The following reports originate from a variety of sources, including the Associated Press. We're always on the lookout for news of interest. Send us news and if we use it here we'll send you a `Piss on Pity' button. Use the eMail below.
Apparently a lot of folks involved in winning the 2004 Olympic Games for Athens, Greece did not know that they also won the Paralympic Games. In fact, some of them seem to have never heard of the Paralympics. "What's that?" was a common response from members of the Athens bid committee.
The city's bid file makes only a brief reference to our games. It says "The enthusiasm and support of the people of Athens are sure to make the Paralympics a memorable experience for all."
That sure can be read in more than one way.
Because the Paralympics are now combined with the Olympics there is no separate bid. The Paralympics, however, has a separate budget of $200 million.
Can Athens bring off the Paralympics successfully?
"No, we're not optimistic with the situation at present. Our disabled feel cut off from the rest of society," said Panagiotis Papakonstantopoulos, a member of the National Sports Federation for the Disabled.
Athens itself is said to be not very friendly, with narrow uneven sidewalks, many steps and few ramps. Even the new subway was not going to be accessible until disability groups got up in arms.
"Access is essential," said Aristides Pananos, secretary-general of the federation. "This is what we have been fighting for for a long time, regardless of the Olympics." With seven years to go, members of the disability community hope they can influence the Olympic (and Paralympic) officials. There is still time, but it sounds like a marathon task.
More than 16,000 Japanese women with disabilities were involuntarily sterilized with government approval from 1949 to 1995, an official said. But the government does not plan to apologize, offer compensation to the victims or their families, or conduct an investigation, the official said.
The admission came one day after 17 citizens' groups that represent women or the handicapped demanded that the Health and Welfare Ministry investigate cases of involuntary sterilization. Over the years, a few Japanese women have claimed they were sterilized without their consent while housed in public institutions.
But their claims did not gain much attention until last month, when it was discovered that as many as 60,000 people had been involuntarily sterilized in Sweden, and Stockholm apologized.
In 1948, Japan legalized sterilization as a means of improving the human species through the control of hereditary factors. The law, which was only revoked last year, allowed doctors to sterilize people with mental or physical disabilities without their consent, after obtaining the approval of local governments.
-- The ABC-CLIO Companion to The Disability Rights Movement by MAINSTREAM contributing editor Fred Pelka is an encyclopedia of the people and events of the movement. This book has a $60 price tag, but it is a must-have book for anyone who wants to know who's who and what happened when. Contains a chronology of events, and a bibliography as well as hundreds of individual entries. Get your local library or ILC to order one.
-- Partners in Independence by Ed and Toni Eames (Howell Book House, New York, $25.95) is about guide, hearing and other service dogs, and those people whose lives they enhance. Great stories.
President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore met with a group of disability leaders in the White House in September. Discussion focused on ADA enforcement (too little), employment of people with disabilities, SSI eligibility for children, personal assistance services, IDEA, and telecommunications issues. That's a lot to talk about in two hours.
Bruce Vladeck, head of the Health Care Financing Administration (HFCA), discussed establishment of a task force on personal assistance services, and a plan to conduct demonstration projects in targeted areas.
Alaska's Department of Transportation pledged to triple the amount of money set aside over the next three years to make it easier for people with disabilities to get around. All of the money is earmarked for the northern region of the state, which includes Fairbanks, Valdez, Nome, Cordova, Barrow and Tok.
"We're dealing with really a basic obligation here to make the streets and sidewalks accessible," said Tom Brigham, DOT's statewide planning director based in Juneau. "We see our job as to fulfill that obligation."
Kathy Marquette was glad to hear it. She had been cruising the streets of downtown Fairbanks in her motorized wheelchair picketing for safer sidewalks.
But Marquette is frustrated because there is no allocation specified in the final three years of the state's six year plan. "If they could just do it across the board, that should get all the streets," she said. "We're going to need more."
The new head of the Social Security Administration said he was disturbed by stories of children who appear to have been improperly removed from the disability rolls.
Kenneth Apfel promised that he would conduct a "top to bottom review" of the children being terminated from the Supplemental Security Income program.
Apfel said he does not know if some of the disturbing stories he has heard are isolated instances or reflect larger problems.
"There's a need to go back in and determine what needs to be fixed," he told the Senate Finance Committee during his confirmation hearing. "Within 30 days I would require the Social Security Administration to do a top to bottom review."
He said he is particularly concerned about children with mental retardation who are being kicked off SSI, which serves low-income people with disabilities.
So far, about 122,000 children have been removed from the program after investigators determined they were not disabled enough to qualify for aid under the stricter definitions established by last year's welfare reform law.
Scene: Young woman buys a hot dog at a sidewalk stand in a city somewhere. Nice hot dog. Juicy. Phallic.
Young woman saunters off down the street. Mischievous sparkle in her eyes, she gives her nice juicy hot dog to a dog. It's a guide dog, whose blind partner remains oblivious to this hot dog giveaway.
Obviously, the blind guy didn't have that famous compensation. You know, can't see, but has a sharpened sense of hearing and/or smell.
Okay, this is a TV commercial. Really. Guess what they're selling. Jeans. Blue jeans. Not Guess. Levis. They don't shrink from anything these days. But they sure stretch.
Levi Strauss says they had no intention of slighting people with disabilities. Lighten up, they say, where's your sense of humor? Guess we don't compensate there either.
Guide dogs are working dogs. Leave them alone when they're in harness. Don't encourage anyone to flirt with them. Bite `em, Tiger.
President Calvin Coolidge's home church in Plymouth Notch, Vermont is compromising some of its historic appearance to become more accessible to the disabled: a new ramp is being added.
Workers installed a $5,000 wheelchair ramp on the side and front of the Union Christian Church. And a $30,000 sprinkler system for the inside of the building is nearly complete, said Cyndy Bittinger, executive director of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation, which owns the church.
In 1993, a proposal from some of the foundation's trustees to install a new door and a wheelchair ramp in the back of the church drew criticism from historic preservationists, who said the project would ruin the church's interior. Part of an interior wall with ornate Gothic paneling would have been cut out to construct the door.
Bittinger said the trustees decided around 1993 to try to make the building accessible, and learned shortly thereafter that the church didn't comply with the state's fire code because both of its doors were at the front of the building. The new back door would have met both the accessibility and the safety needs.
The trustees voted down the new door in August 1994, and began looking for less intrusive alternatives.
Bittinger said the foundation ended up getting a variance from the state that allowed it to refrain from adding a new door as long as a sprinkler system was installed, and the trustees decided to build a wheelchair ramp leading to one of the front doors.
A Maine woman who sued United Airlines for discrimination said she is pleased that a federal jury found that the carrier acted illegally but is disappointed at the size of the award.
Alice Conway contended that United had violated a federal anti-discrimination law by denying her access to a bathroom during a flight from Mexico City to Chicago three years ago.
A U.S. District Court jury in Portland, Maine, ruled that the Chicago-based airline discriminated against Conway. But after concluding that United did not act intentionally or with negligence, jurors awarded Conway only $500 in compensatory damages.
The two sides settled before the trial could shift to the punitive damages phase. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
Conway, an author and advocate for the disabled, claims she was left sitting on the plane for an hour prior to takeoff and could not go to the bathroom during her flight.
A Southern California eye clinic will pay $5,000 in compensatory damages for rejecting a teen-ager as a patient because she had Down Syndrome, the Justice Department said.
The agreement settles a complaint filed against the Eye Institute of Orange County in September 1996 under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The parents of a 15-year-old girl alleged she was denied an appointment for an optometry exam because of her disability.
The family submitted a taped message left by a clinic staff member who said the office "was not equipped to handle patients with Down Syndrome," the department said in a written statement.
"The presence of mental retardation, including Down Syndrome, should never be a reason to deny appropriate health care," said Isabelle K. Pinzler, acting assistant attorney general for civil rights.
"Many people with disabilities already face obstacles such as the cost of medical care; they should not also have to worry about an additional obstacle of being denied medical attention because of their disability," Pinzler said.
The federal government is suing the nation's largest bank for not offering employees mental-health disability benefits on a par with coverage they receive for physical ailments.
The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission contends that Chase Manhattan Bank and its insurer are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by limiting benefits for those with mental disabilities.
"Mental disorders are medical disorders, just like heart disease and cancer," said Ron Honberg of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. "It seems strange to me that we would allow one organ of the body to be singled out for a lower level of coverage."
But Chase says its employees would pay 30-40 percent more for the same level of insurance coverage if the courts agree with the EEOC.
The case deals with worker disability payments and does not address the broader issue of treating mental and physical problems equally in health insurance.
The federal commission says the bank and the Unum Life Insurance Co. have denied employees with mental illnesses disability pay -- a percentage of their salary when not working -- after 18 months.
Employees with physical illnesses have the right to receive disability benefits þ or return to work if they can þ until age 65.
The manager of a Massachusetts car dealership who was convicted of cheating a man with a mental disability out of thousands of dollars argued in an appeal that all car prices were relative.
But the state appeals court rejected that argument, upholding the theft convictions of Howard R. Reske Jr., who was general manager of Quirk Chevrolet in Braintree in 1992.
The story began when "Ronald Nellon," a borderline retarded man who could not comprehend numbers over 100, came into an inheritance of $142,409. The name was a pseudonym given by the court.
"With money in his pocket, Nellon was able to indulge in one of his dearest wants: to buy trucks," the Massachusetts Appeals Court recounted in a nine-page ruling written by Judge Rudolph Kass.
From June 8, 1992 to July 17, 1992, he made six purchases at Quirk Chevrolet. The terms of the sales were established by Reske.
Reske inflated the prices artificially and also gave Nellon extremely low trade-in allowances. In one case, for example, Nellon received a trade-in allowance of $5,530 on a truck that he had bought the day before for $13,818 and that had 20 miles on the odometer.
Ultimately, Nellon was overcharged by at least $23,651, the opinion said.
Hundreds of people with mental disabilities were forced to eat vast amounts of candy and other sweet foods in an experiment a half a century ago on tooth decay, a Swedish newspaper reported.
The revelation follows an uproar over reports that Sweden forcibly sterilized some 60,000 people between 1935 to 1976. The sterilizations were conducted under a law passed in the belief that society as a whole would benefit from a policy of eugenics.
The same sort of thinking was behind the 1943-53 tooth decay experiments. "Society needed evidence. We thought we were doing a good deed," said dentist Bo Krasse, who helped run the tests.
According to the newspaper, more than 400 mentally handicapped patients at Vipeholm mental hospital were fed daily diets of toffee, other sweets and white bread.
The toffee was "as much as a child could imagine putting away," said Hans Grahnen, another dentist in the experiment.
The purpose of the tests was to show a direct connection between consumption of high-sugar foods and tooth decay.
"Certainly there were suspicions that sweets affected dental health, but this was not accepted by the industry. In order to be able to give the public dietary advice, we needed evidence," Krasse was quoted as saying.
Bo Petersson, a Linkoeping University professor who has researched the program, said the goals were commendable but the methods distasteful, and said he was surprised it had been supported by the Swedish parliament.
Reports on the sterilization program focused worldwide attention on Sweden, with many media accounts contrasting the program with the country's benign and liberal image.
A blind judge in Alabama faces complaints that include sleeping in court during hearings.
Court workers, lawyers and citizens claim they watched several times as Circuit Judge Tony Cothren dozed and snored on the bench as cases were being argued, according to a complaint by the Judicial Inquiry Commission.
The complaint, which led to Cothren's paid suspension, also accused him of making improper contact with lawyers, letting cases languish and holding a hearing in a divorce case without the husband's attorney.
Cothren, 47, has denied wrongdoing and blamed his problems on vindictive former employees and a media "smear campaign."
Al Agricola, who represents Cothren, said in a statement that the charges "reflect a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of those people who testified in support of the charges of how blind people function in today's society."
The Court of the Judiciary will hear the charges in a public session similar to a trial. If proven true, possible penalties include a reprimand, censure or removal from office.
Cothren, sightless since birth, was sued earlier this year by former law clerk Leslee French, who accuses him of fondling her and making lewd comments. Another ex-clerk, Alan Scott Hughes, claimed he was fired for objecting to Cothren's treatment of Ms. French.
The judge also was accused of using a racial slur toward a black reporter, compiling a list of "enemy" lawyers, ordering staffers not to help citizens and closing his courtroom to the public without reason.
"Despite unfounded and malicious charges which appeared in the Birmingham press surrounding Judge Cothren's tenure on the bench, the charges brought by the Judicial Inquiry Commission addressed largely management and administrative issues," Agricola said.
Associated Press reports were used compiling this column.