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She gave birth 8 months ago but this permanent resident still can't bring her baby to Canada – CBC.ca

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It’s been eight months since Anu Sehgal gave birth to her baby boy — but she’s been waiting for Canada to let her bring him home ever since. 

The 39-year-old, a permanent resident who lives in Toronto, had her little boy in India last year, but despite following all the right processes, still hasn’t been able to bring him home. 

Now, after multiple inquiries to the federal government with little word back, Sehgal wonders if moving to Canada was the right choice for her and her family.

“That was my main motive: to move here for a brighter future for [my] children,” she told CBC News. “I never thought that it would become such a problem.”

Sehgal received her permanent residency in 2019. She originally planned to immigrate to Canada in 2020, but then the pandemic hit.

Last year, another hitch: Sehgal contracted COVID-19 in India. Her doctors advised her to avoid travel, so she had baby there, further delaying her move.

She finally arrived in Canada this past March, leaving behind her baby and husband, who has yet to apply for residency in Canada. The hope was that by the time she arrived, her son’s temporary residency application would be approved. 

It wasn’t. Last month, she decided to file a permanent residency application for her baby, hoping to increase the chances of getting a response.

Case should have been expedited, say some lawyers

Immigration lawyers say Sehgal’s applications should have been easy to expedite on compassionate grounds, but could have fallen through the cracks of a backlogged and inefficient immigration system that’s been made worse by COVID-19. 

As of May, the IRCC states there are roughly 2.2 million citizenship, temporary and permanent residency applications waiting to be processed — about one million more than before the pandemic, according to the Canadian Immigration Lawyer Association (CILA).

Immigration lawyers Ravi Jain, left, and Adrienne Smith, right, say COVID-19 made immigration timelines worse and the system is still trying to catch up. (Jain Immigration Law and Battista Smith Migration Law Group)

“Why would you not issue the visitor visa in the interim so that the family can reunite?” said immigration lawyer Adrienne Smith, who works with Battista Smith Migration Law Group, based in Toronto. 

According to Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada’s website, the average time to process a temporary visa application for someone from India is a little more than four months.

In an email to CBC News, IRCC spokesperson Nancy Caron says the ministry processes 80 per cent of family sponsorship permanent residency applications within 12 months, and welcomed more than 405,000 new permanent residents just last year. That’s the highest annual number of newcomers in Canadian history, IRCC says.

But Smith says cases like Sehgal’s can create a vicious cycle: the more applicants follow up and inquire about their applications, the longer it can take to get them processed because immigration officials need to address those follow-ups, splitting their time between answering inquiries and getting applications processed. 

She also says lawyers will look to federal court to intervene in especially egregious cases, which can strain resources even further.

Processing applications in a timely manner would “take the pressure off everyone,” she says.

‘People losing faith in our immigration system’

Ravi Jain, a member of the CILA, says immigration lawyers formed the group last year to find ways to improve the way Canada processes immigrants. He believes if the system is allowed to stay as is, it will continue to let down newcomers and Canadians alike.

“It’s not just the reputation to foreigners that I worry about. It’s also resulting in people losing faith in our immigration system.”

In the IRCC’s statement, Caron says that during the pandemic the department “prioritized the processing of temporary resident visas for essential workers” and for reuniting families, but has since shifted back to standard processing times.

Caron says IRCC is using $85 million in extra federal funding to reduce application backlogs by hiring new processing staff and digitizing applications, among other measures. That’s on top of the $2.1 billion the federal government committed to help process and settle new permanent residents over the next five years.

But Jain says there needs to be greater transparency in IRCC processing times, applications, and reasons for refusals as well as better planning for emergencies that could affect processes, such as COVID-19.

“It’s not good enough to say… ‘We’re spending all this money. We’re hiring all these people,'” he said.

“You guys didn’t pivot, and you’re in charge.”

Looking for answers

Meanwhile, Sehgal says being apart from her son has led her to be diagnosed with depression. She says she’s taking medication to treat it and is looking into counselling. 

She’s also considering legal advice and help from immigration consultants to find the best way to move forward.

Sehgal wonders what would have happened if she’d been able to give birth in Canada, or if she would have made the same choices knowing that bringing her family to their new home would be such a struggle.

“I don’t think I would have had the courage … if I had known my infant would not be able to come.”

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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