News (1,650 posts)

Unconditional, direct cash payments each month can provide a lifeline to young people transitioning out of foster care in New York City, new youth-led research suggests.

The UK Government’s controversial plans to reform the welfare system has overcome its first hurdle in parliament, staving off a rebellion from backbench Labour MPs but only thanks to a plethora of last-minute concessions. The final result was 335-260 in favour of progressing the Bill.

The 43-year-old, who took his PSLE, O levels and A levels behind bars, completed his social work degree at the Singapore University of Social Sciences in April. In May, he started his “dream job” as a social worker with the Industrial and Services Co-operative Society (Iscos), helping ex-offenders to turn their lives around.

Last week, the Australian Human Rights Commission launched a new report on sexual harassment, called Speaking From Experience. It includes the voices of more than 300 victim-survivors of workplace sexual harassment from vulnerable communities. In it, the commission calls for a new wave of robust law reform measures to protect and support victim-survivors and hold employers accountable.

Social worker Justyna Rzewinski saw people with mental illness “deadlocked” in their cells for months without sunlight, human contact — or medication.

Mamdani’s win is clearly a rebuke of the more corporate wing of the Democratic Party. I know there are people who say that New York is different from the rest of the country. But from a political perspective, Democrats in New York are less different from Democrats in the rest of country than they used to be. That’s because the rest of America is so much more diverse than it used to be. But if you look at progressive politicians now in the House of Representatives and state legislatures, they are being elected from all over – not just in big cities like New York anymore.

A refreshed, modern Mental Health Act for England and Wales was a priority ask in BASW’s manifesto for social work ahead of last year’s General Election. The fact that the incoming government not only agreed to our request but took it upon themselves to get the legislation moving as quickly as possible, was very welcome.

On behalf of NIPSA and our wider membership, I would like to offer my sincere thanks to each and every member who participated in the recent three-day industrial action across the Southern Health and Social Care Trust. Your dedication, unity and strength in standing up for Children’s Social Work have sent a powerful and unambiguous message to both the Trust and the Department of Health.

Controversy surrounds Gopchang House in Seoul after asking its women employees to perform a suggestive “dance service” in front of customers by mimicking the viral, so-called Terminal Dance.

A decade after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, we asked people from across the country to share stories of what the ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges has meant to them.

Lindsey, who joined UCLA’s Social Welfare faculty in 1994, was the founding editor of “Children & Youth Services Review” (CYSR), one of the field’s most influential journals. Under his leadership — and working with his wife Deborah — the publication became the premier platform for research on child welfare practices and policies…. Dr. Darcey Merritt, current editor of CYSR, was a former doctoral student of Lindsey. Merritt recalled Lindsey, who was also on her doctoral dissertation committee, as a true mentor throughout her studies and career. Merritt now serves as chief editor of the publication Lindsey founded and is a professor at the University of Chicago, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice.

NIH employees, who had been instructed to screen thousands of grants on a rolling weekly basis to assess their compliance with “agency priorities”, have continued to do so after the court ruling on 16 June. This has left many confused and worried about the legality of their actions, according to eight NIH employees who spoke to Nature and were granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak with the press.

Across the globe, we are living in a moment of profound crisis where the very essence of education as a democratic institution is under attack. In the United States, the assault on higher education is part of a broader war waged by authoritarian forces aiming to dismantle the pillars of not only academic freedom, dissent, and human rights, but also the essential foundations of democracy itself. Universities are no longer seen as spaces of intellectual freedom and critical inquiry but as battlegrounds for ideological control. Campus protests are met with police brutality; students are abducted for their political views, and those who dare to speak out against the prevailing orthodoxy face expulsion, censorship, and criminalization.

After 26 years of teaching, research and leadership at the University of Toronto, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work (FIFSW) professor and former dean Faye Mishna is retiring from her academic role…. Under her leadership, the faculty strengthened its approach to research-informed practice, developed new community partnerships and launched a range of hands-on, community-based teaching, programming and practicum opportunities.

Disabled people’s organisations, such as Inclusion London, WinVisible and Long Covid Advocacy, have told the Guardian that plans to exempt only existing claimants from the cuts will create a “two-tier” benefit system that “condemns” future disabled people to poverty.

In 2024, some 826,000 working people were dependent on benefits, or Bürgergeld (“citizen’s income”) as it is called in Germany. That represents an increase of around 30,000 since 2023 — the first time that the number of employed people receiving a top-up had increased since 2015.

My task force approved the inclusion of the new diagnosis, Asperger’s syndrome, which is much milder in severity than classic autism and much more common. In doing so, we were responding to child psychiatrists’ and pediatricians’ concerns for children who did not meet the extremely stringent criteria for classic autism, but had similar symptoms in milder form and might benefit from services.

The wealth divide in this country has reached obscene, and plainly anti-democratic, proportions. It was not always this way. In fact, it’s never been this way.

The artificial intelligence boom runs on more than just code and compute power — it depends on a hidden, silenced workforce. Behind every AI model promising efficiency, safety, or innovation are thousands of data labelers and content moderators who train these systems by performing repetitive, often psychologically damaging tasks. Many of these workers are based in the Global South, working eight to twelve hours a day reviewing hundreds — sometimes thousands — of images, videos, or data points, including graphic material involving rape, murder, child abuse, and suicide. They do this without adequate breaks, paid leave, or mental health support — and in some cases, for as little as $2 an hour. Bound by sweeping nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), they are prohibited from sharing their experiences.

Mr Sheridan served as an MSP for Glasgow between 1999 and 2007 before later retraining as a social worker. He had applied to become a criminal justice social worker in Glasgow last year, but was rejected and told future applications would not be progressed.

BASW Chair, Julia Ross, urges Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to not overlook the vital role social workers play in working with families

Senator Loren Legarda honors the extraordinary men and women who serve as the very lifeline of the nation’s humanitarian and welfare response, calling for stronger institutional support, including regularization, for the country’s thousands of social workers.

Doctors, academics and social workers who work with people on the street often say arrests make it harder for unhoused people to get back on their feet. When someone living outside gets a citation, they often miss their court date — they might lose the ticket or simply forget the date amidst the chaos of life on the street — which leads the court to issue a warrant for their arrest. People with active warrants can’t qualify for many housing and treatment programs.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain in London in May. Several recent policy reversals have led some to question his political judgment.

It is the first time since 2016 that data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, which is carried out by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen), the University of Leicester, and City St George’s, University of London, on behalf of NHS England, has been released. It found that more than one in five people aged 16 to 74 had reported so-called “common mental health conditions”, which include generalised anxiety disorder, depressive episodes, phobias, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and panic disorder.

Operation Spinney has been investigating reports made by men and women of sexual and physical abuse committed against them as children predominantly at the former Coed Glas Assessment Centre, Abergavenny, between the 1970s and 1990s. The charges relate to 16 victims. The centre at the time was the responsibility of the former Gwent County Council and has been closed since 1995.

I can’t imagine such blasé faith in public safety back when I last lived in China in 2013, but on this visit it was true: Cameras gawked from poles, flashed as we drove through intersections, lingered on faces as we passed through stations or shops. And that was just the most obvious edge of the ubiquitous, multilayered tracking that has come to define life in China. I came away troubled by my time in some of the world’s most-surveilled places — not on China’s account, but because I felt that I’d gotten a taste of our own American future. Wasn’t this, after all, the logical endpoint of an evolution already underway in America?

The idea is to decarbonise social housing – reducing Wales’ greenhouse gas emissions – by further upgrading insulation, adding solar panels and replacing gas boilers with heat pumps, for example. Above: Energy efficient council bungalows in West Cross

The Australian federal government wants 80% of workers to have a TAFE or university qualification by by 2050, up from the current 60%. A key part of this will be supporting more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to go on to further study.

All my fleeting memories of my father from the acreage are of his anger, or of me in his shadow. In one strong memory, my sisters and I were in the back seat of the car, my mom was in the front, and my dad was in the driver’s seat. We were in some kind of work yard. This was years before my dad started selling drugs, or rather, this was one of the stints when he had a trades job. Our dog, Buddy, had just died after getting hit by a car in front of our property. My mother broke the news to my father, and I watched a flood of sadness wash over his eyes, but only for a second, until he covered it with anger.

Using AI to review coverage saves insurers time and resources, especially because it means fewer medical professionals are needed to review each case. But the financial benefit to insurers doesn’t stop there. If an AI system quickly denies a valid claim, and the patient appeals, that appeal process can take years. If the patient is seriously ill and expected to die soon, the insurance company might save money simply by dragging out the process in the hope that the patient dies before the case is resolved.

As soon as she found out that she was pregnant, Freeman, a social worker, placed her daughter on a handful of waiting lists through a government website. Now she can drop her daughter off for up to 10 hours a day, between 6am and 6pm, five days a week, all year round. In addition to childcare, Grace sees a speech therapist at the CPE. A daily menu of the home-cooked meals and snacks is posted at the building’s entrance every morning; meals are on a monthly rotation with seasonal changes and locally sourced produce when available. All this is possible because in 1997, Quebec lawmakers enacted a universal childcare program as part of an effort to give equal opportunities to all children – especially kids from low-income families – to get young mothers back to work and to increase the government’s tax revenue and eliminate the province’s budget deficit.

The Irish government set up the Mother and Baby Institutions Payment Scheme with the expectation of issuing payments to around 34,000 people and health supports to 19,000 people who were in mother and baby homes, at a cost of 800 million euro

The new policy means that community flags, such as the Pride flag and the disabled people’s flag, will not automatically be raised in the inner quadrangle at County Hall to celebrate events and celebration days. Instead, a decision will be taken by the chief executive ‘following consultation with the leader of the council’, the party’s Dan Harrison, over whether they can fly or not, leading some to fear they will not be flown going forward.

Whilst he was living in South Africa, Desmond Breen (58), of Forest Lodge, Lemybrien, was receiving disability allowance payments from the Department of Social Protection, which came to a total value of €54,308.50.

As Te Mana Raraunga (the Māori Data Sovereignty Network) advocates, data is a living taonga (treasure), is of strategic value to Māori, and should be subject to Māori governance. Changes to census methods risk compromising these values – and undermining public trust in the official statistics system in general. Because the new system takes census data gathering out of the hands of individual citizens and households, it also raises questions about state surveillance and social licence.

The Social Security Administration regularly publishes anonymized benefit data to foster transparency and promote public understanding. For instance, the average Social Security benefit paid to retired workers was $1,975 in December 2024.

Today is National HIV Testing Day, which recognizes the importance of getting tested for HIV and getting linked to the HIV prevention or treatment that is right for you. Some answers to possible questions.

In the nearly two decades Sara Smith spent working at Missouri’s Department of Social Services, she remembers nine different people running the agency in charge of investigating child abuse and neglect. In March, Smith took the helm herself.

Sexual crimes increased by 3%, from 14,484 to 14,892. These crimes are now at their second-highest level since 1971.

Sri Lankan society has ‘come a long way’ in the last 20 years, with far more public support for LGBTQ+ people. Sri Lanka’s colonial-era laws echo those once seen across Asia. Many countries have repealed these laws — notably India in 2018 and Singapore in 2022 — but Sri Lanka still lags behind.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant says the government’s laws to keep under-16s off social media are a “delay” rather than a ban.

Dr. Allen Frances, a top psychiatrist, led an update to the guidelines for diagnosing autism in 1994 that loosened the definition to include people with milder symptoms. In the 1980s, around one in 2,000 children had autism in the US…. Today, around one in 31 children have autism spectrum disorder.

Allan Barsky, Ph.D., a Florida Atlantic University professor of social work, has received the Significant Lifetime Achievement in Social Work Education Award from the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE).

Let’s return to your recent stream of consciousness: were you purely absorbed in abstract thoughts or were you also aware of your body? Could you feel your heart beating? The rhythm of your breath against your chest, mouth or nose? Maybe a flutter in your stomach? If so, what thoughts or feelings, if any, occurred at the same time as, or just before or after, the bodily sensations? My colleagues and I refer to these body-related thoughts in the stream of consciousness as ‘body-wandering’, a mental process that we think could play an important – yet overlooked – role in many people’s emotional wellbeing.

From Amazon: Francesca Gino is an award-winning researcher and teacher, and a tenured professor at Harvard Business School. Her consulting and speaking clients include Bacardi, Akamai, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Honeywell, Novartis, P&G, and the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy. She has been honored as one of the world’s Top 40 Business Professors under 40 and one of the world’s 50 most influential management thinkers. Her work has been featured on CNN and NPR, as well as in the Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, Newsweek, Scientific American, and Psychology Today.
Reality: This month Francesca Gino, the star Harvard researcher whose research he was relying on, became the first academic in 80 years to lose tenure from the university amid accusations held to be well-founded that her results were manipulated.

More than 5,000 people have signed a petition calling for stronger measures to stop a “growing tide” of anti-social behaviour including drink and drug use, looting and fighting. The petition says incidents are “eroding [Broadstairs beach above] charm, safety and economic health” and is calling for increased police patrols, permanent dispersal orders and stronger sanctions on young people involved in anti-social behaviour.

On Friday, submissions close for the federal government’s rapid review into school bullying. Here, we suggest six key areas on which governments, schools and education authorities need to focus to re-imagine Australia’s approach to tackling bullying.

Frailty increases the risk of falls, hospital stays, slower recovery from illness, and early death. It’s more than just about being thin or weak – it’s about reduced muscle mass, strength and energy – and it’s one of the main reasons older adults lose the ability to live on their own.

This was a straightforward triumph of people over money, the kind that capitalist elites try so hard to convince is impossible. Cuomo’s campaign was bankrolled by $25 million from some of the worst actors in American life — more than $8 million from billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg; $2.5 million from a landlord group; $1 million from DoorDash, a food delivery app deeply dependent on the exploitation of low-wage workers; and half a million from Bill Ackman, a… hedge funder who has been attempting to destroy the campus Palestinian solidarity movement (and with it, all of American higher education) — in total comprising the largest super PAC in the history of New York City mayoral campaigns. Mamdani didn’t just beat money as usual, he beat an extraordinary mobilization of money.