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The Games have begun. Here is the BBC’s report on the 2008 Paralympics opening ceremonies in Beijing:
Dazzling show opens Paralympics
The 2008 Paralympic Games has been officially opened by Chinese President Hu Jintao during a stunning ceremony at the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing.
In the three-hour spectacular show, 6,000 performers and 4,000 disabled athletes from 148 countries took part in front of 91,000 ecstatic spectators.
Britain has a 206-strong team and was led into the arena by flag-bearer Danny Crates, 800m champion in Athens.
The action across 20 sports begins on Sunday and lasts until 17 September.
The opening spectacular featured a number of disabled actors [...]
Action online calls your attention to an article on the Paralympics in The New York Times (registration required):
September 6, 2008
Paralympic Athletes Add Equality to Their Goals
By ALAN SCHWARZ
AURORA, Ill. – When he rolls to the starting line for the 1,500-meter wheelchair race at the Paralympics, the Olympics for disabled athletes that begin Saturday in Beijing, Tony Iniguez will wear his Team USA uniform with pride. He will compete for the United States’s Olympic program. He is also suing it for discrimination.
Iniguez is one of many Paralympians who criticize the United States Olympic Committee for providing less direct financial assistance [...]
By Marjorie Cohen
FDR–American Experience. PBS 2007. Filmed and Written by David Grubin.
It was the summer of 1921 when Franklin Roosevelt, former undersecretary of the Navy and rising star in the Democratic Party, was stricken. He had visited a boy’s summer camp and left with a strange virus that rendered his legs useless to him. He was finally diagnosed with polio or as it was then called, Infantile Paralysis.
It appeared that Roosevelt’s political career was truly finished. In the 1920s, polio, if not a death sentence, was a scourge on the populace. “Nice families kept their disabled children in a back [...]
Dr. Richard L. Bruno rants on why “Most research submitted to journals is [...]
Here’s another article from the international media on the 2008 Paralympics, this one from the BBC:
The challenges facing China’s disabled
With the Paralympic Games about to get under way, the BBC’s Michael Bristow looks at how life has changed in recent years for Chinese people with disabilities.
Wheelchair user Jin Yi’s journey across Beijing by bus and subway shows just how seriously China is tackling disability issues.
Mr Jin, an Olympic volunteer, is able to travel on public transport with the help of ramps and lifts.
But he concedes that despite the improvements in accessibility, ordinary people’s attitudes still need to change.
As in many [...]
Bowel and bladder control. “Coach” Scott Chesney takes on The Battle of The [...]
While the US media are relatively silent about the Paralympics, other nations’ media are paying closer attention. Action online will try to bring your attention to this coverage as we find it.
Here is an article from The Independent of the UK:
Prejudice & the Paralympics
The Games are another chance for China to show the world what it can do. Yet this is a country where disabled people are shunned. By Clifford Coonan
Wheelchair-friendly London cabs with distinctive Beijing taxi livery are waiting outside the Bird’s Nest stadium, buses fitted with ramps cruise the city and all over the capital there are banners [...]
By Kathleen M. Muldoon
The other day I was surfing the ‘net for information on a new type artificial foot I thought might suit my prosthesis. In the middle of my search an article popped up titled “Feline Receives First Ever Paw Prosthesis.” Whoa! I had to read that one, and when I did a whole new scientific field was revealed to me, that of animal prosthetics. I forgot all about my own body parts and read every article I could find on the amazing work veterinarians are doing to afford comfort and mobility to critters of many types.
The cat whose [...]
A little over a year after Laura Schwanger first got into a scull to row for a place on the US national team, she earned a prime spot on the US Paralympic rowing team during the US National Rowing Championships, Sunday, June 29, 2008, at Lake Mercer County Park outside of Princeton, New Jersey.
This year marks the sport’s Paralympian debut in Beijing this month. It won’t be the first time the 49-year-old resident of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, has been to the Games, however.
Schwanger is a three-time Paralympic track and field athlete, winner of multiple golds, silver and bronze medals at [...]
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