The Museo Calderón Guardia will feature sculptor Cecilia Paredes in an exposition titled "El jardín de Dafne" which opens Aug. 5.

The artist is celebrating her 15 years in Costa Rica with the exposition in which her works are united.

The exposition runs to Sept. 3 at the Galería Manuel de la Cruz González in the museum, which is in Barrio Escalante in northeast San José not far from the Santa Teresita church.  Admission is free.

The title is based on the myth in which a girl going through the forest feels afraid and asks the gods to convert her into something that is not alive or dead. She becomes a laurel tree.

Part of the exposition includes two six-foot bronze laurel trees with dried leaves on the floor. Also there are a set of bronze feet that the artist considers one of her more expressive works. The museum is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

Meanwhile, the Ministerio de Cultura, Deporte y Juventud are seeking proposals for works to be exhibited in its Teatro 1887 at the Centro Nacional de la Cultura. The works are chosen by a committee and are displayed for a month.

There is an Oct. 31 deadline, and the type of art is variable and includes photography. Information is available at 223-3924  and 221-2022.

A proposal to continue the practice of allowing some foreigners to enter Costa Rica with so-called tourist cards instead of passports ran into a snag Wednesday at a legislative committee.

Epsy Campbell, a deputy from the Partido Acción Ciudadana, strongly criticized the committee for not having expert advice, particularly on the topic of sexual tourism and exploitation. 

Although most sexual exploitation and prostitution  of children involves Costa Ricans, foreign tourists are more visible and the topic frequently comes up when discussing tourism.

Deputy Campbell said she wanted to hear from the defensor de los habitantes and the executive president of Fundación PANIAMOR, a Costa Rican private, non-profit, organization that works for children’s rights.

The tourist cards are an easy way for U.S. and Canadian citizens to enter the country without the expense of a passport. However, legislation authorizing them has expired, and the tourist cards are being allowed administratively.

The law being discussed by deputies would formalize the situation in the Migración y Extranjería code.

The deputies finally decided to hold a work session with a representative of the Consejo Nacional de Migración and PANIAMOR and the defensor.

Taxi driver dies,
and fugitive found

Someone murdered a taxi driver Tuesday night near Quepos on the Pacific coast, and Wednesday morning investigators found a wounded fugitive from Italy nearby.

The strange set of circumstances began to unfold about 10:30 p.m. when the body of Enrique Chávez Barboza, 62, was found near his taxi in a small settlement some 10 kms. or six miles from Quepos.

The area is in a plantation of African palms.

The man was outside the taxi and showed signs of knife wounds to his head. Police said he also had a bullet wound to the head.

There was no sign of robbery because the man carried his belongings in a belt pack, said police. Taxi drivers joined in the search but it was not until about 6:30 a.m. that a briefcase was located about a kilometer from the crime scene by neighbors who called police. Inside were various documents believed belonging to the dead man.

During a routine search of the area, investigators found a wounded man among the palm trees. He was identified by his last name of Roberciu. Police said he was 40 and was the subject of an arrest warrant on a charge of narcotics trafficking in Italy. They said the 40-year-old man has knife wounds on his neck and left leg. He was hospitalized while police attempt to see if there is a connection.

It’s a warm bye-bye
for VW’s beetle

PUEBLA, México — The last original model of the Volkswagen Beetle has rolled off an assembly line here.

Volkswagen ended production of the Beetle Wednesday because of sluggish demand after making the small vehicle for nearly seven decades. The car, famous for its domed roof and trunk-mounted engine, was an icon of the 1960s counterculture and starred in three popular Walt Disney movies.

Workers at the plant in Mexico adorned the light blue Bug with a Mexican flag made of flowers, and a Mariachi band serenaded the car before it heads to Germany, where it will be placed in the Volkswagen museum.

Volkswagen will continue to manufacture the revamped 1998 model of the Beetle.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Senate has confirmed Roger Noriega as the State Department's top official for Latin American affairs. 

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher says lawmakers confirmed Noriega Tuesday as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. 

Noriega has been serving as ambassador to the Organization of American States. Before his appointment as OAS ambassador, Noriega was an aide to former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, a conservative Republican.  It is not clear when the ambassador will assume his new post.
 

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TEHRAN, Iran — Iran's vice president said Wednesday that a Canadian journalist, who died while in custody here earlier this month, was probably murdered. He was basing his remarks on the results of an investigation ordered by Iran's president.

Iranian Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi Wednesday used the word murder when he said the death of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was caused by a blow to her head.

The vice president, referring to the results of an investigation ordered by President Mohammad Khatami, said the most likely cause of Ms. Kazemi's murder was a blow to the head that resulted in internal bleeding.

Ms. Kazemi, a 54-year-old Montreal-based photographer, was arrested June 23 while taking pictures of a demonstration outside a prison in Tehran. Three days after her arrest she was taken to a hospital in Tehran where she died July 10.

Later, Iranian commentators speculated the death of the journalist was accidental. But, Iran's health minister, Masoud Pezeshkian, told reporters Wednesday the fracture to Ms. Kazemi's skull could not have been caused by an accident.

Iranian Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi-Lari said on Wednesday that the investigating judge in the case has requested that five people who were in contact with Ms. Kazemi before her death, be taken into custody.

Ms. Kazemi's son and the Canadian government had demanded that Iran return Ms. Kazemi's body to Canada. 

Instead, Iranian authorities ordered that the journalist be buried in Iran. The decision outraged Canadian officials who recalled the country's ambassador to Tehran and said they would review Canada-Iran relations. 

WASHINGTON, D.C. —  The U.S. State Department said Wednesday that most applicants for non-immigrant visas now must be interviewed individually by a consular official. 

And the department needs to add staff to get the job done.

The new procedures, effective Friday, are aimed at increasing the security of the United States and creating greater uniformity in the processing of visas at U.S. consulates worldwide, an official said Wednesday.

The visa application process requires that the applicant appear before a consular officer for a personal interview, though some waivers of the interview had been previously allowed. The State Department has revised the categories of applicants who may be eligible for these waivers. In practice the new requirements will mean that more visa applicants will need to schedule interviews, and the visa approval process could take more time than in the past.

"Since September 11, 2001, we've engaged in an ongoing review of the visa process as it relates to the security of our nation," said Stephen A. Edson from the Bureau of Consular Affairs. "In this process we have greatly increased the rate of personal interviews. As a result, many of our posts overseas and our consular offices are already handling an interview workload quite similar to what will be required under the new regulation."

The State Department has added 39 new consular officers to handle the increased workload and will plan to add another 80 in the next year, Edson said.

Under the new regulations, Edson said waivers of the personal interview may be considered for the following categories of applicants: those under 16 or over 60 years of age, employees or officials of foreign governments, persons who have previously applied for a visa and have not violated their nonimmigrant status, and persons for whom national interests warrant consideration of a waiver. 

Edson also emphasized the consular officers will be responsive to the needs of students coming into the United States for academic programs or participation in time-sensitive programs.

The new regulations only affect travelers who are currently required to obtain a visa to enter the United States. Twenty-seven nations are identified as "visa waiver nations" under a separate provision in U.S. law. Citizens from these nations, Western Europeans and Japanese among them, are not required to obtain visas because their countries have met a number of specified criteria which make these travelers unlikely candidates to attempt illegal immigration into the United States. 

Edson also emphasized that an approved visa does not ensure that a visitor will gain admission to the country at a U.S. port of entry. An approved visa allows only the attempt to enter. The Department of Homeland Security oversees the actual admission of travelers as they set foot on U.S. soil. Even if a traveler is carrying an approved visa, an immigration officer may deny permission to enter if security concerns are at stake, Edson said. 

Briefing foreign journalists in Washington and others participating via video link from New York and Los Angeles, the consular official said the new procedures change nothing in the application process or in the forms a traveler must complete. 

The increased scrutiny focused on nonimmigrant visa applications since the 2001 terrorist attacks has resulted in a slight overall increase in the number of visa denials, consular officials explained. But the more significant change is in the overall number of applications processed. That has declined from 10 million applications in the fiscal year that ended weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks to 8 million applications in the following fiscal year. The officials said it is impossible to determine whether that decline is due to a harsher global economy, a fear of further terrorism, or changes in U.S. visa approval policies.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the 12 months since Congress boosted oversight of U.S. corporations in response to a wave of business fraud, the government's securities regulator says progress is being made in winning back tarnished investor confidence. 

William Donaldson, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, says investigations continue concerning the collapse of the energy trading company Enron and the telecommunications giant WorldCom. While declining to say whether the heads of those companies will be prosecuted, Donaldson said the full force of the law is being applied to corporate wrongdoing. 

Donaldson, who was a respected Wall Street investment banker, says the wave of corporate fraud had its origin in the boom times of the mid 1990s, when the Internet revolution gave rise to what was called the new economy. 

Speaking at the National Press Club, Donaldson said the manic rise in dot com stock prices led financial officers to sometimes twist accounting rules and 

The collapse of the high-tech bubble three years ago, he said, exposed corporate wrongdoing. "As happened after the crash in 1929, the falling market that began in 2000 led to other revelations. Starting with the Enron story in October 2001, it became apparent that the boom years had been accompanied by a serious erosion in business principles," he said.

The collapse of Houston-based Enron was one of the biggest bankruptcies in U.S. history, costing thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of stock market valuation. 

Donaldson suggested that investors will return to the stock market once they are convinced that corporate financial data is reliable. New regulations require chief executive officers to personally certify their companies' financial reports. 

The Securities and Exchange chief says the brokerage business has been hurt by revelations that financial analysts sometimes overstated the prospects of companies that had business relationships with their firms.

Kristi Anderson was a federal criminal investigator when she traveled to South Africa on vacation in 1991. To protect her against malaria, a potentially fatal infection spread by mosquito bites, Ms. Anderson’s doctor prescribed a drug called mefloquine, sold in the United States under the brand name Lariam. 

After the third pill, Ms. Anderson says, she began having constant dizziness, nausea, and panic attacks. "Almost always there was nausea," she remembers, "but sometimes it was a wave of dizziness or vertigo, and then I would start having this feeling of impending doom, I wanted to get out of where I was, I just wanted to get back home or someplace where I felt safe because I was afraid something terrible might happen."

Ms. Anderson says her nausea, anxiety and dizziness were so severe that she ultimately had to quit her job. She moved back to California to live with her parents for a year-and-a-half, until she was well enough to go back to work.

But in 1996, she returned to South Africa, again took Lariam and again became violently ill. Only then did she begin to suspect the drug was the cause. She sought a diagnosis at Stanford University’s California Ear Institute, where tests by the medical director documented injury to the part of the brain that controls balance, the vestibular system.

"He told me from the Lariam patients he had seen and what his tests showed, he believed that Lariam was the cause of my vestibular problems and he thought it was the cause of the earlier problems as well," Ms. Anderson says.

The Roche pharmaceutical company, which makes Lariam, has declined requests for an interview. But in the 14 years since mefloquine was approved for use in the United States, Roche has added increasingly serious warnings of possible adverse effects in the package insert given to doctors. It’s a long list that includes, among other things, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, convulsions, depression, hallucinations, psychotic or paranoid reactions, and anxiety.

The Food and Drug Administration’s latest action orders doctors to give patients a new medication guide warning that "Lariam can rarely cause serious mental problems in some patients" and that those side effects may continue. It also says, "There have been rare reports of suicides," but adds "we do not know if Lariam was responsible."

Last year, Roche settled a lawsuit brought by a woman whose husband committed suicide after taking Lariam. The terms of the settlement were kept secret. More recently, the U.S. Army investigated whether the drug was implicated in 

Malaria is endemic to many parts of Africa and Asia, and kills nearly one million people a year, most of them young children. Others are damaged permanently by the disease. And so despite the new warnings, many tropical health and travel specialists, like physician Martin Wolfe, regard Lariam as an essential drug — and more practical than the alternatives doxycycline or Malarone.

In contrast to those drugs which must be taken daily, Wolfe notes, Lariam is taken only once a week. "We believe the compliance is better with a drug taken once a week than one taken daily," he says. "And since we are protecting against a potentially life-threatening disease, we want to do the very best we can to encourage people to take their medication." 

It’s impossible to pin down the incidence, but some experts say the rate of severe reactions is far higher than the one in 10,000 cited in early research by Roche. A study published in 2001 in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases reported "mild to serious" neuropsychiatric adverse effects in 29 percent of travelers on Lariam.

Retired Col. Wilbur Milhous was among the military scientists who developed Lariam at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Medical Research and then licensed the Roche company to make and sell the drug. But as reports of severe side effects emerged, he says the government promised Roche it would continue to back the drug. "There was clearly an unmet medical need which the drug fulfilled," Milhous says. "We were frightened from a U.S. perspective, in terms of national contingencies, what would happen if it were withdrawn?"

The U.S. Army today depends on Lariam, as does the Peace Corps, because of the once-weekly dosing. But as Milhous says, malaria researchers must always be at work on the next generation of new drugs, because the malaria parasite quickly develops resistance. The best weapon against malaria, he says, would be vaccination. 

Last week, tests of a new vaccine began on 2,000 children in Mozambique. Earlier trials found the vaccine, created by the SmithGlaxoKline company, safe and effective in adults, though the effects lasted only two months. Investigators hope it will remain effective longer in children.

As for Kristi Anderson, she says her recent brain scans are normal, and her other symptoms have diminished. But she says she began to heal emotionally only when she read a newspaper story about Lariam. "Reading that article released me from this shame of ‘Kristi, you’re some kind of weak person and you better watch out because you’re going to have a nervous breakdown again sometime, you just better be careful,’" she says. "I realized that’s what made me sick - that’s what happened to me, that’s why I became a different person."