Catcalls, whistles, groping: the everyday picture of sexual harassment in London (from the Independent)
Yesterday (Friday) it was reported in the Independent newspaper in London, and discussed on the Vanessa Feltz show on BBC London (and to a lesser extent, on the same station’s breakfast show), that a survey had shown that four in ten young women (under 34) had experienced sexual harassment of some sort on the streets of London. Vicki Simister of the Anti Street Harassment Campaign did an interview with the station, in which she described an incident which escalated from a group of men shouting at her from a car to them pinning her to a wall inside a Tube station, and when bystanders intervened and the police arrived, they blamed her and told her that the assault was her fault for reacting to their initial verbal harassment from the car. There are two other opinion pieces from the paper here and here, and you can listen to the Vanessa Feltz show here until next Friday morning and to the breakfast show here (same time limit).
There is a letter in this week’s edition of the New Statesman from 
This post has been republished at 
Last week the issue of postal voting reform in the UK was in the news again, after a judge who had found six Labour councillors in Birmingham guilty of 
Recently the ME community online had to deal with the sad news of three deaths, including one of its best-known and most loved activists, Emily Collingridge (right). There were also two inquests which reported in the last couple of months, those of Lois Owen who died in 2009 and Victoria Webster who died last year. All had very severe ME and, it appears, died of its complications (the immediate cause of Emily’s death will not be known until the inquest is heard later in the year). A major cause of Emily’s final deterioration was a hospital admission in late 2009, following a period in which her condition had improved somewhat; the environment in the hospital was clearly very unsuited to someone who was highly sensitive to light and sound and needed a low-stimulation environment. A further problem with British hospitals has to do with the medical and nursing professions: the fact that there is a substantial number of people with in it who are uncaring, dismissive or abusive and it has led to many people with chronic illnesses becoming fearful or even phobic of hospitals. This simply should not be the case.
Rachel Cohen Rottenberg recently blogged about the recurrent problem of parents of children with severe disabilities (usually autism) 