With the news of quarterback Tim Tebow coming to Boston, the level of excitement, debate and anticipation have been high.
But no Patriots fan is more elated than Zack McLeod. The 21-year-old suffered a major head injury playing football five years ago.
Zack has been through multiple surgeries since his high school football head injury. But what defines the young man is not his disability, not even football --which three generations of his family, including his father, have played -- but his faith.
America's disability benefits program was recently thrown into the middle of an ideological battlefield after This American Life, the WBEZ radio show hosted by Ira Glass, portrayed the disability program as a "de-facto welfare program."
Just a couple of months later, that very program appears dangerously close to becoming insolvent.
Technically known as Intentional Community housing, a new estate with some social engineering is allowing people with disabilities to live more independently.
Dozens of the homes will provide an opportunity for people with a severe disability to live independently, with help only as far away as next door.
The Intentional Community at Phillip in Canberra's inner-south was opened by Chief Minister Katy Gallagher and Australian Governor-General Quentin Bryce.
It has been an extraordinary three weeks in the history of the American penal system, perhaps one of the darkest periods on record. In four states, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, the systemic abuse and neglect of inmates, and especially mentally ill inmates, has been investigated, chronicled and disclosed in grim detail to the world by lawyers, government investigators and one federal judge. The conclusions are inescapable: In our zeal to dehumanize criminals we have allowed our prisons to become medieval places of unspeakable cruelty so far beyond constitutional norms that they are barely recognizable.
A grand jury in Frederick County, Md., decided last week not to bring criminal charges in the death of Robert Ethan Saylor, a 26-year-old man with Down syndrome who was killed in a struggle with three off-duty county sheriff’s deputies at a movie theater in January. Advocates for people with intellectual disabilities are bewildered and furious, and it is easy to see why.
Mr. Saylor and an aide who cared for him had just seen “Zero Dark Thirty.” She went to get the car, leaving him alone. Theater employees told him to get out. He refused, and the deputies — moonlighting as mall security — were called. They handcuffed Mr. Saylor on his stomach on the ground. He went into distress and died. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide by asphyxiation.
