July 06, 2006
Weekend Express Bus Service To Keep Rolling
Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the X27 and X28 are crucial for Brooklyn residents, especially seniors and the disabled.
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April 23, 2006
New home sweet for disabled man
There's a happy ending in sight for a disabled Holocaust survivor who has been living as a virtual prisoner in his Brooklyn home.
After two years of legal wrangling, tomorrow Chaim Indig, who uses a wheelchair, is set to move into a handicapped-accessible co-op in Premier House - a luxury Midwood building whose board initially had turned him away.
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April 17, 2006
Lost Puppy Love
A severely disabled boy and his sister were traumatized after a Brooklyn pet store sold their family a pair of sick puggle puppies, which had to be euthanized just weeks after becoming part of their Chelsea home, the family of the children claim.
...The $1,900 puggles--a popular crossbreed of pug and beagle--were more than just pets, Kushlefsky said.
Jaden and his family had to get the dogs in order to get a trained assistance dog.
Read the rest of "Lost Puppy Love".Posted by Michelle at 12:31 PM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2006
Green may be Brooklyn's most able disabled skier
Bedford-Stuyvesant isn't given to much snowfall in the winter months (last February's 27-inch abomination aside). Its elevation (roughly 59 feet above sea level) isn't especially conducive to schussing down the slopes either -- which might explain why the Brooklyn neighborhood produces so few skiers of note. Bed-Stuy is better known for NBA stars like Connie Hawkins and emcees like Biggie than for standout skiers.
But Ralph Green is out to change all that. The 28-year-old Bed-Stuy native already made history four years ago when he became the first black man to make the U.S. Disabled Alpine team.
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March 01, 2006
A Life of Peaks and Valleys, and of Hope
Until he was shot, Green had escaped the violence that plagued his Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. He was 15 and a promising high school quarterback. After the shooting, his left leg had to be amputated and he was in a coma.
But Grace Green vowed that her son was not finished.
"I'm not going to let my son be a forgotten one," she told reporters in September 1992. "They say things happen for a purpose. As good as he was in football, he'll be even better in something else."
Sure enough, Ralph Green walked into the Olympic Village here one day last week, leaning on metal crutches, his smile a bright spot on a cold and rainy afternoon. Wearing his United States Paralympic Team jacket, he looked around and marveled at his surroundings.
"The Olympics is something that you see on TV," Green said. "You see the athletes that you see on TV, and they're eating lunch."
Soon, Green will move into his own Olympic Village room, in nearby Sestriere, for the Paralympics, which begin March 10 and will be contested in the same places as the Winter Games. Green, now 28, will compete in all four Alpine skiing disciplines.
Read the rest of "A Life of Peaks and Valleys, and of Hope".Posted by Michelle at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2006
Breaking Down Barriers: Disability rights pioneer to speak
"It's hard to think there'd be a [disability rights] movement without [Ms. Heumann]," said Katherine Seelman, associate dean for disability programs at Pitt's School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, co-sponsor of the lecture.
Born in Philadelphia in 1947 and raised in Brooklyn, Ms. Heumann contracted polio when she was 18 months old.
Like many disabled children of that time, she was denied access to public school, and her parents had to fight for her admission. As a young college graduate, she encountered another round of discrimination when she sought a teaching position in the New York Public Schools; she successfully sued the New York Board of Education.
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February 03, 2006
Satirical comedy premieres tonight
A comedy about bureaucracy?
Such a play might sound far fetched. But that's exactly the theme of "Archangels Don't Play Pinball," a satiric play that will be performed beginning tonight by the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School's Repertory Theatre Company.
The play by Italian Nobel laureate Dario Fo is in the style of commedia dell'arte, following the protagonist Lanky through a farcical adventure as he travels to Washington, D.C., to get his pension for being a disabled veteran. Commedia dell'arte is Italian comedy of the 16th through 18th centuries improvised from standard situations with stock characters like the buffoon or the corrupt official.
...In addition, the company will perform the play on Feb. 14 at the Brooklyn Lyceum in New York City in keeping with the tradition of repertory companies going on tour.
Read the rest of "Satirical comedy premieres tonight".Posted by Michelle at 07:26 PM | Comments (0)
December 06, 2005
Kensington Residents Want City To Put A Stop To Overdevelopment
Earlier this year, the 19th century building that Kensington Stables rented and used as a barn was sold to make way a 107-unit condominium complex. The horses were forced into the remaining building, and to make room, the indoor riding ring had to be eliminated. With no indoor riding ring, Kensington Stables lost its program for the disabled.
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November 25, 2005
Germ Fears at Second Brooklyn School
For the second time in as many weeks, state inspectors found workers at a public school for disabled kids were not being properly protected from dangerous blood-borne pathogens, like hepatitis, according to a state Labor Department official.
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November 10, 2005
Disabled Subway Riders Protest Busted Elevator At New Stillwell Station
Disabled subway riders want to know why it's taken so long for a new elevator to get installed at a Brooklyn train station.
They say the opening of a brand new elevator at the Stillwell Avenue station was delayed for months, making their commute more difficult.
The station recently underwent a $300 million renovation. New elevators were supposed to open in May but didn't start running until last month, with one of them in and out of service as late as Wednesday.
Because both the subway map and the MTA website indicate the station is accessible, some disabled riders have taken the D train all the way here, only to have to turn right back around because they had no way of getting off the platform.
Read the rest of "Disabled Subway Riders Protest Busted Elevator At New Stillwell Station".Posted by Michelle at 04:52 PM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2005
'I thought I was going to die on that bus'
The Brooklyn bus matron who survived a nightmare ride with an allegedly drugged-up driver and four autistic children described a scene of terror that she never thought she'd escape alive.
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November 06, 2005
Minibus Driver Leaves Chaos in His Wake
A minivan school bus carrying four preschoolers and a matron and driven at high speed by a man wanted on a drug charge veered into the wrong lane on a Brooklyn street yesterday and plowed into parked cars, a traffic light, a concrete pillar and a marble-and-iron fence, the police said.
No one was seriously injured in the lurching, 150-foot skein along Church Avenue near Stratford Road in Prospect Park South at 8:10 a.m., although witnesses said the passengers--two boys and two girls under 5 and an escort on their way to a school for disabled children--were severely shaken.
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October 15, 2005
Downhill from here: Brooklyn amputee, victim of a 1992 shooting, striving to make the Paralympic alpine ski team
The bullet "definitely changed my life," he said, yet in ways that are no more logical than the shooting itself. At 28, Green not only remains an athlete, but a world-class athlete at that, in the unlikely endeavor of disabled alpine skiing, and is the first black man on that sport's national team. From a dark, rainy, violent night in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he has come to a Rocky Mountain High: He lives in Vail, trains nearby, loves snow and wants to settle for good in the mountains.
Ski officials expect he will compete on the U.S. team at the Paralympic Games in Turin, Italy, in March.
Read the rest of "Downhill from here: Brooklyn amputee, victim of a 1992 shooting, striving to make the Paralympic alpine ski team".Posted by Michelle at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2005
HUD reneging on building deal, center for disabled charges
Brooklyn's red-hot real estate boom is pitting a local nonprofit group that cares for the mentally ill against the U.S. government.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to sell a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone to the group, but at market value instead of at a lower price HUD originally agreed to, officials of the nonprofit organization charged.
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August 22, 2005
ASPS Member Surgeons Celebrate the Faces of Plastic Surgery; Patients of Courage: Triumph Over Adversity
Caitlin Sarubbi, 15, of Brooklyn, N.Y., was born with an extremely rare congenital syndrome known as ablepharon- macrostomia where she was born without eyelids and absence of body hair. She also had a deformed mouth and facial appearance. She has endured 44 surgeries from eyelid and forehead reconstruction to hand surgery and more. Although legally blind and hearing impaired, Caitlin is a model student and a star athlete.
Read the rest of "ASPS Member Surgeons Celebrate the Faces of Plastic Surgery; Patients of Courage: Triumph Over Adversity".Posted by Michelle at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)
August 09, 2005
Theater: Catharsis and crusade
...That's a fair description of Charles Mee, prolific polymath of cutting-edge American theater. "I think I have 31 or 32 plays on my Web site, and none of them is about disability," said Mee, who contracted polio in his teens.
The Brooklyn playwright has written about living with a disability in his memoir, "A Nearly Normal Life" But his plays are more apt to deal with themes from Greek mythology--he's a distinguished classical scholar--or American politics.
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August 05, 2005
Union talk at care site
Employees at a Brooklyn day care center for mentally retarded adults say the facility is a "disgusting" place to work and management is stifling their efforts to unionize.
Lifespire--housed in a one-story building on 48th St. in Sunset Park, where 100 developmentally disabled adults are cared for--is rundown, often sweltering, understaffed and undersupplied, said Helen Hane, a pro-union employee.
"We're forced to treat the consumers in a way that we wouldn't want anyone to treat our families," Hane said. "This building is a disgusting place for the consumers to attend programs."
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