From the [UK] Guardian, [UK] Telegraph, Daily Mail:

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown today dismissed concerns about his eyesight, insisting that it was not getting worse and that he was not stepping down from his position. The comments by Brown, who is blind in his left eye, came amid controversy over his disclosure this weekend that he has two minor tears in the retina of his right eye.

Cabinet colleagues rallied to his support, dismissing the medical disclosure as unimportant. Yvette Cooper, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said she had “never noticed any manifestation” of Brown’s eyesight problems. “The idea that we should be a country that writes people off from employment or senior positions just because of difficulties with their eyesight, I just think that is not the kind of country we want to be,” she said.

While there is no suggestion that Brown’s eyesight has hurt his ability to do his job, insiders are quoted as saying the eye problems may be affecting his psychological outlook.

See also:

• How Gordon Brown’s loss of an eye informs his view of the world — [UK] Guardian
• Op-ed: You don’t need sight to have vision, by Sandi Wassmer in the [UK] Guardian. An excerpt:

I now know plenty of blind and partially sighted people just like me, working hard and going about their busy lives, with canes, guide dogs, support workers and assistive technologies in tow. I realize that none of these aids will bring back my eyesight, but they do provide me with an alternative route to wherever it is that I want to go and enable me to work and live alongside everyone else and enjoy the same freedoms and equal opportunities. After all, isn’t this a basic human right?

Whatever the outcome of this next election, I can only hope that votes are not cast based on archaic views about disability. I know that my eyesight may be deteriorating but my “vision” remains perfectly intact.

(Photo from [UK] Daily Mail)

From Associated Press, [UK] Telegraph and elsewhere:

A British inquest jury ruled this week that years of abuse and terror at the hands of neighborhood toughs had led a despairing single mother to kill herself and her 18-year-old disabled daughter, and that police inaction contributed to their deaths.

Fiona Pilkington had called police dozens of times and written desperate letters to her local lawmaker, but no one intervened to stop the persecution. The inquest heard testimony that a local gang of youths repeatedly urinated on Pilkington’s home, pushed excrement through her mailbox, smashed her windows with stones and spattered her walls with eggs and flour.

Pilkington’s daughter Francecca, who had an intellectual disability, was mercilessly taunted. On one occasion, a mob of more than a dozen youths demanded that she lift up her dress. Her son Anthony, 19, who has dyslexia, was locked in a shed at knifepoint and, on another occasion, beaten with an iron bar, but no one was prosecuted.

Pilkington’s family said the case highlighted problems faced by parents of disabled children, and campaigners and academics said the police’s sluggishness in responding to the attacks showed that hate crimes against disabled people were often ignored.

“The failure to take seriously the ‘drip-drip’ of daily violence against some disabled people is at the heart of the Pilkington case,” said professor Alan Roulstone, who researches disability issues at De Montfort University in central England. He said that while British society had made strides toward tackling religious or racially-motivated hate crimes, disabled people were often “last on the list.”

See also:

Op-ed: We must clamp down on disability hate crime — [UK] Telegraph

Advocates say case may mark a turning point for disability hate crime — [UK] Guardian

Spotlight on disability hate crime — BBC

Column: Disabled people are often not taken seriously when they report crime — [UK] Independent

Prosecutions unlikely in cases of terminal illness or ‘severe and incurable physical disability’

From the Wall Street Journal,  New York Times, [UK] Times, BBC:

England’s top prosecutor has made it easier for people to help a terminally ill or disabled person kill themself, handing a victory to advocates of assisted suicide.

Keir Starmer, director of public prosecutions for England and Wales, issued a list of conditions under which his office would be unlikely to prosecute people who helped others commit suicide. The new guidelines sparked a vociferous public debate between supporters and opponents.

Starmer said the state will be unlikely to prosecute someone who acted out of compassion, and who helped a person who clearly wanted to die and had a terminal illness or a “severe and incurable physical disability.”

He said that prosecutions would be more likely in cases in which the victim wasn’t able to make their own decision, or was pressured, mentally disabled, or under 18 years of age; or if the person assisting the suicide was motivated by personal gain.

From the New York Times:

Advocates say Xiu Ping Jiang’s case demonstrates the need for protections for people with mental disabilities in the nation’s immigration courts.

Jiang has a history of mental illness and was forcibly sterilized in China before immigrating to the United States. She was held in a Florida immigration detention center for a year and a half without legal representation or medical treatment, and fell into a suicidal depression. After the New York Times wrote about her, an immigration judge reopened her case. Jiang is now out on bail, living with family in New York.

If immigration courts were required to offer the same basic protections for the mentally disabled as any other court, advocates say, Ms. Jiang’s prolonged detention – which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and put her life at risk – could have been avoided.

Hers is one of several cases cited in a 15-page letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that asks for such protections, including the appointment of counsel to anyone with a mental disability in deportation proceedings, and the appointment of guardians ad litem to speak on behalf of those found mentally incompetent.

(New York Times photo)

From the BBC, [UK] Guardian:

Lady Nicky Chapman, the first person with a congenital disability to be appointed to the British House of Lords, has died. She was 48.

Baroness Chapman was born with brittle bone disease and elected to the House of Lords as a “people’s peer” in 2004. She was known as a fierce advocate whose complaints about a taxi driver who would not transport her led to broad enforcement of the UK’s Disability Discrimination Act.

Chapman said she was written off by doctors at birth as someone who would be blind, deaf, and unable to communicate, and would have “no noticeable mental function.” She used this personal story to powerful effect in debates on such issues as the right to die, “reminding peers and the wider world of how often doctors are wrong, and how stout the human spirit can be.”

From Mike Donnelly in the [UK] Guardian:

She had the special power to make people grow and be the best of themselves. She made us stretch towards a higher understanding of what it means to be different. In a profound way she shook people’s perception of normality and what it means to be human.

From the [UK] Times, BBC News, Associated Press, and AFP;

Riam Dean, 22, was awarded £9,000 by an employment tribunal after alleging that she was harassed and dismissed by the Abercrombie & Fitch clothing chain for reasons related to her disability.

Dean sued the clothing giant for discrimination, saying the firm’s London store banished her to the stockroom because her prosthetic arm didn’t meet the company’s “look policy,” then dismissed her over the disagreement. Dean, a law student, was born without a left forearm.

The Central London Employment Tribunal ruled that Dean was “unlawfully harassed for a reason that related to her disability” under the Disability Discrimination Act. The tribunal also found that the firm “failed to comply with its duty to make reasonable adjustments” for her disability.

Earlier post here.

(AP photo)

From the [UK] Telegraph:

UK academics and prominent disability sports advocates are criticizing the absence of a concrete policy to raise disability awareness and advance social change at the 2012 Paralympic Games in London.

According to a survey commissioned by London 2012, about 69 per cent of respondents could not name a Paralympian. Sixty-nine per cent of those surveyed said they would like to see more media coverage of Paralympic events.

[The nation's most decorated Paralympic athlete, Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson], believes the public’s lack of understanding may be holding back not just the sport, but the disability aspects of the Games.

The Paralympics are a sporting – and political – movement for those living with disabilities. Grey-Thompson said: “Awareness and education, and a move towards social change and widespread acceptance have to be the key aims, along with developing a sporting structure for the future…”

Advocates are calling for increased media coverage and more community and school opportunities for Paralympic sports.