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For the past 21 years, The Filipino Express has provided the Filipino American community the best news, arts and entertainment coverage from around the United States and the Philippines.
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This website includes selected articles from this week's edition of the Filipino Express. Not all the stories published in the printed version appear on this site.
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An ABS-CBN video grab photo of Drs. Jefferson and Elnora Calimlim. (Joseph Lariosa)
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CHICAGO, Illinois – A Milwaukee judge ordered a rich Filipino doctor couple to pay close a million a dollars to the Filipino domestic helper whom they kept virtually as a slave for 20 years.
For the last 19 years, Filipino domestic helper Irma Martinez worked for 15 hours a day in the home of Dr. Jefferson N. Calimlim and his wife Elnora in Milwaukee’s suburban Brokefield, Wisconsin.
Judge Rudolph T. Randa of the United States District Court of Eastern Wisconsin in Milwaukee ruled in a three-page order that Martinez is entitled to restitution worth $934,420.
Meanwhile, United States Attorney Stephen M. Biskupic of the Eastern District of Wisconsin has objected to “any additional extensions” of self-surrender after Judge Randa extended anew their self-surrender from February 16, 2007 to March 12, 2007.
In a two-page letter to Judge Randa, Biskupic, through Assistant US Attorney Tracy M. Johnson, said that the “defendants have requested two extensions to avoid reporting prison” that “will be nearly four months since sentencing.”
In his order, Randa said “the Court finds that Martinez is entitled to the prevailing wage under the Foreign Labor Certification Program.
The Court adopts the conclusions reached by the government’s witness at trial, Charlene Giles. The prevailing wage rate is to be multiplied by the number of hours that the victim worked.
“Review of the evidence would put the time that the victim worked on a daily basis at 15 hours. While the victim testified that she was on call from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., the evidence suggests that not all of the hours in between were working hours,” according to the order, which excluded her time watching television and attending church, among others.
By applying the wage to the period of work, the Court summed up Martinez wage at $934,420. It also ordered the Calimlims to reimburse Martinez $1,000 spent for psychological counseling.
The Court did not order forfeiture of Calimlims’ $1.2-M residence at Brookfield.
Judge Randa first extended Calimlims’ self-surrender to Jan. 17 when the couple filed an appeal during the Holidays.
The Calimlims were convicted to serve four years in prison after being found guilty of imposing forced labor on an illegal immigrant they harbored as a maid in their eastern Wisconsin home for 19 years.
Their son, Jefferson M. Calimlim, 32, who was accused of conspiring to harbor an illegal alien, was sentenced to three years probation, including four months of house arrest with an electronic monitoring device, and fined $5,000.
He was found guilty of one-count of harboring an alien but acquitted on two other charges. But their son did not appeal Judge Randa’s verdict.
The decision against the Calimlim family was announced last May by the jury, which found the couple guilty of four counts of conspiracy to obtain labor and services of Filipino national Martinez, by threats of harm and physical restraint and concealing an alien from detection for private financial gain.
During the trial, Martinez and her parents, whom the US government had flown to the US, testified in court but stayed in Chicago while preparing for the trial.
The wealthy couple from the Philippines initially faced a maximum of 45 years in prison, forfeiture of their $1.2-M home and deportation to the Philippines after they were found guilty of all four felony immigration charges filed against them in what is believed to be the first conviction of a forced labor in the nation without employing violence.
As immigrants for more than 30 years, the Calimlim couple is deportable to the Philippines for failure to naturalize as US citizens after they step out of prison.
The lawyers of the Calimlims argue that the couple only owes Martinez, a native of Malbong, Gianza, Camarines Sur in the Philippines, back wages amounting to $49,440 that kicked in when the Violence Against Women Act was passed into law in 2000.
The amount covers the period from Oct. 29, 2000 to Sept. 29, 2004 for 2,400 hours of work each year computed at eight hours a day at the minimum wage of $5.15. But Judge Randa stretched it back to July 1985 when Martinez started working as a maid for the Calimlim couple until September 2004 when authorities rescued Martinez.
Martinez is now in the care of the U.S. government.
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McALLEN, TEXAS – What could have been a long drawn-out legal battle for the custody of an 11 year-old Filipino boy - whose father shot dead his mother and another person then was killed by responding policemen - was finally averted when his grandparents reached an out-of-court settlement.
Joshua Ramirez was recently flown to the Philippines to be with his maternal grandparents. He, however, will spend the summer vacation in New Jersey every year to allow him to spend time too with his paternal grandparents.
“This way, Josh can be nurtured by his two grandparents and at the same time maintain his status as a US immigrant,” said Padini Santiago, a close family friend.
Santiago believes this arrangement can hasten the young boy’s recovery from the trauma he experienced after witnessing the death of his parents April 30, 2006.
Police quoting witnesses said Arthur Ramirez, 34, shot dead his wife, Alma, 32, and a Hispanic man while attending a housewarming party of a Filipino family in a subdivision here in McAllen.
He himself sustained multiple gunshot wounds when, after a 20-minute standoff, he tried to shoot it out with responding police men.
Witnesses and friends intimated there was no hint whatsoever Arthur Ramirez was already being consumed with jealousy as he appeared relax and jolly that night.
Shortly before the shooting, he reportedly took his son in one of the rooms upstairs. When he came down, the killings began.
Apparently the couple’s marriage had been on the rocks for quite some time. Arthur filed in court for a divorce in December 2005 which Alma contested. The court on March 20 finally granted the divorce.
At the time of his death, Arthur was about to graduate as a nursing student. Alma practiced as a nurse in New Jersey but moved here later in McAllen together with Arthur and Joshua.
Santiago, who together with his wife Kay acted as foster parents of Joshua after the incident, told The Filipino Express it was the young boy who ultimately made the decision to stay with his maternal grandparents in the Philippines. Both the boy’s grandparents affirmed his decision.
“I hope and pray that one day, he might be able to get over the tragedy that befell his family, and start a purposeful life of his own,” Santiago said, whose son Miguel, was Joshua’s classmate and close friend.
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MANILA -- The Philippine government is to appeal a move by the US to ban some 17,000 nurses who passed the 2006 nursing examination amid allegations of mass cheating.
The United States Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools (CGFNS) issued the temporary ban this week insisting that Filipino nurses retake sections of the June 2006 Nursing Licensure Examination where mass cheating took place.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in a statement Saturday, February 17, said she had ordered the appeal to “uphold the prestige of the country’s nursing profession and continue the deployment of Filipino nurses abroad.”
She said the government has already provided fi-nancial assistance to the 2006 nurses who passed to retake the exams.
The President said all officials of the Professional Regulations Commission (PRC), which overseas the examinations, found involved in scandal will be dismissed and criminally charged.
“All officials involved in the nursing exam leakage should be dismissed without benefits and criminally charged,” she stressed.
Mrs. Arroyo on Friday ordered Labor Secretary Arturo Brion to appeal the decision after a nursing review center disclosed it had leaked answers to some students who took the examinations.
The scandal rocked the country’s medical profession and cast a shadow over the quality of its nurses, who are in high demand overseas, especially in the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
Some 42,000 students sat the nursing examination but only 17,000 passed.
The CGFNS said on its Web site on Thursday that “Philippine nurses who were sworn in as licensed nurses in the Philippines following their passing the compromised licensure exam of June 2006 are not eligible for a VisaScreen Certificate.”
The Philadelphia-based CGFNS said that it sent a fact-finding mission to the Philippines in September 2006 to investigate the reports of irregularities in the nursing licensure exam.
The CGFNS investigation concluded that “those who received their license as a result of passing the compromised June 2006 licensure examination raises significant questions about the accurate assessment of the competencies of many of those individuals.”
All foreign nurses must have a CGFNS-issued VisaScreen Certificate before being allowed to work in the US.
“The integrity of foreign licensing systems ultimately affects the health and safety of patients in the United States, a primary consideration of CGFNS in its role of evaluating candidates under US immigration law,” the CGFNS said. (MNS)
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MANILA -- The United Nations has blamed the Philippine military for many of the political murders that have rocked the country and pressed President Gloria Arroyo to rein in the bloodshed.
Wrapping up an investigation into what rights groups say are more than 800 political assassinations, UN special envoy Philip Alston said many of the killings stemmed from the military’s campaign against left-wing guerrillas.
Alston said the government was responsible for a climate of impunity but said he did not have evidence to support allegations by the nation’s leading human rights group that Arroyo had ordered or condoned the murders.
“The increase in extrajudicial executions in recent years is attributable, at least in part, to a shift in the military’s counter-insurgency strategy,” Alston told a news conference.
“In some areas, an appeal to hearts and minds is combined with an attempt to vilify left-leaning organizations and to intimidate leaders of such organizations,” he said.
“In some instances, such intimidation escalates into extrajudicial executions,” he said -- adding that many of the killings had been “convincingly attributed” to the military, which he said was in “almost total denial”.
Philippine forces have been battling for decades against communist insurgents who effectively control parts of this vast island nation and fund their activities by extorting “taxes” from shops and businesses.
Local rights group Karapatan says more than 830 people have been murdered for political motives since Arroyo came to power in 2001 -- many of them leftists, and some of them accused by the army of links to the guerrillas.
The military, one of the most powerful institutions in the country, has accused rights groups of inflating the numbers of victims and said that many of those listed as dead were guerrillas killed in clashes with the armed forces.
But Alston said that, while leftist organizations were also guilty of propaganda, most of the cases they presented “proved credible under cross-examination.”
He declined to give an overall tally of the killings but said: “I am certain the number is high enough to be distressing.”
Lieutenant Colonel Bartolome Bacarro, a military spokesman, said at least four soldiers were being investigated, and that one had been officially charged, but declined to comment when asked if Alston’s remarks were unfair.
The Australian-born lawyer, who met Arroyo and members of her cabinet as well as families of victims during his almost two-week mission, said he did not think that orders for the murders had come from on high.
“I do not believe that there is a policy at the top designed to, or which directs, that these killings take place,” he said. “I am clear on that.”
Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said Arroyo should persuade the military to improve its reputation “by acknowledging the facts and take genuine steps to investigate.”
He added that there was a “problem of virtual impunity” which meant eight out of 10 cases failed to move from police investigation to prosecution.
“The present message is that if you want to preserve your life expectancy, don’t act as a witness in a criminal prosecution for killing,” he said.
Alston also called on Arroyo to declassify a report by an independent commission headed by a retired Supreme Court justice which contains names of military officials who reportedly should be charged.
He added that his own final report would be released within three months, calling his remarks Wednesday “a general indication of some -- but by no means all -- of the issues to be addressed”.
Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon on Thursday lashed back at Alston, saying it was the latter and not the military who was in denial about the extrajudicial killings in the country. (MNS)
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