Some 635 children were orphaned in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami.

Fifteen-year-old Natasha Fonseka (not her real name) is once again a happy child. Orphaned by the December 2004 tsunami and a victim of subsequent child abuse, she now lives in a children’s home where she receives emotional and psychological support.
Natasha used to cry herself to sleep after her parents and younger brother were killed in the tsunami, reported IRIN.
“My aunt didn’t like me,“ Natasha said. “She began hitting me every night, saying I was a curse.“ According to Natasha, Beatrice also stopped her from going to school.
Natasha lived like this for almost two years until, after a night of severe beatings; she slipped out of the house and lodged a complaint at Galle Police Station on 13 December 2006. The police immediately transferred Natasha to the safety of a children’s home in the area. Her aunt was remanded but later released on bail.
According to the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA), 635 children were orphaned in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. In southern districts of the country--including Kalutara, Galle, Matara and Hambantota--137 boys and 129 girls were orphaned.
In its summary report of children affected by the tsunami, published in 2005, the NCPA said all these southern children were living with relatives, guardians or in children’s homes in the area. There are 12 children’s homes in southern Sri Lanka.
There are some children who continue to fall prey to some level of physical abuse. Through our programs we hope to minimize this and, to a certain extent, we have been able to curb the problem.
“Children who have been orphaned by the tsunami cannot be adopted unless they receive a foster care order from court. If the guardian or relative wants to adopt a child, he or she must request foster care parenting, according to the tsunami special provisions act,“ the NCPA report said.
The NCPA is currently conducting psycho-social projects in collaboration with the Department of Childcare and Probation Services in the south in order to safeguard children at risk. The Authority said there were no statistics on the number of children who had been abused.
The Child First project, funded by UNICEF, will continue until March 2008. After that, the government will be chiefly responsible for such activities, using the child rights officers who have been trained and have worked closely with the program over the past two years.

The formation of the ASEAN Charter is not just a task left to politicians and policy-makers in the ten nation grouping.
Speaking at the 23rd ASEAN Council of Teachers Convention, Deputy Prime Minister Professor S Jayakumar told educators that they, too, have a role to play.
He said teachers are best placed to teach the young about the world outside the classroom, said Channelnewsasia.com.
And the youths of today can learn much about understanding other cultures, heritage and religion.
He added insensitivity and ignorance can create political controversy and violent reactions, worsening religious and ethnic divisions.
About 200 Singapore schools now have links with Southeast Asian countries.
Professor Jayakumar said; “We need to involve different sectors of society from different walks of life and people who deal directly with youths like teachers and educators.“
“Apart from imparting academic knowledge, teachers also play a critical role in shaping the hearts and minds of young people and inculcating core values in them.“

The shortage of male undergraduates and the growing dominance of female students in British universities is one of the biggest problems facing higher education, according to university admission tutors.
A new survey of academics involved in recruitment has revealed widespread concern about the gap in the numbers of male and female students.
This year, 54,700 more girls than boys applied for places, up from 51,394 last year. Last year, 47 pecent of 17- to 30-year-old women went into higher education, compared to 37 percent of young men, wrote Telegraph.co.uk.
More than 70 percent of tutors questioned in the study, which covered half of the 114 institutions in the UK, said the trend was negatively affecting the quality of university education.
The survey, commissioned by ACS International Schools, found that the problem was perceived as more damaging to applications than variable students’ fees or difficulties caused by the abundance of A grades at A-level.
“There is a very substantial--and growing--disparity between the extent to which males and females participate in higher education,“ said Bahram Bekhradnia, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute.
“And it is not as if young men put off university when they are young and participate later. This is a really serious issue, the disadvantage--disenfranchisement even--of a large and growing proportion of the population. If you believe that higher education is a life-enhancing and essential experience, then you weep for the growing army of young men who exclude themselves from this experience.“
The gap at university level originates in the underachievement of boys at school.
A report published last week by the Department for Children, Schools and Families said girls were leaving boys behind at nursery level and making better progress up to the GCSE, where they outperformed them in almost every subject, including the traditional “male“ areas.
In some popular university degree courses girls outnumber boys by more than four to one and almost twice as many were accepted in to law courses last year.
Despite the concern, there are few strategies that deal directly with the problem. At university level, measures to widen participation, such as campus visits and summer schools, concentrate on disadvantaged groups rather than males specifically.

Elementary schoolboys wrestling in “smackdown“ style have become a common sight in schools throughout Indonesia, even though the program has been taken off the air by all local TV stations.
Intense protest at the death of a 9-year-old boy (in Bandung, 2006), who was beaten to death during an apparent smackdown-style fight with his friends, successfully led to the cancellation of the program.
Alas, this is not the end of the horrific story. Just a month ago, the media again reported the case of an elementary schoolboy (Bali, 2007) who died in the aftermath of a fight with his classmate, said Thejakartapost.com
Teachers and friends said that this particular classmate tended to be aggressive. Can we then blame this act on the negative effects of TV violence?
Results of psychological research carried out abroad and in Indonesia have shown that a correlation between TV violence exposure and aggression does exist, wherein increased exposure to TV violence may feed on the individual’s aggression.
For viewers, especially children, there’s always a danger of imitating acts portrayed by models on TV. Positive appraisal for the acts of these models on TV provides positive reinforcement for children to imitate these acts, not necessarily immediately, but possibly in the long run.
One psychological mechanism that explains how exposure to TV violence can encourage aggressive behavior in a child is as follows:
* Step 1--Acquisition
A child views a movie hero punching a “bad guy“ and the hero is cheered by the crowd. The child acquires the message that punching a guy perceived as bad is rewarding. The child may not necessarily commit the act himself at this point. However, it is well lodged in his memory.
* Step 2--Decreasing inhibition
Continued exposure to the same act of punching a bad guy may decrease the initial inhibition the child may have had about hitting another person.
* Step 3--Imitation
With decreased inhibition, the likelihood of the child actually committing the act himself when the situation warrants it is increased.
One might argue that when an individual shows aggressive behavior, there are a lot of other factors at work apart from continued exposure to TV violence, such as the individual’s own temperamental disposition, or the environmental conditions around him or her.
Whatever the argument, one thing is for sure. We know that TV violence can be one of the culprits responsible for an increase of violence in society.
So, the time to protect our children can never be too soon. More so in Indonesia, because according to a survey conducted by the Indonesian Child Welfare Foundation (YKAI--Yayasan Kesejahteraan Anak Indonesia), Indonesian children are spending 35 hours a week watching TV.
Most of them are watching adult programs such as soap operas that are filled with adult plots.

Students taking part in IranÕs university entrance exam, Tehran.

Studies suggest that daytime napping may prevent children sleeping properly at night and impair mental performance.

Afternoon naps taken by young children may give parents a welcome rest but could be harmful, say researchers. Studies suggest that daytime napping may prevent children sleeping properly at night and impair mental performance.
Scientists in the US measured how well 27 pre-school children could solve puzzles requiring planning and organizational skills.
Children who took longer naps completed fewer puzzles successfully, and the later they went to bed the worse they performed, New Scientist magazine reported, said Telegraph.co.uk.
The team led by Dr Joe McNamara, from the University of Florida, was one of several groups that presented similar findings at a meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Minneapolis.
Dr John Harsh and colleagues from the University of Southern Mississippi asked the parents of 738 children aged two to 12 about their children’s sleeping habits. Children who took long daytime naps fell asleep at night an average of 39 minutes later, and slept later at the weekend.
The napping children found it more difficult to go to bed, slept badly and struggled to get up in the morning.
Dr Harsh said the findings posed a “chicken and egg“ problem. “It could be that children are getting less sleep at night because they are napping, or they could be napping because they’re getting less sleep at night,“ he said.

Men and women with multiple sclerosis (MS) equally transmit the genetic risk of the disease to their children, according to a study published June 27, 2007, in the the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The research contradicts the results of a recent study, which found affected fathers were more likely than affected mothers to transmit the risk of developing MS to their children.
Researchers studied 3,088 Canadian families with one parent affected with MS. Of the 8,401 children in those families, 798 had MS.
The study found equal transmission of the genetic risk of MS to children with 9.41 percent of fathers transmitting MS to their children compared to 9.76 percent of mothers, Medicalnewstoday.com wrote.
“We also found there were equal numbers of daughters and sons receiving the genetic risk of the disease from their parents,“ said study author George Ebers, MD, FMedSci, Action Research Professor of Clinical Neurology at the University of Oxford. “Intriguingly, we also found when half siblings both have MS; there is a clear maternal effect with mothers much more likely to be the common parent.“
Ebers says the findings show no evidence of the Carter effect, which was recently cited in a study that found men with MS were twice as likely to pass the risk of disease on to their children. According to the Carter effect, men are more resistant to MS because they carry a higher genetic load and thus are more likely to transmit the genetic risk of the disease to their children.
“Our study involved 16 times as many people as the previous published study. It casts further doubt on the widely believed multiple gene mode of inheritance of susceptibility to MS,“ said Ebers.
The study was supported by the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada Scientific Research Foundation.

In a bid to ensure that Qatar’s new generation is conscious of their rich culture and tradition, the country has decided to promote children’s literature.
Qatar’s Supreme Council for Family Affairs (SCFA) announced its decision to institute awards for the best works in various branches of Children’s literature.
The SCFA has invited separate entries for children’s poetry, drama, short stories, music, painting and literary studies.
A cash prize of QR200, 000 would be given to the winners of each section, reported Thepeninsulaqatar.com.
If more than one writer is being declared as the winner, the cash prize will have to be shared among them.
The works must be in Arab language.