News &
Advocacy in Disability Rights
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News &
Advocacy in Disability Rights |
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.
Fantastic finish at the Boston Marathon HUD thud? Idaho housing DOJ at work Bushwhacked Docs on disability The Rock Yosemite signs Now hear this Going to the top MCI answers Locked out 50 great years Deaf help sought The Book Shelf
The finish was astonishing, the closest in the 102-year history of the Boston Marathon.
Coming into the home stretch, Jean Driscoll had the race won. She was 50 yards ahead of Louise Sauvage. It was a done deal.
Almost.
In an incredible burst, Sauvage caught Driscoll at the finish. They finished with identical times: 1 hour, 41 minutes and 19 seconds. But Sauvage was a front wheel ahead and broke the tape.
Driscoll was stunned. A year before she had tipped over during the race and still managed to finish second to Sauvage on a flat tire. This year was to be vindication for both of them: Driscoll to prove she was still the champ, having won the women's wheelchair division seven years in a row. And Sauvage to prove that last year was not a fluke, that she was a legitimate champion.
Coming from behind, Sauvage said she had flickers of doubt that she could win. But she told herself she had a chance. Remembering what she tells the young wheelchair racers she coaches at home in Australia þ "Never Quit" þ she gave it her best shot and won.
It was a great race. Thanks to them both for the thrill.
In the men's division, Franz Nietlispach of Switzerland ran away with the race. He won last year, too. Not bad for a 40-year-old.
The winners receive $10,000. The runners on foot get $80,000. Considering that for two years running, the wheelchair racers, particularly the women Sauvage and Driscoll, have provided the real drama and excitement, it's time more prize money went their way.
It remains a disgrace that the wheelchair racers don't receive the publicity that the runners get.
For the first time, HUD (the federal Housing and Urban Development department) is making a builder modify housing units to make them accessible.
Perland Corp. of Crest Hill, Illinois, will have to spend $61,000 to fix eight ground floor condos that are out of compliance with the Fair Housing Act.
And the architect Thomas A. Buchar & Associates, Inc. of Joliet will pay $9,000 to settle housing discrimination accusations.
The action followed complaints from the Will-Grundy Center for Independent Living.
"This decision tells everyone in the housing industry that HUD will strictly and vigorously enforce the Fair Housing Act to protect the rights of people with disabilities," said HUDmeister Andrew Cuomo.
Well, we'll see about that. These malefactors didn't have to bleed very much after being caught. You can see why builders and architects will take a chance and not comply. Even if caught the penalty is unbelievably light.
Paulette Radford of Pocatello, Idaho hasn't had a bath in more than a year.
Radford, 43, who is blind, diabetic and a double amputee, can't use her apartment bathroom because there isn't enough room for a hoist to lift her out of her wheelchair into a tub. She has to make do with sponge baths instead.
Radford waited three years for a vacancy at one of the city's few disabled-accessible apartments. Her Cedar View apartment was the first she could get.
It is considered accessible because there are no steps to negotiate to get in the apartment's front door. But that doesn't count for much. Only one of the apartment's three bedrooms is large enough for her to move around in her wheelchair.
She can't prepare a meal because the kitchen counter tops are too high, and light switches and electric sockets are out of her reach.
Nevertheless, Radford counts her blessings. "I had to fight like the devil to get this one," she says.
The city must implement a fair housing plan to comply with the 1988 Federal Housing Act, as a requirement for $670,000 in community development block grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
A city report said local apartment owners, builders and architects show "a serious lack of compliance" and "a fundamental lack of understanding, awareness or respect" for the Fair Housing Act's accessibility requirements.
Under federal law, all ground floor apartments in complexes with four or more units built after 1991 should be fully accessible.
If you are deaf and want to try out to be a volunteer emergency medical technician in Prince George's County, Maryland, now you can under an agreement worked out by the Justice Department.
The deal followed complaints from two qualified applicants with hearing impairments who were turned down. That's a no-no under the ADA.
And in Nebraska, the Fremont YMCA agreed to make its facilities accessible to people with disabilities by removing barriers and ensuring that new renovations comply with federal disability law.
The Fremont Y had made renovations that didn't comply with the ADA. Among the changes to be made: enlarge a vacant elevator shaft and install an elevator and ensure the locker rooms are accessible.
Mark Hankins, an amputee, was denied access to a ground-floor bathroom for employees of an El Torito restaurant in Burlingame, California. He ended up using the bushes outside.
He sued. In April, a California Court of Appeals upheld $80,000 in damages to Hankins, dismissing as without evidence El Torito's claim that customers might steal food from nearby preparation bins if they were allowed to use the employee bathroom. Ol‚!
Most doctors have given up on the house call. Now many are turning in their stethoscope for an early retirement, and the way they are doing it is raising some eyebrows.
Nearly 10,000 doctors across the nation filed disability claims in the last year þ roughly five times more than the number filed a decade ago.
James Johnson, a spokesman for Provident Life & Accident, said there has been a "fundamental shift" in the physician work ethic. "It used to be that a doctor would sort of be like Marcus Welby, delivering a baby in the morning and dying in the afternoon," Johnson told the Boston Globe. "Now physicians are calling it quits a little earlier, and unfortunately they're using their disability policy in place of a retirement program."
"I'm not saying they were inventing things, because no insurance company would pay for fraudulent pain," said Jane Ann Schiltz, vice president of Northwestern Mutual Life, the second-largest individual disability carrier.
"But I don't really believe they all became disabled in 1992 or '93 or '94," she said. "The pain was there before, but it just wasn't going to disable them because they liked what they were doing."
Some reasons industry analysts give for doctors' disillusionment with their profession are increasing control over physicians' practices by insurers, increasing paperwork and the rise of big, impersonal doctors' groups.
They made a movie about Alcatraz Island, the former California prison that was called escape proof. Today it is a tourist trap (so to speak) run by the National Park Service. And now it is accessible. A new program called SEAT (Sustainable Easy Access Transport) helps deal with the climb up the rock. SEAT is a powered vehicle that can take two wheelchairs and 12 other people up the steep grade.
So if want to go directly to jail, do not pass go. Look for the boarding area at the dock and Cellhouse levels. Just try to escape.
Call (415) 705-1045 for more info.
Meanwhile, the Park Service announced that sign language interpretation will be available for ranger-led activities during June, July and August at Yosemite National Park in California.
Activities include interpretive walks, talks, evening campfire talks, and Yosemite Theater programs. Call (209) 372-4726 (TTY), (209) 372-0599 (V/TTY) or email Sarina Lambert at sarina_lambert@nps.gov.
Mauro Sanango left school in Danbury, Connecticut one day this month with more than an understanding of his usual daily lessons. Sanango and his fourth-grade classmates at Shelter Rock School visited with three radio personalities from Bridgeport's "Star 99.9," radio station WEZN-FM.
One of the trio was Tommy Edison, who delivers traffic reports from a helicopter hovering above the roadways. But even some loyal listeners may not realize Edison isn't watching the traffic crawl below him as he advises drivers which thoroughfares to take, and which to avoid. He can't.
Like Mauro, Edison is blind.
Instead, he monitors a police scanner to keep track of accidents and takes cues from his helicopter pilot. "One of the reasons I got into radio is that people told me all my life that I couldn't," said Edison. "But I wanted to do it, and I wanted to do it badly enough.
"So, if you want it, go for it," he counseled the students. "Don't let people tell you that you can't do it and put everything you have into it. If you love it, you'll give it 100 percent." Edison and his colleagues, John Harper, the host of the daily program that airs 5 to 9 a.m., and Lisa Wiernik, who does the news, have spent four years traveling to schools to encourage students. They visit one or two schools a week.
Two blind Korean climbers guided by a veteran alpinist scaled a Himalayan peak in March, team members said. Hyoun Mug Oh, 29, of Ulsan, and Dong Am Kim, 42, of Seoul, reached 6,160 meters (20,330 feet) on Island Peak, 10 days after setting off from Katmandu, the Nepalese capital.
Island Peak is one of the lower Himalayan peaks. The two were accompanied by Young Seouk Park, 36, of Seoul, who set a record last year by climbing five mountain peaks over 8,000 meters (26,400 feet) high in one calendar year.
"I wanted to join the climb to overcome my handicap and boost my confidence," Oh told the Associated Press on his arrival in the Nepalese capital. Oh lost his eyesight three years ago. This was his first trip abroad and his first Himalayan expedition.
Telephone giant MCI has agreed to improve its telephone relay service for the state's deaf and hard-of-hearing customers in a settlement with the Massachusetts attorney general's office.
The agreement calls for an outside firm to monitor MCI's service for accuracy, imposes monetary sanctions if MCI fails to meet monthly performance standards and reduces the length of MCI's contract by one year.
State prosecutors and advocates had alleged that MCI's relay service was substandard, providing garbled messages, breaches of confidentiality, inaccurate transmissions and other problems.
Fearful of coddling bad guys, the California state Assembly refused to spend $6.5 million to fix state prisons for disabled inmates.
The bill needed a two-thirds vote of 54, but fell 10 votes short. Lawmakers from both parties hesitated in an election year to vote for a prison bill that does anything but punish criminals.
Prisoners don't have access problems, since they're easily able to get inside the walls, said Assemblyman Bernie Richter, R-Chico.
The state has been sued under the ADA and has responded with a construction program at 16 state prisons.
The bill would have provided $6.5 million to pay for new doorways, ramps, toilets and sinks, handrails and visual and audio signals.
The nation's first comprehensive college program for students with disabilities marked its 50th anniversary this year.
The program began in 1948 on the University of Illinois' Galesburg campus, in a never-used hospital complex full of one-story buildings and ramps, decades before laws mandated equal opportunities for people with disabilities.
When the university decided in 1949 to close the Galesburg campus, it appeared the program would end, too. The program's director, Timothy Nugent, appealed unsuccessfully to hundreds of other universities and colleges to adopt the program. But Nugent and his students, many of them crusty veterans disabled in World War II, wouldn't take no for an answer.
Nugent and his students traveled to Springfield to appeal to lawmakers. They protested on the Urbana-Champaign campus. They even built temporary ramps from wooden planks to show how easy it would be to accommodate students in wheelchairs.
The university relented, moving the program to Urbana-Champaign in 1949, but Nugent and his students still faced a tough road. The program was termed "experimental" and received no university money for its first eight years, so Nugent drummed up money from outside sources.
To calm those who feared the college would be overrun with disabled students, the university limited the number of students Nugent could admit, forcing him to turn down 15 students for every one who got in.
Nugent attributes such resistance in part to the revolutionary nature of the idea that disabled students could attend college and lead active, productive lives.
Another obstacle was simple prejudice. Nugent recalls a letter from the father of a nondisabled student, asking the university "to protect our sons and daughters from these freaks."
And he lays some blame on the medical profession, which predicted that people with spinal cord injuries would die young.
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service is turning to New Mexico's deaf community for help to stop smugglers who prey on deaf Mexican immigrants.
The action came after authorities discovered three deaf smugglers who allegedly enslaved a deaf immigrant family in Fabens, Texas, near El Paso, for four years and forced them to make money.
INS officials said the agency needs help from the deaf community, asking that they watch out for this type of behavior and report anything suspicious to the agency. Officials also said 30 INS agents in the El Paso District are the first in the nation to learn sign language to better communicate with deaf immigrants.
Coming up on the 8th anniversary of the signing of the ADA, let's take note of several books worth the time of anyone interested in disability issues and the disability rights movement.
-- Flying Solo by Leonard Kriegel, Beacon Press, 1998. Thought-provoking essays on disability and life. A personal favorite.
-- Waist High in the World by Nancy Mairs, Beacon Press. Another personal favorite. Perspectives on life and disability.
-- Claiming Disability by Simi Linton, New York University Press. Making a strong case for disability studies in academia.
-- Nothing About Us Without Us by James L. Charlton, University of California Press. Not easy to plow through, but contains an interesting analysis of the reasons for oppression of people with disabilities around the globe.
-- ADA Watch by Disability Rights Advocates, Volcano Press. Essential reading on the status of people with disabilities.
-- The ABC-Clio Companion to the Disability Rights Movement by Fred Pelka. ABC-Clio Inc., Santa Barbara, California. More essential reading on the people and events of the movement.
Associated Press reports were used compiling this column.
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