Russia’s government has ridden to the rescue of children by banning a television ad that declares Father Christmas does not exist.
The Federal Anti-Monopoly Service ruled that the advertisement run by a network of electronics stores called Eto breaks a law against discrediting parents, reported AFP.
The advertisement declares bluntly “that Father Frost does not exist“, according to the report, referring to Russia’s version of the gift-bearing, red-coated old man.
“It means that parents are not telling the truth to children when they say Father Frost exists. In that way the ad induces negative relations between children and their parents,“ the service’s deputy director, Andrei Kashevarov, was quoted as saying.
Russia’s law on advertising bans “discrediting parents and educators, undermining children’s trust in them“.
Eto defended the ad, saying it was aimed at middle-aged people.

Boys regularly use images and ideas gleaned from the media, which may involve characters with special powers or weapons.

Boys in nursery schools should not be discouraged from playing with toy guns and other weapons, the UK government says.
In guidance for nurseries in England, the Department for Children, Schools and Families says staff should resist a “natural instinct“ to stop such play, BBC said.
It says role playing helps create the right conditions for boys’ learning and could help them become more engaged in education in the future.
Teachers have condemned the advice, saying toy guns “symbolize aggression“.
The guidance--entitled Confident, Capable and Creative: Supporting Boys’ Achievements--says “practitioners“ often find boys’ chosen type of play “more difficult to understand and value than that of girls“.
Boys regularly use “images and ideas gleaned from the media“ as starting points in play, the advice says, which “may involve characters with special powers or weapons“.
The guidance continues, “Adults can find this type of play particularly challenging and have a natural instinct to stop it.“
“This is not necessary as long as practitioners help the boys to understand and respect the rights of other children and to take responsibility for the resources and environment.“
Fostering these “forms of play“ helps to “enhance every aspect of their learning and development“, it adds.
Boys’ underachievement in schools has been a source of concern for teachers and ministers.
But the National Union of Teachers (NUT) has criticized the government’s advice on toy guns.
General secretary, Steve Sinnott said the problem with toy weapons was that they “symbolize aggression“.
Sinnott said, “The reason why teachers often intervene when kids have toy guns is that the boy is usually being very aggressive.“
Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, the national association of schoolmasters union of women teachers, said any nursery following the government’s advice risked angering parents.
“Many parents take the decision that their children won’t have toy weapons,“ she said.
She added, “I do not think schools should be encouraging boys to play with toy weapons.“

South Korea’s capital Seoul will expand payments to encourage couples to have more children and reverse the nation’s ageing society, the city government said.
Starting next month, families raising a third child aged six or younger will either get 100,000 won ($106) in cash every month or 50 percent of the fee for the child’s daytime care, the city said in a statement, reported AFP.
Payments were previously limited to families raising a third child aged three or younger and covered the entire fee for daytime care.
“Full-time housewives who raise their children at home, not at day care facilities, have complained the old policy is not fair,“ Choung Yun-Hee, a city official in charge of population policy said.
She added, “The new policy is also aimed at extending the period for the subsidy.“
After years of promoting family planning in the crowded nation of 49.4 million, the central government has become increasingly alarmed at the prospect of an ageing society--with a huge pensions bill and too few workers to sustain economic growth.
In mid-2006 it announced plans to spend a total of 18.9 trillion won ($20.1 billion) until 2010 to increase the number of nursery schools and provide more financial support for parents. The pro-birth policy seems to be paying off.
The fertility rate, or the average number of babies that a woman gives birth to during her lifetime, advanced to 1.13 in 2006 from a record low of 1.08 a year earlier.
In the first nine months of this year the number of births reached 365,492, up 8.5 percent year-on-year, the Health and Welfare Ministry said.

China’s top legislature ratified an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflicts.
The protocol stipulated, “Contracting parties should raise the minimum age for the voluntary recruitment of persons into their national armed forces from 15 years old as regulated by the convention.“
It said that the government shall take all feasible measures to ensure that “members of their armed forces who have not attained the age of 18 years do not take a direct part in hostilities“, Xinhua said.
Other obligations included drawing relevant laws and policies, publicizing the protocol, giving financial support and submitting working reports.
The weeklong 31st session of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislature, ended on Saturday.
The State Council said in its motion to the top legislature at the beginning of the session that the protocol did not contradict China’s current laws, policies and practice of recruiting soldiers.
The protocol, consisting of one foreword and 13 articles, was ratified by the 55th General Assembly of the United Nations in 2000 and came into effect in 2002. It aimed to join international efforts to protect children against armed conflicts.
China signed the protocol in March 2001. By July this year, it had been ratified by 117 nations.
Statistics showed that about 250,000 children were currently involved in armed conflicts around the world.

Some 42 percent of the youth sleep on the streets of New York.

At least 3,800 of the people in New York City’s homeless population are under age 25, according to a new survey.
A publicly funded report by the Empire State Coalition said a large number of those young people had been in state or city care at some point before they ended up on the street. About 28 percent had been in the foster care
system. Four in 10 had spent time in jail or a juvenile detention facility, AP said.
They survey found that while a majority of those young homeless went nightly to city shelters, 42 percent slept instead on the street, in the public transit system, or in empty buildings.

Kids painting on the sideline of the 8th Children Press Festival, (Dec. 29-31), in Tehran

Working parents can shake off any guilt about leaving their children in childcare all day, as a new Australian study says it helps their social development.
Preliminary results from the nationwide, long-term study found attending childcare in Australia generally had a positive effect on children’s social and emotional well being, wrote Nz.news.yahoo.com.
The results differ from similar large-scale studies conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom, but the researchers think the difference could be due to consistently higher standards of care offered locally.
Charles Sturt University early childhood education researcher Linda Harrison found children aged two or three who attended more hours in center-based childcare were more socially competent.
Associate Professor Harrison, said her preliminary findings showed no evidence that longer hours in care were linked to poor outcomes for children.
“In fact, the results of this large study indicate the reverse,“ Prof Harrison said.
She added, “Children who attended more hours in center-based childcare were more socially competent and children who received more hours in home-based childcare had fewer behavior problems.

Exactly a year ago, the chopped remains of some children of daily wage earners and migrants were recovered from a drain in Nithari, a village on the outskirts of the Indian capital.
For a country with a child population of over 445 million, of whom 126 million are less than five years old, the unearthing of 20 dismembered bodies of missing kids at the fag end of 2006 was a shocking revelation of how India neglects its children. Most of the children had been sexually abused and mutilated, IANS said.
One year later, India continues to be among the worst performers in the world in terms of ensuring that children have the basic right to survive, even though policies and processes for their protection and development are in place.
As per UNICEF’s Progress for Children report released in December 2007, an estimated 2.1 million children in India died before their fifth birthday in one year. Of these, one million deaths were of neonates, or less than 29-day-old infants, from preventable causes.
Globally, this means a quarter of all neo-natal deaths in the world occurred in India.
Among the surviving infants, 8.3 million infants were low weight babies (less than 2,500 grams), who got a disadvantaged start in life. Nearly 50 percent of these low weight babies died before their fifth birthday. In fact, about one-third of less-than-five-year-old underweight children in the world are in India.
The country has made significant advances towards eradication of polio but the program suffered setbacks in 2007 with the virus continuing to circulate and resurface in some states like Bihar.

Across
1- Another word for to come back home is toÉÉ.
2- ÉÉÉÉ.. is the meal we have in the evening
3- We have toÉÉÉÉÉ.water when we want to make tea.
4- There are twelve months in aÉÉ

Down
5-There are sixtyÉÉin an hour.