Online, the idea that autism and ADHD can coexist is so widely accepted that it has spawned its own label â âAuDHDâ â and a groundswell of people who say they recognise its oxymoronic nature, perpetual internal war and rollercoaster of needs. There are tens of thousands of people in AuDHD self-help forums, and millions more watching AuDHD videos.
Some of those videos come from Samantha Stein, a British YouTuber. âThe fact that you can have both [autism and ADHD] at the same time is kind of paradoxical in nature,â she admits. âYou think: âHow can you be extremely rigid and need routines and structure, but also be completely incapable of maintaining a routine and structure?ââ
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Other AuDHDers give colourful analogies to describe the epiphany of diagnosis. Before the discovery, Iâm told, itâs as if you are trying to fit in and be a horse rather than celebrating the fact that youâre a zebra. Itâs like being trapped in a maze in the dark, then suddenly the lights are on and now thereâs a way to navigate out.
In The Guardian
The sudden rise of AuDHD: what is behind the rocketing rates of this life-changing diagnosis?
in The GuardianAustralian universities accused of awarding degrees to students with no grasp of âbasicâ English
in The GuardianMore than a dozen academics and students who spoke to Guardian Australia, most on the condition of anonymity, said the universitiesâ financial reliance on foreign students over many years had hollowed out academic integrity and threatened the international credibility of the sector.
Many said the rise of artificial intelligence was accelerating the crisis to the point where the only way to fail a course would be to hand nothing in, unless universities came up with a coherent institutional response.
A tutor in an arts subject at a leading sandstone university said in recent years the number of overseas students in her classes â who may pay up to $300,000 in upfront costs â had reached as high as 80%.
âMost canât speak, write or understand basic English,â she said. âThey use translators or text capture to translate the lectures and tutorials, translation aids to read the literature and ChatGPT to generate ideas.
âItâs mind blowing that you can walk away with a masterâs degree in a variety of subjects without being able to understand a sentence.â
By disciplining MPs for voting to pull children out of poverty, Keir Starmer has shown us who he really is
in The GuardianWon't somebody think about the children? Well, in the face of certain poverty, at least all these kids won't be exposed to the vanishingly small risk of eventually regretting trans health care. F***ing hypocrites.
The Labour leadership has told you who it is, over and over again: it is time to believe it. Keir Starmer has suspended seven Labour MPs because they voted to overturn a Tory policy which imposes poverty on children. Sure, another tale will be spun: that by voting for the Scottish National partyâs amendment to abolish the two-child benefit cap, the seven undermined the unity of the parliamentary Labour party and were duly disciplined. But that is nonsense.
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It is hard to imagine Starmer is unaware of the fact that Osborne devised the policy to stoke public hostility towards and create a Victorian caricature of the undeserving, overbreeding poor. No decent society punishes children for choices they have not made and parents should not be punished for having more children. In Britain in 2024, kids turn up to schools with bowed legs and heart murmurs because of malnourishment, but a vast cost is also imposed on society as the scarring effect of poverty produces lasting lower productivity and employment levels.
Starmer knew this when he told the BBC almost exactly a year ago that he would retain this wicked Tory policy. He made the commitment to sound tough. Contrast with how he genuflects before powerful interests such as the Murdoch empire. By endorsing the two-child benefit cap, Starmer decided to gain partisan advantage, rather than fix an injustice afflicting his country. Party first, country second. Or rather, to be specific: playing politics with the lives of our most vulnerable children.
People-power led to my re-election. It is the start of a new politics
in The GuardianThe general election did not allow for the full expression of people power. Rather, we saw a rejection of the political establishment, leading to a loveless landslide; this election saw the second-lowest turnout since 1918 and the smallest combined vote share for the two main parties since 1945. Public discontent with a broken political system will only grow as the government fails to make the real change that people expect.
That energy needs somewhere to go. It needs to be channelled. It needs to be mobilised. Thatâs why our campaign will organise with those who have been inspired by our victory to build community power in every corner of the country. Once our grassroots model has been replicated elsewhere, this can be the genesis of a new movement capable of challenging the stale two-party system. A movement that offers a real alternative to child poverty, inequality and endless war. A movement that provides a real opposition to the far right â one that doesnât concede ground to divisive rhetoric, but stands by its principles of anti-racism, equality and inclusion.
I have no doubt that this movement will eventually run in elections. However, to create a new, centralised party, based around the personality of one person, is to put the cart before the horse. Remember that only once strength is built from below can we challenge those at the top.
Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuperâs online account due to âunprecedented misconfigurationâ
in The GuardianBut it's okay, because "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a âone-of-a-kindâ Google Cloud âmisconfigurationâ led to the financial services providerâs private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.
Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline. Investment account balances would reflect last weekâs figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible.
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In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologised to members for the outage, and said it had been âextremely frustrating and disappointingâ.
They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuperâs cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.
Sydney council bans same-sex parenting books from libraries for âsafety of our childrenâ
in The GuardianSix councillors voted in favour. It beginsâŠ
A Sydney council has voted to place a blanket ban on same-sex parenting books from local libraries in a move the New South Wales government warns could be a breach of the stateâs Anti-Discrimination Act.
At a meeting last week, Cumberland city council in western Sydney voted on a new strategy for its eight council-run libraries.
The amendment, put forward by the former mayor and current councillor Steve Christou, proposed that the council take âimmediate actionâ to âridâ same-sex parents books and materials in its library service.
During the meeting, Christou brandished a book he alleged had received âreally disturbingâ constituent complaints, saying parents were âdistraughtâ to see the book, Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig, displayed on a shelf in the childrenâs section of the library.
The book, originally published in the UK, explores the experience of having two mums or two dads and features two men and a young child on the front cover.
Six councillors voted in favour of the amendment and five voted against, while four councillors were not present to vote.
âWeâre going to make it clear tonight that ⊠these kind of books, same-sex parents books, donât find their way to our kids,â Christou said during debate. âOur kids shouldnât be sexualised.
âThis community is a very religious community, a very family-orientated community.
âThey donât want such controversial issues going against their beliefs indoctrinated to their libraries. This is not Marrickville or Newtown, this is Cumberland city council.â
Christou said toddlers shouldnât be âexposedâ to same-sex content and that the proposed amendment was âfor the protection and safety of our childrenâ.
âHands off our kids,â he repeated.
Job providers receiving millions of dollars for positions found by jobseekers themselves
in The GuardianJob providers are being paid millions of dollars in public money for work that jobseekers are finding themselves, with advocates saying there is âsimply no reasonâ for the payments.
The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has paid providers more than $3.6m in the past five years for pre-existing employment, where someone on jobseeker found a job prior to starting with a provider, according to data provided to Guardian Australia by the department.
The data shows there has been an uptick in pre-existing employment payments, with providers receiving $1.1m in the 2023-2024 financial year, more than double the $464,200 paid in 2019-2020.
âItâs not the 19th centuryâ: tenants in new social housing block in Victoria say they go weeks without flushing toilets
in The GuardianTenants in one of Victoriaâs newest community housing blocks say they have gone weeks without being able to flush their toilets and months without being able to get a signal for TV, while their concerns over cracks in the building have gone unaddressed.
The $140m development in Dunlop Avenue in Ascot Value is the first development to open from the governmentâs Public Housing Renewal Program â now known as the Big Housing Build â and was heralded as the âmost advancedâ social housing project in the state when it was completed in March last year.
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The estate was previously public housing, managed directly by the Victorian government. Since its redevelopment, the 200-dwelling complex offers only community housing managed by third-party not-for-profit provider Evolve and rent-controlled affordable housing.
But residents of the estate say they have had ongoing issues with the building management. One tenant says they have been served a notice to vacate twice in 12 months â and residents say their requests for maintenance are often ignored or take weeks to address.
Councils now sell off more houses than they build. Thatcherâs legacy, right to buy, is a failure
in The GuardianThis is spectacularly dysfunctional.
Itâs not just historic flats from Britainâs postwar housebuilding boom that are being sold. Brand new council houses are also going under the hammer, almost as fast as they are being built. Design blog Dezeen revealed this month that seven of Norwichâs newest council homes are already in the process of being sold off, fewer than five years after they were completed. Other authorities have also been forced to sell their new council homes, such as Hackney in east London, which has already lost some of the social housing it built in Stoke Newington in 2018.
Despite right to buy being so destructive to public finances that it has been abolished in Scotland and Wales, Labour has announced it will keep Thatcherâs policy if it wins the next general election. This U-turn, backtracking on the partyâs previous two manifestos, which promised to suspend sell-offs, has bitterly disappointed many local politicians who are desperate for change.
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Itâs hardly surprising most councils are not building many homes at all, given they are obliged to sell them at a discount almost as soon as the paint is dry. Would you spend hundreds of thousands of pounds building a new house to rent out if your tenants could force you to flog it to them for less than it cost to construct, just three years later? According to research from UCL, right to buy âremains the major disincentive to local authorities building more social rent homesâ as the majority of councils rightly fear the policy will impact any new housing developments they undertake.
Instead, many authorities have launched schemes to cling on to as much of their remaining stock as possible. Some offer grants to incentivise council tenants to buy on the open market instead of via right to buy. Wandsworth, in south-west London, for instance, will chip in up to ÂŁ120,000 towards helping their tenants purchase a home âwithin the UK or anywhere else in the worldâ, provided it is not a council property.
Could strategic price controls help fight inflation?
in The GuardianPaul Krugman apparently called this article "truly stupid". I can think of no higher praise.
President Truman was aware of the risks of ending price controls. On 30 October 1945, he warned that after the first world war, the US had âsimply pulled off the few controls that had been established, and let nature take its courseâ. And he urged, âThe result should stand as a lesson to all of us. A dizzy upward spiral of wages and the cost of living ended in the crash of 1920 â a crash that spread bankruptcy and foreclosure and unemployment throughout the Nation.â Nevertheless, price controls were pulled in 1946, again triggering inflation and a boom-bust cycle.
Today, there is once more a choice between tolerating the ongoing explosion of profits that drives up prices or tailored controls on carefully selected prices. Price controls would buy time to deal with bottlenecks that will continue as long as the pandemic prevails. Strategic price controls could also contribute to the monetary stability needed to mobilize public investments towards economic resilience, climate change mitigation and carbon-neutrality. The cost of waiting for inflation to go away is high.