After a year of price hikes, the National Oil Refinery (RECOPE) has requested authorization to drop gasoline prices, it said in a press release. The request is the result of a strengthening of the colón after the Central Bank made an adjustment to the exchange rate in November.

Jorge Rojas announced yesterday he would step down form his post as director of the Judicial Investigation Police (OIJ), ending a 32-year career with Costa Rican law enforcement.

Costa Rica this year has stayed the course in broadening its breadth of diplomacy, Foreign Minister Bruno Stagno boasted over breakfast yesterday morning.

Inside the lavish Foreign Ministry, reporters sat before coffee and banana-leaf-bundled tamales as the slick-haired, straight-talking minister gave his year-end roundup.

Without looking down once at his notes, Stagno ran off a list of 14 countries with which the ministry has established fresh diplomatic ties under his — and President Oscar Arias' ­­-- watch “in record time for Costa Rica.” The countries were mainly African — among them, Egypt, Congo, Uganda, Swaziland – as well as Middle Eastern nations Kuwait, Jordan and Yemen.

But journalists wanted to know more about one Eastern ally in particular: China.

Almost six months on from Costa Rica's rapprochement with China – at the expense of severing its Taiwanese ties – big moves are already in the works, or on the table. They include China's plan to help expand and enhance a petroleum refinery in the Caribbean province of Limón, and its $20 million pledge to revamp the National Stadium in San José's La Sabana park and rebuild 40 Costa Rican cantons that were devastated by flooding in October.

“We're making up for lost time,” said Stagno of Costa Rica and its new associate. “China answers all of our calls.”

Asked if the government planned on rebuilding friendly bridges to Taiwan, Stagno gave a resounding no.

But he pointed to strides made closer to home, namely the government's efforts to strengthen Costa Rica's bilateral political ties with Nicaragua and Panama, efforts that will continue in the coming year, he said.

A hot item on Stagno's scorecard was Costa Rica's re-entry into the U.N. Security Council after its last non-permanent membership expired 10 years ago. The foreign minister stressed the need for Costa Rica to push the council toward agreeing on fairer treatment of individuals suspected of terrorism.

The Arias administration is “concerned that some of the practices and mechanisms of the council in the fight against terrorism do not follow the highest of standards in human rights and due process,” he explained.

U.S. citizen Eric Volz remains in a hospital in Managua, Nicaragua, awaiting the end of a drawn-out saga that took an unexpected turn when a judge delayed his prison-release order.

Volz' scheduled release from jail Monday was inexplicably delayed when a judge in Rivas, in southwest Nicaragua, failed to sign-off on the release order, as required by law, according to a family spokeswoman.

Melissa Campbell, a representative of the Volz family, told The Nica Times in an e-mail that Volz has not yet been released from jail, despite the Granada appellate court's Dec. 14 ruling that overturned the murder verdict from last February, when the 28-year-old realtor and magazine publisher was found guilty of killing his Nicaraguan ex-girlfriend, Doris Ivania Jimenez, and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

By a split vote of two to one, the Granada Appeals Court ruled in Volz' favor and ordered Rivas Judge Ivette Toruño, who ruled on the Volz case earlier this year, to issue his release. The appeals court also ruled to uphold the guilty verdict against Nicaraguan suspect Julio Martin Chamorro, a second murder suspect who stood trial and was found culpable along with Volz.

Toruño, who has declined Nica Times requests for comment since the February verdict, reportedly failed to issue the release order Monday afternoon, skipping out of the office at 1:30 p.m. before she was scheduled to meet with Volz's attorney and sign the papers, according to Campbell.

In the meantime, Volz remains in the Calderón Hospital in Managua, where he has been for the last month recovering for a series of gastrointestinal illnesses and asthma.

He is being “illegally detained,” according to Granada appellate judge Roberto Rodríguez, one of the three judges who ruled on the appeal and who discussed the case at length yesterday with The Nica Times.

Nicaragua's Top Government Attorney, Julio Centeno, expressed outrage yesterday at the verdict in the Volz appeal, and said that the case would be appealed to the Supreme Court.

Volz's mother, Maggie Anthony, meanwhile, went on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Monday night and the Today Show yesterday morning to plead her case and ask the Nicaraguan authorities to execute the Granada court order and let her son return home to Tennessee for Christmas, after nearly 10 months in prison here.

Read this Friday's print edition of The Nica Times, an eight-page publication of The Tico Times, for more on this story.

http://www.ticotimes.net/dailyarchive/2007_12/1219071.htm
http://www.ticotimes.net/dailyarchive/2007_12/1219072.htm
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http://www.ticotimes.net/dailyarchive/2007_12/1219074.htm