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Tuesday, June 8, 2010

A new study by a professor at the University of Oxford has concluded that attending nursery school does not have harmful effects upon “the vast majority” of children under two years old. The research contrasts with the views of other writers in the field, who argue that pre-school children achieve the best results when cared for by their parents full-time.

Kathy Sylva, Professor of Educational Psychology at the university, has based her findings upon data from the Effective Provision of Pre-School Education Project. This has been running since 1996, tracking the development of 3,000 children to discover the effects upon their development of pre-school care and education.

Sylva told The Sunday Times that “[a] lot of parents worry unnecessarily about this issue but my research shows that the vast majority of children are not impaired on any measure by attending nursery under the age of two”, although she admits that there is an increased risk for children from deprived background, and for boys. Those attending better-quality nurseries go on to make better relationships when they start school, she says, and urges parents to check the standards of nurseries for themselves.

Her conclusions come in the wake of a vast expansion in nursery care provision in the United Kingdom in recent years, aimed at getting mothers of young children back to work. One study states that 5% of “middle-class” parents in Britain put their children in full-time nursery care.

According to others such as the child psychologist Oliver James, however, full-time care by parents gives the best results for children. James states that there is evidence that nursery care is “highly stressful and can be harmful”, since levels of the hormone cortisol double after one hour in day care, and raised levels can be detected for some months afterwards. Sylva agrees, though, that some children who attend nursery before they are two are slightly more aggressive at primary school – a finding in line with other research – but says that this aggression disappears by the time the child reaches eleven.

Sylva, a Professorial Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, was awarded the OBE in 2008. She is a former special advisor to the UK House of Commons and the Scottish Parliament.

Friday, February 9, 2007

An initiative has been introduced in the U.S. state of Washington that would require a married couple to have children within three years, or else their marriage would become void.

The activist group Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance (WA-DOMA) filed Initiative 957 on January 26. If passed, marriage in the state would be limited to men and women who are able to have children. In order to receive a marriage license, a couple would have to assert that they “know of no reason” that they cannot have children. If they did not have children within three years, their marriages would be subject to annulment. All other marriages would be defined as ‘unrecognized’ and people in them would be ineligible to receive any marriage benefits.

WA-DOMA formed in 2006 in response to the decision in the case Andersen v. King County, where the state Supreme Court upheld Washington’s ban on same-sex marriage. The court found the 1998 Defense of Marriage Act, which restricts marriage to unions between a man and woman, was proper. In the decision, the court reasoned that there was a “legitimate state interest” in limiting marriage to couples capable of having children.

WA-DOMA is in favor of gay marriage rights. The purpose of the initiative, according to founder Gregory Gadow, is to show that the logic behind the DOMA ruling is absurd. ‘For many years, social conservatives have claimed that marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation … The time has come for these conservatives to be dosed with their own medicine,’ said Gadow. ‘If same-sex couples should be barred from marriage because they can not have children together, it follows that all couples who cannot or will not have children together should equally be barred from marriage.’

Supporters of I-957 must gather at least 224,800 valid signatures by July 6 to put it on the November ballot. The alliance says if the initiative were passed, the state supreme court would likely strike it down as unconstitutional, which would in turn weaken the Court’s reasoning in upholding the Defense of Marriage Act.

The measure’s backers have said they are planning two additional initiatives. One would prohibit divorce or separation when a married couple has children, and would make having a child together the equivalent of marriage.

Other gay rights groups do not support the paper. Activist Bill Dubay commented that while he gets the point of the initiative, it is unlikely he would sign it. The gay advocacy group Equal Rights Washington does not endorse the bill, stressing that that families come in all forms, with or without children, and that laws should help families, not hurt them.

Friday, October 9, 2009

US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that the Senate Finance Committee will vote on a sweeping health care reform bill next Tuesday. US President Barack Obama has made clear that extending health insurance coverage to as many Americans as possible is his top domestic priority.

Republican lawmakers, however, are still overwhelmingly opposed to the bill, saying it is too expensive and would expand the role of government in people’s health care.

Obama and his fellow Democrats in the Senate received some good news late Wednesday from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which put the total cost of the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill at $829 billion over the next decade, below Obama’s stated goal of $900 billion. The budget watchdog organization also said the health care bill would help reduce the federal budget deficit over the next ten years.

Harry Reid said he believed health care reform was moving forward. “And so today we stand closer than ever to fulfilling that fundamental promise, one for which we have fought for more than 60 years,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, however said that the cost estimate was “irrelevant”, because the final bill that will actually emerge from both houses of Congress is likely to look very different and cost a lot more. “What matters is that the final bill will cost about a trillion dollars, vastly expand the role of government in people’s health care decisions, increase premiums and limit choice,” McConnell said.

McConnell said Republicans favor a step by step approach to health care reform, focusing on prevention and wellness programs and dealing with the high costs of malpractice insurance doctors have to pay due to fears of excessive lawsuits.

Under the Finance Committee’s bill, US residents would be required to get health insurance or face a penalty, and insurance companies would face tough new regulations. For example, insurance companies could no longer reject coverage for people due to pre-existing conditions.

The Senate Finance Committee is likely to pass the bill, which will then have to be merged with one passed by the Senate health committee before it goes to the full Senate floor for debate.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Alberto Granado Jiménez, the Argentinian biochemist who was Che Guevara’s companion on his transformative motorcycle trip through South America, died in Havana on Saturday, reported Cuban state television. He was 88 and died of natural causes.

The politically active Jiménez met Ernesto “Che” Guevara, then a medical student, in Hernando, Argentina where Guevara had gone to play rugby. Both were intellectually curious and interested in exploration. In 1951 they set out on an eight-month motorcycle trip through South American that exposed them to the poverty in which most South Americans lived. The pair worked in a leprosy colony and met wtih destitute miners and indigenous people. Both men kept diaries which served as the basis for the 2004 film, The Motorcycle Diaries, produced by Robert Redford and directed by Walter Salles.

According to the Guardian, “Their road trip awoke in Guevara a social consciousness and political convictions that would turn him into one of the iconic revolutionaries of the 20th century.” The trip is widely believed to have inspired Guevara to go to Cuba and join Fidel Castro in his 1959 revolt against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

By the time the two men met again eight years later, Guevara was a revolutionary hero and chief of Cuba’s central bank. Jiménez, who had remained in Argentina working in a clinic, accepted Guevara’s invitation to move to Cuba in 1961 and founded a medical facility in Santiago. Later he moved to Havana where he continued his medical work. The two remained friends although they did not always agree. Jiménez rejected Guevara’s belief that social reform in Latin America had to be accomplished through guerrilla warfare.

The book The Motorcycle Diaries was published in the 1990’s. Jiménez said of the book that it inspired the image of the young Che as a romantic figure.

Jiménez authored the book Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary, published in 2003.

Wednesday, June 8, 2005

Copenhagen, Denmark – The Danish Integration Minister Rikke Hvilshøj’s car was set ablaze outside her family-home on the morning of Wednesday 8 June. From there, the fire spread to the family’s garage, and further on to the side of the house, damaging the roof above the kitchen and children’s room.

At the same time, an e-mail was sent to several media agencies, where a group calling themselves “Action Group Beate” claimed responsibility, saying it is a “protest against the racist immigrational laws of Denmark”. The police found the computer used for sending the mail within a few hours, and closed down the cybercafé whilst removing the computer.

Throughout the Danish political system politicians from both the ruling party and the opposition have expressed their outrage over the terrorism.

The insurance company is currently assessing the amount of damage done to the home, but so far they have made an estimate of £27.000, just for the house damages.

Monday, March 12, 2007

The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark has expressed an interest of extending daylight saving time in New Zealand after a petition to extend daylight saving was closed, gathering 35,000 signatures.

The petition was launched by Peter Dunne, leader of the United Future party, and Nelson city councillor, Mark Holmes in October, 2006. The petition requests “…that the House call upon the Government to provide 3 extra weeks of daylight saving to begin on the last Sunday of September and end on the first Sunday in April.”

Ms Clark says that daylight savings could be stretched at the end because our summer is now lasting through till March. Ms Clark does not support a change to the start of daylight savings. Ms Clark said, “I think the way our weather and seasons have moved around we are finding that at the start of the so-called summer it’s not the best, but we’ve just seen the most glorious Indian summer lasting well through into March and daylight savings ends in about a week’s time.”

Ms Clark also says she supports moving the summer school holidays from January to February, although she says that this would be hard to do.

The Minister for the Department of Internal Affairs, Rick Barker, is considering the extension of daylight savings, as an extension does not require any law change, instead it is done by Order in Council signed by the Governor-General, acting under section 4(1) of the Time Act 1974.

Ms Clark claims that there is a lot of public support for the extension.

If any change was to occur, it would be implemented next year, as daylight savings finishes this coming weekend.

The United States and Canada have both recently extended their daylight savings periods.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Richard Jenkins, an engineer from the United Kingdom, broke a record for the fastest speed attained in a wind-powered land vehicle on Friday.

Jenkins managed to reach a speed of 126.1 miles per hour (202.9 kilometres per hour) in his Greenbird car along the plains of Nevada’s Ivanpah Lake.

Jenkins said that he had worked for ten years to break the record, and that “things couldn’t have been better” on the day he broke the record. “It’s great. It’s one of those things that you spend so long trying to do and when it actually happens, it’s almost too easy,” he said to the BBC.

“It has been an incredibly difficult challenge. Half the challenge is technical, having to create a more efficient vehicle than the previous record holder, then the rest is luck, being in the right place, at the right time, to get the perfect conditions, with the right people watching. I must have been on record standby at some remote location around the world for at least two months of every year for the past ten years,” he said. “Then everything came together perfectly and the Greenbird stepped up to the mark and performed amazingly. I am absolutely delighted.”

The previous record for the fastest wind-powered land vehicle belonged to Bob Schumacher from the United States, who reached 116 miles per hour in his Iron Duck machine.

The Greenbird is a fifth generation in an array of vehicles created by Jenkins in his ten-year effort to break the speed record. It is composed out of carbon fibre composite, and powered only by wind. According to Jenkins, it weighs 600 kilograms.