Archive for December 2024

Social workers on the front lines of homelessness in Montreal say they feel increasingly powerless as more people find themselves forced to live in tents during the winter. Above: A homeless encampment of tents are seen near the highway in the west end of Montreal on Tuesday, Dec.10

Minister of Social Development Cindy Miles is responsible for the province’s child protection system.

The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) England acknowledges the Government’s recognition of the urgent need for investment in local authority services through the Local Government Finance Settlement. However, we remain deeply concerned about whether the measures outlined will adequately address the entrenched challenges facing adult and children’s social care.

The self-serving myths of a new wave of defense tech

An international conference dedicated to “The next steps of professional social work in achieving sustainable Development Goals in the context of Kazakhstan: the implementation of the SOLID project” took place at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan hosted together with the National Alliance of Professional Social Workers.

After the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, President Joe Biden issued an executive order tasking the federal government with assessing the “devastating implications for women’s health“ of new state abortion bans…. Biden directed the secretary of Health and Human Services to make sure federal agencies were “​​accurately measuring the effect of access to reproductive healthcare on maternal health outcomes.” He called on the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to drive targeted research and data-collection efforts.

Could complex beliefs like paranoia have roots in something as basic as vision? A new study finds evidence that they might. When completing a visual perception task, in which participants had to identify whether one moving dot was chasing another moving dot, those with greater tendencies toward paranoid thinking (believing others intend them harm) and teleological thinking (ascribing excessive meaning and purpose to events) performed worse than their counterparts, the study found. Those individuals more often — and confidently — claimed one dot was chasing the other when it wasn’t. The findings suggest that, in the future, testing for illnesses like schizophrenia could be done with a simple eye test.

Earlier this month, to coincide with World AIDS Day, the Library of Congress (LOC) released a new digitized collection of records related to the National AIDS Memorial Quilt. The collection contains more than 125,000 letters, diaries, photographs, and other materials documenting the lives of those represented in the Quilt.