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Charities have warned that deep cuts to the UK aid budget will cost lives and damage support for some of the world’s poorest communities. It comes after ministers confirmed international development spending will be squeezed to fund a major increase in defence spending.

Today, I am proud to inform the House that this Government are setting out the details of the adult social care fair pay agreement, a landmark reform that will turn the page on decades of low pay, insecurity, and the exploitation of adult social care workers. In doing so, we are one step closer to delivering on our manifesto commitment.

Specialist region-wide teams will oversee the care and support of children at risk of, or experiencing, a deprivation of liberty, under Department for Education (DfE) plans. The teams, which will include children’s and adult social workers, mental health practitioners and youth justice staff, will co-ordinate assessments, planning and support for this cohort of children under the Home Again approach.

Care minister Stephen Kinnock said care workers ‘deserve much better than they’ve had’.

By formally recognizing social work as a profession, the Bill marks important progress toward the recommendation of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) to strengthen social workers and provides a foundation for stronger professional standards, accountability and quality of support for children and families at risk. Above: A social worker speaks to a policewoman regarding a case in Malaysia.

In the early 1900s, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung began noticing patterns in the dreams and life stories of those who visited him for treatment at his clinic near Lake Zurich. But these patterns, he found, weren’t limited to Europeans seeking psychoanalysis in Switzerland. Looking closely, Jung found them spread throughout humanity’s oldest myths. At first, he referred to his discovery as ‘primordial images’. But he soon began to use a different term, one that we are more familiar with today: ‘archetypes’.

The so-called Big Beautiful Bill cut SNAP funding by nearly $200 billion. According to No Kid Hungry, enrollment across the Commonwealth has dropped by nearly 15%. That’s almost 117,000 people.

As working Americans struggle, the money for ICE’s cruelty comes right out of SNAP and Medicaid. Above: Department of Homeland Security agents with their weapons drawn in a neighborhood outside of Boston, Massachusetts, June 2026

In March, Baroness Casey called for a ‘moment of reckoning’ for social care, noting it has lacked the design moment that the NHS had in 1948. Instead, it has evolved in a piecemeal way, layered with assumption, opacity and inconsistency. The boundary between the role of the state and the responsibility of individuals and families in supporting people has remained blurry. As Andy Burnham takes office and the Casey Commission kicks off a ‘national conversation’ with the public about the future of social care and its role in our lives, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to renegotiate the social contract for social care.

By strengthening the skills of frontline social workers, the United Nations Mission in South Sudan is helping improve early warning, accountability and support for vulnerable communities across Jonglei.

Professor Paul Yip Siu-fai (above), of the Jockey Club Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong, said that although an overall decline in cases was a positive sign, the rising trend of juvenile suicides was worrying. He said the previous spike in suicides was driven by the pandemic’s lingering impact and a migration wave, both of which disrupted support systems and fostered prolonged alienation.

Reporting Highlights
Private School Abuse: At an Arkansas school, a boy was hit by the school’s founder and attacked by classmates in a group session the founder led, prompting a complaint and her arrest.
State Money Still Flows: Despite a jail term for the school’s founder, The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain continues to operate and Arkansas still sends it public funds.
Unregulated and Growing: By design, private schools get little oversight in Arkansas even as new opportunities to receive state money have spurred a boom in openings since 2023.

Consider the American evangelist James Dobson… His book Dare to Discipline (1970) put forth a divine vision of the iron bed, framing parental authority as a God-given rod to civilise the sinful child. For anxious parents terrified of moral failure – of raising a child who would stray from the faith or descend into waywardness – Dobson offered a seductive simplicity: disobedience met with physical consequence, the parent’s role reduced to righteous enforcement. No need to sit with uncertainty, to wonder if a child’s rebellion might signal an unmet need or a developmental phase. The rod resolved the anxiety.

An immersive installation developed by playwright and director Nicola McCartney, One Hundred Voices aims to put the spotlight on the care system in Scotland

Complaints about a council’s children’s services department rose 37% over a 12-month period, with the authority partly attributing the increase to the ease of people using AI to draft their criticisms.

It is the first time that the number of referrals to the Child and Family Agency has surpassed 100,000, according to its 2025 annual report, reaching 106,444…. Demand remained high across Tusla services throughout the year, including child safety and welfare, educational support, family support, residential care and Special Care and supports for Separated Children Seeking International Protection (SCSIP).

Minister of Women, Family and Community Development Datuk Seri Nancy Shukri said the legislation reflects the Madani Government’s commitment to enhancing professionalism, ethics, and accountability in the delivery of social services.

India’s Minister of External Affairs, S. Jaishankar, has received a plea from a group of social workers in the United Arab Emirates asking the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to examine the recent increase in passport prices. They claimed that the rising expense of obtaining travel documents has been a source of anxiety for many Indian expatriates.

“Governments and health workers have helped global vaccination rates bounce back after dropping significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “But millions of vulnerable children are still being left unprotected due to conflict, displacement and poverty. We must reach every child, and we must rebuild trust where it is fraying.” Above: A child receives a vaccine during a nationwide immunisation drive in Yemen.

Eighteen associate editors of the journal Statistics and Computing have announced they will resign after Springer Nature announced the journal would require a fee to publish.

Operation Metro Surge was the culmination of a decades-long campaign in which conspiratorial crusaders have painted Somalis as a drain on social programs, criminals, and extremists.

Medicaid covers 46% of people in the United States living with HIV, making it the largest source of insurance for Americans with this diagnosis. Eligibility is primarily determined by annual income—in most states the cutoff is $22,025 for a single adult. (Other factors include age and disability status.) But starting January 1, 2027, Medicaid is changing in a big way, and the implications for people with HIV are severe.

The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) welcomes the Independent Review of Social Work Professional Regulation in England. The report rightly highlights and clarifies the role and function of a regulator whilst acknowledging the fundamental role a professional association plays in providing practice leadership, professional advocacy for and with the profession and of course advice and representation. The report highlights the need for social work to have a strong identifiable architecture to support our profession which includes a professional association and BASW warmly acknowledges this conclusion.

Addressing the Legislative Council’s Panel on Welfare Services on Monday, Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun (file photo above) said that the old poverty benchmark failed to objectively reflect the situation in Hong Kong and could not accurately address the difficulties faced by vulnerable groups.

Indigenous people across the country face a range of social policy challenges, many of which are often politicised. In this three-part series, experts examine issues with child protection, violence and reconciliation and look at evidence-based policy approaches that would help improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

This past year, ZL has signed his name to at least 35 letters to the editor of medical journals, weighing in on topics from ICU care to breast cancer. In eight of them, he identified himself as a Ph.D. at Cornell University, although he held only a bachelor’s degree at the time.

Bernie Sanders wants to nationalize half the stock of major AI companies and create a sovereign wealth fund for the American people. The case for going even further is stronger than most people realize. If tech executives are right about the devastating effects their products will have on the livelihoods of massive swaths of the US population, they can hardly turn around and complain that it’s unfair for their companies to be partially nationalized.

Alcohol kills more than 178,000 Americans each year. It doesn’t have to. Drinking’s deadly toll in the U.S. is the result of decades of policy decisions, industry influence, and cultural inertia, as STAT shows in its investigative series, The Deadliest Drug. The U.S. has not made a concerted effort to reduce heavy drinking since Prohibition ended nearly a century ago.

The annual report, written by City of Wolverhampton Council’s Principal Social Worker Hannah Bates, drew attention to the roll out of services designed to “understand and respond to the impact that trauma can have on children, families and adults”. It also said in the past year the council had supported 11 social work apprentices and 12 newly qualified social workers who were involved in a supported year in employment.

During the three decades following the second world war, historians estimate that between 300,000 and 500,000 children in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland were removed from their mothers. Most of these women were single, and their children were put up for adoption without their free and informed consent.

KUALA LUMPUR: The government will make registration compulsory for private social workers but civil servants doing social work as part of their official duties will be exempt for now.

Medicare is taxpayer-funded, and every dollar lost to fraud is a dollar not spent on patient care. But the cure One Nation proposes runs into a problem from the start. The party’s own examples of fraud describe quite different things. A patient using someone else’s card is an identity problem. A doctor billing for an appointment that never happened is a provider-compliance problem. While a photo on your card may catch the first, it does nothing about the second.

Big Tech has looted humanity’s creative output to create artificial intelligence. We don’t just deserve a share of AI’s profits — we deserve control over it.

During his campaign, Mamdani vowed that as mayor he would put a stop to the city’s practice of busting up encampments without making sure the occupants have someplace appropriate to go. This week, he defended his administration’s approach, which has been to put social workers from the city’s Department of Homeless Services in charge of outreach — rather than police. Those social workers would engage with occupants for seven days in a row before sweeping away their stuff.

The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: Every component is now built, tested, and humming.

The Living Wage Foundation said 12.5% of roles at UK not-for-profit organisations are now paid below the voluntary benchmark, based on its analysis of the latest Office for National Statistics annual survey of hours and earnings.

The culture and structure of churches can create “fertile ground for sexual violence,” the report said. Power dynamics, as well as the culture of harmony and unity, can make it difficult for victims to come forward and for church members to raise concerns for fear of damaging relationships or provoking conflict, the report stated.

Nancy Kurshan, cofounder of the theatrical antiwar group the Yippies, discusses her new memoir.

The Bipartisan Policy Center found that nearly 90% percent of voters wanted Congress to make housing more affordable. But sadly, this law won’t do that — because new homes aren’t necessarily affordable homes. Congress overlooked that fact because they were relying on two faulty economic assumptions: they took a narrow view of supply and demand, and they recycled a piece of Reagan-era propaganda.

In Washington, some progressive Democrats have made it a cause: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act to freeze construction until federal safeguards are in place. Sanders went further, proposing a Sovereign Wealth Fund Act that would require 50 percent of the stock of the largest AI companies to be moved into a public fund paying every American a dividend, similar to Norway’s oil fund model. This proposal is an important corrective to a debate that has largely treated AI as an energy and environmental challenge. But the remedy must reach further than a dividend check. What needs protection isn’t just the workers but their identity—and if that can no longer be provided by labor, it must come from becoming owners of the machines that replaced them. Right now, the people being displaced remain scattered and unorganized, but this is the demand they’ll make when they find their voice.

Researchers found that every pregnancy rewires the brain in its own way, with a second pregnancy bringing a different pattern of changes than the first. The discoveries could lead to better ways to recognize and treat maternal mental health challenges, including peripartum depression.

Many men who have sex with men remain unaware of the growing risk posed by sexually transmitted Shigella, say researchers, as a new study shows variants are spreading quickly in the UK and evolving resistance to key antibiotics.

A simple, non-invasive ultrasound treatment could one day help injured joints heal instead of remaining trapped in a cycle of damaging inflammation. Researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville found that continuous low-intensity ultrasound encouraged key immune cells called macrophages to shift from an inflammatory state toward one that supports tissue repair.

Under the new mandatory child abuse reporting law, 25 categories of specified professionals in the social welfare, education, and healthcare sectors are required to file a child abuse report if there are “reasonable grounds” to do so. The professions include those who work with children such as teachers, occupational therapists and social workers. Doctors, optometrists, physiotherapists and dentists are also subject to the new law.

Congress will soon vote on the Pentagon budget. This year’s proposed budget is an obscene $1.5 trillion…. According to the National Priorities Project, the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget could fund a year’s solar electricity for 1.92 billion homes, for instance. And according to the Climate and Community Institute (CCI), the proposed $500 billion increase alone could cover 60% of U.S. homes. $500 billion could also end the wildfire crisis in California and restore 100 million acres of forest…. The CCI report estimates that as of early April 2026, the $37 billion that the U.S. had spent on the assault on Iran could have paid for pre-k for every four-year-old in the country, green retrofits for 2,000 public schools, and over double the cost of restoring Republican cuts to SNAP benefits.

Last year the CDC recorded 2,289 infections for the entire year, so the nation is just 58 cases short of that as we pass the midpoint of the year. The 2025 total was the most since 1991, and the United States is now on track to lose its measles elimination status that it gained in 2000.

Student backpacks seen on the first day of school last year at Harborview Elementary School in Juneau, Alaska. Fifteen Democratic-led states are suing the administration over cuts to a $1 billion school mental health grant program.

She often introduces herself as a social worker, a mom, and a state legislator for the past eight years. She has two teenagers, aged 14 and 17. During her career, Gilchrest has served as director of health professional outreach for the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Connecticut, and policy director for the Connecticut Alliance to End Sexual Violence.