The Fever Lever Center

If you are like many people today, you may be having trouble making ends meet or are living paycheck to paycheck. If you find yourself unable to pay your mortgage on your primary or second home, you may face major consequences. These consequences vary by country and can even vary by state or province within the same country, so it is important to understand them fully.

Defaulting on a Spanish mortgage, for example, has very specific consequences. In the past, such defaulting used to be very simple. This used to be true, especially for second residences or vacation homes. However, this is no longer the case, as Spanish banks can and will pursue non-residents to fulfill their mortgage obligations.

In case a homeowner must default on a mortgage in Spain, turning over the home to the bank is often an option. This simple option will save the homeowner a lot of money in court costs and additional interest on the home loan. You cant just turn the keys over to the bank without arranging it, however. The bank can to agree to accept the home back, but they do not have to. They will be rather unlikely to take the home back without good reason such as a hardship. An example of such a hardship would be the death of a spouse or another situation that has caused your income to be drastically cut.

If you cannot negotiate a home turnover with the bank that holds your Spanish mortgage, you will need to sell the home as soon as possible. The homeowner must sell the home for as much as possible, as the bank that holds the Spanish mortgage will come after him or her for any amount remaining on the loan after the home sale proceeds are paid to the bank. The bank will be most likely to aggressively pursue you for a large shortfall on the Spanish mortgage. They will attempt to collect the remaining amount they are owed in any legal way they can. This includes placing liens on any assists you may have, such as investment portfolios, your primary residence, and any other property you own that has value. Although it may take years to collect on the shortfall by going through the court systems, the bank that holds your Spanish mortgage will not give up until they do.

If you must default on your Spanish mortgage, it is vital that you contact the bank as soon as possible to work with them. Doing so can result in an agreement that will satisfy the bank, relieve you of your responsibilities associated with the Spanish mortgage, and allow you to keep other assets you may own.

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Drospirenone is just one of the elements ascribed to the outpouring of Yaz side effects reported regularly in America. Drospirenone is an ingredient allegedly unlike other progestins in the United States and was not utilized in America before appeared in Yasmin, Yaz and Ocella. Also consider that the FDA issued warning letter to the makers of Ocella, Yasmin and Yaz for using low-quality batches of drospirenone from Germany and you have the makings of a cautionary tale involving Big Pharma and its neglect for the individuals using its pills.

Bells and whistles went off when women in their 20s and 30s were suddenly falling victim to ischemic stroke and heart attack after being put on Yasmin. Young, healthy individuals who were on this brand of contraceptive method for as little as a few months were exhibiting symptoms of major side effects and serious health risks. Cardiovascular injury, organ failure, and blood clots are just some of the serious birth control side effects allegedly experienced by patients put on this oral contraceptive.

Women taking Yasmin, Yaz or Ocella to avoid getting pregnant or to treat PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder) or severe acne have reportedly endured major injury to their health and wellness. Although most pharmaceuticals present some form of side effects, the main issue surrounding Yaz seems to be that the original commercials downplayed the health risks and side effects. This attracted users to the product that may not have taken it otherwise had they been properly informed about the risks posed by Ocella, Yasmin and Yaz.

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So youve found your dream holiday home, arranged your mortgage in Spain and are now ready to complete the purchase

Many foreign countries have different regulations regarding the buying and selling of property; this includes Spain where such transactions are regulated. As such hiring an English speaking lawyer would be advisable. Make sure that the Spanish property is free of restrictive clauses and debts.

The legal process for purchasing property located in Spain falls under two types of transactions. First you have the preliminary contract, or Contrato privado de compraventa, and then you have the completion contract, or Escritura de compraventa.

Once the buyer and seller are in agreement on the price then they need to sign a preliminary sales contract. The vendor must provide proof that he or she owns the property free of any charges before this Contrato privado de compraventa has been signed. It is Spanish law to charge all outstanding debts to the actual property, and any remaining debt would be the new owner’s responsibility. Nota Simple tells about outstanding debts.

The completion date, overall price, and property description will all be elaborated in the preliminary sales contract. A 5% to 15% deposit of the final purchase price will be required. A bonded client account is where the funds will be kept for you. It is possible though not advisable to sign the private preliminary sales contract without putting down a deposit.

The second stage is the final contract stage, or the Escritura de compraventa stage. The purchaser will be required to pay the balance of the purchase price and all fees on the date of completion. The buyer and seller will meet to finalize the deal with a contract, which is the same as a deed on the property. The purchaser will receive the public deed of conveyance, known in Spain as the escritura, in front of a Notary Public. To make this legal, a copy of the dded must get to a tax office, and then sent to a property registry. In Spain, all deeds of sale must be witnessed by a Notary Public, which is a public official in that country. However, you need to have your own legal counsel to protect your own interests during the transaction. Also keep in mind that as the purchaser you will be required to pay property sales taxes as well as the legal fees for the Notary Public.

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John Sides, a team leader for Barrow-based cleaning products manufacturing company Robert McBride Ltd, was paid a compensation of 17,500 pounds by his employer in an out-of-court settlement, after he hurt his shoulder permanently during work.

Sides’ injury was caused by using a handheld grinder for two continuous days. Sides had been given this equipment for the first time by his employer, without any training on how to use it. After two days of prolonged use, when his right shoulder was sore, Sides decided to undergo a check up, whereupon it was found that he had strained his shoulder badly. He has in fact suffered a permanent injury due to which he will not be able to raise his arm above his shoulder level. He will also be unable to paint and decorate.

Sides’ union the GMB alleged that his injury was a direct consequence of the employer’s negligence in providing him with any training on how to handle the equipment. It was found that long hours of exposure to high vibrations from the grinder had caused the pain and the subsequent injury. The union instructed its lawyers Thompsons Solicitors to file a compensation claim, following which the company admitted liability for the accident and settled the issue out of court.

Regional Secretary of the GMB, Tom Brennan, said Sides’ injury was caused because the vibration level of the tool was too high. He added that the accident could have been averted if Sides had been trained properly to use the grinder, which would have enabled him to use it while minimising the vibrations from it.

Paul Morpeth from Thompsons Solicitors explained the gravity of the injury by saying that Sides will never be able to do the same type of work again. He added that a proper risk assessment and adequate training could have helped in saving Sides from such a condition.

The Manual Handling Operations Regulations require employers to conduct risk assessments of manual handling activities and to provide appropriate training for their employees. The Manual Handling Courses, available through the Workplace Law Network, will benefit organisations in attaining Legal compliance with the requirement to train persons involved in manual handling activities along with a reduction in the risk of injury.

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A recent study by Eversheds, an international law firm, revealed that nearly seventy-five percent of businesses in the United Kingdom have been hit by the dreaded swine flu, yet more than forty percent are yet to come up with a contingency plan.

Eversheds surveyed more than four hundred establishments all over the country. It indicated widespread anxiety over the absence of staff, with almost forty percent firms fearing losses. Twenty one percent believe they will have to shut down, either partially or completely.

Martin Warren, head of employment law at Eversheds, stated that every firm must make an emergency plan to deal with the hazards of swine flu and its affect on business. He proposed that the strategy could involve reorganisation of workers, enrolling extra contract workers, getting special protection for important organisation posts and closing down infected offices for a while.

According to the report, almost ninety percent of businesses struck by swine flu have adopted new sanitation practices and seventy-five percent have attempted to spread awareness among the staff by distributing handouts. Nearly ninety percent have adopted HR-related techniques to control swine flu. These include restricting the infected employees to their home, providing opportunities to work from home and other alternative work practices, besides increasing awareness. Click on IOSH UK, for information on courses to help improve your health and safety management system by teaching you to identify and implement appropriate workplace precautions for specific risks or seek advice on workplace precautions.

Warren said business organizations are already under pressure due to the economic recession; therefore, the aim of an emergency plan should be to minimise the loss of work due to swine flu. He believes the situation demands immediate action before the pandemic strikes hard on businesses, especially the smaller organizations.

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Thirty of the 50 salaried employees the company laid off were at least 44 years old. In other words the ADEA permits employers to discriminate based on age considering age is legitimately necessary under the circumstances. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit initially affirmed the jurys findings but after the United States Supreme Court asked it to reconsider the Second Circuit reversed itself and ruled in favor of Knolls. In reaching its conclusion that the employer has the burden to prove the reasonable factors other than age defense the Supreme Court looked at another provision of the ADEA the bona fide occupational qualification defense. A lawyer from Oud Beijerland won from a lawfirm in Carlsbad California In Meacham Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory was planning to lay off a number of employees. In that case Meacham versus Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory the Supreme Court interpreted a provision of the ADEA that permits an employer to take an adverse employment action against an employee. Twenty-eight of those 53 employees sued under the ADEA claiming Knolls illegally fired them because of their age. The company had its supervisors rate their subordinates based on their performance flexibility and critical skills. Specifically the jury found that although the plaintiffs did not prove that Knolls intentionally discriminated against them they did prove that Knolls method of deciding who to lay off disproportionately harmed older workers. At the trial a jury found Knolls had violated the ADEA because its layoff procedure had a disparate impact based on age. The Supreme Court has previously recognized that the employer has the burden to establish the BFOQ affirmative defense. The BFOQ defense states that it is not unlawful for an employer to take adverse employment actions otherwise prohibited by the ADEA where age is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the particular business. It then used those totals to decide who to lay off. Knolls totaled those scores and gave the employees additional points based on their years of service. For example it would not be illegal to consider criteria for a particular role in a movie that has a disparate impact on age if the part calls for someone of a particular age. As long as the adverse action is based on reasonable factors other than age. It has the burden to prove that its decision was based on a reasonable factor other than age. The Supreme Court then agreed to hear the case and eventually reversed the Second Circuit and reinstated the jurys finding that Knolls policy unlawfully discriminated because of age. Even if the employment action is otherwise prohibited by the ADEA. The Supreme Court ruled that if an employer seeks to rely on that defense.

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A kidney fetches $2700 in Turkey. According to last month’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, this is a high price. An Indian or Iraqi kidney enriches its former owner by a mere $1000. Wealthy clients later pay for the rare organ up to $150,000.

CBS News aired, two years ago, a documentary, filmed by Antenna 3 of Spain, in which undercover reporters in Mexico were asked, by a priest acting as a middleman for a doctor, to pay close to 1 million dollars for a single kidney. An auction of a human kidney on eBay in February 2000 drew a bid of $100,000 before the company put a stop to it. Another auction in September 1999 drew $5.7 million - though, probably, merely as a prank.

Organ harvesting operations flourish in Turkey, in central Europe, mainly in the Czech Republic, and in the Caucasus, mainly in Georgia. They operate on Turkish, Moldovan, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Romanian, Bosnian, Kosovar, Macedonian, Albanian and assorted east European donors.

They remove kidneys, lungs, pieces of liver, even corneas, bones, tendons, heart valves, skin and other sellable human bits. The organs are kept in cold storage and air lifted to illegal distribution centers in the United States, Germany, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Israel, South Africa, and other rich, industrialized locales. It gives “brain drain” a new, spine chilling, meaning.

Organ trafficking has become an international trade. It involves Indian, Thai, Philippine, Brazilian, Turkish and Israeli doctors who scour the Balkan and other destitute regions for tissues. The Washington Post reported last week that in a single village in Moldova, 14 out of 40 men were reduced by penury to selling body parts.

Last year, Moldova cut off the thriving baby adoption trade due to an - an unfounded - fear the toddlers were being dissected for spare organs. According to the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz, the Romanians are investigating similar allegations in Israel and have withheld permission to adopt Romanian babies from dozens of eager and out of pocket couples. American authorities are scrutinizing a two year old Moldovan harvesting operation based in the United States.

Organ theft and trading in Ukraine is a smooth operation. According to news agencies, last August three Ukrainian doctors were charged in Lvov with trafficking in the organs of victims of road accidents. The doctors used helicopters to ferry kidneys and livers to colluding hospitals. They charged up to $19,000 per organ.

The West Australian daily surveyed in January the thriving organs business in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Sellers are offering their wares openly, through newspaper ads. Prices reach up to $68,000. Compared to an average monthly wage of less than $200, this is an unimaginable fortune.

National health insurance schemes turn a blind eye. Israel’s participates in the costs of purchasing organs abroad, though only subject to rigorous vetting of the sources of the donation. Still, a May 2001 article in a the New York Times Magazine, quotes “the coordinator of kidney transplantation at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem (as saying that) 60 of the 244 patients currently receiving post-transplant care purchased their new kidney from a stranger - just short of 25 percent of the patients at one of Israel’s largest medical centers participating in the organ business”.

Many Israelis - attempting to avoid scrutiny - travel to east Europe, accompanied by Israeli doctors, to perform the transplantation surgery. These junkets are euphemistically known as “transplant tourism”. Clinics have sprouted all over the benighted region. Israeli doctors have recently visited impoverished Macedonia, Bulgaria, Kosovo and Yugoslavia to discuss with local businessmen and doctors the setting up of kidney transplant clinics.

Such open involvement in what can be charitably described as a latter day slave trade gives rise to a new wave of thinly disguised anti-Semitism. The Ukrainian Echo, quoting the Ukrinform news agency, reported, on January 7, that, implausibly, a Ukrainian guest worker died in Tel-Aviv in mysterious circumstances and his heart was removed. The Interpol, according to the paper, is investigating this lurid affair.

According to scholars, reports of organ thefts and related abductions, mainly of children, have been rife in Poland and Russia at least since 1991. The buyers are supposed to be rich Arabs.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley and co-founder of Organs Watch, a research and documentation center, is also a member and co-author of the Bellagio Task Force Report on Transplantation, Bodily Integrity and the International Traffic in Organs. In a report presented in June 2001 to the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, she substantiated at least the nationality of the alleged buyers, though not the urban legends regarding organ theft:

“In the Middle East residents of the Gulf States (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Oman) have for many years traveled to India, the Philippines, and to Eastern Europe to purchase kidneys made scarce locally due to local fundamentalist Islamic teachings that allow organ transplantation (to save a life), but prohibit organ harvesting from brain-dead bodies.

Meanwhile, hundreds of kidney patients from Israel, which has its own well -developed, but under-used transplantation centers (due to ultra-orthodox Jewish reservations about brain death) travel in ‘transplant tourist’ junkets to Turkey, Moldova, Romania where desperate kidney sellers can be found, and to Russia where an excess of lucrative cadaveric organs are produced due to lax standards for designating brain death, and to South Africa where the amenities in transplantation clinics in private hospitals can resemble four star hotels.

We found in many countries - from Brazil and Argentina to India, Russia, Romania, Turkey to South Africa and parts of the United States - a kind of ‘apartheid medicine’ that divides the world into two distinctly different populations of ‘organs supplies’ and ‘organs receivers’.”

Russia, together with Estonia, China and Iraq, is, indeed, a major harvesting and trading centre. International news agencies described, two years ago, how a grandmother in Ryazan tried to sell her grandchild to a mediator. The boy was to be smuggled to the West and there dismembered for his organs. The uncle, who assisted in the matter, was supposed to collect $70,000 - a fortune in Russian terms.

When confronted by the European Union on this issue, Russia responded that it lacks the resources required to monitor organ donations. The Italian magazine, Happy Web, reports that organ trading has taken to the Internet. A simple query on the Google search engine yields thousands of Web sites purporting to sell various body parts - mostly kidneys - for up to $125,000. The sellers are Russian, Moldovan, Ukrainian and Romanian.

Scheper-Hughes, an avid opponent of legalizing any form of trade in organs, says that “in general, the movement and flow of living donor organs - mostly kidneys - is from South to North, from poor to rich, from black and brown to white, and from female to male bodies”.

Yet, this summer, bowing to reality, the American Medical Association commissioned a study to examine the effects of paying for cadaveric organs would have on the current shortage. The 1984 National Organ Transplant Act that forbids such payments is also under attack. Bills to amend it were submitted recently by several Congressmen. These are steps in the right direction.

Organ trafficking is the outcome of the international ban on organ sales and live donor organs. But wherever there is demand there is a market. Excruciating poverty of potential donors, lengthening patient waiting lists and the better quality of organs harvested from live people make organ sales an irresistible proposition. The medical professions and authorities everywhere would do better to legalize and regulate the trade rather than transform it into a form of organized crime. The denizens of Moldova would surely appreciate it.

About the Author

Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, and eBookWeb , and Bellaonline, and as a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent. He is the the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.

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