Between June 27 and July 3, the provincial Office of the Independent Police Review Director received 164 complaints, compared with an average 80 per week, said spokeswoman Rosemary Parker.

The arm’s-length agency created last year to deal with complaints against police doesn’t have “enough resources” to determine what portion of those are related to the G20, Parker said.

However, some people who may be intimidated by the process of lodging a complaint with the provincial office are turning to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. It has received more than 75 complaints from people caught up in mass arrests.

“We are finding that people may be intimidated by the process, by the amount of information they need to provide to make a complaint, and some are worried that if they file a complaint the police will get mad at them,” said Des Rosiers. The group helps individuals file a complaint or get legal advice, she said.

Most complaints lodged with CCLA came after a meeting last Tuesday at Christie Pits Park, where people were urged to take action through legal avenues.

Natalie Logan, 21, was among those attending. She said she was arrested while taking photos at The Esplanade on Saturday evening and detained for 14 hours.

Logan plans to send her complaint to both the complaints office and the civil liberties group. She delayed doing so, she said, because she wanted to ensure her account was as neutral and accurate as possible. “I want to keep this issue upfront and not let it fizzle away with time.”

In the mean time, she urges people to speak out: “It’s important for people to stand up and denounce police misconduct, and filing a complaint is the best way to do so. It’s a service to your community to do so.”

Seventeen companies are named in the lawsuit, including Seacor Marine and Diamond Offshore Drilling. According to a Business Week report, the suit seeks compensatory and punitive damages on behalf of all commercial fisherman, charter-boat operators and other businesses affected by the spill; property owners whose land was fouled; and oil workers who lost work because of the U.S.-imposed halt in offshore drilling.

According to Business Week, the complaint further alleges that the fireboats should have used their “dynamic positioning systems” to hold the Deepwater Horizon in place while fighting the fire with industry-approved methods, which would have prevented the sinking and the oil spill.

The lawsuit has been filed in U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana (New Orleans).

In other oil spill news, federal officials have decided to allow pressure testing of the containment cap that was installed over the leaking well last week to continue for now. This despite the appearance of bubbles and seepage in four place around the gusher. According to The Washington Post, the Obama Administration is allowing BP to keep the cap shut off for the next 24 hours while engineers try to determine the severity and consequences of the problems.

The well was shut off last week, and oil has stopped flowing in the Gulf of Mexico for now. However, over the weekend, BP and the government were at odds over whether to allow the well to remain shut off. BP wants it to stay capped until relief wells – the only permanent way to end the spill – are finished sometime in the next month.

However, the government was pushing BP to open the well up and continue efforts to siphon the oil and collect it in containment ships on the shore. It would take at least a few days to get those ships reconnected, and oil would have to be allowed to flow freely into the sea while that occurred. Federal officials took this stance after pressure readings on the cap weren’t as high as expected. This could be an indication that there is a leak somewhere else in the wellbore, or deep down in bedrock, which could make the seabed unstable. The well would need to be reopened to ensure no further damage is done
]]> http://my-complaint.com/latest-bp-oil-spill-lawsuit/feed/ 0 http://my-complaint.com/complaint-over-police-mexico-border/ http://my-complaint.com/complaint-over-police-mexico-border/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:57:06 +0000 admin http://my-complaint.com/?p=15660 Mexico is demanding answers from Washington over the fatal shooting of a teenager by a US border patrol agent and has sent a formal complaint over the incident, Mexico’s foreign minister said.

At a wake on Wednesday, grieving relatives wept over the body of Sergio Hernandez, shot on the Mexican side of the border in the frontier city of Ciudad Juarez as he and other youths were running from US border patrol agents.

The death of the teenager has sparked outrage in Mexico, where many already bristle at the way Mexican immigrants doing menial jobs are treated in the United States.

“I would just caution on this particular incident … Any law enforcement officer has the right of self-defence if people are taking up arms or (throwing) rocks against them,” Crowley told reporters in Washington.

Espinosa said it was not clear if the youths, who were under a bridge border crossing a few meters into Mexican territory, had attacked the agents.

Tensions between the major trading partners have been fanned by the state of Arizona’s decision to crack down on illegal immigrants.

First we have to get control of the human rights problem. We need better training of the agents so they won’t abuse the migrants. Several of them have been indicted recently for rape, beatings and so on. Fortunately, we haven’t had any shootings here since the early nineties.

Secondly, once we get the human rights issue under control we need to revisit our immigration laws. We have three to five million undocumented migrants in the U.S. and we have to look at the whole amnesty issue all over again. We have to find ways that people can cross to the U.S. and work legally. That’s something that has to be agreed on by immigrants rights groups as well as by Congressional leaders and immigration authorities. Sooner or later they are going to have to revisit the whole amnesty issue.

Right now it’s estimated between six and seven thousand. Five thousand on the border at least. Here in San Diego alone we have 2,200. In San Diego we are boxed in. That’s part of the problem. But the real big problem is these troops were not trained for immigration or interacting with civilians. They were trained for battle. For combat. For search and destroy. The boy is an example. They left that boy out there, after they shot him. He laid out there for 20 to 30 minutes bleeding to death. They didn’t have any first-aid on them. They didn’t have any medics with them like they do in combat. They had to wait for the Border Patrol to call the paramedics. By then the boy had bled to death. That’s the kind of people they are going to have out there on the border.

In one of her first moves, ombudsman Fiona Crean asked all civic departments to forward copies of their processes for handling complaints from the public.

That was last December. She’s still waiting.

“We received good procedures from some, mediocre from others and none from yet others,” Crean told reporters Thursday. “Less than half the areas submitted processes or posted them on their website. Openness and accessibility was a problem even for those who had good procedures.”

Citizens must first seek redress from the relevant civic department before approaching the ombudsman’s office, on Elizabeth St. near city hall, but people often say the municipal public service just isn’t responsive to them, she said.

“I can’t tell you how many people said, `I never heard back from the city.’”
“So we’ll take the steps that are necessary to make sure that people have a well-understood point of access to approach the city with concerns they might have about a service, or a time frame in which a service was delivered. It’s completely reasonable.”

In 2009, the office received 1,057 inquiries and complaints and processed and closed 958 of them, or just over 90 per cent, she said.

As it began operations, the ombudsman’s office first focused on individual complaints. In 2010, Crean wants to turn her attention to solving systemic problems.

The first order of business is ensuring the government develops procedures to handle complaints and publicizes them.
People have been able to pursue complaints by speaking to a supervisor or, if that doesn’t get results, speaking to the division’s general manager, he said.

“There always has been a way to make your concerns known. What we’re doing now is formalizing that, making sure it’s documented and available publicly on websites and that the city communicates it more clearly.

“The goal, of course, is to deal with concerns people have as quickly as possible without the need to make a formal complaint.”

Ideally, municipal services should be provided in a way that doesn’t attract complaints, he added.

The 32-year-old Mexican immigrant said he put up with the situation for months because he was desperate to support his wife and young daughter. And like many co-workers, he was afraid to challenge his boss.

“All of us took abuse. We were disrespected,” said Gutierrez, who found help at a workers’ rights center, joined with other workers to sue the owner of La Fruteria and now works at another grocery store that he says treats him better.

Across the nation, the long-simmering problem of employers who don’t pay their workers appears to be getting worse, especially for immigrant laborers.
n the absence of aggressive federal action, some states and local governments have begun to tackle the issue on their own. They say employers who don’t pay overtime or minimum wage are unlikely to pay into state workers’ compensation or unemployment insurance funds — bilking taxpayers even as they’re cheating workers.

Workers rights centers say wage theft has become the No. 1 complaint they’ve heard in recent months.

In Chicago, Working Hands Legal Clinic, which is helping Gutierrez, received 161 complaints of wage theft from January through June 2008. That jumped by more than 60 percent to 252 complaints during the same period this year.

The Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network says at least 50 percent of day laborers — there are 120,000 on a given day in the U.S. — experience some form of wage theft.

About 68 percent of low-wage workers reported wage theft in 2008, regardless of citizenship status, according to a study released earlier this year that surveyed 4,400 low-wage workers in major U.S. cities, the first such extensive review in years.

“It’s not confined to the margins, or a few rogue employers. Employers realize that workers are desperate,” said Nik Theodore, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and lead author of the study conducted with the University of California, Los Angeles and the City University of New York. “It looks like standard business practice in many industries.”
Advocates say enforcing wage and hour laws even for laborers in the country illegally keeps wages for all workers from being driven down and ensures that employers who follow the rules can compete.

California has also required some businesses to pay a state registration fee, which pays workers if violations are later found and funds a collections department, making fines enforceable.

Some worker advocates say combining efforts for massive raids is good publicity but nets little for workers because the focus is on recovering unemployment or Social Security taxes for the state rather than overtime wages for the employee.

In response, New York Labor Commissioner M. Patricia Smith has worked with community-based groups and even unions, which are often the first to receive labor complaints, in a nationally recognized effort to identify employers violating labor laws.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has added about 250 wage and hour inspectors, and last week, the department signed an agreement with the New York labor department, Mexican Consulate and several other groups to create a call center that will provide Hispanic workers in the New York area information about their labor rights.

For now, Gutierrez and his former employer are trying to work things out in court, but he’s unsure if he’ll get all the back pay he says he’s owed.

Launching the ombudsman’s 2008 annual report today, Minister for Social and Family Affairs Mary Hanafin refused to rule out the possibility that a single tax relief rate of 33 per cent on pension contributions may be introduced in next week’s Budget.

Ms Hanafin said this measure, which was proposed in the revised programme for government, should be viewed as part of the National Pensions Framework, which has yet to be published and is unlikely to be implemented before 2014.

However she added that tax reliefs can be changed by the Minister for Finance in any budget. “The Minister could do it next week,” she said.

Pensions ombudsman Paul Kenny said about 15 per cent of the complaints received by his office now relate to the construction sector. In some these cases, employers deducted pension contributions from their employee’s wages but did not remit them to the pension schemes.

The flow of complaints from the construction industry has been particularly heavy this year as people have been losing their jobs in the sector, he noted. While in employment, many workers were afraid “to put their heads above the parapet”, while others, particularly foreign nationals, didn’t understand their pension rights.

During 2008, the ombudsman received 758 new complaints, a 47 per cent jump
from the previous year. Mr Kenny said that 40 per cent of complaints came
from the public sector, with the remainder coming from the private sector.

In the 12th stop on its “Save the Dream” tour, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America said it expects to draw 50,000 people over five days to a program that brings together borrowers, counselors and lenders. Some loans will be modified on the same day, the group said.

NACA is based in Boston but has been expanding a Charlotte office that helps coordinate the nationwide tour.
The borrowers that come to NACA usually have tried to work with their lender without success, said founder Bruce Marks, who was in Charlotte Tuesday to promote the event to be held at The Park, formerly the Charlotte Merchandise Mart. The group acts as a middleman on behalf of borrowers. “You have to push pretty aggressively,” Marks said.

NACA is known for protesting predatory lending practices and making its own affordable home loans to low-income borrowers. But increasingly it has focused on helping borrowers threatened by the nation’s foreclosure crisis.

The group this year began hiring in its Charlotte office as part of an expansion of its “Home Save” services. N.C. and local officials have promised NACA $3.5 million in incentives in return for hiring about 1,000 employees over five years. The group now has about 700 people in Charlotte and Marks has said the group plans to hire a total of 2,000 by the end of next year.
NACA works to find a quick, permanent solution for borrowers, while the government program starts with a trial-modification period, he noted. In a statement Monday, Charlotte-based Bank of America highlighted another challenge with the government program: getting borrowers to supply the necessary paperwork.

At the news conference, Marks acknowledged his approach is controversial. He has cultivated a reputation as a “bank terrorist” who holds protests at the homes of CEOs whose banks NACA deems to be engaged in predatory lending. This pressure has helped persuade lenders to sign loan-modification agreements with the group.
During the five-day event, Marks said monthly payments can be reduced by $500 or more and interest rates can be dropped to as low as 2 percent. The service is free. Borrowers are encouraged to pre-register at naca.com or by calling 888-499-6222, but walk-ins are welcome. The event runs 9 a.m.-8 p.m. each day, although counselors will stay later working with people who arrived during those hours.

At the news conference, NACA touted some of the homeowners the group has helped. Eddie Cuffie, a Charlotte retiree, said he didn’t have good credit when he took out a Countrywide Financial loan with a monthly payment of $975 and a 9.75 percent interest rate. With NACA’s help, he now has a Bank of America loan with a $683 monthly payment and a 5 percent interest rate.

Seven-year-old Tanadon, however, never showed up.

Because she kept his birth from Canadian immigration officials, Chumchantha’s efforts to bring the boy to Canada from her native Thailand are being rebuffed on the grounds that he doesn’t qualify as a family member.

“I was shocked,” said the 31-year-old mother of three, who makes her home in Ottawa. “I just want to be with my son.”

Stung by the cultural stigma that came with being a single mother in a Thai village and with no knowledge of the immigration process, she kept her baby a secret, putting all thoughts of going to a new country out of her mind as the sponsorship process dragged on.

When her permanent residency finally came through, Chumchantha was caught between leaving her son behind and jeopardizing her aging mother’s chances of being with the rest of her family in Canada.

In a blur of confusion, she made the gut-wrenching decision to leave her son with his paternal grandparents, an arrangement she vowed would be temporary.

Now, four years later, not even a birth certificate or photos – both before and after her pregnancy – have helped as Chumchantha grapples with a complex immigration system that’s keeping her from the son she failed to declare to Canadian authorities.

“I just didn’t know what to do then,” she said. “I feel this is not really fair.”
“We can’t go wasting years and leaving people in limbo.”

Chumchantha’s request to have her case re-examined has already been dismissed, and she has opted not to appeal the decision to the Federal Court of Canada for fear of losing.

Instead, desperate to experience at least part of her son’s childhood, Chumchantha is now considering a novel solution: having her husband of two months adopt the child so the family can be together.

“I want to fight for it,” she said.

It won’t be easy, warned Mike Bell, an immigration lawyer consulted by the couple.

“There is a potential option for the stepfather to adopt the child, assuming he intends to assume a parental role,” Bell said. But it’s far from a perfect solution, he warned.

Everything is out of the family’s hands and they have no control over anything.”

In addition to extensive background checks and a comprehensive home-study, if a family wants to adopt a pre-identified child in Thailand, the process gets complicated overseas, she added.

Thailand requires the birth parents to relinquish all right to the child in court before a pre-identified child can be adopted. For a case like Chumchantha’s, that could create problems which would stretch the typical three-year adoption process even further.

Still, nothing impossible.

Chumchantha’s daily routine is now punctuated by lawyer visits, consultations with support groups and appeals to politicians. Meanwhile, as she juggles her job, her new marriage and her push to be reunited with her son, she clings to the crackly long distance calls that serve as her only connection to her child.

Guillermo Duarte had a lot to prove just to take a two-week vacation to visit his brother in Canada.

The engineer, 36, had to convince Canadian visa officers that he, his engineer wife, Luz, and their younger children Fernando, 10, and Faviola, 8, had strong enough ties to Guatemala to ensure they would leave Canada after a visit to his brother, Mauricio, in Toronto.

But after paying a non-refundable fee of $300, they were denied visitor’s visas. (Even leaving two teens at home didn’t convince the officer they wouldn’t stay in Canada.)

While the denial cost the Duartes a ruined vacation, for other prospective visitors it might mean not being able to bid farewell to a dying relative, attend a loved one’s wedding, or see a newborn grandchild
“It’s a very big problem for our community,” says Gurmeet Singh of Brampton’s Nanaksar Satsang Sabha Sikh temple. “And it’s going to get worse … if our visa officials don’t change their attitude and show some compassion.”

Visas are imposed to help “facilitate the entry of bonafide visitors to Canada for such purposes as trade, commerce, tourism, international understanding, and cultural, educational and scientific activities, while also protecting the health, safety and security of Canadian society,” says Citizenship and Immigration spokesperson Karen Shadd-Evelyn.

New Democrat MP Olivia Chow (Trinity-Spadina) says her office has 65 outstanding complaints from constituents involving relatives’ failed visa applications.

“Visa officers have the discretionary power to decide who to let in. There’s no humanitarian and compassionate consideration. Their decisions are completely arbitrary and don’t get reviewed,” Chow says. “The onus should’ve been on the Canadian officials to show that these people would not leave CanadaDuarte walked into the Canadian embassy in Guatemala City last month, hands full of documents: pay stubs, an employer letter, bank statements, the deeds on his three properties and a passport to show his lengthy travel history.

When his first try failed, his brother in Canada wrote an official invitation and asked his local councillor, MP and even a senator to intervene. The visa office later called Duarte in to apply for a minister’s special permit for an extra $185. But by then, the date was too close to the family’s booked vacation time and the airfare too expensive. “We are all disappointed,” says Mauricio Duarte, who immigrated 17 years ago. “Whenever we go back home, we stay with our families and relatives. We would like to play hosts to someone when they come here.”

Lawyer Avvy Go, director of the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, points out there’s no guarantee that visitors from visa-exempt countries would leave Canada either.
after their visits.”
Immigration reacts slowly to the global economic and political changes. Countries like China and India are becoming bigger economic powers,” says Mamann, an ex-immigration officer. “My concern is our visa officers are still using outdated standards to judge these applications, (believing) these people will come and stay in Canada.”

If nothing changes, he adds, Canada stands to lose the substantial economic benefits from delegates attending conferences, buyers going to trade shows and tourists all in a world that’s become closer and more intimate than ever before.

Last month, a Daily Journal investigation found that disability insurers frequently deny or terminate benefits to people who have limited recourse to appeal the insurers’ decisions.

The investigation also found that the California Department of Insurance does little to regulate the practices of disability insurers.

The state Department of Insurance says it does not always have the power to intervene in claims denial cases because the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act governs employer-sponsored worker benefits.

Assembly Health Committee Chair Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) said the Department of Insurance could wield more power to investigate claims denials and protect disabled consumers. Jones is running to replace current Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner (R) next year.

Poizner is seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination.
In related news, some advocacy groups plan to pressure lawmakers to change ERISA regulations if national health care reform legislation requires all residents to have insurance coverage.

ERISA currently prohibits individuals covered under group policies from appealing a claims rejection in state courts or from seeking punitive damages.