Archive for May 2025

The new awards are part of a wider campaign by BASW and the Social Workers Union (SWU) to improve the public’s perception of social work. Entries and nominations were sought across eight categories covering mainstream print, broadcast and trade journalism, as well as podcasts and television programmes.

Using data from Zillow, the Rent Brigade estimates that there were more than 5,000 likely cases of rent gouging between Jan. 7 and March 16. While calculating the exact number of landlords involved in those cases is difficult because of LLCs and ownership structure, they found 3,553 unique addresses associated with the rent-gouged listings. Volunteers cross-referenced existing registries and ownership data to track down the owners of these listings, which are often nested in LLCs with nondescript titles. What the group found was a combination of corporate mega-landlords and real estate tycoons who had in many cases lobbied against tenant protections in Los Angeles and California. Some had also paid thousands to help elect the very officials tasked with enforcing anti-price-gouging laws.

The riveting new Criterion Channel film series “Noir and the Blacklist” is distressingly timely. It’s a sampling of film noir made by Hollywood directors, writers, and actors who were targeted as communists or broadly left-wing “subversives” by their own government in the post–World War II era by a punitive right-wing body called the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

It’s hard to keep up with Canada’s measles outbreak. Last month, the federal health database reported more than 1,500 cases across the country. More recent stats from Public Health Ontario counted more than 1,400 cases and 100 hospitalizations in Ontario alone. Of these, some 70 per cent are in Southwestern Ontario, 95 per cent of patients are unvaccinated and most all can be traced back to last fall, where a large Mennonite gathering in New Brunswick unknowingly became a superspreader event that’s still unfolding today.