Adrian Sobaru falls into the Romania parliament to protest spending cuts.

Adrian Sobaru, a public employee who has a son with autism, plunged from a balcony in the Romanian parliament to protest cuts to his salary and benefits for his son:

Austerity measures recently passed by the Romanian government have also resulted in cuts of up to 25 percent in civil servant pay and cuts in welfare allowances.

As emergency medical workers hoisted him out on a stretcher, Mr Sobaru was heard shouting "freedom" and "liberty and justice".

The aggrieved father wore a white t-shirt with a slogan written in Romanian: "You've pierced us. You've killed our children's future. Freedom."

Although injured, Sobarua has survived the fall.

Click here to watch it on video-- warning: may be disturbing.

Looking for some good autistic holiday fun?

Click here to enter Autistmas Wonderland!

If you haven't watched the stop motion episode of Community that first ran a couple of weeks ago, Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas, you might want to take half an hour sometime over the next couple of days to watch the first Aspie holiday special. 

Danny Pudi's Abed is even more Aspergian than usual.  He views the world differently than others (he's the only one who sees the characters as animated).  He even takes them on a visit to Planet Abed (wrong planet syndrome), where they are punished for things that typically bother people on the spectrum (sarcasm, for example). The writers have wisely chosen not to make Abed's AS official, but the show offers more frequent and accurate inisights into what it's like to be on the autism spectrum as it goes.

My favorite line?  After Abed tells tells his friends they are going to take a journey through his mind he says, "It's not going to be safe, fun, or pretty."

True.

Even a superhero can be disappointed.

Tim Sharp, the Australian creator of Laser Beak Man, offers the above holiday image.  If you aren't familiar with Tim, who has autism and whose work was adapted into an animated series, please click here to watch a video about him.

Some of the Squirrel Man's friends.

Click here to listen to an interview with Andrew Watts, who runs the website Squirrel Awareness.  Watts says his Aspergers is one of the reasons he cares so much about the animals:

It's a different kind of brain wiring, really. There's impairments in communication, but there's also a lot of benefits, like we might notice things that other people don't notice. And that's where that deep connection comes from.