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Haiti in ruins after huge earthquake

Television pictures are slowly beginning to show the damage in Haiti following the huge earthquake on Tuesday. A magnitude 7.3 quake, just 16km from the capital, hit the Caribbean nation as people were going home after work. It was the worst earthquake to strike Haiti in more than two centuries. Many major buildings in the capital Port-au-Prince have collapsed, including the Presidential Palace and the UN headquarters.
Haiti's President Rene Preval described the scene in the capital as "unimaginable" and fears "well over 100,000 people" may have died. The Red Cross says up to 3 million people have been affected. Haiti's ambassador to the USA, Raymond Joseph, said there was "no way of estimating" how many casualties there were.

Countries around the world are acting quickly to send whatever help they can to Haiti. US President Barack Obama has promised America will do all it can to help. He vowed "unwavering support" following a “particularly cruel” disaster. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. More than half its people live on less than two dollars a day. The nation was still trying to recover from being hit by four deadly hurricanes in 30 days in 2008. Its economy is in ruins and it has a long history of corruption and coups.

Adapted from http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com

War against skinny mannequins

Thousands of Spanish women are to be invited to undergo “body scans” so that shop-window mannequins will better reflect the real female form. The Health Ministry is sending out invitations to 8,500 women between the ages of 12 and 70, drawn randomly from the electoral roll.

The findings will also be used to design clothes that fit women better, as Spain breaks new ground in trying to combat eating disorders by promoting a healthier body image for girls.

The country’s largest fashion retailers have signed up to the initiative. Chains such as Zara, Mango, Bershka and Massimo Dutti have agreed to get rid of skinny mannequins of sizes less than a European 38 – a 10 in Uk terms. “The idea is that the mannequins should not falsify reality, that they should be within the range of measurements of Spanish women”, explained Domingo Roibás, a spokesman for the ministry. Elena Salgado, the Health Minister, said: “It is unreasonable for a modern and advanced society to establish beauty stereotypes that are far removed from reality. It’s everyone’s commitment that beauty and health go hand-in-hand”.

It is not just the central Government that is taking up issues important to women. The Madrid regional government, controlled by the opposition conservative Popular Party, took the first step last year by banning very skinny models from its Cibeles fashion show.

Many Spanish women said yesterday that the ubiquitous mannequins did influence the way they thought about their bodies. “It’s a good measure”, said Maria José, a stylish woman entering Zara on Gran Via, Madrid’s main shopping street. “Hopefully it will stop our girls from thinking they need to be a size 34 to be normal”

Pressed by the Government, Spanish companies have also agreed to include size 46 clothing in their normal, rather than outsize ranges. They will also work to standardise sizes, which can vary widely between shops.

Space tourism - PAEG inglés CLM

Would you pay $20 million for a 10-day vacation? That is what Dennis Tito, a millionaire from the USA, did when he became the first space tourist in April, 2001. Two others followed him in 2002 and 2005. After a short training period, each man went for a short visit to the orbiting International Space Station (ISS).

The high cost of a “space vacation” makes it impossible for most people, but several private companies believe that the cost will soon come down. New technological developments should lower fares initially to about $100,000, but the price could quickly drop to $10,000. Although this sounds high, estimates indicate that at least half a million people each year would pay $50,000 for a ticket to space.

Companies also have to ensure the safety of their passengers to the satisfaction of national space agencies. In addition, they still have to develop reliable vehicles that can be reused. But despite these problems, several commercial companies believe that they will soon be able to offer brief space flights. These would take passengers straight up into space for about 100 km, and then back down again, without orbiting the Earth. Brief orbital flights are planned for the next stage.

Space tourism may sound unbelievable, but even NASA, the American space agency, recognised the possibility in a report published in 1998. So in the not too distant future, when you start to plan a vacation, you may include “space” along with the Caribbean or the Himalayas as a possible destination.

Zoo life - PAEG inglés CLM

In the past, a visit to the zoo was considered an enjoyable day out, not much different from a picnic in the park. But zoos are now causing a lot of controversy.

As people move away from rural areas, it is more difficult for them to see animals in their natural habitats. Many people believe that we can teach children about these animals through visits to zoos, where it is possible to see, hear, smell and sometimes even touch them.

Opponents, however, argue that seeing animals in cages is not instructive, because it is impossible to learn about their natural behaviour in such unnatural conditions. They believe that zoos actually send a negative message and allow people to believe that keeping living beings captive is permissible.

Moreover, these opponents believe that keeping animals in cages promotes suffering, especially for more intellectually complex species that need mental stimulation as well as adequate space in which to move. They say that in many zoos, animals are kept in small, filthy enclosures and are often forced to perform tricks for the public. Consequently, many animals suffer from “zoochosis”; that is, abnormal behaviours such as bar-biting or self-mutilation among zoo animals. They reject the arguments that zoos help animals to lead longer, healthier lives due to the guaranteed diet and veterinary care they receive.

There are, of course, kind and humane zoos, such as the Jersey Zoo in the UK, that provide *outstanding services to animal welfare and conservation. But most zoos do not in fact meet the standards they set themselves. Unless they really do start to contribute to animal welfare, zoos may soon find that they themselves are extinct.

Airport cities - PAEG inglés CLM

Anyone who has ever spent time in an airport waiting for a flight knows that this can be very dull. However, this is changing, as airports have already entered the twenty-first century.

The rise and expansion of air traffic is causing many changes. Many people commute for business reasons, and there has recently been a large increase in the air cargo business. Food items produced in one place, for example, tropical fruit, may have to be transported quickly for sale in another. In addition, the growth in Internet use has expanded e-commerce, and customers who order items online expect delivery right away.

As a result, airports and the surrounding areas have grown tremendously. Many companies are building warehouses near runways, and high-tech firms are setting up offices that are convenient for airline commuters. Other new airport buildings include entertainment and sports facilities. Some “aerotropoli”, as these new airport cities have been called, even include housing. Despite the noise and pollution, developers are quickly building homes to house the increasing number of workers dependent on airports.

Even without the adjacent businesses, airports themselves are growing. To meet the needs of workers and travellers, airports are expanding their services. Not only has shopping become more attractive and competitive, but some airports display works of art, and the Dallas / Fort Worth International Airport even offers wine tasting.

The idea of building aerotropoli is now spreading beyond the USA, and there are plans to build them in France, Brazil, South Korea, and Hong Kong. Wouldn’t it be nice if, while you wait for your next flight, you could sit in a rocking chair (as in Boston Logan International Airport, Massachusetts) and listen to live music (as in Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, Texas)?

Ethical fashion - PAEG inglés CLM

“Would you like some sweet potato with your pineapple?” You might expect this question in a restaurant, but now, it seems, it could be asked in your local clothing boutique as the ethical fashion industry is starting to gain recognition.

Ethical fashion is all about creating and promoting clothing which uses raw materials that can be recycled, and treating these materials in ways that are not environmentally harmful. In addition, ethical fashion aims to encourage local craft workers, and many of the garments produced are made by women in co-operative groups in developing countries. Ethical fashion also promises to reinvest part of its profits in local community projects such as health and education.

In 2006, the Ethical Fashion Show in Paris featured 60 designers from all over the world. Some used organic materials to create modern fashions. For example, one designer used a traditional technique from the Philippines in order to create fabric made from pineapple leaves. Other designers focused on unusual methods of processing fabrics. One French company employed a traditional Chinese practice to dye silk fabric. This involves coating the silk in a sweet potato paste, and then burying it in the ground. It is later rinsed many times in water, and ends up a soft, off-black colour. This company also uses an old Japanese method to produce kakishibu, a natural dye made from fruit, to colour silk scarves brown and pink.

Those involved in ethical fashion hope that the movement will gain in popularity. Twenty years ago, they say, organic food was considered “alternative” and was produced mostly by small companies, but today it has become mainstream. They hope this will happen to fashion, boosting sales and benefiting workers at local levels, as well as helping the environment.

Food allergies - PAEG inglés CLM

Are you hungry? Perhaps you would like a peanut butter sandwich and some milk. For some people – including two million US teenagers – such foods could cause a severe adverse reaction, or even death.

Potentially life-threatening allergies to food are common among children and are often outgrown over time, although allergies to peanuts or other nuts almost never disappear. Sometimes, an allergic person may suffer a reaction from simply touching or smelling the dangerous food.

An allergic reaction is a mistake made by the body. It may identify certain foods as harmful and try to attack the “threat” by releasing chemicals such as histamine, which cause an allergic reaction. The reaction may prove fatal if the vocal chords swell shut, leading to suffocation. Or the sufferer may experience an anaphylactic reaction, which results in a decrease in the flow of blood to the heart, lungs or brain, leading to seizures and, possibly, to death.

Allergic individuals are encouraged to wear medical alert bracelets, and carry anti-histamine for immediate injection if necessary. But recent research shows that teenagers often ignore these precautions partly because they want to conform and partly because they tend to minimise the risks. Certainly, living with a potentially fatal food allergy can be difficult for teenagers. They have to cope with telling new acquaintances about their allergy, eating carefully in restaurants, and reading labels on food packaging. And, since even kissing someone who has recently eaten a forbidden food can trigger a reaction, they may even have to ask their dates to brush their teeth before kissing!

So the next time you reach for some peanuts, remember those who can’t. Some people avoid peanuts because they are fattening or can cause skin problems, but for a small minority, those peanuts are a killer.

The truth about laughter - PAEG CLM

Why do we laugh? Most people believe that laughter involves humour, but it seems that laughter is really a serious business.
Dr Robert Provine conducted research in shopping centres in the USA to find out when and why people laugh. He found out that most laughter did not occur after jokes but in response to simple statements, such as “It was nice to meet you, too”. This suggests that laughter is not just a response to humour, but has got other, less obvious functions.
Sometimes we laugh to mask fear (think of a roller-coaster ride at an amusement park) or express relief, especially after a stressful experience. Often, laughter helps us to bond with other people – we rarely laugh out loud when we are alone. In many situations, laughter has got a positive social function, reinforcing social relationships within a group. However, laughter may sometimes have the opposite effect – people who are laughed at will probably feel excluded from the group. And sometimes laughter is about power: a boss may laugh in order to control the emotional mood of surrounding individuals.
A good laugh also has a physical effect. It obviously involves facial muscles, but may also involve arms, legs and torso, and so uses up calories. And laughing affects our breathing, relaxing arteries and lowering blood pressure. It even increases the amount of immune response cells in the blood, and increases blood flow to the brain, stimulating a feel-good response. So perhaps laughter really is the best medicine!
And so we will continue to laugh several times a day. Oh, do you know why the chicken crossed the road? Obviously, to get to the other side!

SAD - PAEG inglés CLM

If you’ve been feeling depressed recently, this could be due to the weather. Every winter, a number of people (between 1 to 9 percent of the US population) suffer from a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), also known as winter depression or the winter blues.

As days become shorter, many people experience mild “winter blues”, with symptoms such as fatigue, a desire to eat more, and an increased vulnerability to infection. With the coming of spring, these symptoms disappear. But some people, 70 to 80% of them women, are so affected by the lack of sunlight that they become unable to function. They experience severe disruptions in eating and sleeping patterns, mood changes, extreme loss of energy and depression.

SAD is not a new phenomenon. In the 6th century AD, symptoms of winter depression among Scandinavians were noted by a scholar called Jordanes. Even today, SAD is most commonly found in locations further away from the equator and nearer to the poles – up to 20% of Swedes may be affected. However, SAD was not diagnosed as a medical condition until the mid-1980s.

No one is certain what causes the condition, but some researchers believe that SAD is related to a disruption of our internal body clock. This “clock” controls the secretion of hormones that affect our daily functioning. Without sufficient sunlight, the clock does not reset itself. As a result, we may feel sleepy or hungry at inappropriate times, or suffer from mood changes. Luckily, most sufferers respond to light therapy, which involves exposure to super-bright light bulbs as a supplement to weak winter sun. These may be fitted inside a light-box, which is placed in front of the user, or in the visor of a cap, which is worn by sufferers for half an hour a day.

Chocolate is good for your heart

A study carried out in Germany over eight years has found that chocolate may be good for your heart. They compared how much chocolate was in the diet of almost 20,000 people to the number of heart attacks and strokes people had. Lead researcher Brian Buijsse said: "Chocolate is not as bad as we used to think, and may even lower the risk of heart disease and stroke." Mr Buijsse's team found that dark chocolate was the healthiest kind to eat; milk chocolate has fewer effects and white chocolate no effects.
The German study showed that people who ate the most chocolate reduced their risk of having a heart attack by 27 per cent. The risk of suffering a stroke was cut by 48 per cent. Nutrition experts believe that natural compounds in chocolate called flavonols are good for our heart. Flavonols also help reduce blood pressure. They are found in cocoa beans, and this is why dark chocolate, which has more cocoa, contains more of them than milk chocolate, which has more fat. Buijsse warns people not to suddenly eat lots of chocolate: "Eating higher amounts will most likely result in weight gain. If people start eating small amounts of chocolate, it should replace other high-calorie sweets or snacks."

(Adapted from http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com )

Britons abroad - PAEG inglés CLM

According to a recent report, almost one in 10 British nationals live overseas, at least 5.5 million permanently and a further 500,000 for part of the year, mainly because they own a second home. And researchers predict that as many as a million more will be moving to a foreign country in the next five years.

Britons have always emigrated, but the reasons have changed. Some early émigrés had little choice about the matter, from those who fled persecution in England to make a new life in America in the 17th century, to the convicts who were forcibly transported to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the same time, tens of thousands of others left Britain more voluntarily to find new fortunes and careers in the countries of the Empire, such as India and Africa.

Emigration peaked in 1966-67, when 468,000 people left the UK. That included those who had been attracted to a new life in Australia, in the decades after the Second World War, by the offer of cheap passages and the promise of jobs.

More than a third of those who are currently living abroad said they chose to go for professional and educational opportunities. A fifth had moved for family and personal reasons, one in four had gone for a better lifestyle and climate, while 11 per cent said they wanted to “have an adventure”.

According to the report most people live abroad for the positive attributes of their destination rather than negative opinions of life in the UK. It showed, too, that when house prices increase, so does emigration, while a stronger pound is also associated with high rates of movement abroad.

Some of them come back. More than half of highly skilled emigrants who returned to the UK in 2005 did so for professional reasons or because of visa requirements or their children’s education. However, there are signs that the rising cost of living in European countries such as Spain may be driving people back to Britain, particularly elderly people who run out of provision of care homes and help as found in the UK. Alongside them are the people who want to come back but cannot afford because of the high cost of living in Britain.

DataDots - PAEG inglés CLM

If you own a mobile phone or an iPod, you may worry that it will be stolen. These items are attractive to thieves, because they are easily transportable and difficult to trace.

But now a new method of identifying personal property makes tracing stolen items much easier because each item is marked with microscopic dots containing a laser-etched ID number. By checking an online register, police are able to identify owners of the stolen items once they have been recovered.

Identification numbers are not new, but what makes this system different is the fact that thousands of dots can be applied to any item. An Australian company, DataDot Technology, has developed a spray that can apply thousands of dots within minutes. Each dot is smaller than a pinhole and the identification number must be read using a magnifying glass under ultraviolet light.

DataDots are being used successfully on many different kinds of items from boats to jewellery. In the past, cars were attractive targets for thieves because parts could be sold separately. DataDots now make it possible for police to identify each part, and car theft in Australia has fallen dramatically. The dots can even be incorporated into thread and sewn into labels, to eliminate the possibility of being able to counterfeit brand-name clothing.

It is no wonder that DataDot Technology markets one particular product with the name DataDotDNA, because in fact the dots provide an inanimate object with identification as unique, and as permanent, as a person’s DNA or fingerprint.

An exercise routine - PAEG inglés CLM

When we talk about an exercise routine we tend to focus on the word 'exercise' rather than on 'routine', but regularity and constancy are the key elements to keeping fit, so make sure your exercise routine is part of your daily habits and vice versa: don't forget that physical chores such as housework or dog-walking, and leisure activities such as dancing or walking can all contribute to your keep fit routine.
It’s also important to focus on health because it's not all about losing weight but about being healthy. You may find that it’s easier to lose weight if the health benefits that go with it are your priority. On the other hand, don't aspire to quick changes. Those sudden losses of weight that occur when you skip meals aren't usually relevant. You'll do much better to adopt new and healthy habits, both in terms of diet and keep fit. Just like the tortoise and the hare, you'll find that “slow and steady wins the race.”
Finally, let other people help you. Although you are the one who has to keep to the routine, it'll be easier if you let your friends and family know what you're doing. That way, they'll be more likely to encourage you. If you've got a birthday or anniversary coming up, make it clear that flowers, a book or a spa gift voucher is a better present than chocolates.

Adapted from http://www.hellomagazine.com

Higher education in the US: What does it cost?

The first thing to know is that the costs of undergraduate study in the United States are different from school to school. Private colleges and universities generally cost more than public ones. Another thing to keep in mind is that not all students pay a school's "published price." Financial aid and scholarships may reduce the cost. Here are a few numbers for this school year from the College Board organization. The average published price for undergraduate study at a four-year public college is about seven thousand dollars. That is for students from "in state." Students from other states and international students often have to pay the highest prices. They pay an average of more than eighteen thousand dollars. And these prices are only for tuition and fees. Food, housing, books and supplies can add from ten to twelve thousand dollars a year.

American students often have to take out a loan to help pay for their education, so they try to save money by starting their education at a two-year public college, also known as a community college, where the average tuition this year is about two thousand five hundred dollars. A few American colleges provide free education, and others pay all first-year costs for their foreign students, but they are expected to pay one thousand dollars a year after that.

(Adapted from http://www.voanews.com)