News (1,607 posts)

Inverclyde Council’s social work and social care scrutiny panel were given an update on the three local schemes: the ‘Grow our Own’ initiative, support for Newly Qualified Social Workers (NQSWs), and financial rewards for masters (MSc) students who commit to Inverclyde.

Portlethen Men’s Shed will soon call the town’s former social work offices home after taking it off Aberdeenshire Council’s hands for just £100.

Social care workers have been warned they may face employment disruption and not be able to do essential work in areas such as disability, if they fail to register with their regulatory body CORU before the November 30 deadline.

According to the post, although Aquabeat, which operates the promenade event space, said the venue was unavailable due to government construction work, the Buildings Department later clarified that no such work was scheduled for that day. Aquabeat then told the committee there had been a “communication misunderstanding.”

Despite Meta’s own work documenting a causal link between its products and negative mental health effects, the filing alleges, Meta told Congress that it had no ability to quantify whether its products were harmful to teenage girls…. Allegations against Meta and its rivals include tacitly encouraging children below the age of 13 to use their platforms, failing to address child sexual abuse content and seeking to expand the use of social media products by teenagers while they were at school. The plaintiffs also allege that the platforms attempted to pay child-focused organizations to defend the safety of their products in public.

A social worker with experience leading educational and care programs geared toward older adults will take the helm of a new Washtenaw County department. Shannon Effler has been selected from more than 70 job applicants to serve as the county’s first Director of Aging Services.

The reclassification… narrows the definition of “professional degree” programs to just eleven fields: medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, optometry, law, veterinary medicine, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology, and clinical psychology…. Theology is included, whereas nursing at all advanced levels (Master of Science in Nursing, Doctor of Nursing Practice), teaching and education degrees, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, audiology, social work, public health, architecture, and counseling are excluded — professions that educate children, care for the sick and elderly, and provide essential social services.

During a visit in October, watchdogs from Ofsted and found Dudley’s social workers know their clients well and carry out sensitive work with children and families, especially when young people are at risk of harm. The inspection also found, while most children receive timely help and support, the quality of assessments by staff can vary.

The Commission will take evidence from around the UK on the scale and scope of food poverty and hunger, with the ultimate aim of setting out a roadmap for delivery of the UK Right to Food Campaign.

A project of First Amendment Watch within the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. We are building the first national database of alleged SLAPPs — strategic lawsuits against public participation — potentially meritless or malicious legal actions that can financially cripple and ultimately silence critical voices. Targets are frequently journalists, activists, and whistleblowers, but can be anyone exercising their First Amendment rights.

Housing advocacy groups have expressed varying degrees of optimism about the $13 billion the federal government allocated to Build Canada Homes (BCH) in its first budget since taking office. This is news many in the housing policy world have been waiting for. After campaigning heavily on the then-ill-defined BCH back in the spring, Mark Carney has now given some scale to the project and allowed the new home building initiative to take shape. Above: Construction site in Vancouver

> Protecting an Abuser: Leaders of a Minnesota church didn’t report a parishioner to police though they knew he’d sexually abused girls for years and had been told reporting it was their duty.
> Forgive and Forget: Church leaders held meetings where children were told to forgive the man who sexually abused them and forget the abuse. If they spoke of it, the sin would be theirs.
> Missed Opportunities: Prosecutors had at least one opportunity to intervene but hoped educating church leaders about their duties would encourage them to cooperate with authorities.
Above: An internal church document outlining guidelines for handling abuse includes bringing both parties together for a discussion.

Fossil fuels pollute the air when they are extracted and when they are burned, but the steps between those two points involve far more than familiar scenes of drilling equipment and smoke-filled power plants. These visible operations represent only the beginning and end of a five-stage process that brings fossil fuels from the ground to their final use.

For more than 20 years, hormone therapy for menopause has carried a warning label from the Food and Drug Administration describing the medication’s risk of serious harms – namely, cancer, cardiovascular disease and possibly dementia. On Nov. 10, 2025, the FDA announced that drugmakers should remove these “black box” safety warnings.

APA warns that generative AI chatbots and wellness apps lack sufficient evidence and regulation to ensure user safety, urging systemic mental health reforms, stronger safeguards, and evidence-based standards before these technologies are relied on for emotional support or treatment.

Boris Johnson and his top adviser presided over a “toxic and chaotic culture” in Downing Street that undermined efforts to deal with the pandemic, the Covid Inquiry has found.

The disciplinary action against a licensed clinical social worker, follows allegations that he harassed two female employees he supervised at a rehabilitation facility and entered into a personal and sexual relationship with one of them.

LLMs are also using material from retracted scientific papers to answer questions on their chatbot interfaces, according to a study in the Journal of Advanced Research in May 2025. “People are increasingly using ChatGPT or similar to summarize topics, and this shows that they risk being misled by the inclusion of retracted information,” Thelwall added.

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

Puberty blockers have been used in gender-affirming healthcare for decades.
They temporarily suppress the hormones that cause pubertal development, giving young people and their families time to make informed decisions without the pressure of irreversible bodily changes proceeding in a direction that may not fit who they are. They can also reduce the need for later interventions such as hair removal, voice therapy or chest surgery. If treatment stops, puberty resumes – a key reason they are considered an appropriate early intervention in international clinical guidelines.

Most of us take for granted that, when we get sick, we can visit a doctor, receive treatment and start to feel better. For many people, however, this journey back to wellness is much shakier. Their experience is confusing, frustrating and painful. It leaves them doubting their sanity. After a few trips to doctors and specialists, these folks might be told that there is nothing ‘physically’ wrong with them. Despite their very real suffering, they might even be dismissed as malingerers or hypochondriacs. These folks have what’s called an ‘invisible disease’.

Research shows nearly 26% of U.S. service members and veterans drop out of PTSD therapy, with trauma-focused treatments seeing the highest rates—highlighting the need for tailored, sustainable care.

In their week on Marco Island, the family played card games and lounged by the water. “He slept a lot. He was very, very tired,” Eric’s daughter, Amiya, recalls.

We already live in a world where at least one in three women experience physical or sexual violence. Enter a host of extremely powerful AI tools, trained on existing gender biases, now enabling that violence to spread further, faster, and in more complex ways. It’s a perfect storm.

While the British left is buried in factional debate, Reform is rapidly securing a foothold in former socialist heartlands across the country — paving the way for a nightmarish far-right takeover of the British state. Above: The high street in Biddulph — a small, former mining town in the Staffordshire Moorlands.

Wales’ older people’s commissioner wants to hear people’s experiences of social care services as part of a report being published next year. Rhian Bowen-Davies is working on a report outlining what’s working well for older people in social care and what improvements are needed.

Of course, some might ask why we should tax AI at all. The answer reflects two fundamentals about tax systems and how AI is changing the economy. First, many countries now tax human workers more heavily than their potential AI competitors in the labour market. In the case of the US, roughly 85 per cent of federal revenue comes from taxing people and their work (through income and payroll taxes), while capital and corporate profits are taxed far less. Technologies like AI benefit from favourable treatment in the form of generous write-offs, low corporate rates, and carve-outs.

Professor Andrew Irvine believes that provocative ideas—like the notion that Canada is an illegitimate, genocidal state—should be permitted on campus almost unconditionally when expressed by students or professors. But when the administration itself states an opinion, it signals which ideas will and will not be treated approvingly. He thinks that this kind of institutional favouritism should be anathema at a liberal university, where free debate is supposed to flourish.

CSWE calls upon social work educators, students, community partners, and allies to protect academic freedom and preserve the capacity of education as a tenet of democracy. If IU’s investigation finds that the complaint lodged against Adams is ideological in nature and nothing more, then we urge the University to quickly reinstate her to her former role.

The full list of 383 shelved clinical trials cited in the JAMA paper, obtained by Scientific American, reveals a wide range. The cuts follow a Trump administration drive to slash costs and cull funding for studies “misaligned” with its priorities; some 74,000 study participants have been affected by the trial cuts, according to the study.

Evelyn Tomaszewski… Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work, has been appointed to a four-year term as a regional representative to the United Nations Commission for the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW)…. In this role, Tomaszewski oversees the IFSW team’s engagement with the United Nations in New York.

Regulator has received 29% more concerns about social workers this year than last, undermining drive to tackle longstanding fitness to practise delays

Teen suicide rates in Penang are rising to worrying levels, Air Itam assemblyman Joseph Ng Soon Siang said in the state legislative assembly today. Data from the Penang Health Department found that 12 per cent of teenagers here have suicidal thoughts, 9.5 per cent have made plans and 9.3 per cent have attempted suicide, he said.

The University Centre Grimsby has received official confirmation that they are now an accredited social work education institute, paving the way for a new degree course in the subject which will in turn open the door to more people in the area looking to take it up as a career.

Samara and Neal with a portrait of Anthony at their home.

Even as the Beltway and media elites have made themselves sick with anxiety over the so-called epidemic of political violence, the humdrum, everyday, acceptable violence of American life—the violence of transphobes, racists, and war criminals in power, of overincarceration, mass deportation, and victimization of the poor—has serenely powered on, untouched by stigma and untroubled by the law. This is because that violence is the law, the brutality on which government rests; it’s violence made legitimate, deemed appropriate and necessary for the administration of the nation.

A Youngstown State University (YSU) social work student and two alumni were honored by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Ohio Chapter on Monday

Ms P had been running away from home and hanging out with friends her parents disapproved of after a difficult move with her family from Ottawa to Montreal. “I was an ordinary teenager,” she recalled. But the judge sent her to the Allan. Once there, she became an unwitting participant in covert CIA experiments known as MK-Ultra. The Cold War project tested the effects of psychedelic drugs like LSD, electroshock treatments and brainwashing techniques on human beings without their consent. Over 100 institutions – hospitals, prisons and schools – in the US and Canada were involved. Above: The Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal is where the CIA-backed experiments were conducted in Canada

Rositano received his bachelor’s degree in broadcast and cinematic arts from Central Michigan University and a Master of Social Work from UM…. He was also a member of former UM President Santa Ono’s search advisory group for a new vice president of communications and served as a housing policy advisor for the UM Central Student Government.

There is an epidemic of violence against women and girls. Some 3,000 offences are recorded every day. One in 12 women experience violence every year. Over one million violence against women related crimes were recorded between 2022-23. They accounted for 20 percent of all police recorded crime in England and Wales.

The Prime Minister stated: “Sri Lanka faces coastal erosion, unpredictable monsoons, urban flooding, droughts, and other climate-related challenges that directly affect agriculture, fisheries, and rural communities. These environmental changes also worsen existing social inequalities, disproportionately impacting rural farmers, fisherfolk, plantation communities and other marginalised groups”

The Victorian government has announced it will send social workers to 20 of the state’s schools to try to reduce violent youth crime. It will spend A$5.6 million on “targeted” schools next year. The aim is to “intervene early in the lives of children who are heading down the wrong path […] drifting towards violence, crime and anti-social behavior.”

As a geriatric physician and medical educator, I care for older adults in both inpatient and outpatient settings. My research and clinical work focus on dementia and surrogate decision-making. In my experience, regardless of race, education or socioeconomic status, there are some universal challenges that all people face with aging and there are steps everyone can take to prepare.

Postpartum depression descended on her like a heavy fog that separated her from everyone she loved. She could see her newborn baby girl, her two older kids and her husband, but she felt like a ghost passing through their world. “I was going through the motions, but it was like I was looking down on my family,” she recalls.

On Monday, the West Virginia Department of Human Services shared its response to the report with 13 News. “The recent OIG audit identifies deficiencies that occurred during the review period October 2023- September 2024, but it does not reflect the significant reforms and modernization efforts already underway within the West Virginia Department of Human Services (DoHS) since the Morrisey Administration took over in 2025. Since assuming office, Governor Patrick Morrisey and DoHS leadership have launched an aggressive transformation of the child welfare system, one that addresses the very issues highlighted in the report and, in many cases, goes well beyond federal expectations,” the DoHS release said.