Noting difficulties with the interpretation and application of the law in federal courts, attorney Susser, who specializes in employment and labor law, outlines the development of disability discrimination law in the US workplace through 2004, with emphasis on the Americans with Disabilities Act. He also discusses the boundaries of the Rehabilitation Act and individual state disability discrimination protections. The 1990 federal disabilities statute is examined in terms of key definitions, anti-discrimination and accommodation requirements, what disabilities are protected, the hiring process, related statutes such as the Family and Medical Leave Act and worker's compensation laws, and litigation and alternative dispute resolution. A CD-ROM containing the appendix, which consists of statutory and regulatory documents from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, US Department of Justice, and US Access Board, is included.

Government proposals to enforce a smoking ban in mental healthcare are likely to be very unpopular, according to new research published in the Journal of Public Health.

Researchers asked 2,574 clinicians about their attitudes to healthcare settings as smoke-free environments. The results showed clear differences between mental health staff and those in general healthcare settings. One in three psychiatric staff were against such a ban compared with just one in ten for staff in general healthcare.

In consultation on the recent Health Act (2006), the government has proposed that only those premises that provide long-term accommodation will be exempt from smoke-free legislation.

But many staff worry that introducing a smoking ban in mental health units could cause confrontation between patients and staff.

The researchers concluded that staff attitudes need to be carefully considered in psychiatric settings when implementing smoke-free policies.

On Aug. 25, a committee of the United Nations, after several years of study and discussion, recommended an international covenant for the protection of the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities.

The General Assembly is expected to recommend the covenant to the 191 U.N. members for ratification. It will enter into force after 20 nations have ratified it. A U.N. committee will monitor compliance of the signatories, who are required to report every fourth year. The Holy See was an active participant in the deliberations that led to the new treaty.

A new and wonderful day has arrived for the 650 million people in the world who are physically or mentally handicapped.

By almost every measure the United States is one of the most progressive countries with respect to the disabled. The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, requires, among other things, extensive accommodation in public places for disabled individuals. Recently, the Bush administration proposed $8.6 billion for people with disabilities. This includes funds for improving access to buses, trains and airplanes.

The fifth article of the new U.N. covenant on the rights of persons with disabilities reflects the Americans with Disabilities Act but probably goes beyond it. Provisions for equality and against discrimination are clear and strong. Rights are spelled out in detail, with rights of women and children with disabilities receiving special attention. The needs of blind and deaf people get explicit treatment,
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Also, every nation is urged to be involved in comprehensive education so that all disabled persons enjoy "the full and equal enjoyment" to which everyone is entitled. The disabled have a right to "live independently and participate fully in all aspects of life." The press and the public are urged to portray disabled persons in ways that are contrary to "stereotypes, prejudices and harmful practices."

Emphasis on Braille and sign language should be basic in those nations that ratify the new covenant. The administration of justice in courts and prisons must follow the new standards, which, after a period when the vast majority of nations ratify the treaty, will become what jurists call "customary international law."

Nongovernmental organizations devoted to the rights of the disabled have worked diligently on the covenant's development. They will continue to be effective forces for the implementation of the rights it guarantees. The impact of the nongovernmental organizations is evident in the text and wording.

One of the most promising features is the inclusion of an optional protocol. This means that in the countries that agree to it, individuals can bring their complaints to the U.N. watchdog committee, composed of up to 18 experts. The machinery to process these complaints is limited but the complaints may receive widespread attention in countries where they originate.

While it is easy to wonder about the usefulness and enforceability of the new covenant, the fact is that the world's disabled persons have over a period of several years produced a statement that, in strong and vigorous language, protects as never before the rights of the 10 percent of humanity that is disabled.

The new committee will join six other U.N. committees that monitor compliance with the treaties that are devoted to the rights of women, children, those who are tortured, persons who suffer discrimination because of their color and race, and individuals who are denied either their political or economic rights.

These watchdog committees could and should be stronger. They lack funding to make known their conclusions and have a difficult time inducing the signatories to report on a regular basis. They are clearly hampered by the absence of the United States, which has not ratified U.N. covenants on women, children and those deprived of their economic rights.

The United States was recently rebuked by the U.N. committee on political rights for falling to file in a timely manner the required periodic reports (NCR, Oct. 6).

Although the U.S. government participated in several ways in the development of the new covenant for the disabled, it appears that the White House and State Department are not about to ask the Senate to ratify the new treaty. This could possibly change with a new president.

The idea that disabled people have a right to dignity and equality has enormous appeal. There has been little backlash to the omnipresent practice in the United States of allocating parking spaces to the disabled, the requirement that public places make accommodation for the disabled or that children receive real equality of opportunity in education and recreation.

After the Soviet Union's collapse, the Clinton White House initiated a conference on human rights held in Vienna, Austria, in June 1993, which I attended as a delegate from the American Bar Association. The final statement, agreed to by 172 nations, contained clear and compelling provisions on the rights of the disabled.

We men don't want to wear condoms, we want the West to find a cure.' This dilemma, faced by HIV counsellors at the Mildmay Centre near Entebbe, mirrors that experienced by those hoping to help Uganda financially. Mukasa, a handler at the chimpanzee sanctuary on Ngamba Island, 45 minutes from Entebbe by speedboat, gives me the analogy: the chimps there are hand-reared orphans. Five times a day food for them is tossed over the fence. A Pavlovian response has developed: they come whooping through the undergrowth at set times -- and can never be released into the wild, as they would not survive. They are literally sustained by handouts.

The other problem with handouts is that 'the Big Men eat all the money', a reference to high-level corruption heard all over Uganda -- earlier this year Britain redirected £15 million of aid away from President Yoweri Museveni's government and into the humanitarian agencies. And sometimes it's not just the Big Men eating all the money; the pilot of the light aircraft flying me out of Entebbe to trek for gorillas tells me of a colleague who used to transport payroll cash for workers on the tea plantations. One day, on landing at the airstrip, he was surrounded by heavily armed bandits who forced him to hand over the money. Today the same pilot flies low and drops sacks of money out of the window; he is the proud owner of a certificate, hanging in the private airline's clubhouse, for 'retaining sphincter muscle control in the face of automatic gunfire and grenades'.

Tomost British people over the age of 40, Entebbe is synonymous with hijacking. In July 1976 Israel conducted a daring raid to rescue hostages from an Air France plane which had been hijacked by Palestinians and forced to land at Entebbe. The episode marked the beginning of the end for Idi Amin, who supported the hijackers, and his ruthless regime. As such, 'Entebbe' is still a defining moment for many Ugandans today.

Thirty years on, the old airport is home to the UN, which uses it as the logistical base for peacekeeping operations in the Congo, Sudan and Burundi. Across the road is the new airport. With its cluster of duty-free shops well stocked with international liquor and perfume brands, it is the gateway to the industry that is being groomed to play a major part in landlocked Uganda's economic renaissance: tourism. The past year has seen an 18 per cent increase in international passenger numbers through Entebbe compared with roughly 5 per cent growth for the rest of Africa, with revenues of dollars-22.5 million. President Museveni's vision is to turn Entebbe into a logistical centre for Africa's cargo traffic; there is talk of increasing the retail and recreational areas to bring it closer to the standards of modern international airports.

With increased air traffic comes a need for additional accommodation. Hotels are springing up all along the tarmac road from Entebbe to the capital, Kampala. Part of this construction boom is linked to Uganda's role as host of the 2007 Commonwealth heads of government meeting, for which the government estimates it needs an additional 3,000 hotel rooms. Some Ugandans remain to be convinced. So adept has Museveni's government become at selling off land to foreign investors and developers (who can form 100 per cent foreign-owned companies, or joint ventures with local investors with no restrictions) that ordinary people have taken to putting hand-painted signs on their one-storey brick homes saying: This Plot Is Not For Sale.

Uganda's economic revival depends above all on one thing: security. Along its Western border, Uganda has suffered from a continuing power vacuum in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while its north-eastern region has been terrorised for two decades by the Lord's Resistance Army, infamous for its use of children as fighters and sex slaves. This civil war has resulted in a humanitarian crisis thought to have displaced 1.8 million people; the LRA's territory is now a wasteland -- its once-thriving agricultural base destroyed. A recent truce is proving fragile.

Newly discovered oil deposits near Lake Albert to the east of the country (30 million recoverable barrels, apparently) need to be protected, as does the workforce. And in the major tourist attraction of gorilla trekking, every group of tourists is accompanied by Ugandan army soldiers, AK-47s slung over their shoulders -- a practice put into place following the killing in 1999 of eight tourists, including four Britons.

Many ordinary Ugandans are finding out for themselves that increased tourism brings benefits. People who previously eked out a living on the banana plantations are establishing new communities around the national parks, home to the endangered mountain gorillas. In Bwindi, fledgling entrepreneurs offer a nice line in freshly baked cakes and wooden gorillas: the splash of white on the back to denote the rare Silverback males is done with Tippex. The strongest men in the village act as porters to trekking tourists; mine earned £40 for a day's work, a month's wages for a farm labourer. But he earned it, carrying me piggy-back for four hours in humid temperatures after I'd injured myself, up near-vertical inclines, hacking at the jungle as he went -- the park is not called the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest for nothing.

PUERTO IGUAZU, Paraguay -- The United States quietly opened a new intelligence base in this Paraguayan town that sits on the border of Brazil and Bolivia. Although ostensibly its focus is on regional anti-drug trafficking measures, Latin American government officials say the base will have more to do with counterterrorism than drugs.

According to Latinamerica Press, these officials said they worry that the base, which falls under the purview of the Pentagon's Southern Command, will strengthen U.S. control in the region.

The base was hastily constructed and paid for entirely by the United States, with a state-of-the-art radar system, a heliport and accommodation for 100 agents. It was built without consultation with the Regional Intelligence Center, an intelligence sharing body for law enforcement agencies of Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia with observers from Chile and Uruguay, Latinamerica Press reported.

According to Paraguayan Sen. Domingo Laino, the United States has alleged for more than a decade that this border region is a sanctuary for international terrorism, "though it has not provided a single fact to back this up."

MANY IT MANAGERS MOVE into uncharted waters when they begin ILM projects.When ancient mariners sailed into the unknown, the edges of their charts were often marked "here monsters be." Here are some suggestions to keep your project from falling off the map.

* All data is not necessarily valuable. Some starts out valuable and loses value along the way Some never has value to begin with. Don't invest time and budget protecting what your company does not value.

* Don't get fooled. ILM is not a product, but a mix of products, processes and services. No matter what some vendors may tell you, tiered storage alone isn't ILM. It's just tiered storage. Don't forget the importance of two other key ingredients: data classification and automation.

* Don't get locked in to a single vendor, unless it is clear the vendor has all the technology you will need for the foreseeable future, and unless you are sure about the vendor's future. A great product from a vendor who isn't there next year is a questionable investment at best. * Don't depend on service-level agreements (SLA) to define compliance issues during the first round of an ILM implementation. In many cases, department managers may have known nothing about these issues when the servicelevel objectives were originally defined.As the SLA process matures, compliance and other subtle requirements will begin to influence how service levels are defined.

* If your company keeps data on desktop machines, make accommodation for that in your plans. As far as regulatory issues are concerned, corporate responsibility extends to all data, and not just to data on a server.

* Ditto for remote offices and home offices - include them in your planning.

* Don't forget to engage with the various lines of business early in the process.

* Don't be naïve about project length. At some sites, an ILM implementation can stretch on for years, which in some cases is at least as long as it takes your accounting department to write down your initial investment. As far as budgets are concerned, by the time you're done, it's time to start over.

Action must be taken to improve the condition of mental Healthcare environments, while NHS financial pressures could lead to further deterioration in cleanliness and repair standards, according to the mental health charity Mind.

Mental health patients spend 12 times as long in hospital as general medical patients, yet the conditions of their wards are among the worst.

Now Mind has released a new report, Building solutions: improving mental healthcare environments, based on a survey showing that nearly a third of people (29 per cent) who had recently stayed in mental health wards were dissatisfied with their ward's state of repair, with 28 per cent unhappy about ward cleanliness.

This backs up last year's Healthcare Commission finding that standards of cleanliness are markedly poorer in mental health hospitals compared to acute hospitals.

Mental health inpatients often have to spend many weeks in hospital, with average stays of around 58 days, nearly 12 times longer than patients with physical health problems. In the survey 56 per cent of recent inpatients rated their ward as unpleasant or very unpleasant.

Mind is calling for standards on wards to be improved to ensure that all patients have a therapeutic and stimulating stay.

The lack of activities leads to boredom, which causes frustration and slows recovery, the charity says.

Mind chief executive, Paul Farmer, said: 'Going into hospital with mental health problems can be very traumatic. We rely on hospitals to help us get well, but at the moment many are not providing a therapeutic environment.

'We would like to see all mental healthcare environments come up to the standards of the best. On many wards there's simply no alternative to, at best, boredom, at worst, fear. This can and must be addressed as a matter of urgency."

In 2004 Mind's Ward Watch report found that patient safety, morale and recovery were being undermined by boredom, harassment, and difficulties associated with low staffing levels.

Mind's key recommendations:

* Service users should be involved in the design of new hospitals

* Wards should be maintained to the highest levels of cleanliness

* All patients should have access to green spaces

* All sleeping accommodation must be single-sex

* Urgent action must be taken to address levels of violence on wards

* Wards and their facilities need to be pleasant and stimulating, with a good range of activities

The dollar strengthened despite slower job growth in the US in September, but prospects of a worsening economic slump in the months ahead could expose the greenback to a sudden decline, analysts say. The impact of the collapsing housing market on aggregate demand has the potential to pull the economy to the brink of an outright recession by early next year, says David Rosenberg, US economist at Merrill Lynch.

For the full year 2007, Merrill Lynch estimates the US economy will grow 1.8%, well below the International Monetary Fund's forecast of 2.9%. "Slowing housing construction will probably take about a percentage point off of growth in the second half of this year, and probably something going into next year as well," Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said in a speech in early October.

While worries about inflation could keep the Fed from cutting interest rates in the months ahead, markets likely will continue reducing their preoccupation with US inflation risks and shift their concerns toward a continued economic slowdown, says Stuart Scrase, an analyst at CMC Markets, a leading foreign exchange broker, which created one of the first online currency trading systems in 1996. The sharp dollar rally in the face of news that only 51,000 new jobs were added to the US economy in September was largely due to big upward revisions to August and July payrolls, as well as a decline in the unemployment rate to 4.6% in September from 4.7%.

The Institute for Supply Management's US manufacturing survey for September delivered the worst of all worlds for the dollar, namely a falling headline index, falling prices and a contraction in the employment index, Scrase says. "With the headline ISM falling to a 16-month low, the prices-paid index at a 14-month low, and the employment index falling back into contraction territory, the report suggests that further cooling in growth and diminishing pricing power will remove the Fed's tightening bias," according to Scrase. Although manufacturing accounts for a declining share of the US economy, at less than 20%, its trend relationship with growth of gross domestic product remains intact, he says.

Meanwhile, contrasting monetary policy conditions between the US and Europe indicated increased pressure for the dollar, Scrase says. The European Central Bank raised its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points to 3.25% on October 5, in line with market expectations. The accompanying press conference statement said, "After today's increase, the key ECB interest rates remain at low levels, money and credit growth are strong, and liquidity in the euro area is ample by all plausible measures."

The unanimous vote of the ECB governing council and comments by ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet reinforced expectations that the central bank will continue hiking interest rates, says Michael Woolfolk, senior currency strategist at The Bank of New York. While Trichet's statement may not have been everything that euro bulls could have hoped for, since it dropped the code word "vigilance" on inflation monitoring, it did reinforce the ECB's commitment to continued removal of monetary accommodation and said risks to the outlook for prices "remain clearly on the upside."

Despite concerns that housing-market weakness is sapping the strength of the US consumer, who accounts for nearly 70% of US economic activity, Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York, says the economy is resilient and stubborn price pressures mean that investors cannot be confident that the monetary tightening cycle is complete. "While many observers have embraced the decline in oil prices and commodity prices in general as a force that will contain price pressures, we would emphasize the positive impact on growth from the fall in oil and gasoline prices and the decline in interest rates," Chandler says.

US mortgage rates have been declining, along with US bond yields, but high-frequency data are volatile, and "We are not saying that the US housing market has bottomed," Chandler says. "Our claim is more modest: Falling interest rates and falling oil and gasoline prices will help support consumption and the US economy in general," he explains. "To this, we would add the strength of personal income in the US, which has risen 9.4% in the 12 months through August," he says. US personal income rose 0.3% in August to the highest level since January 1985.

"Both income and spending remain solid so far this year," says Woolfolk of The Bank of New York. "Full-employment conditions and the largest year-on-year rise in personal income in over 21 years have made the US consumer highly resilient to shocks that would have ordinarily derailed spending," he says. The recent decline in energy prices, if it persists, could be the countervailing force in 2007 that keeps the US economy growing at its trend pace and the Fed complacent with the current federal funds rate target, he adds.

If the dollar does get into trouble, either as a result of a sharp slowdown in the US economy or because of renewed worries about financing the record current-account deficit, analysts are confident that treasury secretary Henry Paulson will come to its defense.