Vox Populi dance show
Today through Saturday, 8 p.m.; and Sunday, 5 p.m., Teatro de la Danza, CENAC, 2223-6128.

Stories in English
Favorite fables with a twist, in English, directed by Lisa DeFuso and Kathryn Smith, starring a team of Country Day high school students, today through Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Country Day School, Escazú, 2289-0919.

Sasha Campbell
Soul, R&B, Jazz Café, San Pedro, 10 p.m., http://jazzcafecostarica.com

Former Colombian legislator Mario Uribe – wanted by the Colombian government for alleged ties to paramilitary death squads – turned himself in this week after Costa Rica refused his request for asylum at its embassy in Bogotá.

Uribe, second cousin and adviser of President Alvaro Uribe, went to the Costa Rican Embassy on Tuesday, arguing Colombia lacks due process, according to the nation's daily El Tiempo. The ex-lawmaker has repeatedly denied ties to the far-right death squads blamed for some of the worst atrocities in Colombian history.

The Costa Rican Foreign Ministry rejected Uribe's request for asylum after learning that the Prosecutor's Office of Colombia had ordered his arrest for helping paramilitary and armed self-defense groups.

“It was a very simple decision,” President Oscar Arias said.

Arias said he called Alvaro Uribe to ask how the two men were related, but that they did not discuss the case further.

“If it's a sovereign decision, we do not have to consult anyone, except our own conscience and laws,” Arias said.

Mario Uribe surrendered to Colombian prosecutors at the embassy, where he had waited nine hours for a reply to his bid for asylum, the Agence France-Presse reported. He was escorted to a holding facility at the Prosecutor's Office.

Like his cousin, President Uribe is also being probed for alleged links to paramilitaries, particularly for his alleged role in planning a 1997 massacre that killed 15 people, the president himself said Wednesday on Colombia's Radio Caracol.

Earlier, President Uribe said he was in “pain” over his cousin's arrest, but that he will “assume this pain with patriotism,” AFP reported.

Costa Rica and Colombia have cooperated in recent weeks in an investigation into inroads here by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

The state-run Water and Sewage Company, ENACAL, froze assets belonging to Spanish electricity provider Unión Fenosa as collateral for $1 million debt, Unión Fenosa said.

The “preventive embargo” began Monday with orders from a judge from the Third Civil Court of Managua.

The Spanish power giant has warned that any similar attempts to freeze company bank accounts would plunge the country back into another electricity crisis.

The government last August embargoed property belonging to U.S. oil company Esso Standard Oil in a tax payment dispute that later served as leverage in high-stakes round of business negotiations.

Unión Fenosa spokesman Jorge Katín, however, thinks that in this case ENACAL might be acting alone because the Sandinista government has already negotiated a deal to buy 16% of Unión Fenosa.

“I don't think the government would need to do this type of thing,” he told The Nica Times.

A team of Chinese architects and engineers has drafted plans for a new $72 million National Stadium in La Sabana Park, on the western edge of San José, a gift from the Chinese government.

But the plans are falling short of what President Oscar Arias' administration had anticipated.

For example, the stadium has been designed to accommodate just 35,000 people, 10,000 fewer than the Arias administration had hoped.

Construction is set to begin in July and end in May 2010, five months later than Arias had wanted.

The workforce will be almost entirely Chinese, contrary to Arias' statement in November that it would be largely Costa Rican. Plans call for Chinese workers to camp out in provisional shelters near the site and work 24 hours a day in shifts.

Also contrary to what sports officials had hoped for earlier, the stadium will not include offices for the Costa Rican Sports and Recreation Institute (ICODER) or for the country's 36 sports federations.

“Costa Rica wanted one thing, but we had to compromise according to the budget and China's own proposals,” said Juan Carlos Bonilla, a spokesman for ICODER.

The 11-member Chinese team will leave Costa Rica tomorrow after spending a month here surveying the site and meeting with Costa Rican officials and the Chinese Ambassador Wang Xiaoyuan.