Free Republic

The Justice Department reached an agreement Monday with Peapod, a popular Internet grocer, to settle claims that the company’s website discriminated against people with disabilities.The agreement forces Peapod LLC and parent company Ahold USA to update www.peapod.com so assistive technologies like text-to-speech and Braille displays function with the site.The DOJ hailed the action as ensuring that anti-discrimination laws under the Americans with Disabilities Act apply to Internet businesses as well as brick and mortar stores.“This agreement ensures that people with disabilities will have an equal opportunity to independently and conveniently shop online for groceries,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Vanita...

How should employers respond when they learn that an employee is planning a trip to West Africa to visit family? What if other employees refuse to come to work because they fear that the returning employee may have been exposed to Ebola Virus Disease? How can employers prepare in advance for such situations? Based on extensive news media coverage of the spread of Ebola in West Africa, and the recent transmission of the virus in the United States, many employers are scrambling to answer these questions. The right response depends on several factors and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However,...

Alfredo Garcia is an illegal alien with a long list of felonies on his arrest record. Garcia also fell out of an avocado tree while high on cocaine and sustained a spinal injury 18 years ago. Since the injury, Garcia uses the Federal ADA laws to pilfer money from honest hard-working American business owners. In addition to extorting money from American businesses, Garcia claims to be poor so that the American taxpayer will pick up the tab for his legal expenses. Estimated law suit settlements total at least $1.2 million, and legal fees paid by the taxpayer approximately $213,502. The...

IRONSIDES is an authoritative/recursive DNS server pair that is provably invulnerable to many of the problems that plague other servers. It achieves this property through the use of formal methods in its design, in particular the language Ada and the SPARK formal methods tool set. Code validated in this way is provably exception-free, contains no data flow errors, and terminates only in the ways that its programmers explicitly say that it can. These are very desirable properties from a computer security perspective. IRONSIDES is not a complete implementation of DNS. In particular, it does not support zone transfers or all...

A new set of seating is being torn down outside the Plymouth Wildcats varsity boys’ baseball field, not long before the season begins, because the fields for boys’ and girls’ athletics must be equal. […] (A)fter a complaint, the U.S Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights investigated the new addition and says it must be torn down. It says the facility was no longer equal to the girls’ softball field next door, which has old bleachers and an old scoreboard. …

Nearly a quarter of the U.S. workforce will soon have to answer a personal question from the boss: Are you disabled? U.S. regulations going into effect next week require for the first time that federal contractors—a group that includes Boeing Co., Dell Inc. and AT&T Inc., T among some 40,000 others—ask their employees if they have a disability. Those that don't employ a minimum of 7% disabled workers, or can't prove they are taking steps to achieve that goal, could face penalties and, in the most extreme cases, the loss of their contracts, according to a government official. The target...

SQUID: Suite of Quality Unified Integrated Development This project is to develop the basis for an Ada 2012 Integrated Development Environment more akin to the `80s/`90s idea of a Programming Support Environment (complete with project-management tools) -- to start, this kickstareter project is for me to: Design the underlying DB structure, and Create a website for the Open-Source project This will allow me to have this kickstarter as a minimalistic goal, allowing for some collaboration with others in the open-source community, as the preliminary calculations have 25 weeks and nearly $37k allocated for the development of the specifications for...

Still adjusting to his life as an amputee, doctors discovered Mr Baer had bone cancer after a non-combat related injury in Iraq in 2009. His left leg had to be amputated from the knee down and was given a physical service dog, Beanz, through a national organization called Canine Companions for Independence. However, as soon as he walked through the door of the coffee chain, the trouble started. A Starbucks employee approached him as he entered with Beanz, his service dog. 'You can't have dogs in here,' the worker yelled at him. It was in your face, loud and bold....

After more than 50 years leading the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Keith Conners could be celebrating. Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond. But Dr. Conners did not feel triumphant this fall as he addressed a group of fellow A.D.H.D. specialists in Washington. He noted that recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the diagnosis...

The US Justice Department is intervening in a private lawsuit against H&R Block for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. H&R Block is a large provider of American tax services and informational services for tax payers.

In one of the more outrageous moves by the Justice Department’s bloated civil rights division, a private college was strong armed into a legal settlement in which it agreed that food allergies are a disability under federal law. The story got little coverage as the Department of Justice (DOJ) quietly persuaded the Massachusetts College, Lesley University, to change its campus menu and serve certain foods to accommodate students with allergies. The preposterous case was brought to Judicial Watch’s attention by Robert Popper, who at the time was a Deputy Chief at the DOJ’s Voting Section. Popper, an esteemed attorney, currently...

We have a great little movie theater in our neighborhood. It has just three screens, but it always shows the newest releases. The best parts of the movie experience at our little theater are the food and the seating. We get to sit at tables in nice, padded chairs on a gently sloping floor. We can order real food to eat, including salads, burgers and chicken wings, regular and alcoholic beverages, and the most awesome chocolate, chocolate-chip cake (with ice cream, of course!) We used to not go to the movies very often, but our little neighborhood theater has drawn...

Fans of Walt Disney World were fuming last spring following reports of people gaming a system that allowed disabled park guests to advance to the front of lines. Now it seems the entitled few have ruined it for everyone. Disney Parks has just announced a change in policy: People with disabilities will no longer be ushered to the front of lines. It “certainly has been problematic, and we wanted to curb some of the abuse of this system,” Disneyland Resort spokeswoman Suzi Brown told the Orange County Register. Further, a statement by Disney, provided to Yahoo Shine through a spokesperson,...

Public confusion, legal loopholes and shady Internet businesses have led to an "epidemic" of fake service-dog certificates, vests and harnesses for use on ordinary pets. And advocates for the disabled say the issue is creating big headaches for those who truly need the canines' assistance. The problem has gotten so bad that Canine Companions for Independence — the nation's largest breeding and training service-dog program — launched an online petition this week asking the U.S. Department of Justice to take action. "Unfortunately, people are trading on the fact these harnesses and vests have become distinguishing marks of service dogs, so...

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently had gastric bypass surgery to help him lose weight.The American Medical Association’s decision to call obesity a “disease” instead of a medical condition could make it harder to discriminate against fat employees, The Wall Street Journal Law Blog reports. Now that obesity is a disease, people with body mass indexes of more than 30 are almost certainly covered under The Americans with Disabilities Act, attorney Jon Hyman told the Law Blog. That 1990 law says employers have to provide disabled workers with “reasonable accommodations” to help them do their jobs. It also makes it...

Lesley University is not nearly so isolated, but it has the same mandatory policy about its student cafeteria. There was a problem however. Several students had Celiac disease. They needed to eat gluten free in order to not get sick. So naturally they told the college and the college allowed them an exception to the mandatory cafeteria plan, letting them keep the money and use it to buy gluten-free food off campus. Right? No, the students sued the college to mandate that the college accommodate them. I don’t feel sorry for Lesley because, frankly, I still bear a grudge against...

WESTLAND, Mich., Feb. 21 (UPI) -- The owners of a Michigan buffet restaurant are being sued in federal court for allegedly kicking out a family whose children suffer from a rare skin disorder. A lawsuit filed Wednesday against a Westland Golden Corral alleges the restaurant's owners, Kirit and Shakuntla Patel, violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by refusing to serve the family, The Detroit News reported. The lawsuit alleges that restaurant manager David Robinson approached the family and asked Duford "What is wrong with your baby?" Duford said nothing was wrong and informed the manager about the skin disease. "She...

School districts that do not provide deaf students "a visual cue" alongside a starter pistol to enable them to compete on the track team or create basketball and tennis leagues for students in wheelchairs will be in violation of federal law and could lose government funding. On Friday, the Obama administration declared disabled students "have the right" to "an equal opportunity to participate in their schools' extracurricular activities." In essence, the Obama administration established the right for disabled students to play wheelchair basketball or wheelchair tennis. The U.S. Department of Education sent a guidance letter to schools, school districts, and...

Rights: The Senate is considering a treaty which says "disability is an evolving concept" and which would infringe on U.S. sovereignty and the right to raise our children as American families see fit. Those who thought that the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) adequately guaranteed the rights of the handicapped to have access to all facets of American life were apparently wrong. The U.S. Senate is considering ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which President Obama signed in 2009 and which goes well beyond mandating wheel-chair ramps for public buildings. CRPD doesn't even bother to...

A disability debacle is playing out in Yuba City as officials are paying a man to stay away. And because of it, he’s cashing in. Yuba City officials say the man is attacking small business owners with frivolous lawsuits. This settlement agreement is the first of its kind in the state, and while it does give the city and businesses a moment of relief from one man, it also opens the floodgates for others to cash in on their decision. Owners of JJ’s Tools and Merchandise shop off Gray Avenue say they are relieved a notorious local man will not...