Bread NEWS 08 - 'Church Bomber in Nepal Repents, Admits India Link' & 'Spanked kids do better later in life'

  Disillusioned with Hindu nationalists, the leader of a militant Hindu extremist group told Compass that contact with Christians in prison had led him to repent of bombing a Catholic church here in May 2008. Ram Prasad Mainali, the 37-year-old chief of the Nepal Defense Army (NDA), was arrested on Sept. 5 for exploding a bomb in the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, in the Lalitpur area of Kathmandu on May 23. The explosion killed a teenager and a newly-married woman from India’s Bihar state and injured more than a dozen others. ------------------- - Flying in the face of conventional wisdom, a psychologist has concluded that preschoolers who were spanked by their parents are more likely to grow up happier and be more successful than kids who have never been spanked, the National Post reported.   Dr. Marjorie Gunnoe, a professor of psychology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, believes there is not enough evidence to prove that getting spanked harms most children. She presented her findings at a conference of the Society for Research in Child Development.    “The claims that are made for not spanking children fail to hold up,” Gunnoe told the Daily Mail (UK). But neither does she advocate that parents resort to it indiscriminately. “I think of spanking as a dangerous tool,” she said, “but then there are times when there is a job big enough for a dangerous tool. You don’t use it for all your jobs.”