Archive for November 2025

Staff at Coventry City Council have been violently attacked, sexually assaulted and verbally abused, a new study has revealed. Assaults have risen by 30 per cent in the past year, showing the serious risks faced by employees on the job.

National safe working limits for children’s social workers are needed to stop workloads driving practitioners out of the profession, the Department for Education (DfE) has been told…. Following a two-year DfE-commissioned project, the national workload action group (NWAG) called on the department to urgently commission work to determine safe workload limits, which it said should be followed by a review of the sufficiency of the children’s social work workforce.

Allegations of sexual abuse by early childhood educators have rocked Australia in recent months. Now, the ABC’s investigation into the childcare sector has revealed hundreds more cases – this time committed by children against other children. But some distressed parents have told the ABC their concerns were not taken seriously by the centre or police because it happened between children.

The US military is a behemoth that covers nearly the entirety of the planet, and the extent of the damage it is doing to the environment is difficult to comprehend. The military emits more carbon pollution than any other single institution and, depending on which estimates you trust, more than a vast number of countries in their entirety. As the world continues to hurtle toward climate disaster, the military is disproportionately responsible.

Uneducated fear motivates citizens to choose security and material or social advantages at the expense of justice. Hence why tyrants, in Aristotle’s time as much as ours, use fear and threats to wellbeing to maintain power. If we are going to have a political community that can make the sacrifices required to resist injustice, then some members of that community need to know how to feel fear well.

Cocaine, amphetamines and MDMA now have to compete with a group of imitators: synthetic cathinones, more commonly called “bath salts”. These are the most popular new stimulants in Europe today, and they are here to stay. Within this family of chemicals, the most popular is mephedrone, which was first sold online in 2007 as a legal alternative to MDMA. Its effects – euphoria, heightened appreciation of music, empathy and light sexual arousal – made it a popular party drug. However, its effects don’t last as long as MDMA, which leads people to take it various times during the same session, increasing the associated risks.