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Thursday 2 April was World Autism Day 
President Obama didn’t forget World Autism Awareness Day and his office sent out this message
 Hello,
Kareem Dale, Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy,
advised me to send you the following attachments.
Thank you for all that you do,
Matt Tranchin
The White House
Office of Public Liaison

March 30, 2009

It is with profound commitment [...]

I was angered that a significant change to the Education Act was passed by Parliament through all its stages under urgency before Christmas. It increased fines for parents of students who were not attending school, and it made way for publicly notified standardised testing of primary school students (as in the No Child Left Behind policy of the United States). [...]

Sarah is a New Zealand trained clinician working in Australia. As someone skilled in recognising autism spectrum conditions, she often faces a  dilemma about disclosure of possible AS to her patients. She wrote this for humans. She also has a website www.aspiesontv.blogspot.com
As a clinician working with a range of general patients, but with a research and clinical interest in [...]

Ari Ne’eman, who runs the Autistic Self Advocacy Network in the US, has sent out their recommendations about autism to the Obama Transition Team. President-elect Obama has already promised to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and even had autism-specific policies in his election manifesto. These recommendations have been made at the request of the Transition Team, [...]

Here is the latest official news on the Austism Spectrum Disorder Guideline from the Ministry of Health. Some of the formatting and visual information has been lost in translation but you can see the original pdf at  New Zealand Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Guideline Updates
http://www.moh.govt.nz/moh.nsf/pagesmh/8594/$File/asd-newsletter-dec08.pdf
Two new tenders have also just been released as part of the implementation process. [...]

[This is an abridged version of a paper I gave as part of a symposium on the NZ ASD Guideline at the Australasian ASSID conference in Melbourne on 26 November 2008. I would be interested in any feedback.] 
Introduction
The New Zealand Autism Spectrum Disorder Guideline is a whole of spectrum, whole of life, whole of government approach [...]

People may be wondering what has been happening with the implementation of the NZ ASD Guideline since a consortium led by the New Zealand Guidelines Group working in partnership with the Ministries of Health and Education began working on it earlier this year. An Implementation Advisory Group (IAG) was set up, has now met three times, and has started prioritising the [...]

When we were young my sisters and I spent many happy hours playing with a Hornby clockwork trainset which my father had collected in the 1920s. It had a gauge of about two inches, three shiny locomotives, and enough tracks and rolling stock to populate three bedrooms and a hallway. So I wasn’t surprised when my [...]

The NZ Autism Spectrum Disorder Guideline was launched at Parliament on World Autism Awareness Day, 2 April 2008. It is a world first in that it is a whole of life, whole of spectrum and whole of government approach to autism. It will be a living guideline so can be updated regularly and have gaps [...]

Last Friday was a great day. An hour before we set off for the Big Day Out, the mail arrived. It contained our older boy’s first set of NCEA results. He achieved every Level 1 standard he sat, and picked up a couple of merits along the way.
For an Asperger Syndrome child we once thought [...]