Disability Pride Month is celebrated annually throughout July and commemorates the anniversary of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was signed into law on July 26, 1990. The official 2026 theme is "The World Works Better With Us".
Please, for the sake of our country, Copy & Paste. It's important!
The Human Rights Campaign has reached a historic high of 4 million members and supporters. With our rights and freedoms under attack, our job at this moment is not simply to defend ourselves. We must rewrite what it means to be free in America. Because freedom must belong to all of us.
So this Pride Month, as we head into marking this country’s 250th birthday, the LGBTQ+ community and allies are showing up loud and proud — we’re reclaiming this country and its freedoms as our own. We say with our full chest: Pride is Patriotism.
Real change doesn’t come from the top down — it rises from the streets, from our communities, and from people like you. With 4 million voices already united under the Human Rights Campaign, this movement is fierce, fearless, and growing. Together, we can ensure that our voices are heard and our rights are protected.
Help to show Congress the critical need and growing support for protecting the civil rights of ALL Americans. Support the Equality Act.
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Juneteenth, also known as Juneteenth National Independence Day, became an official U.S. federal holiday on June 17, 2021, when President Joe Biden signed the legislation. Celebrated annually on June 19, it commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans.
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World Elder Abuse Awareness Day (WEAAD) is June 16. WEAAD provides an opportunity for communities to promote a better understanding of abuse and neglect of older persons by raising awareness of the cultural, social, economic and demographic processes affecting elder abuse and neglect. 2026 Theme: Beyond Awareness: Making Elder Abuse Prevention WorkAs populations age, more people with disabilities are growing older, and many older persons develop disabilities later in life. This overlap calls for closer coordination between efforts on ageing and disability, especially in areas such as protection, care, and community-based support—all of which are essential to addressing elder abuse. Elder abuse remains widely under-recognized and under-reported. It can take many forms, including physical, psychological, and financial abuse, as well as neglect. It often occurs in situations where individuals lack visibility, support, or access to services. Addressing this issue requires more than raising awareness. It calls for stronger systems that can prevent abuse and respond effectively when it happens, while respecting the dignity, independence, and rights of older persons. What needs to be in place for societies to effectively prevent, identify, and respond Ageism affects how we think, feel and act towards others and ourselves based on age. It imposes powerful barriers to the development of good policies and programmes for older and younger people, and has profound negative consequences on older adults’ health and well-being. Launched by World Health Organization, the Combatting Ageism Campaign aims to change the narrative around age and ageing and help create a world for all ages. Addressing Elder AbuseBetween 2019 and 2030, the number of persons aged 60 years or over is projected to grow by 38%, from 1 billion to 1.4 billion, globally outnumbering youth, and this increase will be the greatest and the most rapid in the developing world, and recognizing that greater attention needs to be paid to the specific challenges affecting older persons, including in the field of human rights. Elder abuse is a problem that exists in both developing and developed countries yet is typically underreported globally. Prevalence rates or estimates exist only in selected developed countries — ranging from 1% to 10%. Although the extent of elder mistreatment is unknown, its social and moral significance is obvious. As such, it demands a global multifaceted response, one which focuses on protecting the rights of older persons. Approaches to define, detect and address elder abuse need to be placed within a cultural context and considered along side culturally specific risk factors. For example, in some traditional societies, older widows are subjected to forced marriages while in others, isolated older women are accused of witchcraft. From a health and social perspectives, unless both primary health care and social service sectors are well equipped to identify and deal with the problem, elder abuse will continue to be underdiagnosed and overlooked.
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Facebook is limiting the number of friends and groups with whom I can share my posts on the basis that they limit posting to protect against spamming. To ensure you receive all posts from me, you have two options.
The first option is to sign up on our website https://womensvoicesmedia.org/ You will receive the posts in an email format.Not only will you receive our posts but you can access our Resource Library which has listings for organizations that provide valuable information and help. In addition you may post your own articles.
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Janice C. Jochum, President & Managing Editor
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US senator Bernie Sanders amplified his recent criticism of artificial intelligence on Sunday, explicitly linking the financial ambition of “the richest people in the world” to economic insecurity for millions of Americans – and calling for a potential moratorium on new datacenters.
Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic party, said on CNN’s State of the Union that he was “fearful of a lot” when it came to AI. And the senator called it “the most consequential technology in the history of humanity” that will “transform” the US and the world in ways that had not been fully discussed.
“If there are no jobs and humans won’t be needed for most things, how do people get an income to feed their families, to get healthcare or to pay the rent?” Sanders said. “There’s not been one serious word of discussion in the Congress about that reality.”
Days from being scheduled to help swear New York mayor-elect and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani into office, Sanders said “the richest people in the world” were pushing the technology. He singled out tech moguls Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel Thiel while questioning their motives.
“You think they’re staying up nights worrying about working people and how this technology will impact those people?” Sanders said. “They are not. They are doing it to get richer and even more powerful.”
Sanders also pointed to studies that show dependence on AI chatbots for emotional support. “If this trend continues, what does it mean over the years when people are not getting their support, their interaction from other human beings, but from a machine?” he said. “What does that mean to humanity?”
That theme was taken up separately on State of the Union by Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican senator and co-sponsor of legislation to protect minors from chatbots.
The proposed measure – the Guardianship Over Artificial Intelligence Relationships (Guard) Act – seeks to ban providing AI companions to minors. It also mandates that AI companions disclose their non-human status and lack of professional credentials. The measure seeks to establish criminal liability if companies make AI companions available to minors that solicit or produce sexually explicit content – or encourage self-harm or violence.
Britt said she had met with parents who have told her “devastating stories about their children where chatbots ultimately, when they kind of peeled everything back, had isolated them from their parents, had talked to them about suicide”.
She said: “If these AI companies can make the most brilliant machines in the world, they could do us all a service by putting up proper guardrails that did not allow for minors to utilize these things, that also told the user consistently that they are not a physician, they are not a psychiatrist, ‘I am a machine.’”
Britt said AI companies should be held criminally liable if they create spaces where chatbots “are having these types of sensual and sexual relationships with young people or encouraging suicide”.
The remarks by Sanders and Britt offer a rare convergence of thinking from the left and right on aspects of the issue of governing AI. Sanders said Congress needed “to vigorously study the impact that AI is having on the mental health of our country”.
“I worry very much about kids spending their entire days getting emotional support,” he added. “So we have got to take a hard look on that.” The senator said lawmakers need to be “thinking seriously” about a moratorium on new AI datacenters.
“Frankly, I think you have got to slow this process down,” he said. “It’s not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us, it’s coming, you adapt. What are they talking about? They going to guarantee health care to all people?
“What are they going to do when people have no jobs? What are they going to do, make housing free? So I think we need to take a deep breath, and I think we need to slow this thing down.”
Sun 28 Dec 2025 14.00 EST