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| Workers get leave
to attend march By the A.M. Costa Rica staff Don’t plan on doing a lot of business Friday morning. The government has given public employees four hours off to participate in a march to support its proposed legislation to protect children. A number of private companies will be under pressure to do the same thing. Plus all citizens are invited. The march starts at 8 a.m. at Parque Central on Avenida 2 and will make its way to the Children’s Museum on the north side of town. The march was triggered by the murder of Katia Vanessa González Juárez, who was found buried under a neighbor’s floor July 10. The government has promised to propose changes in the laws that would
increase the penalty for child stealing, murder of a child and abandonment.
The exact changes and details still have not been made public, although
the current penalty of up to two years imprisonment for child kidnapping
is universally regarded as too little.
Pimping arrest made
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff Police and investigators raided a house near Puriscal Monday night and took into custody a man who faces a charge of pimping. A Fuerza Pública spokesman said the raid took place in Tulin
de San Antonio de Puriscal and that the man detained was identified by
the last names of Calderón Jiménez. Confiscated was a video
in which a 15-year-old appeared, said police.
Seven swimmers saved
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff Strong ocean currents created a dangerous condition in the beaches of Manuel Antonio Sunday, and Costa Rican coastguardsmen rescued six women and a man by means of a boat. Those rescued included a Costa Rican, a man and woman from the United
States, two Germans, an Austrian and a Spaniard.
Chang gets stamp
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff Franklin Chang Diaz, the Costa Rican born U.S. astronaut, is now on a stamp issued by Correo de Costa Rica. The stamp was also sponsored by Earth University where Chang has collaborated on a book showing earth from space. The two-part stamp featured Chang on one side and a beetle named after
him last year on the other. The earth as pictured from space is in the
center. Each part is valued at 115 colons, some 29 U.S. cents.
Men fight machete duel
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff Two Nicaraguan men fought what amounted to a duel early Monday morning in Limón. One 27-year-old man, identified by the last names of Condela González, lost part of an arm in the encounter. The weapons were machetes. The second man, still unidentified, suffered lesser wounds. Marijuana plants taken By the A.M. Costa Rica staff Police confiscated some 700 marijuana plants about 50 to 80 cms. in height (20 to 32 inches) after a raid near Palmar Sur Monday afternoon. |
Motorist dies in crash
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff A 61-year-old man, Gabriel Thomas Odor, died about 9 p.m. Monday when
the car he was driving ran into a dividing wall and then smashed into a
parked truck on the General Cañas Autopista in Alajuela, said the
Judicial Investigating Organization.
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| EDITOR’S NOTE: Hunter
Schultz who spends time in Ojochal has compiled a litle fact sheet on Internet
fraud that we think would be useful to some readers.
I received another e-mail that sparked a few thoughts on how to help prevent being the victim of Internet fraud. The link within the e-mail has been included at the end of this note. They may be legitimate. However, for educational purposes, this is a great example of what I will relate below. Here are a few more tips: View any e-mail as suspicious. Verify, then trust. I received an e-mail from what appears to be a reseller of a mortgage refinancing broker. It was spam so red flag No. 1. Just for fun, I did a little research on the domain name and found the server and the domain name registrant based in mainland China. Red flag No. 2. The website address has no street address of any type. Red flag No. 3. No phone number to call or reply e-mail address either. Red flag No. 4. Their company name is nowhere to be seen: Red flag No. 5. They wanted a lot of information except my social security number. So they would have had my address, phone, mortgage amount, credit rating that I think I have, and my current salary. Okay, call the red fire trucks. This looks very bad to me. They have a lot of info about me, but I have none about them. They would also know who the best potential victims are based on my answers and the answers of others. Anyone with a great credit rating, high salary and a low mortgage amount, is someone I would want to know more about. I can just imagine the phone call that comes later. "We need your social security number to check your credit rating." "Yeah, right. Here it is." (See what I mean? These guys are clever at what they do.) Even innocent looking e-mails asking for any information at all are suspect. Here are a few questions to ask: |
1.) Who are these people asking for
this information?
2.) Is there a phone number to call? 3.) Is there a street address? 4.) Go to the following website and enter in the domain name: http://registrar.verisign-grs.com/whois/ Enter the information for the domain in question: i.e. xyz.com. Do not enter anything after the .com or .net, etc. This will give a clue as to where the domain is located. You may have to go to another "whois" page to get all the information. It will usually be listed as part of the results you receive. 5.) Is there an e-mail reply address with the domain name as part of the e-mail. Be suspicious of a company not having their own e-mail account with their domain name. SPAM is no excuse for a Yahoo or Hotmail address. It is the price for doing business. 6) Try Googling or hotbot-ing their domain name. See what comes up. Okay, that should be sufficient for now. Here's the website address that I mentioned above: Have a look, and you'll see what I mean. Just don't fall for the pretty graphics and style of the site. If they are legit, they have learned a valuable lesson. We also would add that you should double check e-mails and Web pages that seem to come from legitimate, recognized merchants, particularly when they ask for financial or personal information. It is not hard to duplicate a Web page or an e-mail that appears to come from a bank or merchant of high repute. |
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A 29-year-old downtown hotel guest plunged to his death early Tuesday, and police are investigating to try to find out why. The death took place about 2 a.m. at the Hotel del Rey, a 24-hour hotel, bar and casino at Avenida 1 and Calle 9 in San José. Investigators identified the dead man as a U.S. citizen and said his name was Rover Constance Valdis of Texas. However, Gregory M. Ruzicka, one of the principals of the hotel, said that he heard the man was from Colorado. The man checked into a hotel rented to another patron and was spending his second night there, said Ruzicka. About 1 a.m. he was seen walking on the ground floor of the establishment without any obvious problems. But according to investigators, the man returned to his second-floor room and then inexplicably ascended to the fourth floor where he broke into another hotel room and began throwing around the personal belongings he found there. Ruzicka said that two managers arrived and thought they had been able to calm down the man |
who sat down and appeared to have
expended his emotions. The two managers began to examine the damaged door
to see if it could be repaired, when the guest jump up and ran through
the french windows on the Calle 9 side of the room, said Ruzicka.
The windows are directly above the entrance to the hotel, and Ruzicka said that some employees were very upset by the event. The man had spent some months working in beach communities and was not a new arrival from the United States, said the hotel operator. Because of its 24-hour operation, there were people in the casino and in the coffee shop adjacent to the sidewalk where the man hit after falling about 40 feet. Ruzicka said the death was only the fourth in the 10 years that he has been involved with the hotel and the only one so public. Other deaths were either suicides or natural causes. A spokesman for the Judicial Investigating Organization said the death was a suicide, but employees at the hotel said they doubted that the man could make such a decision. They attributed his actions to either intoxication or confusion. |
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