Archive for December 2024

When sex workers are able to form relationships with co-workers, they can boost their odds of accessing support services and decrease their odds of facing workplace sexual or physical violence, according to a new study. The Lower Mainland study, peer-reviewed and published in PLOS One, looked at social cohesion and the ways sex workers support one another despite laws that work to isolate and criminalize them. Above: The Red Umbrella March for sex work solidarity has been taking place each June in Vancouver since 2012.

In a statement shared on Dec. 24, the Minister of Health and Social Services, Tracy-Anne McPhee (above), and Chief Coroner Heather Jones, said the work to develop regulations for social workers is continuing. According to the statement, the Yukon government recently met with the Association of Social Workers in Northern Canada to “initiate discussions about regulating social workers.”

The final bill did not extend protections for victims of SNAP benefit theft after it was axed from an original spending deal—a move that Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, called “true Ebenezer Scrooge stuff.” Kogan laid blame at the feet of billionaire Elon Musk, who whipped up opposition to the earlier, bipartisan version of the spending deal. Under the original deal, the SNAP benefit theft protections would have been continued for another four years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Hospitals that have adopted the Center for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) “hospital-at-home” program, which serves as an alternative to admission to brick-and-mortar facilities, are concentrated in large, urban, not-for-profit, and academic hospitals, new research suggests. The findings are among the first to portray the landscape of hospitals participating in this rapidly growing care model, said Dr. Hashem Zikry, a participant in the National Clinician Scholars Program at UCLA and lead author on the paper.

After being taught that education and work was the path to ‘getting on’, millennials have learnt the hard way that the vast wealth being inherited by the children of property-owning parents is far more important than any idea of social mobility.

In the Great Lakes region of Africa, which is ground zero in the global supply chain for Big Tech, Apple appears to have betrayed its vision. The company stands accused of deceiving consumers, laundering Congolese minerals and profiting from war crimes, according to criminal complaints filed against Apple subsidiaries in France and Belgium. A team of international lawyers representing the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) claims Apple’s computers and phones are tainted by the blood of Congolese people.

Why is it that there is so much desperation here on the outskirts of Europe that many women see no alternative to killing their partners? Why does everyone look away until it is too late? What could be done to help? Above: The entrance to the only women’s prison in Moldova