Alan Gross with his wife Judy, attorney Scott Gilbert, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. watch television on board a U.S. government plane headed back to the U.S. as the news breaks of his release, Dec. 17, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson) By Lucia Leal Washington, Jan 23 (EFE).- U.S. citizen Alan Gross believes the C...

Santo Domingo, Jan 20 (EFE).- Dominican Health Minister Altagracia Guzman Marcelino on Wednesday asked women to postpone getting pregnant this year due to the threat posed by the Zika virus, which has been linked to birth defects. Zika is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the same insect that carries dengue fever, Chikungunya and yellow fever. During a meeting of the National Commis...

Source: Kate del Castillo Twitter Mexico City, Jan 18 (EFE).- Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, who met with Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman late last year while he was a still a fugitive, will be summoned by Mexican authorities to testify about her links to the powerful drug lord, a federal government source told EFE Monday. "Yes, they're going to call her to testify," the source said ...

Source: America TeVe MIAMI, Jan. 17, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- América TeVé once again makes television history in the United Stateswith its unique coverage of its' caravan – Path To Freedom Route. For the first time, a professional news team accompanies step by step and day by day, the first group of Cuban refugees stranded for months in Costa Rica, through its pilgrimage through Central Americ...

By Ivonne Malaver Miami, Jan 18 (EFE).- The first Cuban migrants - who had been stranded in Costa Rica - began arriving in Miami on the weekend distressed over their ordeal, but also grateful to the Central American country for its "incredible humanitarian consciousness" after Nicaragua closed its border to them, temporarily halting their trek to the United States. Odalanier Diaz, 27, was re...

"Ejercito de colombia" by Mrnico1092 - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons Bogota, Jan 17 (EFE).- The 17 fishermen kidnapped by the National Liberation Army, or ELN, guerrilla group were rescued in an operation conducted by the Colombian army, President Juan Manuel Santos said Sunday. The ELN, Colombia's second-largest leftist rebel group, kidnapped the fishermen on Saturday. ...

Flickr Commons Mexico City, Jan 16 (EFE).- The arrest in Spain of a former chairman of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has roiled the political scene in Mexico, where the main opposition parties demanded that President Enrique Peña Nieto's administration take legal action against the politician. The center-right National Action Party, or PAN, insisted that the "full we...

Source: Wikimedia Commons Caracas, Jan 15 (EFE).- Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's administration, using constitutionally granted decree powers, on Friday declared a 60-day, nationwide state of economic emergency. The measure, extendable by an additional 60 days, is intended to "protect the people from existing threats," the country's vice president for the economy, Luis Salas, said af...

Wikimedia Commons By Maria Clara Montoya Lima, Jan 13 (EFE; additional context by The Costa Rica Star).- Scientists at Peru's International Potato Center, or CIP, are working on a project to explore the possibility of growing potatoes on Mars. The idea for the project came from researcher Julio Valdivia, who is conducting studies for NASA and found that the soil in an area in southern Pe...

IOM Media Release - A pilot group of 180 Cuban economic migrants stranded in Costa Rica since 14 November, 2015, left shelters provided by the Government of Costa Rica and departed the country as regular migrants. They have each paid USD 555 for a commercial plane and bus tickets in a package trip to reach Mexico via El Salvador and Guatemala. “The departure of the pilot group of Cubans should ...

Wikimedia Commons By Juan Carlos Gomi Bogota, Jan 11 (EFE).- The Spanish galleon San Jose did not sink off Colombia under attack by English ships, as contemporaneous accounts say, and perhaps it did not go down in the Caribbean with its load of treasure due to a powerful explosion, as English commodore Charles Wager reported, nautical researcher Daniel de Narvaez MacAllister told EFE. Th...

FreeStockPhotos.biz The looming economy crisis in Latin America is becoming more apparent with new reports from Mexico and Venezuela. The national currency of Mexico showed signs of retail weakness as global markets plummeted due to concerns about reduced growth of the Chinese economy, and the price of crude oil produced in Venezuela, an OPEC member nation, fell well below $30. The followin...

Panama Canal Panama City, Jan 9 (EFE).- The consortium responsible for the main Panama Canal expansion project is the subject of a criminal complaint in the Central American country for allegedly inflating its cost overrun claims. National Bar Association Vice President Juan Carlos Arauz filed the complaint, to which EFE gained access, on Thursday with Panama's Attorney General's Office. ...

Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman. Source: Wikimedia Commons Mexico City, Jan 9 (EFE).- Mexico's attorney general said marines were able to recapture Joaquin "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzman due partly to their discovery that the fugitive Sinaloa cartel kingpin had contacted people in the film industry about making a movie about his life. "An important aspect in determining his location was having discovere...

By Riley Brands Press Release from the Office of U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar Congressman Henry Cuellar (D-TX-28) and Congresswoman Kay Granger (R-TX-12), as well as U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica S. Fitzgerald Haney and Costa Rican Ambassador to the United States Román Macaya, traveled last week to the Costa Rican border with Nicaragua to see firsthand how Central America is dealing wit...

Wikimedia Commons Mexico City, Jan 7 (EFE).- Three fugtives wanted on criminal conspiracy, drug, sexual abuse and homicide charges by U.S. federal courts were extradited to the United States, the Mexican Attorney General's Office said. "The Foreign Relations Secretariat cited the corresponding agreements under which the government of our country granted the extradition requested by U.S. aut...

Wikimedia Commons Guatemala City, Jan 6 (EFE).- Three officers of Guatemala's PNC national police are being held hostage at an indigenous community in the western province of Solola, where locals burned two patrol cars during disturbances sparked by the slaying of a resident by an off-duty cop, authorities said Tuesday. A PNC spokesperson told EFE that talks were begun on Tuesday in an atte...

Wikimedia Commons Mexico City, Jan 5 (EFE).- Police officers in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas rescued 45 migrants from Guatemala and Honduras in Reynosa, located across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas, the Tamaulipas Coordination Group said. State police officers responding to a tip from the public went to a house in the border city's Puertas del Sol district, where people...

Panama Canal Panama City, Jan 2 (EFE).- President Juan Carlos Varela said Saturday that the inauguration of a newly expanded Panama Canal would take place in May in the presence of several heads of state and government, while also calling on the consortium responsible for the third-locks project to stop waging a media battle with his government. "Sometime in May 2016, our country will once ...

Source: Flickr Commons Mexico City, Jan 2 (EFE).- The newly installed mayor of the central Mexican city of Temixco was killed Saturday, a day after she took office, officials said. "They've informed me of the attack on the mayor of Temixco, Gisela Mota, a young and dear colleague. This a challenge by organized crime. We won't give in," Graco Ramirez - the governor of the central state of Mo...

A Republican Member of the United States Congress visited Costa Rica and toured the shelters provided to stranded Cuban migrants during the holidays. Representative Kay Granger attended a meeting with President Luis Guillermo Solis, Chancellor Manuel Gonzalez, and U.S. Ambassador Fitzgerald Haney before touring the shelters located in the Guanacaste province. At the meeting, which was part of a...

Source: Wikimedia Commons Rio de Janeiro, Dec 29 (EFE).- Rio de Janeiro firefighters are beginning to use drones equipped with cameras and floating life preservers for quicker rescues and to prevent people from drowning at beaches like Ipanema and Copacabana, authorities said Tuesday. A drone's camera will be able to transmit the exact position of a person in danger and its life preserver c...

Bogota, Dec 29 (EFE).- Colombian police in this capital arrested a 58-year-old man and charged him with illegally stockpiling and selling radioactive material, authorities said Tuesday. The man, whose identity was not released, had been illegally storing chemical elements such as Iridium-192 and depleted uranium in a house in Engativa, a town close to Bogota's El Dorado international airport, p...

Source: Flickr Commons San Juan, Dec 28 (EFE).- Three police, two of them women, were shot and killed Monday in Puerto Rico by a fellow officer during a heated argument at the Police Command in Ponce, a city on the south side of the Caribbean island. Police reported that Lieut. Luz Soto, Maj. Frank Roman and patrolwoman Rosario Hernandez were gunned down by Candelario Rivera, a fellow offic...

Guatemala/San Jose, Dec 28 (EFE).- The Central American Integration System agreed on Monday to carry out an initial "pilot humanitarian transfer" of thousands of Cuban migrants from Costa Rica to El Salvador, and later to Mexico, in January, after they were stranded in the region during their attempts to travel to the United States. The move was agreed to after a working group was set up that w...

Wikimedia Commons Beijing, Dec 27 (EFE).- The first direct flight between China and Cuba took off on Sunday from the international airport in Beijing for Havana, with state-owned carrier Air China aiming to promote Chinese tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean. The route is the first direct one linking China, the world's second-largest economy, and the Caribbean, as well as the first r...

San Jose, Dec 26 (EFE).- Costa Rica's Immigration Department said Saturday that a total of 56 Cubans who entered the country illegally will be deported in the coming days. The Immigration Department's press office told the media that those immigrants failed to obtain a Costa Rican visa legally and are being held in San Jose's Hatillo district. Since Nov. 14, Costa Rica has issued almost 8,00...

Wikimedia Commons Mexico City, Dec 26 (EFE).- Two suspected criminals were killed in a clash with marines in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, authorities said Saturday. The marines came under attack Friday by suspected members of an organized crime gang while on patrol in the municipality of Badiraguato, the Navy Secretariat said in a bulletin, adding that a navy helicopter that w...

Source: Red Cross of Costa Rica Paso Canoas, Panama, Dec 25 (EFE).- Some 800 Cubans spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day on the streets or in shelters at the Panamanian-Costa Rican border, not at their final destination as they had hoped. "I thought I'd spend Christmas in the United States with my family," said Sarai Santos, who spent the night of Dec. 24 with friends from her hometown of ...

Flickr Commons By Yeny Garcia Havana, Dec 24 (EFE).- At the close of a year marked by the reestablishment of relations with Washington, Cubans are celebrating the Christmas holidays without big parties but the private restaurants known as "paladares" are causing family traditions to evolve and many people are trying out their culinary offerings. Since 1997, when Christmas was reinstated ...

Source: Erica Hagan Memorial Fund Santiago, Dec 23 (EFE).- A court in the southern Chilean city of Temuco on Wednesday acquitted due to lack of evidence the only suspect in the murder of U.S. psychologist Erica Hagan, who was killed in early September 2014, court sources reported. Domingo Cofre Ferrada, 45, a security guard at the Bautista College in Temuco, where the 22-year-old victim liv...

Panama Canal Panama City, Dec 23 (EFE).- The inauguration of the Panama Canal expansion will be delayed for six months if the ACP, the public entity administering the interocean waterway, does not make more flexible its bureaucratic and payment procedures, Giuseppe Quarta, the director of GUPC, the consortium that is handling the project, said Wednesday. "We ... (can) deliver the project" b...

Pixabay Commons Rio de Janeiro, Dec 22 (EFE).- A 33-year-old man was attacked by a shark, which tore off his hand and part of his arm, while he was swimming a few meters (yards) offshore at a beach on the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, medical personnel reported on Tuesday. The victim, whose name was withheld, was transported on Tuesday morning to a hospital in the mainland city o...

NY Times screenshot New York, Dec 21 (EFE).- The United States should put an end to immigration policies that make it easier for Cubans to leave their island and come to live in this country, The New York Times said in an editorial. For the newspaper, these regulations amount to "a Cold War relic that is hindering the normalization of relations between Washington and Havana." "Congress s...

Source: Flickr Commons A criminal division judge in the municipality of Carazo, located about 70 kilometers southwest of Managua, has named four suspects in the murder of Canadian expat Rajan Deedar Gill, who was found beaten to death in his country home near La Boquita in Nicaragua. According to a November 30th wire report by Agencia EFE, police officers found the victim next to Marbely de...

Wikimedia Commons La Paz, Dec 18 (EFE).- The government of the western Bolivian province of Oruro issued a declaration of natural disaster Saturday after learning that Lake Poopo, the second largest in the country after Titicaca and which once covered more than 4,600 sq. kilometers (1,780 sq. miles), has almost dried up. Oruro Gov. Victor Hugo Vasquez enacted a law that declared it a natura...

San Jose, Dec 19 (EFE).- Costa Rica's government said it would stop issuing transit visas to Cubans after failing to reach an agreement with its neighbors to allow these migrants to continue on through Central America toward the United States. "We can't keep receiving migrants indefinitely ... Please don't come to Costa Rica. We don't want to deport you. Don't come because you can't go through,...

Panama Canal Panama City, Dec 18 (EFE).- The inauguration of an expanded Panama Canal, previously scheduled for April, will be postponed due to cracks detected in the new set of locks that are the centerpiece of the $5.25 billion overhaul, the interoceanic waterway's chief administrator said Friday. Panama Canal Authority, or ACP, head Jorge Quijano said the agency was still planning for th...

Source: Flickr Commons Acapulco, Mexico, Dec 17 (EFE).- After previously denying media reports about the discovery of nearly a score of bodies, the governor of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero said Thursday that a federal prosecutor had informed him that a large number of human remains had been found. "Indeed, the (federal) Attorney General's Office is investigating the discovery of t...

Wikimedia Commons Bogota, Dec 15 (EFE).- The Colombian Culture Ministry officially refused to give U.S.-based treasure hunters Sea Search Armada access to the coordinates of the site where the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Jose was found on Nov. 27. In a letter signed by Minister Mariana Garces and made public on Tuesday, Colombia ruled out the possibility suggested by SSA of receiving a...