News (1,506 posts)

In an open letter published amid the corporate-dominated virtual Davos summit, 102 rich individuals—including such prominent figures as Disney heiress Abigail Disney and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer—warned that “history paints a pretty bleak picture of what the endgame of extremely unequal societies looks like.”

The launch last week of a UK four-day week pilot program continues the momentum that has been growing globally in recent years for a shorter working week with no loss of pay for employees.

Eight companies, including Vietnamese labour recruitment agencies and Chinese construction firms registered in Serbia, have reportedly been implicated in serious human rights abuses.

From the lowest paid workers to those that once felt they could get by on their pay, we’ll all be made to bear the brunt of ­rocketing prices. With inflation hitting 7.5 percent last week, it’ll take a fight to stop people going under.

In recent years, Norway has been found guilty of violating the human rights of families in more than a dozen child welfare cases. Above: Bergen, Norway

Trusting science should not mean trusting in the benevolence of the ruling class.

Roughly 40% of positions are unfilled at the state-run psychiatric hospital.

Research suggests the optimal number of intervention sessions needed to prevent cognitive decline in people at risk.

“Kyrsten Sinema is unfit to be a United States senator,” the project asserts. “Just like the filibuster itself, we need to get rid of her if we want to save our democracy before it’s too late.”

At the City University of New York (CUNY) tens of thousands of students are petitioning for more online classes, and in-person sections are getting canceled left and right due to low enrollment, leading dozens of part-time faculty to lose their jobs. Dissatisfied with the union leadership’s response, rank-and-file union members are taking matters into their own hands.

Neoliberalism called for markets to structure society, and for society to be structured like a market. The result was an era of unbalanced trade protected from democratic accountability, increasingly unaffordable child and elder care, no effort to slow the heating of the planet, slow growth and weak macroeconomic performance, and massive corporate concentration.

Workers at Newham Sixth Form College (NewVic) in east London are upbeat as they continue strikes against academisation.

In democracies, universities remain vulnerable to Beijing’s global campaign to undermine human rights. The funding to the Free University supported its Cross Cultural Human Rights Centre, which has articulated views strikingly similar to those of the Chinese government. For instance, several center employees denied that the Chinese government was oppressing Uyghurs, despite overwhelming evidence that Uyghurs are being targeted for crimes against humanity. Above: Main building of the Vrije Universiteit (Free University)

Jim Green Residence at 415 Alexander Street in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

COVID-19 has shown us images of patients dying in isolation, apart from loved ones during their final moments. But even before the pandemic, harrowing deaths were all too common in most parts of the world, a new survey of end-of-life care shows. The study ranked 81 countries on how well their health systems provide for the physical and mental wellbeing of patients at the end of life. Only six countries earned an A grade.

A striking new study from Dr. Kevin Smith, Chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, suggests the universe of people who find our politics a torment might be much larger than I’d realized.

Much of the foundational data about Covid-19 came from people without housing and those who work with them.

The review will be led by social work academic, writer and former chair of the British Association of Social Workers Professor Ray Jones (above), a vocal critic of a similar review in England due to report its recommendations this spring.

The payments are not means tested and is paid to eligible groups on a monthly basis.

The essays in The Welsh Way forensically blow these myths apart. They make the case that the government in Wales – led by Labour for more than 20 years since the Senedd’s inception in 1999 – has pursued a neoliberal agenda designed to preserve the status quo. Its radical rhetoric, in the words of the late Ceri Evans, one of the socialists to whom this book is dedicated, has been ‘gutted of all content’.

On January 10, the New Jersey legislature passed two bills that will enable the expansion of syringe service programs (SSP), removing key barriers throughout the state.

Tariq MaQbool, who is incarcerated at New Jersey State Prison and is a contributing writer at the Prison Journalism Project, says a new wave of COVID-19 infections is surging in the prison because guards are not adhering to COVID protocols.

Others have noted how universities have come to see their students as consumers. In Columbia’s case, they are treated more as sources of profit to be squeezed for maximum return on investment. This is a game Columbia plays quite well, since the union negotiations took place against a backdrop in which Columbia’s endowment increased by a dazzling 32.3 percent in fiscal year 2021.

Anyhow, this boring prelude brings me to what I want to highlight for you today, which is the fact that billionaire hedge fund manager Daniel Ochs just made a cool $100 million in the following manner: In 2019, he bought a sprawling Central Park South penthouse apartment for $93 million, and then he let a couple of years go by (presumably enjoying his nice apartment from time to time), and now he has sold that same apartment for $190 million.

Clockwise from left, University of Maryland School of Social Work’s Wendy E. Shaia, EdD, MSW, ’01; Ericka M. Lewis, PhD; Becky Davis, MSW; and Christopher S. Beegle, MSW, LCSW-C.

The list of demands – co-authored by the unions and stakeholders such as Australian Council of Social Services, St Vincent de Paul Society and People with Disability Australia – include hiring more staff and social workers, and redesigning debt recovery processes.

There are 500,000 more children living in significant poverty in 2019/20 compared to 2011/12

“I’m more of a person alone,” I’d written to my high school ex soon after our relationship ended, and in the years following, I studied solitude like a discipline in order to make myself actually believe that.

A study conducted in two rural Massachusetts jails found that people with opioid use disorder who were incarcerated and received a medication approved to treat opioid use disorder, known as buprenorphine, were less likely to face rearrest and reconviction after release than those who did not receive the medication.

Dr. Tanya Lorraine Sharpe is the founder and director for the Centre for Research and Innovation for Black Survivors of Homicide Victims (The CRIB), which spearheaded the project.

The suffering and instability gripping at least half the country living in financial distress, alienated and disenfranchised, preyed upon by banks, credit card companies, student loan companies, privatized utilities, the gig economy, a for-profit health care system that has resulted in a quarter of all worldwide COVID-19 deaths—although we are less than 5% of the world’s population—and employers who pay slave wages and do not provide benefits is getting worse. . . . Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. It is not a new story.

Profit-driven hospitals’ continual failure to invest in safe staffing is what’s creating the kind of dangerous working conditions driving nurses away from the profession at a time when they are needed most, unionized RNs say. “Nurses will tell you we are failing because we have let the interests of corporations and our hospital employers dictate our country’s response to this virus. Their goal is profit, not saving lives,”

Are these increases in suicide risk and social media use related? Despite the prevailing negative public sentiment about social media, the truth is that we don’t know.

Imperialism, far from being the exclusive remit of US militarism, is manifest in the everyday organizing principles of the entire global economy, of which states in the Global North (including Canada) have inaugurated themselves as the rulers.

Indeed, the recruitment and training of right-wing candidates is being orchestrated by several large, well-funded national entities. The Leadership Institute, for example, has created a 20-hour online course to teach conservatives how to run for their local school board — even if they don’t have children enrolled in the public schools — in order “to stop the teaching of CRT before it destroys the fabric of our nation.”

As of December, Quinn O’Brian (above) said she had already helped about 80 library guests struggling with housing and food insecurity, finding employment, accessing unemployment and health insurance benefits, and needing mental health assistance, among other challenges.

Adoptions of Native children were proselytized in magazine articles and ads, and by social workers, churches and adoption agencies as a mission to rescue children from poverty and poor living conditions on the reservation.

The Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema – whose vocal opposition to any change in the filibuster is on the verge of dooming voting rights – received almost $2m in campaign donations in 2021 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. . . . Has the money influenced Sinema? You decide. Besides sandbagging voting rights, she voted down the $15 minimum wage increase, opposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and stalled on drug price reform – policies supported by a majority of Democratic senators as well as a majority of Arizonans.

“We have doubled our personal space in the last 50 years,” Anna Braune, director of research and development at the German Sustainable Building Council remarked. “We still have the idea of having big spaces, building for the family, the nest that is only usually used for 20 years if you have kids … and then everybody moves out and does something else. I don’t think it’s very attractive for the future.”

Dr. Poppy Masinga, SACAP’s Head of Social Work and Community Development Faculty
says, “As an applied science, Social Work education is a particularly rewarding study path. Social workers are trained to become agile, critical thinkers who can design and implement diverse, context relevant and transformative interventions.”

Dr. Roger Ball, the Education Department’s supervisor of school social workers for the Bronx, has been leading the effort to mobilize social workers, crisis intervention staff and other clinical support to schools that served children killed or displaced by the fire.

Angela Rafuse, 27, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, founded My Grandfather’s Cat on May 18, her grandfather’s birthday. He died in 2019 and left behind his grumpy 14-year-old cat, Mackenzie.

Licensed social worker Allison Carpenter talks with a woman visiting the Rochester Public Library

A memorial to people who have died of overdoses in Vancouver.

A former Ivy League student who earned one of the world’s most prized scholarships is accused of stretching the truth on her application.

Sven Lehmann, 42, Germany’s first ever LGBTQ+ commissioner, a role created under the new coalition government’s plans for cultural modernisation

The world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day— during the first two years of a pandemic that has seen the incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall and over 160 million more people forced into poverty.

I’m on the second level of the bus, putting on headphones, wiggling into a position of apathy against the window when I hear shouting downstairs. The sound doesn’t quite peak or harden into language, but it has a rhythm, and the rhythm is urgent, and then it’s afraid, and then it’s angry. What animal instinct awakens that knows something is wrong?