commentary on killing of a bull

I agreed with the author that it is wrong to think that it is not our problem. If we allowed such a thing to happen in other parts of the world, it is like allowing human race to abuse animals in whatever ways and wherever they liked. Animals have the rights to live and not be abused. We belonged to the same world and should treasure every lives instead of taking lives.

Animal Abuse: The Killing of a Bull

On 11 September 2001, in Tordesillas (Valadolid, Spain), a bull will be tormented and murdered in a show called "Toro de Vega", just as the one in this picture was tortured and murdered last year. This "show" can be described as: lots of people armed with medieval spears, chasing one bull in the fields and sticking the spears in any part of his body till he is dead. In the year 2000, the animal had one spear stuck completely through his body during 35 minutes till his death while the crowd still continued sticking him with more spears. And, church silence has been promoting this violence.

If the world, and particularly the church would begin to speak out against these atrocities, these types of blood sports would end almost over night; but the church's silence is encouraging their continuation. To take pleasure in the death or suffering of any living being is un-Biblical. The church is supposed to be the moral leader of the community and the world. Its role is not to sanitize violence. To accept torturing an animal for 35 minutes and say nothing against it, is to follow the devil and not the teachings of our Father in Heaven. What is happening here is nothing more than sadistic murder. These people are no better than a lynch mob; in fact, they are probably worse, because they are engaging in torture and well as a killing.

By this time, we suppose that some of our readers are saying, "This is in Spain, and we are not. It's their problem." It isn't only their problem. It's the problem of the whole world, for if we allow this to be done to a bull in Spain, we are not far from allowing such things to be done to humans in another part of the world. Evil is evil no matter where it occurs. The same God who is over them is over all of us, and the same Holy Spirit is convicting us of the sins of humanity. The whole world needs to stand up and shout, "STOP! This must end, now, and forever." As long as we are silent in any part of the world, we are just as guilty of torturing this animal as if we had thrust in a spear with our own hands.

This isn't a "cultural thing" or innocent fun. It's sadistic murder, and it's about time we began calling these atrocities by their proper names.

Our silence is like shooting ourselves in the foot, because we are sanitizing violence in our society.

REVIEW

I do agree with this writer that this is not a problem in Spain only, but the world's problem.
I believe the issue to animal abuse is pressing and should be dealt with seriously. In fact, it includes the world's efforts to ensure animal abuse cases are not rising any further. With everybody's efforts, it will take lesser effort to keep the situation under control. Imagine having government officials making rounds to check cases of animal abuse. Rather, each and every citizen make their efforts to not abuse animals. With that, cost and time can be saved.
Taking an example from green efforts. In order to save Earth, everyone has a role to play. Likewise, animals are everywhere in the world. Hence, world efforts are neccessary for easy control of animal abuse. Thus, animal abuse is a world's problem.

I do agree with the writer's stand on the fact that the church should not be promoting violence.
I do find it ironic. A church should be inculcating correct values into their followers. Instead, this church is harming animals, using cruel ways to do so. Thus, it has defeated the purpose of a church and bring more harm then good. Perhaps, it is similar to Islam, the misunderstanding of Islamic teachings, hence abusing mankind in Islam countries.

Commentary

I disagree with the author's claim that schools are producing illiterate students that are unable to communicate efficiently with effect of the abolishment of debate competitions and alocution lessons. It is indeed unfair to make this claim as there are alternative ways to develop and nurture communication skills in the children of today. Such others would include critical thinking exercises to be creative in their arguments against controversial issues and a wider emphasis on argumentative essays that is equivalent to having a debate, with pen against paper. Although students can further develop their communication skills by utilizing debates as suggested by the author, I feel it is imperative for them to be skilful at substantiating their ideas first before they take the next step to delivering a debate. As they say, you should learn to walk before you run. In Singapore, in our pre-university days we focus more on our writing skills as we built our fundamentals in communication in secondary school. Also, to spice things up, interclass debate sessions are held to let students gauge their previous performance with their current as well as learn from their mistakes to strive for excellence. Doesn't all this build on their literacy and communication skills? Thus the author is delusional to make such a claim.

The author also mentioned that we are devaluing knowledge as there is no requirement to remember anything. I disagree with his claim. In the past, we place heavy emphasis on rote learning as the examinations then were solely on memory. This might be what he considered to be a method of remembering, however in reality this would be very ineffective as people study without understanding how the knowledge can be applied into life. Progressively, they have been changing the questions asked in the examination that would require more application rather than regurgitation. This would then test on their understanding and critical thinking on the implications of the question, which in my opinion, actually adds value to it. The American system of assessment takes into account every piece of work throughout the semester. Thus, there is a greater scope of the topic covered as this extends out into projects over the internet. The internet is a fountain of knowledge that provides knowledge to people from people with different perspectives. As such, students are able to introduce new material into the classroom, whilst the past they were restricted to the teacher's range of knowledge. In Singapore, we are able to utilize the two forms of assessments, with a larger focus over the examinations. We feel that it is essential for students to have a greater understanding of the subject, so bringing in the occasional project works for greater analysis of the topics is effective. However, as ultimately what defines the future is the examination grades, we are trained consistently on scoring for the GCE A levels. Thus, the author is not right to say we are devaluing knowledge, merely passing it to the later generation differently.

Schools producing a generation of illiterates, says David Starkey

he television historian David Starkey said that head teachers should bring back debating competitions and elocution lessons because schools were producing a generation that was illiterate and could not communicate properly.

Narrow-minded bean-counters and the internet had taken over education, he added, suggesting that Britons in the time of Henry VIII had a more rounded schooling and more competent government.

“We are dangerously devaluing knowledge and learning. In much of the national curriculum there is no requirement to remember anything at all. The notion that you need to hold knowledge in your head seems to have been forgotten,” he told head teachers at a conference in Brighton.

He said that pupils “were being fed on a diet of sub-A-level accountancy” and that too many school-leavers were taking “narrow professional degrees such as law or finance”.

“In the United States, anyone going to the top would not dream of doing something so narrow as a first degree — you would do a broad liberal arts degree, then specialise,” he said.

His comments were seen as a swipe at the Government’s decision to withdraw funding for courses taken by anyone who already holds an equivalent or higher-level qualification.

Dr Starkey, whose recent series, Henry VIII: Mind of a Tyrant, looked at the King’s early life, said: “It’s not good enough to say you can look things up on the web. You can produce connections only if you know facts.”

He criticised schools for not stretching the brightest pupils and pitting them against each other. The system was less likely to identify and nurture clever children from poor backgrounds, he said.

“We are producing a generation that is not only illiterate but practically uncommunicative. Elocution competitions should be reintroduced. It is terrific training, along with acting in plays.

“There was a generosity in Henry’s curriculum with music, poetry, physical education and the proper speaking of modern languages.”

The Recession’s Green Lining : A global downturn is doing what activists couldn't: closing dirty factories.

To savvy snowboarders, Baikalsk has long been the beautiful resort where visitors are so few you can feel as though you own the mountain, at least temporarily: for about 5,000 rubles ($175), you can have exclusive use of one of the six long runs for the day and never see another soul as you schuss through forests. Of course, you've had to tolerate a smell that seemed to be a blend of rotten cabbage and New Jersey Turnpike. For in addition to the resort, this town on Siberia's Lake Baikal—the oldest, largest and deepest freshwater lake in the world—is home to the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill, which has been belching foul-smelling sulfates into the air and chlorides, phenols and other chemicals into the lake since it was built during the Cold War. The pollution killed plants, crabs and fish and threatened the world's only freshwater seal, the earless nerpa. Environmentalists have been trying to shut down the mill since 1964, getting precisely nowhere. But where greens failed, the global recession succeeded all too well. In November, the plant ceased production. "The economic crisis," says Marina Rikhvanova, the head of the environmental group Baikal Wave, worked "like magic."

It is no coincidence that some of the dirtiest industrial operations are falling victim to the global recession. Over the past two decades, much of the world's manufacturing moved to where pollution standards are little more than mild suggestions. Since small, corner-cutting, inefficient facilities tend to both flout pollution laws and be most vulnerable to a sudden drop in demand, the global recession has hit such operations especially hard. Thousands of factories in China's Pearl River Delta have shut their doors since late last year, for instance; output of autos, electronics and other goods from factories in Mexico's Ciudad Juárez, Monterrey and Toluca has fallen so sharply that the amount of cargo trucked across the U.S. border has dropped 40 percent. In India, enough small steel-rolling mills around Delhi have closed that levels of sulfur dioxide (which forms acid rain) fell 85 percent in October 2008 compared with a year earlier. The recession is bringing a green dividend in the developed world, too. Reduced economic activity is projected to cut Europe's emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief man-made greenhouse gas, by 100 million tons in 2009, and the United States' by about the same amount.

Recession is not exactly a long-term environmental strategy, obviously. The challenge is to use the downturn to deemphasize manufacturing in favor of cleaner economic activity, and to reengineer what survives so that when the economy revs up it's not at the environment's expense. Even world-class polluters get it. In China, as factories seek lines of credit to see them through the downturn, local governments are "less likely to help companies that are considered major polluters," says economist Deng Yupeng of Dongguan University.

At Baikal, the post-recession economy is poised to undergo a more radical shift, from pulping trees to serving tourists. One weekend in February the mountain was packed with skiers and snowboarders. Resort manager Yury Shiriak says that in December they had 7,000 visitors, compared with the usual 1,000. "Baikalsk will slowly transfer from an industrial place hated by ecologists into a tourist paradise," he predicts. It will help that the air and water are already cleaner. Only three months after the mill closed, locals already noticed a change. "We are so used to pollution, to the smell of rotting cabbage," said Andrei Pylukh, an artist. "The fresh air feels unusual. I see so many more birds on the lake and in my garden." The challenge for Baikalsk is to invest in hotels, restaurants and other labor-intensive, less-polluting businesses so the mill remains a permanent victim of the green recession but the town—which lost 2,300 jobs when the mill closed—doesn't.

The impact of China's slowing economic growth (6.8 percent in the fourth quarter last year but 13 percent in 2007) has hit hardest in cities in the export-heavy south such as Dongguan. There, roughly 10 percent of the 22,000 factories have closed since last year. In Zhejiang province, just south of Shanghai, at least 60,000 small factories are shuttered. Survivors have slashed production and grounded fleets of diesel-fume-belching trucks. As a result, streams where factories dumped their waste are getting cleaner and the air is less smoggy. In 2008, the number of days with dangerous levels of air pollution in Dongguan fell by 65 from the year before, mostly in the final months of the year. "When there's less work, there's less release of sewage and trash, so environmental pressures have eased," says environmental scientist Liu Zhiming of Dongguan University of Technology.

But as in Baikalsk, the challenge is what to do when orders pick up again. If factories ramp up to 2007 production and pollution levels, the time-out offered by the green recession will have been wasted. There are hints that that might happen. Factory owners in China and elsewhere argue that their top priority should be job preservation, and that spending money on pollution controls or switching to renewable energy has to wait. In Guangdong province, factory owners are lobbying the government to roll back environmental standards that, they argue, have made them uncompetitive with Southeast Asia. And factory managers, under pressure to cut costs, know they can reap easy savings by turning off smokestack scrubbers and dumping waste rather than treating it.

But these may be the last gasps of dying industries. There are also signs that China, which has acknowledged that environmental damage had become a drag on the economy, may use the recession to retool part of its manufacturing sector. Some of a 4 trillion–yuan ($585 billion) stimulus package is targeted at projects that will improve energy efficiency, including wind and solar energy to power the "green economy" that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao called for. The Ministry of Environmental Protection reportedly rejected 11 projects because they consumed too much energy or would have caused too much pollution.

For some victims of the recession, using the downturn to institute greener practices is more of a challenge. About two thirds of Brazil's 200 million head of cattle graze in the Amazon where virgin forest once stood, making cattle the single biggest cause of deforestation there. Now falling beef prices (down 51 percent over the past 12 months) plus the shortage of farm credit have done what "save the rainforest" campaigns didn't: give Amazonia a reprieve. "The economic downturn is a natural brake on forest destruction," says Carlos Nobre, a climatologist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research. The rate of deforestation from last November through January, the institute just announced, fell 70 percent from the same period a year before. The environment minister believes that's a result of greater enforcement, however, not of the recession's effect on ranchers. But you can say this for the downturn: it's much easier to enforce forest-protection laws when ranchers aren't all that eager to chop down the jungle.

With Anna Nemtsova In Baikalsk, Craig Simons in Dongguan, Duncan Hewitt In Shanghai, Mac Margolis in Rio De Janeiro, Sudip Mazumdar in Delhi and Malcolm Beith in Mexico City

© 2009

Toppling Kim Jong Il

Bargaining with Pyongyang is pointless. Regime change is the only option; here's how to make it work.

By Andrei Lankov | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 18, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Apr 27, 2009

Over the past few months, North Korea's behavior has grown unusually belligerent, even by Pyongyang's prickly standards. The North has cut relations with Seoul, tested a new missile, and, after the U.N. condemned the launch last week, threatened to withdraw forever from further nuclear-disarmament talks and restart its weapons program.
Much of the recent commentary has suggested that these moves are a ploy—an attempt by North Korea to sweeten a coming deal with the United States—and that ultimately, Pyongyang will give up its provocations and open to the outside world, as China has. This is a dangerous fantasy. Kim Jong Il and his circle know that exposing their subjects to foreign influence would be fatal to the regime. So they're likely to continue clamping down and provoking the West. There's only one way for outsiders to stop Kim's aggression: regime change.
North Korea will never follow the Chinese path because its circumstances are profoundly different. The biggest factor is the existence of a rich and free South Korea across the border. Southerners share the same language and culture as the dirt-poor North, but their per capita income is at least 20 times higher—and at the moment, average North Koreans are ignorant of the gap. The regime's self-imposed isolation is so draconian that even owning a tunable radio set is a crime. If North Korea started reforming, it would be flooded with information about South Korea's prosperity. This would make North Koreans less fearful of the authorities and more likely to push for unification with their far richer cousins, just as the East Germans pushed to rejoin the West.

Knowing all this, North Korea's rulers will do whatever they can to maintain control. Given the weakness of its Stalinist economy, this means coming up with new ways to squeeze aid from the outside world. In order to keep the money flowing—with as few conditions as possible—Kim is likely to continue engaging in risky brinkmanship and blackmail. To survive, Pyongyang has to be, or appear to be, dangerous and unpredictable.
But such tactics could easily lead to disaster. The only way to avoid this is to replace the regime.
That's easier said than done: Military options are unthinkable. And sanctions won't work either, since China and Russia are unlikely to cooperate fully. Even if Moscow and Beijing did go along, the only likely result would be a lot of dead farmers. North Korea's great famine of 1996–99 demonstrated that the locals do not rebel when oppressed, even under terrible circumstances. North Koreans are terrified, disorganized and still largely unaware of any alternative to their misery.

But there's a way to change that equation. The past 15 years have seen the spontaneous growth of grassroots markets in the North and partial disintegration of state controls. Rumors of South Korean prosperity have begun to spread, assisted by popular smuggled DVDs of South Korean movies. The world's most perfect Stalinist regime is starting to disintegrate from below.
The best way to speed things up is for Washington and its allies to push for active engagement with the North in the form of development aid, scholarships for North Korean students and support for all sorts of activities that bring the world to North Korea or take North Koreans outside their cocoon. Such exchanges are often condemned as a way of appeasing dictators, but the experience of East Europe showed that an influx of uncensored information from the outside is deadly for a communist dictatorship.
Pyongyang understands the danger of such exchanges, but it needs money and technology badly enough that it might allow them nonetheless—so long as they fill its coffers and don't look too dangerous. This is even more the case when exchanges ostensibly benefit members of the elite. For example, a scholarship program to study overseas would go mostly to students from top families. Yet this wouldn't limit its impact: experience of the outside world will change these young people and turn some of them into importers of dangerous information. A similarly small step helped to unravel the Soviet Union: the first group of students allowed to study in the U.S., in 1957, numbered just four and were carefully selected. Yet two grew up to become leading reformers, and one of them—Alexander Yakovlev—is often credited as having been the real mastermind behind perestroika.

This approach will take time, but it's the only one likely to work. The sole way to make North Korea less dangerous is to change its government. And the only way to do that is to change the North Korean people themselves.

Lankov is an associate professor of North Korean history at Kookmin University in Seoul and travels frequently to the North.

Review
I disagree with the writer that regime change is the only option to make North Korea less dangerous. The writer said that the only way to overthrow the North Korea's communist government is through it's people. However, as shown by the great famine of 1996-1999, many of the North Koreans would rather die than oppose the government. Hence, the method the writer proposed may not work. Also, if Kim Jong II felt that his rule is threatened, he may take radical actions and start a nuclear warfare with the United States.

North Korea is currently one of the world's top ten producers of fresh fruit and the 15th largest producer of apples in the world. It has substantial natural resources and is the world's 18th largest producer of iron and zinc, having the 22nd largest coal reserves in the world. It is also the 15th largest fluorite producer and 12th largest producer of copper and salt in Asia. Other major natural resources in production include lead, tungsten, graphite, magnesite, gold, pyrites, fluorspar and hydropower. Therefore, I disagree with the author's statement that "Kim is likely to continue engaging in risky brinkmanship and blackmail. To survive, Pyongyang has to be, or appear to be, dangerous and unpredictable."

Dry Taps in Mexico City: A Water Crisis Gets Worse
By Ioan Grillo / Mexico City Saturday, Apr. 11, 2009

The reek of unwashed toilets spilled into the street in the neighborhood of unpainted cinder block houses. Out on the main road, hundreds of residents banged plastic buckets and blocked the path of irate drivers while children scoured the surrounding area for government trucks. Finally, the impatient crowd launched into a high-pitched chant, repeating one word at fever pitch: "Water, Water, Water!"
About five million people, or a quarter of the population of Mexico City's urban sprawl, woke up Thursday with dry taps. The drought was caused by the biggest stoppage in the city's main reservoir system in recent years to ration its depleting supplies. Government officials hope this and four other stoppages will keep water flowing until the summer rainy season fills the basins back up. But they warn that the Mexican capital needs to seriously overhaul its water system to stop an unfathomable disaster in the future.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the biggest metropolis in the Western hemisphere is confronting problems with its water supply — and becoming an alarming cautionary tale for other megacities. Scientists have been talking for years about how humans are pumping up too much water while ripping apart too many forests, and warning that the vital liquid could become the next commodity nations are fighting over with tanks and bombers. But it is hard for most people to appreciate quite how valuable a simple thing like water is — until the taps turn off.
Housewife Graciela Martinez, 44, complains that the smell of her bathroom — used by her family of eight — had forced them all outside. "We have got no toilets, I can't wash my children, I can't cook, I can't clean the mess off the floor," Martinez says, trying to find shade from the sweltering sun. "And the worst thing is, we have got almost nothing to drink."
Paradoxically, the thirsty city was once a great lake, where the Aztecs founded their island citadel Tenochtitlan in 1325. When the Spanish conquerors took control they drained much of the water, laying the basis for the vast expansion of the metropolis across the entire Valley of Mexico. However, as the growing population continues to suck water out in wells, Mexico City is sinking down into the old lake bed at a rate of about three inches a year. This downward plunge puts extra pressure on water distribution pipes, which are now so leaky they lose about 40% of liquid before it even reaches homes.
With its own supplies evaporating, Mexico City relies on the Cutzamala system, a network of reservoirs and treatment plants that pump in water from hundreds of miles around. However, this year Cutzamala itself is running dry amid low levels of rainfall in the area. Its main basin is only 47% full, compared to an annual average of 70% for early April. "This could be caused by climate change and deforestation. These are difficult factors to understand and predict," says Felipe Arreguin, under director of the National Water Commission. "We had to have the stoppages now to make sure that some supply can continue until the rain in June." The first two partial stoppages in February and March cut off water to hundreds of thousands. In the April action, the entire Cutzamala system will be shut down for 36 hours, before gradually resuming water pumping over several days.
Martinez is particularly anxious because this means there will be no water in her taps this entire weekend. She is also enraged that the blight is mostly hitting poor neighborhoods like hers. "The rich are still swimming in their pools while we are dying of thirst," she says. Playing up to the class war theme, Mexican newspaper Reforma showed a photo of a woman using a public tap in a poor area next to another woman hosing down her lawn in a rich suburb.
Ramon Aguirre, director of Mexico City's water department, says the government has tried to distribute supplies as fairly as possible but the Cutzamala system is hooked up to many of the unplanned communities on the city outskirts. The city has, however, sent out of fleets of water trucks, and Mayor Marcelo Ebrard — who built urban beaches and a winter ice rink for the poor — is personally handing out free bottled water. Aguirre says the long-term solution involves teaching people to ration their water much better. "We need to educate people from when they are children that water is valuable and needs to be used wisely," he says.
Few Mexico City residents currently heed such advice. Keen on long showers and washing their cars, homes and clothes well, the average Mexico City resident uses 300 liters of waters per day compared to 180 per day in some European cities, says Arreguin. Furthermore, on Easter Saturdays, residents traditionally have huge water fights, in which everyone from grandparents to young children join in hurling bucket loads over each other. Piet Klop, an investigator at the Washington-based environmental think tank World Resources Institute, says that people will not learn to ration water unless it hits their pockets. "We need to understand that it is a more valuable commodity than oil and prices must reflect that better," Klop says. "Cheap subsidized water is not helping people. It is giving them a bad service." However, radically hiking the prices of any basic commodity would be a tough sell for any politician, especially in a turbulent democracy such as Mexico.








Reflection:

I agreed with the article that the future wars maybe over clean water. Water is scarcity in this world and if we do not save now, we might use up every drop of clean water. As humans need water to survive, living without water will make human nature desperate and fight for water. Some countries that lacked of clean water, like Singapore, may need to depend and buy from other countries that have clean water. Sometimes, these countries want to earn more money by raising the price of water and resulting in disputes between countries. It may also result in wars all over the world as more and more water is depleted, over-consumed by humans. For example, now oil is depleting and getting more expensive, countries quarreled and fight over oil. Iraq war proved this. Sooner or later, it is inevitable that clean water will be fought by countries through wars to ensure that water is enough for their own country.

Reading this article makes us think twice about wasting water. Clean water is easily accessible through water taps but we always start to grumble and complain when the water tap is spoiled. We should be grateful that we do not have to worry about water shortage in Singapore. Even though we relied on Malaysia to supply us water, we will always have water in our water taps 24 hours. Water is indeed precious and we should treasure it. Technology may helps in converting used water to clean water but one country needs to consider land and cost to use such technology. NEWater invented by Singapore is safe to drink and use but the rate of used water is too fast than the rate to convert it to clean water. Also, we should not depend on technology to provide water but depends on ourselves by cutting down and saving water. By having everyone doing their own part, it will make a big difference.



By: Rui Ting