Takes up: potential budget cuts in New Jersey affecting people with disabilities; a plan in Nova Scotia, Canada, to relocate all of its citizens living with disabilities from institutional settings; and Frances Vicioso, a Black-Latina storyteller with mental illness and physical disabilities, leading a “Black Disability History” webinar.
Takes up: a program in Southeast Asia to help people with disabilities migrate without barriers; scrutiny of abusive educational practices in England against children with learning disabilities and severe mental disorders; and students with disabilities win a Disabled Student Bill of Rights at the American University in D.C.
View of the struggle and rights of people living with disabilities: an art series depicting youth with disabilities in Nigeria, Kenya and Senegal; a seminar for women with disabilities in Tanzania; Disability Pride in the U.S. and Canada; a protest in Brussels against segregation in residential care homes.
Takes up: Disability services for students in college; the Supreme Court in Japan ruling unconstitutional the Eugenics Protection Law, which prevented people with disabilities from giving birth; and the life of disability rights activist Margot Imdieke Cross.
Takes up: employees at a hospital in Japan sexually abusing patients with severe disabilities; the push to enforce Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement Act in the U.S.; ‘Menopause and Me,’ a video for women with autism and learning disabilities; and an update of the situation of people with disabilities in Russia.
Takes up: The World Health Organization (WHO) report, ‘Measuring Violence Against Women With Disability’; World Bipolar Day; the “We Are Here” rally in Missouri calling for higher pay for care assistants; and three organizations in Asia sponsoring the UN’s 2024 Project Zero Conference for inclusive education and employment for those with disabilities.
Takes up: disabled children and of color being restrained and secluded in U.S. schools; the All Abilities Ball in Gympie, Queensland, Australia; and the need to ban e-scooters in Toronto, Canada.
Takes up: The right of disabled people to be part of the reproductive justice discussion; Indigenous Disability Awareness Month in Canada; and European Union countries requiring people to prove their percentage of disability in order to have free access to culture.
Takes up: Disability Pride Month; inaccessibility in Montreal’s light-rail stations; proposing cuts to disability payments in the UK, and Case Dominique School in Congo-Brazzaville for children with autism and Down Syndrome.
Takes up: Minnesota Personal Care Assistants (PCAs) who agitated for better wages and overtime pay won; Hereford’s Mercia Learning in the UK applied to convert a day nursery into a Growth, Empowerment and Motivation school, to educate 30 neurodivergent students; and on April 26 people with disabilities protested train travel into Paris, France, as most of the 12 million people with disabilities in France struggle because of taxis and train ramps that cannot accommodate wheelchairs, or no ramps at all.
People with disabilities protest UK anti-protest law; Senegal woman with disabilities works to ensure access for disabled children; Saskatchewan people with disabilities demand better access and benefits.
Takes up: Vanuatu, a Pacific island country, developed a national sign language, Storian wetem han; in Minnesota personal care assistants have won a wage increase through the SEIU Healthcare Minnesota union; the UN celebrated the International Day of Persons with Disabilities on Dec. 3.
Asian-American disability rights activist Alice Wong’s memoir “Year of the Tiger”; In Poland, caregivers of children with disabilities called for the right to work part-time jobs while keeping government stipends; and disability rights activists critique California’s CARE Courts Act, where courts can order involuntary treatment plans for people with psychotic disorders.
Disabled women have joined anti-U.S. Supreme Court demonstrations as they are eleven times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth; Disabled South Koreans protested in subways over lack of access to essential services, abuse in institutions, and elevated death rates; a disabled woman in Pakistan founded two organizations which manufacture and donate wheelchairs, employing mostly the disabled.
Handicap This! on disabled dancer Rodney Bell Ngati Maniapoto; disabled students’ fight for rights at California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Ireland’s first Disability Pride and Power Festival in July.
The difficulties people with disabilities are experiencing in Ukraine as it is being attacked by Russia; the newly formed Marion County (Oregon) Advisory Group will help the disability community connect with emergency management during emergencies; and the Australian Disability Enterprises refused to raise their sub-minimum wage for disabled workers.
Takes up: Difficulty for a disabled raped women in Kyrgyzstan to get justice; Mexican women marching on International Women’s Day for disabled women’s rights; the Disability Rights Coalition of Nova Scotia hailing a victory; and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ ad seeking psychologists boasted of all the mentally ill people in U.S. prisons.
Handicap This! on disgusting comments by the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regarding the disabled; the opening of a center for people who struggle with mental health and other issues in Wales; discrimination on many U.S. university campuses against the disabled; and the Society for Philosophy and Disability.
Handicap This! takes up an inhuman “assisted suicide” bill being debated in the House of Lords in UK; the working conditions of caregivers; the effects of COVID-19 on government-funded caregiver agencies in Ireland; and the danger the Taliban pose for disabled people in Afghanistan.
People with disabilities falling through the cracks when trying to get vaccinated; Egyptian TV show centers people with disabilities; half of people killed by police are people with disabilities; cop dumps Whitney Mitchell out of wheelchair at a protest and leaves her helpless on the ground.
Autistic man in UK awarded damages in a discrimination case against Virgin Active; professor at Oxnard College put on leave for berating hard-of-hearing student; “little person” banned from a cooking class at Heart of Worcestershire College; London Stansted Airport pulls special assistance from woman because she “didn’t look ill.”
During the pandemic Supplemental Security Income has been steadily collapsing, severely affecting handicapped and elderly people; In Ghana people with disabilities face confinement and in some cases physical violence and prejudice; and in the U.S. there has been an increase in the number of women killing their disabled children and then committing suicide.
Staggering COVID-19 death toll in New York nursing homes and nationwide in nursing homes housing the disabled; impact of school closures on special needs students; Team Brit allows people with disabilities to participate in motorsports.
April Dunn, advocate for alternative ways for students with disabilities to get a diploma; workers and disabled adults in group homes don’t get medical equipment they need to avoid COVID-19 and to care for those who have it; the fear that the disabled have that they are disposable in the COVID-19 pandemic; and how pediatricians are considering denying organ transplants to kids with disabilities.
Handicap This! takes up: Mistreatment of disabled patients at Iowa’s Glenwood Resource Center; Venezuela’s ongoing economic collapse hitting the sick and disabled; the Accessible Materials in Higher Education Act; and the removal of a mural depicting struggles for rights at the University of Chicago.
Domino’s Pizza inaccessible website; disability rights advocate Marca Bristo dies; Orange County, California, residential care homes owing over $1 million in back wages, and British rock climber Jesse Dufton leading the ascent of the Old Man of Hoy.
Nursing home resident tells of feeling like a prisoner in her home, and overcrowding, malpractice and mistreatment of residents caused by underfunding and understaffing in for-profit nursing homes.
Handicap This! column on Black Disability History; maltreatment of children with disabilities; and bill aimed at phasing out the subminimum wage paid to over 150,000 disabled workers.
A roundup of actions around people with disabilities: Secretary of Education’s drive to rescind federal guidelines ensuring that disabled and minority students not face unfair discipline; Japan’s plans to use the 2020 Paralympic Games to make Tokyo hotels and public transportation more accessible; the insufficiency of Social Security Disability Insurance; and how charter schools are less likely than public to respond to enquiries regarding disabled students.
FEMA’s failure to include people with disabilities in its response to natural disasters; airline passengers with disabilities gain a bill of rights; George Mason University sororities turn down AnnCatherine Heigl, who has Down syndrome; Texas is penalized for underfunding special education programs.
Handicap This! takes up how the U.S. House of Representatives voted to gut the Americans with Disabilities Act with HR Bill 620; that Springfield College in Massachusetts renovated its baseball field and incorporated an “ability field” designed for students with special needs; and that blind students won a discrimination lawsuit against the education company BarBri.
Santa Barbara’s jail system and sheriff are sued; Texas caps the number of students who can receive special education services; people with disabilities criticize Esther McVey, the Work and Pensions Secretary in the United Kingdom.
“No cuts to Medicaid” sit-in; UK official endorses forced institutionalization; nursing homes dump people with disabilities; rally at Illinois Capitol demanding budget; four prisoners with disabilities executed in Arkansas.
ADAPT takes over Thompson Center in Chicago to demand a meeting with Governor; 40 Guatemalan girls killed in a fire where disabled and children were housed in inhumane conditions; a British conservative councilor and special needs teacher accused disabled persons who protested cuts and privatization of the National Health Service of making false claims to avoid work.
India: fight for institutionalized women with disabilities; England: cuts to the personal budgets of disabled people; U.S.: standard of education for many disabled children could be raised if Supreme Court rules that they should receive “meaningful benefit” in education; and Transgender African-American woman Kayla Moore, who had schizophrenia, is killed by police.
A woman is fired because her daughter was regarded as disabled; how Knott’s Berry Farm had to shut down an attraction giving distorted views of mental illness; the U.S. Department of Labor awarded grants to six states as part of its Disability Employment Initiative.
A summary of disability rights actions around the world including: the savaging of overtime pay for personal assistants in Illinois; a bill in Madison, Wisc., seeking stronger rules for investigating abuse and neglect of children with disabilities; and the arrest in Chennai, India, of disabled rights activists.
A roundup of the situation of people with disabilities and how they are fighting for their rights including in Mexico, a prison in Carlisle, Penn., outrage against the shackling of two young students with disabilities in Covington, KY, the banning of a child with cerebral palsy and autism in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, and disabled people in Iraq who face neglect and isolation.
A roundup of actions around disabilities, including the police gunning down of mentally ill Thaddeus McCarroll in St. Louis, MO; a protest against Peter Singer, who called for legalizing killing disabled infants; and how American Airlines forced a woman in crawl onto a plane.
