News (1,641 posts)

If you’ve seen our work lately, you know we’ve been reporting on troubling conditions at an unregulated, for-profit boarding school for autistic students in New York — not exactly in our backyard. We’d been getting tips for a while from local sources who were worried about the effect of a 2022 Illinois law that made it easier for school districts to use public money to send students with disabilities to far-away schools. Above: Shrub Oak International School in New York

“President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is increasing tax fairness and ensuring that all wealthy taxpayers pay the taxes they owe, just like working families do,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.

The agency’s latest annual report shows it received almost 92,000 child protection and welfare referrals last year — up 11% on 2022, and twice the number seen when Tusla was established in 2014…. Tusla chief executive Kate Duggan said these pressures are being compounded by growing numbers of children and young people with “more complex needs”, along with ongoing difficulties in recruiting social workers and social care staff.

“The family safeguarding model has become more embedded, and adult services workers have been recruited and trained in the model. This enables a joint approach, working alongside children’s social workers and practitioners to address safeguarding risks in child-in-need and child protection planning. Some inconsistencies remain in the quality of social work practice, but increased management oversight is starting to have some impact on planning for children.”

The troubled department has had a large percentage of temp agency social workers in the past. It has also seen a change of leadership at the top in the last 18 months.

“I get hung up on the word scraping,” author R.O. Kwon says. “It sounds quite violent.” Last September, when Kwon learned that her first novel, The Incendiaries, was part of the Books3 dataset that some generative AI models were trained on at the time, she felt violated. She and other authors took to social media, lobbing anger, hurt, and frustration at the tech companies that had secretly “scraped” the Internet for data without consent from or compensation for creators.

Knowing what a nationally representative sample is — and isn’t — will help you avoid errors in covering clinical trials, opinion polls and other research.

By teasing apart the therapeutic benefits from the adverse effects of new generation obesity medications, researchers found a population of neurons in the brain that controls food intake without causing nausea in an animal model.

In all, about 24,000 cancer deaths and 95,000 cases in a single year were attributable to alcohol consumption, according to the researchers’ calculations.

Painted portraits commissioned by Zarinah Lomax. Each person “is not a number. This is somebody’s child. Somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter who was working toward something,” Lomax says. “The portraits are not just portraits. They are telling us what the consequences are for what’s happening in our cities.”

As their name would imply, we tend to think of mixed emotions as a blend of different, often contrasting, emotions — but new research suggests that may not be the case.

Veterans with opioid use disorder (OUD) who do not receive treatment with buprenorphine are more than four times as likely to die by suicide or overdose than those who do take the medication, a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has found.

The Guam chapter of the National Association of Social Workers is calling on Attorney General Douglas Moylan to remove the AG’s office-installed public billboards that it believes “dehumanize, stigmatize and perpetuate racism.” Moylan earlier said his latest billboard sends a message to non-U.S. citizens that if they commit crimes, they can be deported.

It all started in the fluorescent food court at Winrock Mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Whitney and I were hunched over paper plates, licking school bus-yellow cheese from the center of our Hot Dogs on a Stick.

Providence Park is inspired by the Community First Village of Austin, Texas, and when complete, will include 400 tiny homes with full support services to improve both resident health and quality of life.

Assemblymember Yvonne Lopez, a Democrat from Perth Amboy, said she is crafting legislation that would prohibit landlords from using RentPage and other similar rent-setting software. The services collect data on rents from participating landlords, then use their algorithms to suggest rates — a practice the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice argue amounts to price-fixing.

Building on the Stony Brook University School of Social Welfare’s (SSW) strong partnership with the Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS), the SSW has been awarded an additional, new contract that will provide support for master of social work (MSW) students interested in working in the field of addiction and substance use.

Labour’s return to power last week was greeted with a chorus of welcomes from adult social care organisations in England – along with a chorus of demands of the new government. Broadly, these were for significant investment in, and reform to, the sector to address issues including unmet need, workforce shortages and inadequate care. For many, these challenges are the legacy of the Conservatives’ 14-year period in office.

“The quick abandonment of the Rwanda scheme by the new government is welcome, and we hope indicates a more humane and ethical approach to tackling problems the country faces.”

While some inevitably blame President Biden, there is also a bipartisan belief among the electorate, including 45 percent of Republicans, that corporate greed is playing a large role in inflation. There are countless examples that bear out this assessment. RealPage’s algorithmic rent-setting, which is simply collusion by corporate landlords via a third party, has wreaked havoc in rental markets across the country. Oil and gas companies attempted to collude to artificially inflate prices.

No one believed in and embodied the labor movement’s transformative power more than organizer, strategist, and writer Jane McAlevey.

Nine-year-old Eunice Winstead Johns and her husband, Charlie Johns, 22, at their home in Sneedville, Tennessee, in 1937.

Two big items in Kinnock’s in-tray are planned reforms to the adult social care charging system and Labour’s own plans to improve the pay, terms and conditions of the sector’s workforce.

In May there were between 350 and 400 patients being cared for in the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire area who were well enough to leave. The figures showed patients staying longer than three weeks after a discharge decision was made stayed in hospital for about 3,500 extra days.

The researchers developed models to predict how quickly people’s scores would decline on a test of thinking and memory skills. Then they compared the models to actual results from people over time. They studied 961 people with an average age of 65 — 310 had mild cognitive impairment and 651 had mild dementia. All had the amyloid-beta plaques in their brains that are an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease and are targeted by the new drugs.

Researchers have developed an easy-to-use tool that enables someone to perform complicated statistical analyses on tabular data using just a few keystrokes. Their method combines probabilistic AI models with the programming language SQL to provide faster and more accurate results than other methods.

In 2019, a large affordable housing operator implemented a unique program meant to reduce evictions across its properties. Several years, one pandemic, and an economic downturn later, we check in to see how the landlord—and the tenants—are faring.

Life expectancy in the United States has decreased for the first time in decades. This troubling trend is a rarity in developed nations. One of the main factors driving this decline is the escalating drug overdose crisis. More than 110,000 Americans died by drug overdose in the 12-month period ending in March 2023. To put this in perspective, 58,000 US military personnel died throughout the entire 15-year course of the Vietnam War a half century ago…. More than 47 million people in the US are struggling with a substance use disorder.

The Malta Federation of Professional Associations said that, so far, it had not been invited to a meeting scheduled for Monday to discuss the bill – even though they were the ones to make a call for consultation. The federation includes the Maltese Association of Social Workers, Malta Chamber of Psychologists and Malta Association for the Counselling Profession.

Between 2005 and 2015 the Dutch prison population was indeed reduced by 44%. Much was to do with a drop in serious crime which led to fewer people going to court, and ending up in prison. But shorter sentences are also part of the picture, as are alternatives to prison, and more specifically tailored mental health support for those offenders who need it. Above: The Koepelgevangenis prison, which housed Nazi war criminals in Breda, Netherlands, is now used for events.

Part of the reason, says Jessy Levin, an attending psychologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, is because we’re much more open about talking about all our maladies, including cancer, these days. More openness means less stigma, which is good, but the frequent stories about prominent cases – among them King Charles, Princess Catherine and actress Olivia Munn – can up the fear factor.

CNA’s latest trilogy delves into the identities of elderly individuals in danger of suffering this fate, the factors contributing to their solitude and ongoing efforts to support them. *Note: What does this phrase mean in relation to this story – “This audio is generated by an AI tool.”

The Société de transport de Montréal (STM)’s special constables, safety ambassadors and special intervention social workers carry the drug naloxone, which helps reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. Above: Philippe Gagnon, right, is one the six safety ambassadors that started working for the STM earlier this year. ‘We’re more boots on the ground, basically, for all the help people might need,’ he said.

A company has installed computerized vending machines to sell ammunition in grocery stores in Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas, allowing patrons to pick up bullets along with a gallon of milk.

Robert Riley Saunders, 54, was granted a change in his parole this week. The Parole Board of Canada said in a decision published on Thursday that its members are satisfied that Saunders demonstrated the ability to manage his risk to re-offend appropriately during the period he had on day parole. The decision is raising the ire of Indigenous community leaders who wrote to the parole board opposing Saunders’ release. They told the parole board they believe the harm Saunders caused has been profound and long-lasting and he hasn’t changed.

America’s so-called “left behind” counties — the once-great manufacturing centers and other distressed places that struggled mightily at the start of this century — have staged a remarkable comeback. In the last three years, they added jobs and new businesses at their fastest pace since Bill Clinton was president. The turnaround has shocked experts…. Whatever the explanation, though, Biden probably should not expect voters in those areas to reward him electorally. Many left-behind counties are solidly Republican, or have moved to the right since Trump first ran.

I teach a law school clinic where my students and I represent tenants who face eviction and live in horrible housing conditions. Too often, we see tenants getting railroaded by the fast, cheap, and easy eviction process in US courts. In many states, they can be forced out of their homes for no reason and with just a few days’ notice. We see tenants plunged into homelessness after their price-gouging landlords hike rent by 30 percent and more. We see tenants complaining in vain when their heat and water are not working, when mold builds up, and when rodents scuttle through their bedrooms. Then they are evicted as retaliation for making those complaints.

Keir Starmer’s Labour party has won the UK general election in a landslide. Its huge majority should, in theory, give Starmer the clout to see through most of his political agenda. But in reality, the victory celebrations might prove short-lived, given the size of the challenges in front of him.

Nearly 150 social workers have signed on to a letter urging President Joe Biden to fully remove marijuana from the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA), arguing that despite the administration’s proposal to downgrade cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III, there’s nevertheless a “critical need for decriminalization.”

The method described here is called Mendelian randomisation. In a systematic review, my colleagues and I evaluated 63 Mendelian randomisation studies on the relationship between substance use and mental illness to determine what we have learned so far.

Dr. Nabila El-Bassel, Wilma and Albert Musher Professor of Social Work at Columbia School of Social Work (CSSW), served as Principal Investigator on the New York site with help from a multidisciplinary team of scientists at the Social Intervention Group (SIG). Dr. El-Bassel and her colleagues across the study relied heavily on community coalitions made up of policy makers, healthcare professionals, stakeholders, people with lived experience, and more to establish a unique, scientific approach that uplifts the voices of the communities.

It’s also a story about the progressive resistance to this onslaught of money poisoning American democracy, a pushback that may finally be weakening AIPAC’s influence. By training its sights on left-wing members of Congress, AIPAC is setting up a battle not just over U.S. policy surrounding Israel and Palestine, but for the soul of the Democratic Party — and a progressive future…. Turner recalls a conversation with a former ally who does business in Cleveland: ​“They told me they didn’t recognize me anymore, that Palestinians have no rights [and] that if I didn’t ​‘disavow’ the Squad, they were going to come at me with everything they had. And that is, in fact, what they did.”

The Budget is expected to take place in early October, but preparations will be made in the months leading up to it — with Social Justice Ireland saying that all social welfare payments should be increased to at least €25 per week to support households hit by the cost of living crisis.

After a motivational speech, they manage to tie the game. This experience highlights Jason’s talent for working with kids. Nikki and Jason’s social worker, Noah (Karl Collins), suggests Jason pursue a career in social work. Though it requires two years of training, Jason is interested and discusses it with Nikki, who is supportive.

Associate Professor Dr. Dai Haijing (above) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Social Work Department said women still face workplace discrimination…. “Hong Kong turns out to be very conservative in terms of gender ideology; there should be some advocacy for gender equality.”

This past week in Vilnius, at a conference on the European Social Charter, it felt like a paradigm shift was taking place.

All this should serve to remind us about a basic simple truth. We can’t change the generation we get born into. We can change how the world we enter distributes income and wealth.