Their protest dragged out for more than a month, as state and federal government officials alternately ignored them or responded evasively. Finally, the frustrated protestors decided to send a stronger message. On Nov. 12, after their second meeting with state and federal government officials who again offered no resolution to their problems, they set fire to the barges.

Gleba Nova Olinda covers 172,900 hectares between the Maró and Aruá Rivers, at the source of the Arapiuns River in the municipality of Santarém. Its natural resources are vital to the survival of the people of the Arapiuns. The protest unites 14 communities from throughout the region in the “Movement in Defense of the Life and Culture of the Arapiuns.”

Gleba Nova Olinda’s indigenous and peasant communities have petitioned the government for legal recognition of their territorial rights since the creation of the neighboring Tapajos-Arapiuns Extractive Reserve 13 years ago. Over the past decade, state land exchange programs and development incentives drew loggers and potential soy farmers to Gleba Nova Olinda. The influx sparked conflicts over land and resource rights with the area’s inhabitants that rapidly turned violent. Violence and threats of violence are a common means of conflict resolution in the state of Pará, where valuable resources such as timber lead to high-stakes conflicts and state enforcement is minimal.

The logging companies have divided communities in the region, spreading conflict beyond the traditional confrontation between loggers, land speculators, and communities. The companies have co-opted some communities, purchasing community support cheaply by providing infrastructure that the government never delivered, such as generators and community buildings, or jobs that turn the area’s inhabitants into agents of deforestation. Most people of the region, however, continue to protest the presence of the loggers.

The government of the state of Pará effectively decided not to expel the loggers and land speculators operating in traditional and indigenous territories. On the contrary, the proposal authorized 11 “sustainable management plans” and reduced the size of the Vista Alegre Agro-extractive Agrarian Reform Settlement Project from 25,000 hectares to 5,000 hectares.

In a scathing report, the human rights organization was especially critical of Mexico’s civilian authorities, saying they had failed or refused to investigate or prosecute military abuses. Complaints against the military are almost entirely handled by military courts, and only a handful of cases, among thousands of denouncements, has been prosecuted.

“The abuses we have seen contribute to the deterioration of the security situation in Mexico,” Kerrie Howard, deputy director of Amnesty’s Americas Program, said in a statement. “By failing to take action to prevent and punish serious human rights violations the Mexican government could be seen to be complicit in these crimes.”
Cases cited included that of Saul Becerra, whose body was found near the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez in March. He was last seen being taken away by army troops several months earlier. Five men detained with him reported being held in the barracks of a motorized cavalry regiment and beaten and threatened for days.

In another case, 25 municipal police agents from Tijuana said they were seized by the army and held and tortured inside an infantry base for more than a month. Electrical shocks were applied to their feet and genitals, their heads were covered with plastic bags and they were beaten, they said, in an effort to exact false confessions.

In most of the cases, efforts by frantic families to find their missing relatives faced general inaction on the part of authorities, Amnesty International said.

Three men picked up by the army after dinner one night in March in the northern city of Nuevo Laredo were found burned to death about a month later. The families obtained photos and video of soldiers driving around in one of the dead men’s cars.

In this case, a rarity, 12 soldiers were arrested by the army, but, Amnesty International said, because of the military’s opaque justice system, it has not been possible to find out more about what happened and whether the soldiers were punished.
As drug violence and the pace of killings have soared exponentially — more than 14,000 people have died in drug-related slayings in the last three years — so has the number of complaints filed against the army with the National Human Rights Commission: 182 in 2006 compared with 1,230 in 2008 and almost 2,000 this year.

The highest number of human rights complaints has been registered in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s deadliest city, triple this year over last, officials say. Thousands of residents of Juarez took to the streets over the weekend in a march demanding protection from both traffickers and the army. It was a rare show of united public protest against the violence engulfing the region.

With major roads scraped down to the pavement and equipment being sent to clear impassable residential streets, Dean Bell, the city’s manager of road maintenance, said they are on top of the situation.

“I understand people’s frustration when they can’t get to work or are sliding down a hill,” he said. “I think we’re doing a pretty good job, considering the money we get.

“Every storm’s different.”

He expected those streets so clogged by snow or frozen-in vehicles that residents can’t get in or out would be cleared by this morning’s rush hour.

“Our number one focus right now is to get all those impassable residential roads cleared up,” he said, adding there were about 40 locations that were impassable.
But while the city threw every available plow and person at the storm that dropped up to 20 centimetres on parts of the city and saw high winds blow snow into even higher drifts, residents were scrambling to extricate themselves from snowed-under neighbourhoods.

Oliver Ennis said there were still a bus and five cars stuck in the road in front of his Saddle Ridge home Monday. And Grant Galpin, another Saddle Ridge resident, said the hard-hit area was a “nightmare” over the weekend.

“People couldn’t go 10 feet without getting stuck,” he said. “If there had been an emergency case, it’s endangering lives.”

Ald. Ray Jones says while city crews did a great job at attacking the storm and doing what they could, council needs to ensure they are able to do more.
He’d like to see money pulled from the reserve fund in unusual storms such as the one that hit Friday.
“People were not very happy and understandably so,” he said.
With its annual budget of about $24 million, it clears roads with lanes totallingabout 8,000kilometres. The city has more than 14,000 lane kilometres of roads.
By comparison,Winnipeg’s snow clearing budget is $25 million this year, includingwhat it pays to retain outside contractors to call in during a storm. With that money it clears all its streets, including residential, a total of almost 3,300 lane kilometres. That is a distance shorter than Calgary’s priority one roads.

Calgary spends $23 per capita on winter maintenancecosts, compared to $62 in Edmonton, $44 in Winnipeg and $25 in Saskatoon.
It’s super expensive and it’s super expensive for the amount of man hours that it takes,” he said. “It’s a ton of money to put up snow fencing and a lot of times it’s not either effective or itwasn’t required anyway.”

In August 2009, Alaska Attorney General Dan Sullivan issued an opinion recommending changes to the Ethics Act and on Tuesday, the Attorney General is moving forward to change the state’s ethics rules in the wake of the battles waged by former Gov. Sarah Palin.

It’s unclear how much of Palin’s reported $600,000 in personal legal bills would have qualified for reimbursement under the new changes. Meanwhile, the ethics complaints against the former governor keep coming; longtime Palin critic Andree McLeod filed another one last Monday targeting that a legal defense fund set up by Palin supporters to cover her costs continues to solicit contributions after an investigator hired by the state found “probable cause” that it violated the law.

Fairbanks Republican state Rep. Jay Ramras, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, feels a little differently than the Attorney General. Ramras, a frequent critic of Palin recommends letting more time pass and not rushing into new regulations. He said the state should defend officials against ethics complaints and not pay private attorneys to do so.

“I didn’t make a decision one way or the other,” said Bishop Egan, whom the lawyer suggested had failed to act quickly against the cleric. “I kept working on it until I resolved the decision.”

The exchange is one of hundreds recorded in a vast trove of documents the Diocese of Bridgeport made public on Tuesday after battling in court for seven years to keep them sealed. The archive — more than 12,000 pages of memos, church records and testimony — was gathered for 23 lawsuits, alleging sexual abuse of children by seven priests, that the diocese settled in 2002.
Since 2002, when he moved to New York and nationwide attention focused on the church hierarchy’s handling of abuse complaints, Cardinal Egan has faced troubling accusations about his tenure in Bridgeport: that he allowed priests facing multiple sex abuse allegations to continue working; that he did not refer complaints to criminal authorities; and that he showed little interest in meeting with accusers.

As New York archbishop, Cardinal Egan adopted policies to aid the investigation and reporting of abuse complaints, and expressed regret in a 2002 letter to parishioners: “If in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.”
Throughout the testimony, Bishop Egan showed himself as an administrator who could be demanding of his staff, but at times felt limited in his ability to remove men from the priesthood despite several abuse complaints.

He emerges as a religious leader with an almost fatalistic view that the truth in many sex abuse cases is unknowable. “You are of the opinion that everything is crystal clear,” he told a lawyer questioning him about his decisions. “I am not.”
When new accusations emerged against those priests, one had already died. One retired in ill health; Bishop Egan let another keep working in a limited capacity because he considered the charges unfounded, and removed two from the priesthood.
Bishop Egan was at his most combative when voicing his belief in the innocence of most accused priests, including one, the Rev. Raymond Pcolka, who was accused by 12 former parishioners of abuses involving oral and anal sex and beatings.

“I am not aware of those things,” said the bishop. “I am aware of the claims of those things, the allegations of those things. I am aware that there are a number of people who know one another, some are related to one another, have the same lawyers and so forth.”
After one complaint against Father Pcolka surfaced, the bishop sent the priest to the Hartford psychiatric center in 1993. But when the priest checked himself out after 10 days, refusing to return to the diocese, Bishop Egan permitted him to continue receiving a stipend and lawyer’s fees from the diocese. Of the payments, he said, “We are not obligated to do that, except that it is a practice that has a certain moral implication.”

Even during interviews with media following his swearing-in ceremony Wednesday morning, McCulloch’s cell phone was buzzing with calls from area residents concerned about an evergreen on the southwest side of the courthouse square, commonly known as the “Courthouse Christmas Tree.” Responding to concerns about overgrowth, the county’s landscaper aggressively trimmed the tree during the weekend, leading to concerns at Monday morning’s county commission meeting and complaints by the Old Courthouse Museum curator, Marge Thomas, that the tree had been destroyed by improper trimming.

“I don’t mind saying that the main question I’ve had today, especially in my first day as presiding commissioner, has been the Christmas tree in the square on which the branches have been raised,” McCulloch said. “It doesn’t look like there’s any way to salvage it, from my point of view.”
The tree has had many of the lower branches removed and the top has been trimmed as well. McCulloch said he didn’t yet know what solution he’ll propose to the tree problem, or to prevent similar problems in the future.

The presiding commissioner’s duties focus on courthouse issues, not road work, and McCulloch said he won’t try to interfere in the designated duties of Eastern District Commissioner Bill Farnham or Western District Commissioner Ricky Zweerink.

“I want to reiterate that the presiding commissioner has no authority over the roads,” McCulloch said. “There is an eastern and a western side, they have a (road) crew. The presiding commissioner has no crew, does not do roads, however people can contact me if they can’t get a hold of one of the others and I’ll pass the word on.”

Two of the complaints accused the officer, identified by neighbors as Frank Tepper, of seeking retribution for his family members while he was off duty.

Three complaints, including the two involving his family, accused him of using excessive force.

And in a 2002 report, an investigator noted “ongoing tensions” between Tepper and neighborhood youth, and issued an ominous warning that his actions could have led to the use of deadly force.
But incensed neighbors, who painted Tepper as a bully with a track record for abusing his status as a policeman, said that the fight had spilled out from a party at Tepper’s home and that it had involved members of his family.

Several witnesses also claim that Tepper was visibly intoxicated during the incident.

As reported yesterday in the Daily News, Debbie Spencer said that while off duty in 2002 Tepper maced her 17-year-old son and his friend following an argument and that Tepper had failed to identify himself as a cop.

Spencer said she did not file a civilian complaint about the incident, but the mother of the other teen involved, Donna Walker, did.

In interviews with Internal Affairs investigators, Tepper said that his son had been harassed by a teenage boy who’d hung him on the fence of a neighborhood playground.

Tepper went looking for the teen but claimed that he had been stopped by a group of teenage boys who verbally assaulted and surrounded him. Tepper admitted to macing at least one of the teens and to twice drawingDonna Walker also recalled to police an incident two or three years earlier in which Tepper came outside with a gun after one of his relatives was hit with a snowball.

Walker’s son was throwing snowballs when Tepper “came outside waving his gun around. Apparently he does that a lot,” she was quoted as saying.

In the report, Donna Walker claimed that she smelled beer on Tepper’s breath shortly after the incident. Spencer made the same claim to the Daily News. Tepper denied to investigators that he had been drinking.

Sean Walker and Spencer’s son were charged with assault stemming from the incident and later sentenced to probation.

Tepper was “exonerated” by Internal Affairs, but an investigator wrote that he would have “been better served by waiting for uniformed on-duty officers to arrive. By failing to do so he is in violation of Commissioners Memo 98-1 Off-Duty Police Actions.”

Policies outlined in that memo include that “off-duty officers will not take police action in minor family or neighborhood disputes,” and that “in most off-duty situations, the best action an officer can take is to be a good witness and call 9-1-1.”

“It’s up to them now,” said Huron County Planning Commission Chairman Ted Sheldon, referring to the Huron County Board of Commissioners.

He noted the process to add a complaint resolution provision to the county’s wind overlay zoning ordinance came about at the request of the Huron County Board of Commissioners. Huron County commissioners requested amendments be made to the wind ordinance because the county had received about 10 noise complaints from residents living by turbines in the Michigan Wind 1 wind development near Ubly.

Lundberg explained a wind energy subcommittee was formed, consisting of members from the county’s planning commission, board of commissioners and health department. One of the subcommittee’s tasks was to recommend a draft zoning amendment pertaining to complaint resolution that would be forwarded to the planning commission, and then board of commissioners for final approval.

Mr. Osayande spoke at a validation workshop on the Commission’s five-year strategic plan (2008-2012) in Abuja. He said the complaints commission is to curb the abuses and excesses of the police.

He said to ensure unimpeded investigations, the new commission will not be under the PSC, the Police Force nor the Police Affairs Ministry. He said the five year plan sets out the future of the PSC as expressed by the aspiration and inputs of the members of the PSC and management staff.

Various police reforms reveal that low public opinion and confidence in police due to corruption, extortion and improper monitoring and handling misconduct among officers. They also sought the establishment of a recruitment board comprising of a retired police officer, two serving officers (not below the rank of Commissioners) and one director each from the PSC and the Ministry.
The Director General of CLEEN Foundation, Innocent Chuckuma said government must fund its agencies including the police force fully so as ensure service delivery to the public. “State institutions cannot be run on a charity,” he said.

Hamilton’s public health department discovered two months ago during a routine inspection that vaccines were being stored at wrong temperatures or exposed to light, which can make the shots less effective or even render them useless
Hamilton’s medical officer of health apologized publicly during a press conference yesterday to disclose the problems.

“We certainly are very sorry for what has happened here,” said Dr. Elizabeth Richardson, medical officer of health. “We regret any anxiety that it may have caused to any of the patients or the community.”

Improperly stored vaccine doesn’t go bad or pose any danger. But patients could be vulnerable to illness they thought they’d been protected against.

“The worst-case scenario with this would be that the vaccine someone was given was less effective than it should be,” said Dr. Michael Gardam, one of Ontario’s leading infectious disease experts. “Depending on the vaccine and depending on the circumstances, it could be a relatively big deal.”

Of particular concern is rabies, which can take up to seven years to cause illness.

That’s why public health is contacting all 62 patients who had a rabies vaccination at a Hamilton hospital from January 2002 to August 2009.

It’s also looking for 328 patients who had a tetanus diphtheria vaccination at a Hamilton hospital from August 2007 to August 2009.

Both of these vaccines were stored at temperatures above or below the required two to eight degrees Celsius. The problem happened when the vaccines were taken out of the central storage used for all hospitals and put in emergency department fridges.

“Those fridges and that process was less rigorous than the central process,” said Dr. David Higgins, chief of staff at St. Joseph’s.

The hospitals have now ensured the emergency department fridges are always at the right temperature.

Richardson says all of the storage issues have been fixed.

“The vaccine supply overall in Hamilton is very safe,” she said. “The situation we’ve encountered, we’re being very cautious about. We’re just being as proactive and as careful about it as we can.”

Both the hospitals and public health said they waited two months to reveal the errors because it took them that long to determine the size of the problem, how it would affect the vaccines and identify the hundreds of patients involved.

Higgins said it would have been “very anxiety-provoking and difficult to manage” to tell the community any sooner.

Gardam says it’s hard for public health to monitor vaccine storage as well as it should because so many places, from doctors’ offices to pharmacies to hospitals, carry vaccine. Hamilton’s public health nurses inspect about 325 places where vaccine is stored.

“It’s one of the areas where I think public health quite commonly has a challenge, making sure things are stored the way they’re supposed to be stored, so this kind of thing is not that unusual, unfortunately,” Gardam said. “It speaks to the fact that we need to focus on simple things like that so we don’t get into situations like this.”