Jovens bilingues com desempenho pior na escola

Researcher Reza Kormi-Nouri's study shows that bilingual children have a linguistic head start when they first go to school, but fall behind as they get older. His study, published in the 'Bilingualism: Language and Cognition' journal, runs counter to previous previous findings in the field.
"It's surprising because until now we believed it was the other way around: that bilingual children do worse in the first years of school but then catch up," said Kormi-Nouri in a release.
Kormi-Nouri carried out two types of tests in Iran on bilingual and monolingual children aged between 7 and 12-years-old. All of the children were tested in Persian, the language used in school. At home, the bilingual children spoke either Turkish or Kurdish.
The children were first given three minutes to come up with as many words as possible starting with a certain letter or relating to a particular category.
The younger bilingual children matched the single-language children in the letter test and scored higher in the category test. As they grew older, however, the bilingual children were overtaken, and Kormi-Nouri noted that the discrepancy widened with age.  [...]

Ver notícia no The Local

Cristãos coptas do Egipto sofrem mais ataques

Copts in Egypt are begging for Egyptian Armed Forces protection today after a Muslim mob of several thousand attacked their church in the village of Soul, about 30 kilometers from Cairo, last night. The Church of St. Mina and St. George was torched, and its clergy are unaccounted for. The fire department and security forces failed to respond to Coptic pleas for help during the arson attack.

According to a report from the Washington-based Coptic American Friendship Association, the mob, chanting “Allahu Akbar,” pulled down the church’s cross and detonated a handful of gas cylinders inside the structure. The ensuing fire destroyed the church and all its contents, including the sacred relics of centuries-old saints. It is reported that a romantic relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman, which sharia forbids, and the refusal of the woman’s father to kill her to restore the community’s “honor,” aroused the Muslim ire. An account of this incident is here. (I also received a message from a Coptic friend that this week members of the Muslim Brotherhood, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” stormed a Christian school on Thabit Street in downtown Asyut and attempted to take it over. Egyptian security forces, including an army unit, intervened and routed out the Brotherhood members. The school had been built by Presbyterian missionaries in the early 1900s, and is now directed by Presbyterian Pastor Naji. Christian leaders from this southern area expressed a deepening sense of insecurity as the Muslim Brotherhood emerges from the underground.) [...]

Ver notícia no National Review Online

Ministro (cristão) paquistanês das minorias assassinado

Shahbaz Bhatti was Pakistan’s Minister for Minorities and today he paid the price for belonging to the most despised Pakistani minority of all: Christians. He was shot dead in his car for the crime of campaigning to reform the country’s medieval blasphemy laws. Those laws are used to make life hell for Christians – but that doesn’t seem to bother Britain and the EU, which pour millions of pounds into Pakistan and don’t make a big deal out of anti-Christian persecution.
I don’t recall an enormous fuss being made, either, when Egypt last week acquitted the suspected murderers of six Coptic Christians mown down as they left Mass in Nag Hammadi in January. That was the “justice” handed out to Christians in Mubarak’s Egypt. If the Muslim Brotherhood seize power, this sort of case won’t even come to court.
Thank God, then, for our allies in Afghanistan. Following intense and secretive diplomatic pressure, they have magnanimously decided not to execute a man who converted to Christianity. So, you see, we did bring freedom to the Afghan people after all!

Ver notícia no Telegraph