Word: birthed
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...mood in Israel today is more pensive than jubilant. The birth of Israel was a desperate affair; it arose from Holocaust ashes, and Arab countries vowed to carry on where the Nazis had left off. Sixty years ago, Israelis didn't have the luxury of undergoing an identity crisis...
Sixty years since its birth, Israel still lives in peril and without peace. Israelis worry about the threat of a nuclear attack from Iran. They worry that Hizballah will pepper them with more missiles launched from southern Lebanon and that Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza will inevitably land in a crowded Negev school yard. And they worry that Palestinian suicide bombers will once again explode in the buses and cafès of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. "We used to think that every year we survived was a miracle, a gift," an Israeli friend confides gloomily, "but now all I think...
Protestant and Roman Catholic Christmas shoppers scurried warily past one another in drab, sooty Belfast, grimly preparing to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. Without much conviction, carolers sang Joy to the World outside Belfast's city hall, where a Union Jack hung limply from its pole and a signboard listed the latest number of military and civilian deaths?1,140 since 1969. Even the seasonal slogan jointly adopted by Ulster's Catholic and Protestant church leaders had a desperate quality about it: "For God's sake, let peace begin in our land this Christmas time...
Cerebral blood volume is not the only thing responsible for this brain-boosting. Also at work is the fact that exercise increases what's known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that stimulates the birth of new brain cells and then helps them differentiate and connect. BDNF also enhances neural plasticity, the process by which the brain changes in response to learning. In diseases like Alzheimer's, depression, Parkinson's and dementia, BDNF levels are low. In people who exercise, BDNF levels rise...
...hard to imagine more ill-fated births than those of Kerstin, Stefan and Felix Fritzl. In 1984, their father, Josef, the authoritarian patriarch of an already sprawling Austrian family, locked his teenage daughter Elisabeth into a converted nuclear shelter underneath his house in the town of Amstetten so he could rape her at will. His incestuous abuse led to the birth of seven children, three of whom he kept imprisoned underground with their mother. Until April 26, when Austrian authorities discovered Fritzl's lair, reality for those children stretched no further than their dank, windowless confines, their mother's memories...