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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.

Thornbury, 31, filed a candidate affidavit with the city clerk’s office on June 5. She is a licensed clinical social worker. Inspired to run for local office in part by her opposition to many of the policies being enacted at the federal level by the Trump Administration, Thornbury said she wants to “build community” and promote “local resistance.”

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.

Profit motive can sometimes trump quality control even at the world’s largest publishers, which earn billions annually. It also fuels a ravenous pack of “paper mills” that publish scientific work with barely any standards whatsoever, including those that might be used to screen out AI-generated scientific slop.

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.

State-owned cannabis stores
The biggest challenge for legalization in Pennsylvania will be navigating those internal political dynamics – especially finding a compromise that can be supported by both Democrats and Republicans. Public safety is often raised as a concern during legalization debates. To counter this point, Democrats in the state House have proposed selling legal cannabis in state-owned stores, just like how liquor and some wine is sold in Pennsylvania now.

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.

This dramatic change in the law comes a year and a half after a ProPublica investigation showed how the hotline had been weaponized by jealous exes, spiteful landlords and others who endlessly called in baseless allegations. Even if a caller didn’t leave their name or any details, and even if the same allegation had repeatedly been investigated and found to be unsubstantiated, it automatically triggered an invasive search of the accused’s home and often a strip search of the children.

“Venice (like everywhere) needs public services and housing, not VIPs and over-tourism,” Greenpeace UK said on Bluesky. ” It’s time to #TaxTheSuperRich and make them pay for the destruction they cause – the world is not their playground.”

Recent polling from Gallup shows that Americans’ support for same-sex marriage is higher than it was in 2015. Gallup’s latest data, however, finds a 47-percentage-point gap on the issue between Republicans and Democrats, the largest since it first began tracking this measure 29 years ago. The size of that chasm is partially due to a substantial dip in support among Republicans since 2023.

Amid predictions of a big parliamentary revolt and wild speculation that the vote could even be pulled, it is worth thinking about how Labour’s collective belief in the dignity of labour regularly curdles into two toxic ways of thinking. One is a belief that paid employment is the only reliable gauge of people’s esteem; the other is a queasiness about disability that sometimes lurks just below the surface. There is also an apparently desperate need to counter any suggestion that Labour ministers are liberal fainthearts. In March, the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, offered a curt explanation of why the government was set on its plan: “This is the Labour party. The clue is in the name. We believe in work.”

Historic abuse victims facing delays in obtaining social work reports has led to Glasgow City Council being slapped with a formal reprimand by a national watchdog.

Victoria’s landmark anti-vilification laws are a significant step forward for LGBTQIA+ people, people with disabilities and anyone discriminated against because of their sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. They put Victoria ahead of other states and territories by offering a stronger shield from hate speech under both criminal and civil law. The reform extends existing protections for race and religion to now include gender, sex, sexual orientation and disability.

When Kelly Lennox, 63, is grocery shopping, she focuses on buying nutritious food to aid her recovery from a litany of surgeries after a car accident last summer left her injured and unable to work. Without the nearly $100 a month she gets from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Lennox says, those items would be hard to afford.

As AI comes to play a bigger role in industry, the left cannot surrender in advance. While we shouldn’t imagine AI technologies as a cure-all — but nor should we dismiss them or the productivity gains some of them might offer. This moment in our industrial history is a critical juncture, one which presents us with an opportunity to democratize the control and use of AI, and to remake the welfare state in a way commensurate to the change and consistent with the social, political, and cultural goals we collectively choose. We should seize it and make AI work for us, at our command.

The Sangre de Cristo mountains loom over Colorado’s San Luis Valley. Many in this agricultural region voted for President Trump and are deeply concerned about cuts to Medicaid…. The region is one of the state’s poorest. Two in five of Alamosa County’s residents are enrolled in Health First Colorado, the state’s Medicaid program.

In addition to attending the conference, the team had the valuable opportunity to gain work exposure at the Safeguarding and Family Resilience Unit within Surrey County Council. This hands-on experience enabled DFCS social workers to observe and learn from Surrey’s best practices in safeguarding children and supporting families in crisis.

Proponents of these assessment systems argue that they can create more efficient public services by doing more with less and, in the case of welfare systems specifically, reclaim money that is allegedly being lost from the public purse. In practice, many were poorly designed from the start. They sometimes factor in personal characteristics in a way that leads to discrimination, and sometimes they have been deployed without testing for bias or effectiveness. In general, they offer few options for people to challenge—or even understand—the automated actions directly affecting how they live. The result has been more than a decade of scandals.

Surveillance cameras in care homes can help detect abuse, but they raise serious questions about privacy.

The oligarch Donald Trump, in auctioning himself and American government to the highest bidder, may well match or surpass the stew of corruption that Washington created during the Gilded Age. That’s on him. But it’s on the rest of us that over 50 years, through economic policies that coddled the rich under both Democrats and Republicans, American wealth concentrated to such a degree that a Trump presidency—make that two Trump presidencies—was not only possible, but perhaps inevitable.

The 11 exemptions cover courses that are required for a degree or a minor — coursework that cannot be replaced with another class that doesn’t have a DEI component:
– Boise State University requested four exemptions — related to its bachelor’s and master’s programs in social work, and minors in critical theory and gender studies.
– Idaho State University sought three exemptions. Two requests cover bachelor’s and master’s programs in social work, similar to Boise State. The third request involves a minor in gender and sexuality studies.
– Lewis-Clark State College requested exemptions for its social work bachelor’s program and its minor in women and gender studies.
– The University of Idaho sought an exemption for its minor in women’s, gender and sexuality studies.
– The College of Western Idaho requested an exemption for its associate’s degree program in social work.

Before the June 2nd launch of the ‘Partnership and Technology Hub for North Carolina,’ or ‘Path NC’ for short, leaders with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services say the state’s 100 county departments of social services were operating on their own, independent systems. The new system is more efficient, more modern, and means social workers are getting real-time information to support their decisions on child welfare cases.

With housing supply dwindling and rents soaring, protesters call for radical reform and public housing investment…. “There are too many boarded up houses all over the place. There are three generations living together in overcrowded houses because there are not enough being built. All the groups represented at this protest are here to highlight solutions,” he said. Currently, there are more than 300 vacant council houses in Cork City.

A survey from Skills Development Scotland on the proposals for a Graduate Apprenticeship for social work in Scotland