news, new scholarship & more from around the world
Researchers developed a new nano-micelle formulation, CBD-IN, that finally gets CBD into the brain effectively. In mice, it relieved neuropathic pain quickly and didn’t cause the usual movement or memory side effects. Surprisingly, the pain relief didn’t use typical cannabinoid receptors, instead calming abnormal nerve activity more directly. The findings hint at new avenues for treating chronic pain and neurological diseases.
When recent graduate Dr. Sandy Rao began her PhD in social work at the University of Calgary, she brought with her years of experience as both a clinician and a senior leader in Ontario’s health system. Yet, despite her deep understanding of mental health care, she found herself haunted by a question no program or policy seemed to answer: “We were doing all the right things: engaging the community, co-designing programs, listening to lived experience, so why wasn’t it working?”
[From early 2025, still relevant today]
Clintonism fundamentally changed the Democratic Party. With its determined rejection of old liberal commitments, it established a new paradigm for the party’s politics and, with it, a new way of doing business that has persisted even as Clinton himself has faded into the background… It saturated the Obama years, seeping into both policy and electoral strategy through the coterie of Clintonites who shaped so much of his administration’s ethos; it underpinned Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid; and it reasserted itself in 2020 through the party insiders who were so fixated on resisting challenges from within their ranks that they abruptly shut down the Democratic primary field in order to guarantee that Joe Biden would be the nominee—thereby quashing a class-based insurgency in the party—and then propped up a cognitively challenged Biden long past any conceivable electoral viability. Most recently, the dead hand of Clintonism forged the foundations of Kamala Harris’s difference-trimming campaign pitch, which targeted the same elusive moderate suburban voters in swing states.
Fuelled by artificial intelligence, anonymity, and weak accountability, online abuse is rapidly escalating. Yet, 1.8 billion women and girls still lack legal protection from online harassment and other forms of technology-facilitated abuse.
The Inquiry accepted evidence “that the mandatory lockdown should have been imposed one week earlier. Had a mandatory lockdown been imposed on or immediately after 16 March 2020, modelling has established that the number of deaths in England in the first wave up until 1 July 2020 would have been reduced by 48% – equating to approximately 23,000 fewer deaths.” Above: Bereaved families gather outside the UK COVID Inquiry on the day that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave evidence, December 6, 2023