News (1,684 posts)

Over the past few months, RFK Jr. has brought the internationally renowned agency to its knees. He has proposed cutting the agency’s budget by close to 50 percent, destroyed programs responsible for monitoring maternal health and lead poisoning of children in the US at CDC, disbanded the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics and the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice within the National Center for Environmental Health, which is meant to keep our water safe to drink and address environmental causes of childhood asthma. In an article in April, reporters at Wired documented the thousands of CDC employees who had been laid off, endangering these programs and others serving millions of Americans. But all of this was a mere prologue to the Wednesday Night Massacre at CDC last week, in which RFK Jr. tried to fire the new CDC director, Dr. Susan Monarez, whom he had selected to run the agency and had just been confirmed by the Senate earlier this summer.

Cygnet Social Care’s Got Talent competition took place on September 3rd, at Wythenshawe Forum Hall in Manchester. It celebrated the diverse abilities and talents of the people supported by Cygnet’s wide range of social care services.

Cognitive skills aren’t the only thing at stake when we rely too heavily on AI to do our reading work for us. We also miss out on so much of what makes reading enjoyable – encountering a moving piece of dialogue, relishing a turn of phrase, connecting with a character. AI’s lure of efficiency is tantalizing. But it risks undermining the benefits of literacy.

After years in social work, Powell DiGangi started Beam, which partners with building and construction companies to offer support and resources through trained social work professionals. DiGangi saw the strain that life’s common obstacles put on people’s ability to show up and function well at work, and the impact this has on employers.

Europe’s twin transformation needs social conditionalities to prevent corporate capture and build democratic legitimacy.

A hospital needs help identifying a patient who was found injured at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. He stands 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 143 pounds with an average build. He has brown eyes and black hair. Anyone who recognizes the man is asked to call clinical social workers Cristol Perez at 323-409-4317 or Brian Dillon at 323-409-3134. The public can also call the L.A. General Medical Center’s Department of Social Work at 323-409-5253 or, after hours from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m., call 323-409-6883. On weekends, the public can call 323-409-5254.

President Barack Obama speaks with last year’s cohort of Obama Foundation Scholars.

A consultation on a review that could impact on the “health, safety and well-being of some of the most vulnerable children in Edinburgh” is to be extended after Unison claimed it had been “rushed and poorly communicated”.

Government must commission independent review of regulator to examine effectiveness, value for money and performance, following ‘dubious’ decision making’ over fee rise, say BASW, SWU and UNISON

In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, there are statutory codes of practice or standards governing social care employers, produced by the relevant professional regulators and taken into account by inspectorates in their judgments of organisations. However, there is no equivalent in England. Though the 2009 Social Work Task Force called for the introduction of binding standards for employers, this did not happen, with voluntary standards being launched instead, in 2011.

North Lanarkshire Council charges for accommodation in nursing and residential homes and community alarms

I’ve always read my way through depressions. When my world sucks, I shut the drapes, hide under the cover, and read. And I will read everything: novels, classics, epic fantasy, romance, spy novels, you name it.

There is no grocery store in this area, which sits between a wealthier part of town and low-income neighborhoods, so the small market in a parking lot is an oasis every weekend until November. One of its main highlights is a produce-packed stall run by Lorenzo Varisano of Foot of the Mountain Farm…. A social worker by training, he is more focused on the needs of his customers — and how federal decisions could push them further from a healthy lifestyle. “The farm is just the front. It’s about community,” he said.

As a sociologist studying extremism and white supremacy since 1993, I have watched the movement shift from formal organizations to small, decentralized cells – a change embodied most clearly by Active Clubs…. Since 2020, Active Clubs have expanded rapidly across the United States, Canada and Europe, including the U.K., France, Sweden and Finland. Precise numbers are hard to verify, but the clubs appear to be spreading

It has been more than 14 months since a national housing emergency was declared by the Scottish Government. And while pinpointing an exact reason for the emergency can be difficult, systemic failures are the driving force behind people throughout the country not having a place to call home.

At a time when far-right movements across Europe exploit economic anxiety and social division, abandoning the principle of public provision is both economically shortsighted and politically dangerous. The cost of public infrastructure pales in comparison to the social fractures that result from treating basic human needs as cost-centers. The solution to Europe’s welfare crisis isn’t more creative financing, but regulations and removing essential services away from markets.

When it is not framed around cost savings, discussion of public service reform these days mostly focuses on technology. This is most obvious in healthcare, where medical science drives change all the time: weight loss drugs, genetic cancer tests, and so on. The benefits and risks of AI are another theme, from education to criminal justice. But some of those involved in trying to improve public services are taking a strikingly different tack. Their work centres not on machines but on relationships.

Japan’s government spending requests for next fiscal year will likely set a record for the third consecutive year, a draft of the requests obtained by Reuters showed on Monday, highlighting the challenge the country faces in fixing its dire finances…. The biggest outlay would come from the health ministry, which requested 34.8 trillion yen in spending mostly to pay for rising social welfare costs for an ageing population.

Our work with 81 unhoused and street-involved community members reveals how big-city drug traffickers moving into smaller Canadian communities can wreak havoc. These out-of-town dealers often forcefully take over people’s homes so they can use them as a base to sell and produce drugs. These groups and their home takeovers are a significant contributor to homelessness. Home takeovers force people out of housing and into homelessness, deepening cycles of poverty, housing instability and trauma. Above: A homeless man stays in a warm area after having dinner at a shelter

Recent research from Fordham Graduate School of Social Service Professor Lauri Goldkind, Ph.D., explored how clinical social workers are using—or avoiding—the technology, and their mindsets behind these decisions. In an article titled Clinical Social Workers’ Perceptions of Large Language Models in Practice: Resistance to Automation and Prospects for Integration, Goldkind and her co-authors interviewed 21 clinical social workers and explored how they experience their work in the context of growing LLM use.

Vienna has long been among the many international examples that provide valuable lessons for systematic social betterment — particularly for the housing crisis, which has become catastrophic in the U.S. Conversely, in the Austrian capital, a thriving, popular state-led social housing model leads the globe in providing high-quality affordable developments (known locally as the Gemeindebau) to a large segment of the population. With a pragmatic yet forward-thinking design, particularly in green energy future-proofing, the Vienna model offers a knowledge base, born of decades of experience, that in a just world would be tapped to help enact comparable proposals in the United States — like the currently stagnant hopes of a Green New Deal for Housing.

America has never been richer. But the gains are so lopsided that the top 10% controls 69% of all wealth in the country, while the bottom half controls just 3%. Meanwhile, surging corporate profits have mostly benefited investors, not the broader public. This divide is expected to widen after the sweeping new spending bill drastically cuts Medicaid and food aid, programs that stabilize the economy and subsidize low-wage employers. Moreover, the tax cuts at the heart of the bill will deliver tens of billions of dollars in benefits to the wealthiest households while disproportionately burdening low-income households, according to analyses by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation.

For decades, Roxane Cohen Silver has examined the consequences of consuming media about crises, from 9/11 and the Covid-19 pandemic to climate-related disasters and mass shootings. “With greater exposure, we see greater distress in people’s reports of their mental health. Greater anxiety, greater depression, greater post traumatic stress symptoms, acute stress symptoms,” said Silver, professor of psychology, medicine and public health at the University of California, Irvine.

The finding from the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) came as it sounded the alarm over longstanding delays to the implementation of reforms to the Mental Capacity Act 2005 and the implications of this for the human rights and the care of disabled and older people. SCIE referenced successive governments’ failure to implement the planned replacement for DoLS – the Liberty Protections Safeguards (LPS) – and update the MCA code of practice, which is now almost 20 years old. It also warned that the impending overhaul of the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA) and likely legalisation of assisted dying risked foundering because they were built on the “crumbling” foundation of the MCA.

Speaking at a social welfare services conference, the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Dr John Jingu, emphasized that these services are provided in accordance with government policies, laws, regulations, and guidelines, including the 2008 Child Development Policy, the Children’s Act Cap 13, the 2012 Regulations for Day Care Centres, and the 2024 Children’s Homes Regulations.

Two problems explain the repeated failure. First, the targets were set unscientifically. Authorities set numerical goals without careful analysis of causes, realities and shifting contexts, reducing strategy to wishful thinking. Second, implementation was weak. Budgets, personnel, infrastructure and data sharing were insufficient. Governments limited themselves to campaigns and counseling programs while neglecting structural risk factors that drive suicide. Unrealistic goals and feeble execution became the pattern. Above: An SOS Life Line phone box is seen at Mapo Bridge in Seoul

These are examples of AI slop, low- to mid-quality content – video, images, audio, text or a mix – created with AI tools, often with little regard for accuracy. It’s fast, easy and inexpensive to make this content. AI slop producers typically place it on social media to exploit the economics of attention on the internet, displacing higher-quality material that could be more helpful. AI slop has been increasing over the past few years. As the term “slop” indicates, that’s generally not good for people using the internet.

A newly refined method for measuring the Pace of Aging in population-based studies provides a powerful tool for predicting risks associated with aging, including chronic illness, cognitive impairment, disability, and mortality. The method offers researchers and policy makers a novel approach to quantify how quickly individuals and populations experience age-related health decline.

Poverty hits people as they move in and out of different life stages and events: job loss, disability, divorce, having children, family deaths. When they do, they will often dip into poverty — if the welfare state is not there for them.

On August 25, Yanni Gentsch personally handed over her petition, which is addressed to the Federal Minister of Justice, and the Minister of Justice in her state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Benjamin Limbach (left). Gentsch made it clear: “Sexual harassment is never harmless, but rather the first step in a spiral of violence.”

The Youth Justice Department has agreed to review contract clauses which community leaders feared would gag frontline organisations from speaking to media under risk of funding loss, Queensland’s social services sector has revealed. Above: Queensland Council of Social Service chief executive Aimee McVeigh and Youth Advocacy Centre chief executive Katherine Hayes speak to journalists outside Parliament House in 2024.

he sovereign citizen movement is growing, as demonstrated by an increase in the presence of “sovereign citizens” before the courts. Australia is likely to see more violence fuelled by this ideology unless some of the underlying drivers are addressed. The sovereign citizen movement has been in Australia for decades. It can be traced back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the movement was emerging in the United States.

We deserve more vacation, for sure. But we also deserve more free time all year round. Americans work hundreds of hours a year more than Europeans. Imagine if we had more time for our families, friends, the natural world, and our own minds every week. One appealing and highly practical approach is the four-day work week, whose implementation Boston College scholar Juliet Schor has been studying in over thirty companies. She’s finding widespread satisfaction among both employees and employers.

Greater maternal warmth, defined as more praise, positive tone of voice and acts of affection, has previously been shown to predict better health across the lifespan. However, the mechanisms underlying these associations have been unclear, said Dr. Jenna Alley, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research at UCLA.

Coventry council’s decision to use US spy-tech firm Palantir’s AI in social work, Send and children’s services, including to aid in case-note transcription and other time-intensive administrative tasks, is extremely alarming and provides yet more reasons why we need to slow down and think VERY CAREFULLY about what we are ushering into the social work profession, and the lives of people who have involvement with social services.

Public sector workers have voiced “deep concern” after Coventry city council signed a £500,000-a-year artificial intelligence contract with the US data technology company Palantir…. The council’s chief executive, Julie Nugent, said it aimed to “improve internal data integration and service delivery” and “explore the transformative opportunities of artificial intelligence”.

The race toward fascism is unfolding at breakneck speed and on multiple fronts. At the heart of this transformation lies the emergence of the United States as a warfare state, a captive state that merges the interests of the military-industrial-academic complex with the toxic ideologies of white nationalism and white supremacy. What makes this moment especially dangerous is that warfare no longer refers solely to foreign conquest; it has become a central organizing principle of governance at home. The state itself has been weaponized, turning inward against its own population, normalizing domestic terrorism as a tool of rule.

Nothing could undermine trust in politicians more than voting for someone to improve where you live and your opportunities there, only for it get worse. That is exactly what happened when the levelling-up agenda died, and Labour is suffering from the hangover – an utter lack of faith in mainstream politicians to change anything.

The county Department of Children and Family Services, which employed the social workers who allowed Noah to stay in his home, said in a 2021 statement in response to media reports that Noah’s murder remains a source of “deep pain and mourning” for Los Angeles County residents and its child welfare community.

According to UCLA’s Sustainability Committee, the average fast-fashion purchase lasts fewer than ten wears before it falls apart or is thrown out. That’s if it doesn’t fall out of style first. Still, the appeal is undeniable. Fast-fashion platforms bombard shoppers with daily flash sales, push notifications, and endless pages of inventory.

At the helm of the Democratic coalition, professional-class liberals can be counted on to design programs that bury popular benefits in a web of complex tax credits and public-private partnerships, awash in abstruse policy concepts that few voters — even reliable party supporters — can recognize. But these critiques of technocratic thinking could just as easily be applied to the consultant class of the Clinton and Obama administrations as they could to the more patrician architects of the New Deal. The difference of course is that professional-class liberals have — whether knowingly or not — shed even the pretense of reforming capitalism that their ancestors maintained.

Armstrong said she and her colleagues have been talking about the CDC’s value in the past tense. “The CDC was a gem to the world,” she said. “That standing is gone. So much expertise is gone. People who wanted to go into public health don’t see a future. The debate that we’re all having is, will the CDC ever recover, not how long it will take. I don’t know that it can ever recover to what it was.”

Many households in the US need to juggle when to turn on AC, if they have it, due to concerns over energy bills

Can Canada expect voter turnout to increase further in the future? Probably not, given that both support for democracy and satisfaction with democracy have been on the decline, with roughly half of Canadians not feeling represented by their government. These indicators are particularly acute among Canadians of lower class, income and education levels. To better understand these trends, I investigated turnout by social status since the 1960s in new research published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science.

Our study, which took daily surveys from over 600 employees, suggests burnout may quietly fuel worrying attitudes – specifically, the potential justification of violent extremism – towards the perceived source of their distress. Above: Supporters of Luigi Mangione protest outside of his arraignment in Federal Court for murder charges against a healthcare CEO in New York City

“I’m excited that we’re able to bring this credential pathway to fruition and directly impact schools in our local communities,” said Dr. Gordon Capp, Associate Professor of Social Work and credential program coordinator.

The extra water consumption by data centres is a big problem for some in Querétaro which last year endured the worst drought of a century, impacting crops and water supplies to some communities. At her home in Querétaro, activist Teresa Roldán tells me residents have asked the authorities for more information and transparency about the data centres and the water they use but says this has not been forthcoming.

It’s that time of year when the days get shorter. The air turns crisp. The shadows stretch longer. And school starts. It’s also that time when yet another pompous business CEO or ed-tech executive with zero classroom experience trots out a puerile essay declaring what’s wrong with education and how to fix it. Their miracle cure? Some shiny, overpriced gadget or a market-driven ideology dressed up as innovation. School boards and college administrators eat it up—not because it actually improves learning—but because it promises to cut costs by swapping out teachers for tech.

Ted began his social work career at the Logansport State Hospital as a community based social worker, stationed in Lafayette, where he also worked as a part-time practitioner in a private psychiatric office.

As a Black, Christian former Democrat with little previous engagement with Jewish causes, Terrell, now 70, seemed an improbable pick to lead the effort to “root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” as the task force announcement put it. But his zealous conversion and penchant for media bombast made him a perfect bullhorn for the task force’s actual mission: to strong-arm colleges into stripping away any vestige of “wokeness” in their hiring, admissions, classes and research. Above: Terrell speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2021 in Orlando, Florida.