Books are our friends

Reading 'can help reduce stress'

The Telegraph :Reading is the best way to relax and even six minutes can be enough to reduce stress levels by more than two thirds. And it works better and faster than other methods to calm frazzled nerves such as listening to music, going for walk or settling down with a cup of tea...

The research was carried out on a group of volunteers by consultancy Mindlab International at the University of Sussex. Their stress levels and heart rate were increased through a range of tests and exercises before they were then tested with a variety of traditional methods of relaxation.

Reading worked best, reducing stress levels by 68 per cent, said cognitive neuropsychologist Dr David Lewis. Subjects only needed to read, silently, for six minutes to slow down the heart and ease tension in the muscles, he found. In fact it got subjects to stress levels lower than before they started.

Listening to music reduced the levels by 61 per cent, having a cup of tea or coffee lowered them by 54 per cent and taking a walk by 42 per cent. Playing video games brought them down by 21 per cent from their highest level but still left the volunteers with heart rates above their starting point.

Dr Lewis, who conducted the test, said: 'Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation... It really doesn't matter what book you read... This is more than merely a distraction but an active engaging of the imagination as the words on the printed page stimulate your creativity and cause you to enter what is essentially an altered state of consciousness.'

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Time for a break; back in a week

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Imbolc/Lá Fhéile Bríde

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Food more likely shared if given to women

Chaos Eases As Haiti Food Lines Focus on Women

CBS News: The 79-year-old woman with a 55-pound bad of rice perched on her head gingerly descended concrete steps and passed it off to her daughter-in-law -- who quickly disappeared behind the faded leopard-print sheets that are the walls of their makeshift home on the crowded turf of Haiti's National Stadium. That personal victory for Rosedithe Menelas and her hungry family was a leap forward as well for the United Nations and aid groups...

Under a new targeted approach to aid, Menelas and thousands of other women across Haiti's capital no longer have to battle with men at food handouts that in recent days have been chaotic and dangerous scrums. 'Every time they give out food there's too much trouble,' said Menelas, collapsing into a small wooden chair as two grandchildren quickly scrambled into her lap. 'Today, we finally got something.'...

The UN World Food Program and its partners, including World Vision, borrowed an approach that has worked in other disaster zones. The agencies fanned out across Port-au-Prince, distributing coupons to be redeemed for bags of rice at 16 sites. The coupons were given mainly to women, the elderly and the disabled. Men could redeem coupons for women who were taking care of children or who otherwise could not make it.

'Our experience around the world is that food is more likely to be equitably shared in the household if it is given to women,' WFP spokesman Marcus Prior said at the stadium, now a sprawling encampment of families left homeless by the quake. Officials targeted women because they are primary caregivers in most households and are less likely to be aggressive on aid lines. Many Haitians agreed. Chery Frantz, a 35-year-old father of four who lives in a ravine near one distribution center, said men are more likely to try to sell the donated rice. 'Women won't do that because they're more responsible.'...

A tour of several sites showed the project was largely successful. People hauled away their rice, often dividing it up among friends and family... Some recipients said it was their first aid since the quake. 'I have a big family and we have nothing,' said Nadia St. Eloi... who carried her rice bag on her head while holding her 2-year-old son by the arm. She said she still needs cooking oil and beans to make a meal but will make the rice last as long as possible.

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Hiroshi Sugimoto: Electric art

Japanese Photographer Bends Electricity to His Will

Wired: Hiroshi Sugimoto has always used his camera to explore unseen phenomena -- artifacts of time, light, the elements, and human perception. But for his latest project, called Lightning Fields, the award-winning photographer traded optics for electricity. He wields a Van de Graff generator to send up to 400,000 volts through film to a metal table. The resulting fractal branching, subtle feathering, and furry whorls call to mind vascular systems, geologic features, and trees. 'I see the spark of life itself, the lightning that struck the primordial ooze,' Sugimoto says. Although some of the effects happen by chance, the artist does try to exercise control. 'I have a kitchen's worth of utensils that produce sparks with different characteristics,' he says. 'But there are many variables -- weather, humidity, perhaps even what I had for breakfast -- I'm never sure what influences the results.'

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'Keep hating the Arabs and justify the Jews'

Female soldiers break their silence

Ynet News: Six years after first collection of Breaking the Silence testimonials, organization releases booklet of testimonies from female soldiers who served in territories. Stories include systematic humiliation of Palestinians, reckless and cruel violence, theft, killing of innocent people and cover-up. Here are only some of their testimonies...

'We caught a five-year-old... can't remember what he did... The officers just picked him up, slapped him around and put him in the jeep. The kid was crying and the officer next to me said 'don't cry' and started laughing at him. Finally the kid cracked a smile -- and suddenly the officer gave him a punch in the stomach. Why? 'Don't laugh in my face,' he said."...

"It's boring, so we'd create some action. We'd get on the radio, and say they threw stones at us. then someone would be arrested... There was a policewoman, she was bored, so okay, she said they threw stones at her. They asked her who threw them. 'I don't know, two in grey shirts, I didn't manage to see them.' They catch two guys with grey shirts... beat them. Is it them? 'No, I don't think so.' Okay, a whole incident, people get beaten up. Nothing happened that day."...

"Crossing the checkpoint, it's like another world... Palestinians walk with trolleys on the side of the road, with wagons, donkeys... so the Border Guards take a truck with the remains of food and start throwing it at them... cottage cheese, rotten vegetables... Many times the soldiers would open the Palestinians' food... They take things all the time at checkpoints in the territories.... No one was punished. Really, it was an atmosphere in which we were allowed to hit and humiliate."...

Some of the female soldiers were shocked with the level of violence the settlers' children used against the Palestinians... "You also don't really know which side you are on... I have to make a switch in my head and keep hating the Arabs and justify the Jews.'... The same female soldier told of how she once spit on a Palestinian in the street: "I don't think he even did anything. But again, it was cool and it was the only thing I could do to... you know, I couldn't take brag that I caught a terrorist... But I could spit on them and degrade them and laugh at them."...

A female Border Guard officer in Jenin spoke of an incident in which a nine-year-old Palestinian, who tried to climb the fence, failed, and fled -- was shot to death: "They fired... when he was already in the territories and posed no danger. The hit was in the abdomen area, they claimed he was on a bicycle and so they were unable to hit him in the legs."... An investigation was carried out, at first they said it was an unjustified killing... In the end they claimed that he was checking out escape routes for terrorists or something... and they closed the case."

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'There's a cover-up of something'

French missiles or just toy rockets? Mystery deepens in Newfoundland

Toronto Star: Were those mysterious bulletlike objects seen in the sky off the coast of Newfoundland missiles?... Resident Darlene Stewart was planning to take a picture of the sun going down around 5p.m. But to her shock she saw the objects in the sky above Fortune Bay and called her neighbour, Emmy Pardy. Stewart took pictures of the mysterious objects.

'It was grey and silver on colour. It looked like an oversized bullet with a trail of fire behind it,' Pardy told the Star. There was no sound of an airplane's engine, she said, and three of the objects were visible for about 15 minutes.

An RCMP officer initially confirmed to Pardy in two telephone conversations that it was indeed a missile, she said. 'He said the military was made aware of this,' Pardy explained, adding he told her a missile or missiles were launched from nearby St.-Pierre-Miquelon, which is French territory. But the RCMP later referred inquiries on the matter to the federal government, which said there was no missile and no evidence of anyone firing a rocket near the area.

Liberal Senator George Baker told the Star there's no way the objects were models fired by locals. They were too large -- one witness Baker spoke to said they were at least the size of an 18-wheeler.

No 'indication' of rocket launch over Newfoundland, PMO official says

Globe and Mail: 'That's a missile. Of course it's a missile. The question is, whose missile?' said Robert Huebert, associate director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary...

Dr. Huebert speculated it could have been a misfiring intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) or a submarine- or sea-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), which veered badly off course and travelled slowly enough to linger over the Newfoundland skyline for minutes. France, Russia and England are all testing new models of those missiles, he said.

'Generally they're so fast, so high, you'd never see it,' Mr. Huebert said. 'Unless it was having a malfunction. There could be something going wrong with it that wasn't allowing it to go supersonic.'...

As speculation ran wild Thursday, governments provided more denials than answers... 'We confirm that no French military activity took place at the time of the incident...' a French embassy statement said. 'There was never a rocket launched,' added Dimitri Soudas, the exasperated spokesman for Prime Minister Steven Harper... 'We have confirmed that there were no planned exercises off the Eastern Seaboard,' a Defence department spokesman said yesterday. 'We did not see a threat to the security of Canada.'

Ms. Pardy rejected the denials, saying, 'It seems like there's a cover-up of something.'

See also Were those UFOs or missiles seen over Newfoundland?

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