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Is not knowing how to speak English a disability? According to the Social Security administration, it can be.

A representative of the German Labor Ministry went before a UN Committee on Friday to discuss the government’s plan for improved rights for disabled people. Parliamentary state secretary to the Labor Ministry, Gabriele Lösekrug-Möller, went before the committee to explain the government’s plan to put Germany in line with UN standards. […] The government is developing 200 measures aimed at bettering the lives of some 7.5 million Germans living with disabilities. …

NEW YORK (CNNMoney/WIBW) -- There is good news, but there are still serious concerns because only 123,000 of those jobs were full time. Analysis will be found at the bottom of the story and in attached government reports. Officials claim that the U.S. economy added 295,000 jobs in February, which crushed expectations. That beat the estimate from CNNMoney's survey of economists, who predicted 235,000 job gains.

Social Security is surging to the forefront of the political debate ahead of the race for the White House in 2016. The entitlement program has been thrust into the spotlight by a fight over the Social Security disability fund, which is expected to run dry by the end of next year. The looming shortfall is stirring a burst of activism on the left, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a likely 2016 candidate, and liberal hero Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warning of an assault on the program from Republicans in Congress. "We’ve known for years that Social Security Disability Insurance is...

Editor’s note. This appeared on the blog of the Christian Medical Fellowship (CMF). Disabled_Child-192x128When I went to see the midwife at 36 weeks of pregnancy, I did not expect to find myself leaving in the back of an ambulance. My BP [blood pressure] was 200/115 and there were 4 pluses of protein in my urine. My non-medical husband was bewildered and we both wondered what would happen next. A few hours later, my BP was 160/100, but an ultrasound had shown that our baby was very small – about the size you’d expect at 28 weeks. There were no structural...

Democrats appear to have little recourse against a House of Representatives rule change that could prompt a steep cut to Social Security disability benefits next year, congressional aides said on Monday. The new legislative rule, pushed through with little notice last week, would prohibit a routine transfer to the Social Security Disability Trust Fund, which is expected to be depleted by late 2016. Without an injection from the main Social Security retirement fund, the disability program would have to cut benefits by some 20 percent, only paying out what it can collect from payroll taxes. Congress approved the last such...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Rochester, NY (WROC) - LaTanya Daughtry needs a new place to live. The single mother of two boys is on disability and gets a Section 8 housing voucher. But many online classifieds ads say "No Section 8." "It just makes me feel people look at me differently because I'm on Section 8," Daughtry said. "A lot of ads say no Section 8 right off the bat." Section 8 is a federal housing program run through the Rochester Housing Authority. Recipients pay a portion of the rent and Section 8 pays the rest. Section 8 vouchers are in short supply. In...

If you thought the lame-duck Congress that met in December -- in which House Speaker John Boehner cut a deal with President Barack Obama to fund almost all of Obama's programs through the rest of the current fiscal year -- was a bad deal for America, wait until the next lame-duck Congress convenes after the 2016 election. That could be the "bipartisan" moment for a bailout of the federal disability program -- and perhaps Social Security with it. The very dry, very long Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of Social Security, released in July, included two crucial predictions....

"The Firefly is an electric bike you attach to a manual wheelchair." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4jESFIbAS0

Hefty Danish child-minder Karsten Kaltoft, who was fired from his job earlier this year because he was too immobile to tie a kid’s shoelaces, has successfully won his appeal to the European Court of Justice to consider obesity a disability. As a result, new legislation will be drawn for the purposes of equality in the workplace, stating that employers within the EU must treat any overweight members of staff in the same way that they would those with other disabilities—for example, priority parking or adapted facilities. Is this ridiculous, or does the EU have a point? “To disable” means to...

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers gives the Republican Party's Weekly Remarks Today I’d like to tell you the story of a little boy who was diagnosed with Down Syndrome just three days after he was born. His diagnosis came with a list of future complications: endless doctors’ appointments, heart defects, even early Alzheimer’s. Seven years later, as the mom of that little boy, Cole, nothing has given me greater joy than watching the impact he has had on the world — and dreaming of the difference he will make when he grows up. This week, the House spoke for Cole and...

The labor force participation rate remained at a 36-year low of 62.8 percent in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The participation rate, which is the percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population who participated in the labor force by either having a job during the month or actively seeking one, was 62.8 percent in November which matches the percentage since March 1978. In November, according to BLS, the nation’s civilian noninstitutional population, consisting of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution, reached 248,844,000. Of those, 156,397,000 participated in the labor force...

When a veteran academic finds something notable in a Republican president’s administration, it’s generally the expansion of a federal government program. At the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), on Tuesday, Michael Wiseman, an economist at George Washington University (GWU), called Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the disabled, the “big achievement of the Nixon years.” The program dates from 1974. Currently, millions of adults and children are on the program, and millions more are likely to be. “Since 1996, the real value of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, as the Clinton Administration and the Republican Congress renamed welfare) has been declining,”...

Years ago, Rayna Rapp discovered that her baby would be afflicted with down syndrome. She and her partner chose for her to have an abortion. Ever since then, she has been writing about fetal testing and abortion. A supporter of legal abortion who has herself worked in an abortion clinic, the reader can be assured that she writes with no pro-life bias. In her book, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America, she interviewed women and couples who were waiting for the results of an amniocentesis to discover whether their babies would have down syndrome...

* Many CEOs are angry with the Obama administration thanks to three new cases challenging parts of his 'wellness program' * In order to participate in the 'wellness program' and receive a low health care rate under Obamacare, employees must take a physical * Now it is being argued in three cases that forcing someone to take a physical for work violates the Americans with Disabilities Act * The CEOs now have a number of ways they can undermine Obama because of this developmentLeading U.S. CEOs, angered by the Obama administration's challenge to certain 'workplace wellness' programs, are threatening to...

BURBANK (CBSLA.com) — Activists are calling on Disney executives to represent children with Down syndrome and other disabilities in its animated films. More than 75,000 people have signed a San Francisco family’s petition asking Disney to help fight stigma and discrimination against people with disabilities by representing them in their films. Keston Ott-Dahl hand-delivered a copy of the the Care2 petition to Disney headquarters in Burbank Wednesday, along with her partner Andrea, their 6-year-old daughter Jules, and their 15-month-old daughter Delaney, who has Down syndrome. The petition calls upon to the studio to add characters more like Delaney to future...

Lawyers have raked in more than $7.5 billion in fees from the federal Disability Insurance program since 2009, according to a Manhattan Institute report issued Friday. And that money has come directly out of the pockets of workers through the Social Security payroll tax.

In an obscure corner of the federal bureaucracy, there is an office that is 990,399 cases behind. That is Washington’s backlog of backlogs — a queue of waiting Americans larger than the populations of six different states. It is bigger even than the infamous backups at Veterans Affairs, where 526,000 people are waiting in line, and the patent office, where 606,000 applications are pending. All of these people are waiting on a single office at the Social Security Administration. Social Security is best-known for sending benefits to seniors. But it also pays out disability benefits to people who can’t work...

Everyone who isn't an Obamabot (Paul Krugman) or above the age of 5 knows that the current "official" unemployment rate of 5.9% is bogus. The real number that counts is the labor participation rate which has been shrinking for more than 5 years.Why is the labor force participation rate important? Ken Braun of MLive has very clear explanation: The U.S. “civilian noninstitutional population” - the total count of civilian adults - grew by 217,000 in September, according to the latest jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor. Those new entrants represent immigrants, young people coming of age, military personnel...

THINK back to your first childhood crush. Maybe it was a classmate or a friend next door. Most likely, through school and into adulthood, your affections continued to focus on others in your approximate age group. But imagine if they did not. By some estimates, 1 percent of the male population continues, long after puberty, to find themselves attracted to prepubescent children. These people are living with pedophilia, a sexual attraction to prepubescents that often constitutes a mental illness. Unfortunately, our laws are failing them and, consequently, ignoring opportunities to prevent child abuse. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental...