Madras School of Social Work research scholar S. Lalitha (right) interacting with participants at a meeting on ‘Water Governance and Community Organisation’ in Chennai on Wednesday.

Tai Yum-po, 78, sits on his bed in a "cage home" in the Mong Kok district of Hong Kong. As as international financial hub Hong Kong boasts some of Asia's richest people and more Louis Vuitton shops than Paris or New York, yet out of its seven million residents, an estimated 1.25 million live below the poverty line.(AFP | M Clarke)

B MACDONNELL
Susan Hamilton, MSW, is the newly appointed Department of Children and Families commissioner.

Jimmy Chipman, left, and Anthony Rogers, both 16, checked out the view from a bedroom window of their new home. Brooklawn Child & Family Services employees will supervise the house. (M Clevenger | Courier-Journal)

More than 60,000 desperately ill and injured people will miss out on free help from the Health Service under a shake-up in care home funding, charities have warned. They will be left facing huge care bills under new rules which set down a test to decide who is sick enough to qualify to have their care home costs met by the NHS, they said.

An MSP has urged the Scottish Executive to buy up Afghanistan's opium crop. Nationalist Bill Wilson has submitted a motion calling for the issue to be investigated as part of a "national and international drugs and crime policy".

Squatters outside Johannesburg protest after an early-morning raid in which they were evicted from their homes, their shacks demolished and their possessions smashed.
J Hrusa | EPA

Viridiana Garcia, 23, dresses her 5-month-old twins Ella and Isabella Arreola at their home in Goleta. Garcia was eligible for a green card through a program for abused and abandoned undocumented youths but left the foster care system before she could get it.
B Chan | LA Times)

A safety campaign began after Stuart Cunningham-Jones died

Lessons from Aaron Gilbert's murder 'will be learned'

L Seitz, Deseret Morning News
Sgt. Russell Young waits as Christian Calderon, 7, plays with the wall toy installed by his mother.

NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates said the way pupils misused them to bully their teachers meant they should be banned from school premises. She has sent evidence of more than 100 cases of teachers being abused and bullied by phone, e-mail and online.

Europe's top diplomat in Malaysia has been summoned by the foreign ministry to discuss criticisms he made about policies favouring ethnic Malays. Malaysia has been struggling to attract foreign investment.

Across the country, thousands of HIV testing sites, state and local health departments, and community-based HIV/AIDS service providers will participate in NHTD events, by holding health fairs, providing community and media outreach, hosting special testing-related events, or operating extended hours. Some of these events may be scheduled in the days and weeks surrounding NHTD.

The words out of my wife's mouth were like a telephone pole crashing through my gut. "Honey, our son is a heroin addict." No way. Not him. Not us. For the next few days, on a supposed Easter family vacation, I got to see my first born, now 18 years young, go through cold turkey heroin withdrawal. When he wasn't vomiting or experiencing spasms, he would sleep.

Fewer men are willing to enter further education because of bad memories of school or a fear of looking stupid, a Highland institute has found.

Cherie Green of Supporting People in Need folds scarves to prepare for the grand opening. (PK SCHMALENBERGER | THE SOUTHERN)

Abuse ... a dozen unborn babies a week are being referred by families, hospitals, schools and welfare workers because of concerns about their mother's situation / File

The $2.4 million Mutitjulu Police Station opened last October. "We built a police station there with Federal Government money, only to find that it wasn't occupied," Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough said yesterday.
Photo: T Trewin

Kalani Moncibaiz, third from left, of Orange walks through Crockett Street with her cousin Carla, background, and her children, from left, Chelsie, Courtney, Daniel and Dalton during Saturday’s Walk Against Domestic Violence in Beaumont. Moncibaiz and family were present to honor the memory of her mother, Wanda Wallace, who was killed by her husband earlier this year.
M TOBIAS | Port Arthur News

'Housing first,' a new approach to fighting homelessness, is gaining ground in Boston. It's part of an ambitious new movement that seeks to end life on the street, not just manage it.

Self-portrait by Susan Weinreich

Jason Torreano, of Cambria, mentors abused or impoverished children at a shelter in Grahamstown, South Africa.

Photo T FOX/DMN
Somali immigrants like Ilmiya Maalin (left) depend on Ibrahim Muday (carrying her son) to get them through the complex parts of American life. Mr. Muday, a former refugee, relishes his work. 'They're all my relatives,' he says.

Medical chiefs have called for a crackdown on cheap alcohol sales in Scotland.

Anti-smoking efforts have big impact: expert An office worker enjoys a cigarette in downtown Toronto, February 19, 2007. Aggressive efforts to curb smoking led to a sharp drop in the number of smokers in New York City in the past few years, U.S. health experts said on Thursday. REUTERS | JP Moczulski

Replacement ... one of the new trolley collectors. The way their predecessors were sacked has attracted the attention of the Office of Workplace Services.
Photo: Albury Border Mail

Children's hospital patients marched on Capitol Hill opposing a Bush administration proposal they fear will limit the eligibility of low-income families with sick children for federal support through the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

Limping lepers with outstretched arms, pleading mothers pressing their naked babies to car windows, and ragged children begging for food have long been among the more infamous sights in the capital. Now, however, uncomfortable at the way such symbols of grinding poverty jar with India's newly affluent self-image, city authorities plan to get them off the streets within a couple of years.

A study into the Scottish election voting fiasco has found the highest proportion of rejected constituency votes came in the most deprived areas.

The discovery of hundreds of workers - some of them children - forced to work in illegal brickworks in China has caused a national scandal.

Liz was a full-time carer for her mother

Most of the persistent low achievers in England's schools are poor and white, and far more are boys than girls.

"A child on the street is what we call a roofless and rootless kid. He's an unprotected child," says Father Thomas Koshy as we walk through the southern Indian city of Vijayawada.

Two housing bodies have said Wales is short of about 40,000 affordable homes.

"Too many houses are owned by too few people who then carve them into bedsits to rent out to students and make massive profits" Rob, Bangor

Joyce Protopapas, poses at her home in Frisco, Texas, Wednesday, June 20, 2007, by a computer with the web site of the support group On-Line Gamers Anonymous on the screen. Protopapas says video and Internet games transformed her son, Michael, from a courteous, outgoing, academically gifted teen into an aggressive, reclusive manipulator who flunked two 10th grade classes and spent several hours day and night playing a popular online video game. A leading council of the American Medical Association now wants to have this behavior officially classified as a psychiatric disorder, to raise awareness and enable sufferers to get insurance coverage for treatment. (AP Photo | D McWilliam)

A group of girls returning home from school in Afghanistan's Logar province recently did not for a moment expect what lay ahead. As they walked down a dirt track, insurgents sprang out of the parched farms and began firing on them.

Image: K BROWN
BACK TO NATURE: If all human beings vanished, Manhattan would eventually revert to a forested island. Many skyscrapers would topple within decades, undermined by waterlogged foundations; stone buildings such as St. Patrick's Cathedral (at right in artist's rendering) would survive longer. Weeds and colonizing trees would take root in the cracked pavement, while raptors nested in the ruins and foxes roamed the streets.

California State University, Fresno, senior majoring in Social Work

The introduction of the smoking ban on July 1st could be a smooth ride, national survey results suggest.

Police chiefs tackling prostitution in the wake of the red light killings are helping 11 sex workers to get off the streets, it has emerged.

Move over, Paris Hilton. We all have celebrity issues in an age when anyone can create an online profile, post confessional videos on YouTube, or make snarky online comments about other people.

Australian Aboriginal dancers perform in the Woggan-ma-gule Morning Ceremony in the Botanical Gardens in Sydney.
W Burgess | Reuters

R Tsong-Taatarii | Star Tribune
Mina Bown, 9, mother Monique, and brother Zachary, 5, were waiting for a doctor to see Zachary for a stomach ache. Monique was looking for housing and employment so her family could move out of a shelter during the second annual Project Homeless Connect at the St. Paul Armory.

Health Minister Tony Clement. (CPimages | T Hanson)

Connecticut's governor, a cancer survivor, vetoed a bill that would have allowed people with certain serious illnesses to use marijuana, saying it was fraught with problems and sent a mixed message to children.

View Change in Stigma

In homes where at least one parent smokes, infants have 5.5 times higher levels of a nicotine toxin called cotinine in their urine than infants of nonsmokers, a British study finds.

About two dozen people evicted Friday from a parking lot moved across the street to an empty field, setting up more than 20 tents and makeshift shacks.
(CBC)

View image Changes in Depression Treatment

JJ Hensley | Arizona Republic
Luis Hernandez is about to spend his fourth homeless summer in the desert. That's why news of Mesa's Hydration Donation program was welcome news