The cost for foreign tourists, students and business travelers aiming to enter the United States is on the rise. Starting Jan. 1, the application process for nonimmigrant visas will cost $131, up from the present $100 fee, the U.S. State Department announced.

Jam Session
By the Jazz Café Trio, 10 p.m., Jazz Café, San Pedro.

Gata en Vacaciones, Fiesta de Ratones
Comedy, through 21, 7 p.m., Melico Salazar Theater.

It took a while, but the long wait is finally over: New cellular phone lines are available. The Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) started offering the 340,000 lines on Monday.

The lines, however, come with restrictions.

For one thing, only people with state-issued ID cards – obtained through residency or a registered company – can get one, and each person is limited to a single line (company ID cards can have two lines).

Also, the lines cannot be used “to change technologies,” according to an ICE press release. That is, if you already have one of the lines with the old TDMA technology that only works on a limited number of phones, tough luck.

Walk-ins are not welcome. To avoid the long lines and longer waits during previous offerings of cellular phone lines, ICE is using a system of reservations to ration out the lines.

Those interested must call 193 to make a reservation.

-Tico Times

By Tim Rogers
Nica Times Staff | trogers@ticotimes.net

By a split vote of two to one, the Granada Appeals Court on Dec. 14 overturned a guilty murder verdict for U.S. citizen Eric Volz, who is expected to be released from jail today, according to Armando Mejia, secretary of the court's penal chamber.

Mejia told The Nica Times today that the Appeals Court ordered that Volz be freed from jail and that he is now free to leave the country. The plaintiff will now have 10 days to appeal the ruling.

Volz, a 28-year old real estate agent and magazine publisher, was found guilty last February of murdering his Nicaraguan ex-girlfriend, Doris Ivania Jiménez, in San Juan del Sur on Nov. 21, 2006. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison along with another Nicaraguan man, Julio Martín Chamorro, better known as “Rosita.”

The same Granada Appeals Court ruled to uphold the sentence against Chamorro.

Volz, who always maintained his innocence, became the center of an international media storm this year, as his story was covered extensively by more than a dozen major U.S. news outlets.

Read this Friday's print edition of The Nica Times, an eight-page publication of The Tico Times

The cost for foreign tourists, students and business travelers aiming to enter the United States is on the rise. Starting Jan. 1, the application process for nonimmigrant visas will cost $131, up from the present $100 fee, the U.S. State Department announced.

“Because of new security-related costs, new information technology systems, and inflation, the $100... fee is lower than the actual cost of processing nonimmigrant visas," it said in a statement.

It's the first time since November 2002 that the United States has increased the fee, which according to the State Department is largely necessary to cover enhanced technology, such as complete fingerprinting.

“We are now collecting 10 fingerprints from each applicant, and the cost charged by the FBI to review those fingerprints no longer allows us to do this,” the statement said.

The price hike will not apply to immigrant visa applicants or to citizens of the 27 countries in the U.S. Visa Waiver Program, unless they seek permission to enter the United States for longer than 90 days.

For more information check the Web site for U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica, http://sanjose.usembassy.gov, or for an embassy nearest you, http://usembassy.state.gov.