From the [UK] Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, CNN,  BBC:

The British government offered  “sympathy” and “regret” yesterday to survivors of the Thalidomide scandal, and unveiled a government plan award more than £20 million in compensation to survivors.

The statement, by Health Minister Mike O’Brien, comes more than 50 years after one of the worst public health and political scandals in Britain’s recent history. Thalidomide had not been fully tested before it was prescribed to pregnant women  as a treatment for morning sickness or insomnia starting in 1958. The drug was withdrawn in 1961 after thousands of babies were born with missing or foreshortened limbs, blindness, deafness, and other disabilities.

“The government wishes to express its sincere regret and deep sympathy for the injury and suffering endured by all those affected,” said O’Brien.

Advocates have fought a long and bitter battle for compensation, and for public acknowledgment that the government should have done more to avert or minimize the drug’s disastrous consequences.

Guy Tweedy, of the Thalidomide Trust, said: “I’m highly delighted and so glad that it actually came, 50 years too late but never mind. It’s an apology not just to thalidomide victims but to the parents who lost their children in the early days. The apology means as much in some ways as the money.”

Earlier posts here.

Journalist Judy Woodruff jumps into the new PBS NewsHour blog, “The Rundown,” listing some topics she’s eager to talk about. Among her top five: Disability. An excerpt:

Our older son has serious physical disabilities that have opened our entire family’s eyes to the plight of those who wake up each day with the equivalent of a mountain to climb, simply to get ready for the day. As advanced as our nation is, we have a very long way to go to even the playing field, much less give them the opportunities they deserve, to be the contributing members of society they want to be. I am always on the lookout for stories and developments that relate to their lives.

Earlier posts here.

See also this 2004 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Woodruff’s husband, Al Hunt: More attention for disabilities.

(PBS NewsHour photo)

The Axis Dance Company in Oakland, California, is made up of seven dancers. Four of them have physical disabilities and perform in wheelchairs. New York Times writer Bruce Weber says the collaboration among dancers with and without disabilities delivers a powerful message:

Sympathy is irrelevant. Forget what isn’t here, and pay attention to what is. Recognize the chairs for what they are and not as substitutes for what they are not.

From the Nashua Telegraph:

In Nashua, New Hampshire, Project SEARCH is helping students with cognitive and physical disabilities find jobs. The program boosts employment for people with disabilities by offering a total immersion school-to-work program.

All five of the graduates this year, including 21-year-old Noelle Hogan (left), are now working in the medical field. Hogan cleans and sterilizes patient rooms, makes copies, assembles packets of forms, and is preparing to use her photography skills for wound documentation.

“We keep adding more and more responsibilities because she’s extremely focused,” said Dinny D’Anjou, a podiatry nurse who supervises Hogan. “Our motto is that she doesn’t have disabilities. She has different abilities. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

Across the state, only 43 percent of working age people with disabilities were working in 2007, compared with 84 percent of their peers without disabilities.

Earlier posts here.

See also:

• Beyond cognitive disability barriers; Employees quickly emerge as assets — Washington Post
• Project Search

(Nashua Telegraph photo)

From the New York Times, with video:

A fencing club in New Jersey has opened a new program, reportedly the first of its kind in the Northeast, to teach wheelchair fencing to young people with physical disabilities.

The club’s first six fencers have conditions like spina bifida, cerebral palsy and spinal cord injuries. With only 27 wheelchair athletes represented in the United States Fencing Association, club staffers are hopeful that their new athletes could reach national-level competitions and even the Paralympic Games.

Fencing club president George Janto says the sport requires very few modifications to accommodate people with disabilities. Fencing coach Mickey Zeljkovic, a five-time Serbian national fencing champion, says it requires participants to think ahead — “like physical chess.”

Parents say the program brings unexpected benefits to the new duelers. “They have a lot more confidence in themselves, that they can do what other children can do,” said Colleen Mooney, whose 15-year-old son attends weekly. “They may have their own special way of doing it, but they can [do it] like anyone else.”

(New York Times photo)

Writing in Business Week, Ralph Braun says studies show that hiring people with disabilities does not create higher costs for businesses, and yet the myths persist.

He says employer bias poses significant barriers to hiring for people with disabilities, and quotes a recent study that found only 40 percent of American working-age adults with disabilities are employed, either full- or part-time. An excerpt:

The fact is, employees with physical disabilities can do for your business what they’ve done for themselves: Move it forward, one step (or wheel turn) at a time.

Ralph Braun, who uses a wheelchair, is CEO of BraunAbility in Winamac, Ind.

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.