerrilla unit marching in 1998. Wikimedia Commons The names of the more than 8 million victims of Colombia's decades-long armed conflict will be inscribed on trees in an expanse of the southeastern province of Vaupes to be known as the "Forest of Peace. Supported by the Colombian government, the Forest is an initiative of the NGO Saving the Amazon. The group began planning the proj...

Cartoon by Clay Jones The US Olympic Committee (USOC) today publicly acknowledged that four of its swimmers made a false police report and created a story of being held at gunpoint and apologized to the organization of the Olympic Games and Brazil for the swimmers behavior. "The behavior of these athletes is not acceptable, nor does it represent the values of Team USA or the conduct of the ...

María Amalia Matamoros Solís is a Costa Rican beauty queen who won the Miss World Costa Rica 2008 pageant and went on to represent her country in Miss World 2008 in Johannesburg, South Africa, on December 13, 2008. She has also competed Miss Latin America 2008, where she was a top twelve finalist, and Miss Continente Americano 2009. She was also elected in Los Angeles, California, as PANAMERIC...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2z467Poh3o...

Cahuita is a laid back and vibrant little village in the setting of Costa Rica’s unique Creole culture, brought about by its Afro-Caribbean heritage. Only 27 miles (43 km) south of Puerto Limón, Cahuita is an easy drive down Highway 36 along the Caribbean coast. It is assuredly a must-see destination for visitors in the Limón Province. This village is a hit amongst the young and free-spirited, or ...

Managua - Wikimedia Commons The Latin American Business Council, known as CEAL, said Thursday that the region should take advantage of its assets to achieve shared prosperity. Being well-positioned in regard to the "great megatrends" of security in food, water and energy; sustainability; and peace demonstrates that Latin America is "part of the solution and not part of the problem," the pre...

Wikimedia Commons "You can't get it more cheaply" calls a Caracas woman selling flour at the open-air market in Petare, the largest shantytown in Latin America, where hundreds of vendors offer basic products that are generally scarce here at prices often more than 20 times higher than those fixed by the government. Stringent price controls have prevailed in Venezuela since 2003 but, neverth...

Source: Liam Stack Twitter New York City authorities on Thursday removed a life-size, naturally-colored statue of a completely naked Donald Trump from Union Square in downtown Manhattan.   The statue is the work of a group of artists known as Indecline, which by placing the figure of the Republican presidential nominee in the middle of a heavily traveled square were aiming to protes...

Alicia Chong RodrigueZ. Photo: Casey Atkins By Catherine Curro Caruso | MIT News correspondent   When Alicia Chong Rodriguez first toured the MIT campus as a high school student, she was so impressed by everything she saw that she still remembers excitedly phoning her mom back home in Costa Rica, calling collect from a pay phone in the student center. “It’s the first time I was fac...

Olympic mascots are seen at the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro's Sambadrome, Feb. 7, 2016. (Reuters OMX) Members of the U.S. Olympic swimming team fabricated their story about being robbed at gunpoint and got into an altercation with security guards at a gas station in Barra da Tijuca, the section of Rio de Janeiro where the Olympic Park is located, Brazilian police said. Ryan Lochte, James F...

Wikimedia Commons By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. Expats living in Costa Rica, who grew up in the United States of America, can say goodbye to the Pledge of Allegiance that was recited daily by schoolchildren everywhere beginning in 1945. For most Americans, Executiv...

File photo The ex-United States National Security Agency operative who was responsible for the largest-ever leak of top-secret intelligence files has hinted Russia could have been behind a possible cyber attack on the American agency. Edward Snowden, who was granted political asylum in Russia, said there was evidence to suggest NSA servers were the victims of a Russian-inspired malware atta...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPb3N98EaPY...

Wikimedia Commons French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Wednesday he supported the ban issued in several parts of the country against the burkini, but ruled out government legislation on the matter. Valls said in an interview with La Provence newspaper that general laws dictating clothes are not a solution. The Prime Minister's comments arrive in the wake of an all-out beach brawl i...

Up until the 1960s the garden in front of the Iglesia de San Rafael, built in 1895, was just your average collection of topiaries. However, great inspiration (or possibly divine inspiration) drove one gardener named Evangelisto Blanco to create the famed Parque Francisco Alvarado and its strange collection of wobbly and whimsical topiaries. Shape shifting and awe-inspiring, the garden is now a tou...

"El chapo Guzmán" por Fabrizio León Diez - Obra do próprio. Licenciado sob CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons A son of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman is among six people kidnapped at a restaurant in this Pacific resort city, Jalisco state Attorney General Eduardo Almaguer said Tuesday. An examination of items found in the cars of the victims, sitting abandoned in the ...

Arequipa. Wikimedia Commons A magnitude-5.3 earthquake left four people dead, 68 injured and 1,253 families homeless in a rural area of Caylloma province in southern Peru's Arequipa region, to which the authorities have sent humanitarian aid in helicopters and by land. The fatalities were an 80-year-old woman, another age 70 and her granddaughter, a minor, as well as United States citizen E...

Cartoon by Clay Jones Milwaukee police reported on Sunday that the armed man an officer killed after a traffic stop on the weekend was black. The city is trying to recover its calm after a night of disturbances on the weekend that have made it a new focus of tension as a result of police violence. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Sunday ordered the National Guard deployed in Milwaukee to p...

Establishing a business enterprise in Costa Rica is a fairly straightforward process that has considerable immigration benefits for foreigners. Many foreign investors feel empowered to expand their businesses and make them profitable once they are residents; a few of them, however, choose to ignore national labor laws and hire foreign employees without the adequate immigration permits. The lega...

Source: George Mason University By Kristen Dalton What started as a simple project to gather more instruments for George Mason University students quickly blossomed into a program that provides instruments and arts enrichment programs to underserved elementary and middle school students in Northern Virginia. Eight years ago, George Mason’s own music students needed additional instruments. ...

Heading into the Final Day of the 2016 INS ISA World Surfing Games, Team Portugal has gained the lead, determined to make history by winning their first ISA World Surfing Games Team Gold Medal in history. With 3981 potential team points, Team Portugal stands in first place ahead of Team Peru (3745), Team France (3308) and Team Costa Rica (3055). The first Medal of the competition was awarded...

Wikimedia Commons By Andres Sanchez Braun Tokyo, Aug 14 (EFE).- Blood produced artificially is the simple formula proposed by a Japanese firm whose revolutionary project seeks to reduce the scarcity of donor banks, bring down the cost of blood preservation and avoid contaminated transfusions. "One tends to think that blood is always available when a transfusion is required, but the truth...

Britain could remain in the European Union until the end of 2019, almost a year longer than anticipated by the British government, according to The Sunday Times newspaper. The Theresa May-led Conservative government is preparing to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which provides for a two-year period to negotiate cutting off of ties with Brussels. London has publicly stated that it ha...

The Costa Rica No One Talks Abour François Sylvain is an entrepreneur, author, coach and investor raised in Montreal. After traveling across the United States and Europe, François went to Costa Rica to live his dream of living in a tropical climate. The father of four and grandfather of six has written a unique book about his experiences in Costa Rica. This is how he describes his memoir: ...

Cartoon by Clay Jones By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. Everywhere you look you these days you keep hearing why can’t voters come up with better candidates for president of the United States? Here we are, stuck with establishment-backed Democrat Hillary Clinton and her de...

Fidel Castro pictured in July 2014. (Russian state media) Cuban cigar maker Jose Castelar completed on Friday the world's largest cigar, a stogie 90 meters (295 ft.) long, to commemorate the 90th birthday of Fidel Castro. The feat earned Castelar, known as "Cueto," his sixth Guinness record, as certified by a diplomat from the British Embassy in Havana. "I was working on it 10 days, abou...

MS-13 tattoo (El Salvador) - Wikimedia Commons The governments of the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) will create a tri-national force to combat organized crime, with a special target on gangs, following an agreement signed Saturday in the Salvadoran capital by defense and security authorities. The proposal, called "Elite Security Group" was sugges...

Wikimedia Commons A women's rights group staged a protest Friday in front of the Japanese embassy in Pasay City, south of Manila, urging an apology from Japan's government for the alleged sexual enslavement of Filipino women during World War II, an epa journalist reports. The rally, organized by the Gabriela group, included about 20 people, with four women claiming to be former "comfort wom...

On Day 5 of the 2016 INS ISA World Surfing Games Team Portugal and Costa Rica surged into the lead of the overall team points standings, the only two teams that have five of their six competitors remaining in the competition. Source: The Costa Rica Star...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCjZeD8rgx4...

Catalina Freer is a beautiful 23-year-old costa rican model and businesswoman. The young model, who is also studying Business Administration as a second career, owns an international profile modeling agency called "High Select Model Management", with two years in the market. ...

Illustrative image. (Flickr Commons) A 16-year-old boy was killed by gunmen inside a church in the Mexican Pacific resort city of Acapulco, but the motive for the killing has not been determined, state prosecutors said Wednesday. The boy was gunned down Tuesday inside the Parroquia del Niño Jesus in Acapulco's Juan R. Escudero district after being chased by several armed men, the Guerrero s...

By Glenys Young, Texas Tech University Texas Tech University officials announced today the start of an exciting new chapter in the university’s growth: an expanded global presence in the form of its new international campus, Texas Tech University Costa Rica. Upon approval of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, the new campus in San José, Costa Rica, will...

Galaxy Note 7 Samsung Electronics unveiled its new phablet, Galaxy Note 7, a curved-edge smartphone that comes equipped with a stylus, is fully water-resistant and boasts of an iris scanner, to the media in Seoul Thursday. The smartphone will hit the stores in the United States and South Korea on Aug. 19, after which it will be available to buy in other countries till September, a company r...

ISIS fighters in Iraq. (Wikimedia Commons) The Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, said today that the current president of the United States, Barack Obama, is "the founder" of the Islamic State (IS). During a campaign rally in Sunrise, west of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Trump criticized Obama's counterterrorism strategy and said he is "the founder of IS" and that his rival in the ...

Dlodlo V1 Chinese company Dlodlo has developed the world's lightest virtual reality, or VR, glasses that weigh only 88 grams and looks like conventional sunglasses, as opposed to the chunky and larger VR glasses that hit technology markets this year. According to official newspaper China Daily, the V1 Dlodlo are not just the lightest but also the first virtual glasses to operate independent...

Wikimedia Commons Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte threatened to declare martial law if his country's justice obstructs his controversial anti-drug campaign which so far has killed more than 800 alleged drug traffickers since his election in May. Duterte responded to Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno's letter which was written after the president included the names of sev...

President Duterte, Wikimedia Commons By Britt Nelson Editor’s note: The views expressed by guest columnists are not necessarily those of The Costa Rica Star, its advertisers, or its staff. Angry citizens and angry voters in the United States of America have only to look to the Philippines to see what can happen when certain elements of society get so out of control the government no long...

PublicDomainPictures.net Hurricane Earl has so far caused 45 deaths in the Mexican states of Veracruz and Puebla, making it the country's deadliest storm in three years as tropical storm Javier is expected to target Mexico's Baja California Sur on Tuesday, the authorities informed today. The national Civil Protection coordinator of the Ministry of the Interior, Luis Felipe Puente, said at a...

(Archive / Delta Airlines) Delta Airlines, the second-largest carrier in the United States, said Monday that it fixed the technical problems that caused massive flight delays and cancellations, and was restoring service slowly around the world. "A Delta ground stop has been lifted and limited departures are resuming following a power outage in Atlanta that impacted Delta computer systems an...