World Sleep Day: 10 tips for a good night's sleep

How important is a good night's sleep? 07:21

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(CNN)With over 100 types of sleep disorders to contend with, and around 40-50% of us experiencing insomnia at some point in our lives, it's vital to keep an eye on your sleep habits and seek help if you need it, according to Antonio Culebras, organizer of World Sleep Day 2016, a global initiative educating the public about sleep.

Many of us don't even know the basic facts about sleep. For instance, it should take you 10 to 15 minutes to fall asleep, with seven to nine hours being optimal for most of us, ideally at a temperature of around 60-67°F (16-19°C).

Tired all of the time? 07:58

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To celebrate World Sleep Day we asked you to share your top tips for a good night's sleep on Twitter. You replied with loads of ideas, from drinking a soothing cup of camomile tea, to going to the gym, or having sex. Here are our favorite ones and what the experts have to say about them ...

1. Turn off your gadgets

This is a good strategy according to Russell Foster, director of Oxford University's SCNi (Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute), as blue light emitted from smartphone, TV and computer screens can suppress melatonin (a hormone helping you sleep) and increase your alertness.

@cnni When I really want a good night's sleep, so I stop checking my iPhone at least 30 minutes before going to bed! #goodnight

— Gabriela Cestafe (@gabrcestafe) March 12, 2016

"What it probably will do is increase levels of alertness and therefore delay sleep onset ... it's a good rule of thumb to reduce light exposure," says Foster, advising to switch off your screens half an hour before bed and relax in a softly lit room.

You can even buy special light bulbs mimicking sunlight -- "white and color ambience" bulbs can gradually wake you up and send you to sleep by slowly brightening, dimming and alternating the light's frequency.

2. Avoid a bedtime tipple

However enjoyable nightcaps may be, unfortunately they could lead to more shallow sleep.

@cnni #WorldSleepDay
✔ ✈ mode📱
✔ Full-body stretches
✔ Dim all💡1hr before
✔ Read a good 📖
✔ ✒ thoughts in my journal
✔ No late-night 🍻's
✔ 😴

— Johnny Dangerously (@Enjoneer01) March 13, 2016

"Alcohol will actually disrupt some of the important things going on in the brain such as memory consolidation," says Foster.

A shallower sleep could lead to a negative cycle where you're dependent on sedatives to sleep, and stimulants such as caffeine or sugary food to stay awake during the day.

3. Get up early

If you're having trouble sleeping, getting up earlier could be the solution for you. It may seem brutal, but it can get results.

"Expose yourself to morning light as much as you can. That has been shown to stabilize the sleep/wake timing of the human body clock," says Foster.

You should also avoid napping, especially if it's for over 20 minutes, as waking up from deep sleep can make you feel even more groggy. By getting into a routine of getting up early and experiencing daylight your body clock adjusts to sleep earlier in the evenings, ridding you of those restless nights.

4. Forget your worries

Setting aside a quiet time in the evening to meditate, relax or pray was a popular response on Twitter.

It's important to let go of the worries that build up during the day as they can effect both the initiation and maintenance of sleep.

"The worries of the day should not be brought to bed," says Culebras, "A typical example here in the United States are people who work on their personal income tax and returns in bed ... of course they never match, so that's a typical thing that leads to insomnia."

5. Work out

Whether you're swimming, running, or practicing yoga, regular exercise can make for a great night's sleep.

It's best to work out around six hours before you go to bed as your body stays overheated for several hours after vigorous exercise, causing wakefulness.

"Exercise stimulates the nervous system, and it can cause insomnia if you exercise too late in the day," advises Culebras.

6. Work out a little more ...

For those of you with something a little spicier on your minds, sex was suggested as a good way to get a good night's sleep -- although bear in mind this could also be considered a form of exercise.

It's also included in World Sleep Day's Ten Commandments of Sleep, which are guidelines for attaining the best sleep possible. As Culebras explained, "Bed is good for two things: number one, sleep; and number two, sex with your bed partner. It is a type of activity that is helpful and accepted."

7. Have a hot drink

A hot (non alcoholic) beverage before bed is a great way to relax and prepare for sleep says Foster, as long as it doesn't contain caffeine.

"Try and wind down at least 30 minutes before you desired bedtime ... and go into a relaxed state, whatever that is for you -- it may be a hot milky drink, it may be reading a few pages of a novel."

Avoid coffee, chocolate and fizzy drinks at least six hours before you go to bed. Non caffeinated herbal teas are fine -- but don't drink too much or you may be making a midnight trip to the bathroom.

8. Listen to music

From soft new age sounds to gospel rhythms and sleep related podcasts, many of you drift off listening to music.

Soothing sounds can be a good way to doze off, but anything louder might have the opposite effect says Culebras.

"What is not as acceptable is loud rock and roll type music because that leads to excitation."

9. Only use medication as a last resort

While you may get results in the short term, it's important to be aware of unwanted effects and see your doctor if you're having trouble sleeping.

 No caffeine after 12 noon, at least one hour of exercise. For the rare emergency situations, melatonin.

— Matt Ciamaricone

"Do not abuse medications to sleep ... if you need them for a short period always do it under the supervision of your physician, do not auto medicate yourself," advises Culebras.

"Eventually all of them have what we call rebound insomnia, which means once you stop them you are going to have two or three days with very little sleep at night."

Most of the time insomnia is triggered by psychological problems such as stress, anxiety or depression. It's important to see your physician and treat the underlying issues rather than use pills or supplements for immediate respite.

"We don't have this knee jerk reaction of giving a sleeping pill to everyone who suffers from insomnia," says Culebras. "We try to determine why, and then we try to remove what's causing or perpetuating insomnia."

Source--cnn.

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Raid reunites trafficked tea plantation sisters

Delhi, India (CNN)Manju Gaur climbs the staircase with a fierce but steady determination. The building is decrepit, some walls crumbling, others caked in a thin, greasy film.

Just ahead of her is a row of police officers. Some from her native Assam state; others from this working class neighborhood in West Delhi.

A few steps behind her are a handful of social workers and coordinators from Bachpan Bachao Andolan, a local charity that has rescued thousands of children from human trafficking.

But Gaur -- a victim of trafficking herself -- is here on a much more personal mission: Finding her little sister.

Manju Gaur left her home village in rural tea-producing India to find her sister in Delhi.

Gaur was born in a rural village in Assam. Her parents worked on a tea plantation, one of hundreds scattered throughout the northern state, which produces more black tea than anywhere in the world.

Officially, tea workers in her village are supposed to earn around $2 U.S. a day, plus the equivalent of around $2 U.S more as in-kind services provided by their employer, like free housing, medical care, and primary education. With no advanced education and no hope of a better life, Gaur desperately wanted a way to help her parents make ends meet. Read the Tea Industry's full response to CNN's questions

She still remembers the day the agent came knocking on her door. She was just 14.

"One morning, he came to our house and said that he would put us to good work," she says.

The agent said he could arrange for Gaur to work for wealthy homeowners in Delhi where domestic servants are often employed to do everything from cooking to cleaning to looking after young children.

Tea workers earn less than $2 a day but few know how much it product sells for across the world.

Gaur says the agent lived in her own village and was well-known. She thought she could trust him.

"I was easily convinced" she says. "We're poor and live in a broken house without a rooftop. I thought I could earn and help my parents, and my sisters, so that we could study."

She was wrong.

In Delhi, she was kept in a house with other girls from Assam -- just like her -- all waiting to be sold as domestic labor. That's when she says the violence started.

"If the girls didn't listen," she explains, "they often hit them."

In one case, Gaur says the man who appeared to be the ringleader gave one of the girls a drink that rendered her nearly unconscious, and then took her to an empty room upstairs.

"She said that they got her too drunk and she couldn't do anything to stop him. I saw with my own eyes the number of girls they abused," Gaur says.

Manju guar shows off her home village in the tea picking Assam aera. 04:26

Throughout the ordeal, Gaur says she was too afraid to report anything to authorities. For one, she was new to the city and didn't know anybody. And more importantly, she didn't have anywhere else she could go.

Police in Assam say young girls from tea plantations are easy targets. They live in poverty, have very little education, and their parents are often saddled with debt.

Most are descendants of the original bonded laborers brought in from other parts of the country by British colonial rulers. They live in the same circumstances as they did more than a century ago, with the same impoverished lifestyles.

Police say young girls see placement agencies as a way to escape the cycle, lured by promises of good jobs and a steady income. Instead, they often find themselves sold as domestic labor or forced to work in the sex industry. Police say hundreds of girls in tea districts fall victim to traffickers every year. In the worst cases, fathers sell their own daughters as a way to escape poverty.

After she realized what was happening, Gaur says she pleaded with the men.

"I tried telling them that I wanted to go home," she says. "But [the agent] said that they had already spent a lot of money on me, and that my family had to repay all of it before they could let me go. And so, I had to stay."

Final processing at the tea plant before it is shipped to market where prices rise or fall drastically.

She wound up being sent to a middle-class home, working as a domestic servant. There was no abuse, she says, but there was also no money. Her employers told her they sent her monthly salary directly to the placement agency. She never saw a single rupee. She says she worked around the clock, but never entertained the thought of leaving.

"I was new there and didn't know anyone," she says. "Who could I have possibly escaped with?"

After a year, Gaur says she mustered up the courage to explain her situation to a friendly neighbor, who gave her enough money for a train ticket back home. She didn't tell the homeowners she was going. She just took her things and left.

Gaur says life in her village in Assam is still better than working for the trafficker, but now she has another problem. Her sister, Aarti, has been lured away by traffickers. The last time Gaur spoke with her on the phone, she was in tears.

For help, Manju Gaur has turned to Bachao Bachpan Andolan, or the BBA. Its founder, Kailash Satyarthi, is a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his work in combating child labor and trafficking.

The BBA has arranged to bring Gaur to Delhi, where they've traced the trafficker's location to a non-descript apartment complex.

As police barge through the doors, calling out the trafficker by name, they have no idea what they'll find.

Gaur is led by police, room by room, asking if she recognizes anyone. She doesn't, and when they turn the corner to the next room, they find something that unfortunately is commonplace in raids like this.

India's tea producing heart is beautiful but poverty can drive tea workers into the arms of traffickers.

Three young girls, all huddled in a corner. They look frightened and shell-shocked. They tell police they're all from Assam, and that they were lured to Delhi by a man who said he worked for a placement agency. They say they were told he received 15,000 rupees -- just over $200 -- for each girl he brought in. But they haven't seen any money.

"He told us he gave my mummy the money," the youngest girl says.

Upstairs, police finally nab the trafficker, a man with a slight pot belly. When they bring him down, he appears unremorseful, insisting the girls came to Delhi of their own free will

Outside the police station, CNN Freedom Project confronts the trafficker with accusations that he was exploiting the girls

"They were not bought" he says. "We take a 35,000 (rupees) service charge for an 11-month agreement. Those who bring them from the village get 25,000 for an 11-month base.

"Some girls' husbands bring them. Some (girls') fathers bring them. They also get a commission.

Later, inside the police station, they prepare the formal charges, including bonded labor and cruelty to a child. While the suspect awaits, he cuts a deal with the police. He agrees to tell them where Manju's sister, Aarti, is working.

Two hours later, a smiling Aarti appears, accompanied by police. Gaur runs into her arms, with the kind of hug that only a loving sister can give.

Vijay Gaur, Manju and Aarti's father, says the offers from human traffickers can seem tempting.

She knows there's a long road ahead. Aarti will be questioned by police and social workers, sent off to a nearby clinic for a mandatory health inspection, then spend weeks rehabilitating at one of the BBA's shelters for rescued children.

But still, for Manju, it's still a victory. Aarti is free. They're together again. For now, that's all that matters.

Source- edition.cnn.

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Australian leader says he plans to call rare early election

SYDNEY –  Australia's prime minister says he intends to call a rare early election, with the nation likely to head to the polls in July amid waning popularity for the ruling conservative party.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's comments on Tuesday all but confirmed that Australia was on track to hold its first early election since 1987. The early election is called a "double dissolution" because both the House of Representatives and the Senate are dissolved.
Turnbull has until May 11 to officially announce an early election. He had previously said he would call for a double dissolution if the Senate failed to pass government legislation that would create a construction industry watchdog. The Senate rejected the bill for the second time on Monday, providing the trigger Turnbull had been waiting for.
Source- foxnews

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Turkey: 38 arrested for 'framing' Fenerbahce with scandal

ANKARA, Turkey –  Turkey's state-run news agency says authorities have detained 38 people suspected of "framing" soccer team Fenerbahce's players and directors in a match-fixing investigation in 2011, as the government presses ahead with a crackdown on supporters of a U.S.-based Muslim cleric.
Anadolu Agency says the suspects, including former police chiefs, lawyers and at least one journalist, were detained Tuesday in raids in 28 cities.
Several Fenerbahce officials were arrested and tried as part of the match-fixing scandal but were acquitted in a re-trial last year. The club has long maintained that the case was orchestrated by prosecutors and police affiliated with Fethullah Gulen's moderate Islamic movement.
The government accuses Gulen of attempting to overthrow it and has been clamping down on his supporters and seizing newspapers and businesses associated with him.
Source- foxnews

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Morocco: one of the world's oldest libraries is renovated

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  This April 14, 2016, photo shows the reading room of the Al-Qarawiyyin mosque in Fez, Morocco. Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman, the al-Qarawiyyin library is wrapping up a careful restoration project and King Mohamed VI is expected to preside over the reopening. But authorities haven't decided whether the public will be able to view its treasured Islamic manuscripts, or whether that privilege will be limited to university researchers. (AP Photo/Samia Errazouki) (The Associated Press)

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FEZ, Morocco –  The settling dust from renovations and the banging of tools aren't ideal sights and sounds for a library — but this is no ordinary library.
Founded 12 centuries ago by a pioneering woman and nestled in the old medina of Fez, Morocco's University of al-Qarawiyyin library is one of the world's oldest libraries, home to unique Islamic manuscripts treasured by historians. Yet it's been largely hidden from the public. The architect leading its restoration, Fez native Aziza Chaouni, didn't even know it existed until she was asked to work on it.
King Mohammed VI is expected to inaugurate its reopening soon. Chaouni is hoping it will mark an ideological change, too, and open to the public for the first time in its long history. Until now, the privilege of using the library has been limited to scholars who seek formal permission, and authorities haven't decided yet whether to change that.
From calligraphic designs on the walls to ceramic patterns on the floors and wooden carvings on the ceilings, the fingerprint of almost every ruling dynasty since the 9th century can be seen in the architecture.
A devout and wealthy Muslim woman from the Tunisian town of Kairaouan, Fatima al-Fihri, provided the endowment for building al-Qarawiyyin in the 9th century. Originally a mosque, it expanded in the 10th century to become a university, Abdelmajid El-Marzi, imam and administrator of the mosque, told The Associated Press.
The library houses a collection of manuscripts written by renowned thinkers from the region, including Ibn Khaldun's "Muqadimmah." The 14th-century historical work spent six months on loan to the Louvre Museum in Paris during the renovations, library curator Abdelfattah Bougchouf said.
Other texts include a 9th-century Quran written in Kufic calligraphy, and a manuscript on the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence by Ibn Rochd, also known as Averroes.
The manuscripts are now kept in a secure room, with strict temperature and humidity control. They weren't always kept like this, however.
"The original manuscript room door had four locks," Bougchouf told The AP. "Each of those keys was kept with four different people. In order to open the manuscript room, all four of those people had to physically be there to open the door."
Now, he chuckled, "all of that has been replaced with a four-digit security code."
A previous renovation and expansion effort in 1940 opened up the library to foreigners and non-Muslims by creating a separate entrance. Before that, the only way to access the library was via the mosque. Non-Muslims aren't allowed to enter the Qarawiyyin mosque to this day.
"It was a sign of tolerance," Abdelfattah said.
Since ascending to the throne in 1999, King Mohammed VI has called for restorations at Qarawiyyin.
Architect Chaouni said she was pleasantly surprised when the Culture Ministry approached her in 2012 to work on the project — especially in a field dominated by men.
"I knew about the mosque, but never even knew there was a library there," she said, despite growing up in the city.
She specializes in restoring old buildings in a sustainable fashion, and is also trained as an engineer, with degrees from Harvard and Columbia universities.
The restoration is fixing a plumbing issue that increasingly threatened to drench the rare manuscripts in sewage water.
Chaouni is also lobbying for opening a public exhibition room for the first time - calling it "the biggest challenge of my soul" during the restoration project.
The Culture Ministry accepted the idea but bureaucratic control over the site shifted to the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs. Chaouni worries that this shift will squash her efforts. Authorities are also concerned about the cost of keeping the previous manuscripts secure.
Another way to improve access to the manuscripts is to digitize them, which the library has been doing, and about 20 percent are now available in electronic form.

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Journalist faces charges in Russia-occupied Crimea

MOSCOW –  The prosecutor general for Russian-occupied Crimea says security services are pressing charges against a Crimean journalist for undermining Russia's territorial integrity.
Shortly after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, the parliament passed a law making it a criminal offense to question Russia's territorial integrity, which also means opposing the occupation.
The prosecutor general's office said in a statement on Tuesday that the Federal Security Service is pressing charges against an unidentified journalist for reports where he or she "called for the isolation of the peninsula." This could be the first criminal case for denouncing the occupation.
Independent media have been virtually banned in Crimea since the annexation and the few reporters who work for independent media outlets use pen names to hide their identities.

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The Latest: More rescuers arrive in earthquake-hit Ecuador

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  An air force soldier stands guard trying to prevent looting in the earthquake ravaged business district of Manta, Ecuador, Monday, April 18, 2016. A Saturday night quake left a trail of ruin along Ecuador’s Pacific Ocean coast. Hundreds died and thousands are homeless. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd) (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd) (The Associated Press)

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MANTA, Ecuador –  The Latest on the deadly earthquake in Ecuador (all times local):
3:30 a.m.
Ecuador's foreign minister says more international rescuers are heading to the country's disaster zone of flattened buildings to help in the race against time to find survivors from a powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake
Guillaume Long tweeted that 654 search experts from other nations were on the ground late Monday and that more were expected to arrive Tuesday — bringing to 13 the nationalities involved in the rescue.
The government reported Monday that the official death count had increased to 413 and was expected to rise further in the days ahead. Among the dead were an American and two Canadians.
Complicating rescue efforts is the lack of electricity in many areas, meaning noisy power generators must be used, making it harder to hear people who might be trapped beneath rubble.
More than 2,000 people were injured.
Spain's Red Cross said as many as 5,000 people might need temporary housing because of destroyed homes and 100,000 need some sort of aid.
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