miércoles, 30 de marzo de 2011

Pakistan's secret dirty war

Terrible things are happening in the world, but nobody seems to care!


In Balochistan, mutilated corpses bearing the signs of torture keep turning up, among them lawyers, students and farm workers. Why is no one investigating and what have they got to do with the bloody battle for Pakistan's largest province?

Lala Bibi with her father and son 
Lala Bibi with her father and son Saeed Ahmed – and photographs of her murdered son Najibullah and his cousin, who was also abducted. Photograph: Declan Walsh for the Guardian

The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head.
This gruesome parade of corpses has been surfacing in Balochistan, Pakistan's largest province, since last July. Several human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have accounted for more than 100 bodies – lawyers, students, taxi drivers, farm workers. Most have been tortured. The last three were discovered on Sunday.
If you have not heard of this epic killing spree, though, don't worry: neither have most Pakistanis. Newspaper reports from Balochistan are buried quietly on the inside pages, cloaked in euphemisms or, quite often, not published at all.
The forces of law and order also seem to be curiously indifferent to the plight of the dead men. Not a single person has been arrested or prosecuted; in fact, police investigators openly admit they are not even looking for anyone. The stunning lack of interest in Pakistan's greatest murder mystery in decades becomes more understandable, however, when it emerges that the prime suspect is not some shady gang of sadistic serial killers, but the country's powerful military and its unaccountable intelligence men.
This is Pakistan's dirty little war. While foreign attention is focused on the Taliban, a deadly secondary conflict is bubbling in Balochistan, a sprawling, mineral-rich province along the western borders with Afghanistan and Iran. On one side is a scrappy coalition of guerrillas fighting for independence from Pakistan; on the other is a powerful army that seeks to quash their insurgency with maximum prejudice. The revolt, which has been rumbling for more than six years, is spiced by foreign interests and intrigues – US spy bases, Chinese business, vast underground reserves of copper, oil and gold.

martes, 29 de marzo de 2011

Interesting Anecdotes (part 2)

Airports at higher  altitudes require a longer airstrip due to lower air  density.
    
 The University of Alaska  spans four time zones.
  
 The tooth is the only  part of the human body that cannot heal itself.
  
 In ancient Greece ,  tossing an apple to a girl was a traditional proposal of marriage.  Catching it meant she accepted.
  
 Warner Communications  paid $28 million for the copyright to the song Happy  Birthday.
  
 Intelligent people have  more zinc and copper in their hair.
  
 A comet's tail always  points away from the sun.
  
 The Swine Flu vaccine in  1976 caused more death and illness than the disease it was intended to  prevent.
  
 Caffeine increases the  power of aspirin and other painkillers, that is why it is found in some  medicines.
  
 The military salute is a  motion that evolved from medieval times, when knights in armor raised  their visors to reveal their identity.
  
 If you get into the  bottom of a well or a tall chimney and look up, you can see stars, even  in the middle of the day.
  
 When a person dies,  hearing is the last sense to go. The first sense lost is  sight.
   
 In ancient times  strangers shook hands to show that they were  unarmed.
  
 Strawberries are the  only fruits whose seeds grow on the outside.
  
 Avocados have the  highest calories of any fruit at 167 calories per hundred  grams.

 The moon moves about two  inches away from the Earth each year.
  
 The Earth gets 100 tons  heavier every day due to falling space dust.
  
 Due to earth's gravity  it is impossible for mountains to be higher than 15,000  meters.
     
 Mickey Mouse is known as  "Topolino" in Italy.
  
 Soldiers do not march in  step when going across bridges because they could set up a vibration  which could be sufficient to knock the bridge  down.
     
 Everything weighs one  percent less at the equator.
  
 For every extra kilogram  carried on a space flight, 530 kg of excess fuel are needed at  lift-off.
  
 The letter  J does not appear anywhere on the periodic table of the elements.  
  
 And last but  not least:
 In 2011,  July has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays, and 5 Sundays. This apparently happens  once every 823 years!  This is called 'money bags'.

lunes, 28 de marzo de 2011

The King's Speech 1939



I have found this really impressive document. If you saw the film 'The King's Speech', I'm sure you "suffered" with him when he had to pronounce his first serious speech to communicate to his country that they had declared the war against Germany on 3rd September 1939.
This is the real speech, where we can see his difficulties to speak but his enormous efforts to make this solemn declaration sound as serious as it was.
I strongly recommend you to listen to it. You also have the complete speech to follow it without any difficulty and a lot more information about the King and his family and life.

George VI speech 1939

jueves, 24 de marzo de 2011

Authors raise doubts over Gove's 50-book challenge

Michael Gove's remark that children should be reading 50 books a year is called into question by authors from Philip Pullman to children's laureate Anthony Browne.

michael gove

 
Michael Gove … the education secretary said UK schools need to 'raise the bar' on children's reading.
Education secretary Michael Gove has suggested that children as young as 11 should be reading 50 books a year – and that leading children's authors should recommend them.

Following a tour he made of America's independently-run, state-funded charter schools – including the Infinity Charter School in Harlem, which set its pupils a "50-book challenge" over the course of a year – Gove said that schools in the UK needed to "raise the bar" on children's reading:


"Recently, I asked to see what students were reading at GCSE," Gove said. "I discovered that something like 80-90% were just reading one or two novels – and overwhelmingly it was the case that it included Of Mice and Men. We should be saying that our children should be reading 50 books a year, not just one or two for GCSE."


The education secretary's remarks follow a December report that showed British teenagers slumping from 17th to 25th place in an international league table for reading standards.

But children's laureate Anthony Browne has said Gove's aims are at odds with the library closures happening under his government's watch. He declared himself "surprised" at Gove's comments, "given that the government is cutting library budgets, and that programmes giving free books to children, such as Bookstart, are also being cut."

"It's always good to hear that the importance of children's reading is recognised – but rather than setting an arbitrary number of books that children ought to read, I feel it's the quality of children's reading experiences that really matter," Browne said. "Pleasure, engagement and enjoyment of books is what counts – not simply meeting targets."

Browne's views were echoed by others'. Frank Cottrell Boyce, author of children's novels Cosmic and Millions, said that while Gove's instincts were right, the government's wider actions were "militating against what Gove wants – like closing libraries, which is just a disaster."


Alan Garner, author of children's classic The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, meanwhile, questioned the advisability of turning books into numbers. "Is any number a useful guide?" he asked. "The important aim should be a reading that is wide and deep rather than numerical. In my own primary school years I read everything I could find, which amounted to at least four books a week and as many comics as possible. The Beano and The Dandy were equal with Tarzan of the Apes, Enid Blyton, HG Wells, Kipling, wildlife books, fairy tales, encyclopaedias. This resulted, painlessly, in a large vocabulary, an awareness of differences of style, the absorption of grammar and syntax and an ability to spell."

Philip Pullman, author of the prizewinning His Dark Materials trilogy, agreed - and added a further caveat. "I'm all in favour of children reading books, of course, the more the merrier," he said. "What I'm wary of is that people will start saying that quality is more important than quantity. When it comes to reading books, children should be allowed – and encouraged – to read as much rubbish as they want to. But that can only happen when there are plenty of good books as well as rubbish all around them. Where are they going to get these 50 books a year from?"


Meanwhile, Miranda McKearney, chief executive of the Reading Agency, which runs an annual Summer Reading Challenge in which children are encouraged to read six library books over the holiday, expressed concern over the execution of Gove's ambition. "So often the discussion about how to inspire children to read focuses just on schools, but libraries, and families, have a key role to play," she said. "We won't crack the problems unless we build a more systemic approach."

martes, 22 de marzo de 2011

Very interesting anecdotes (part 1)

For your information!

If you are right handed,  you will tend to chew your food on the right side of your mouth. If you  are left handed, you will tend to chew your food on the left side of  your mouth.

To make half a kilo of  honey, bees must collect nectar from over 2 million individual  flowers.

Heroin is the brand name  of morphine once marketed by 'Bayer'.

 Tourists visiting   Iceland should know that tipping at a restaurant is considered an  insult!
  
 People in nudist  colonies play volleyball more than any other  sport.
  
 Albert Einstein was  offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, but he  declined.
  
 Astronauts can't belch -  there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their  stomachs.
  
 Ancient Roman, Chinese  and German societies often used urine as  mouthwash.
 
 The Mona Lisa has no  eyebrows. In the Renaissance era, it was fashion to shave them  off!
  
 Because of the speed at  which Earth moves around the Sun, it is impossible for a solar eclipse  to last more than 7 minutes and 58 seconds.
  
 The night of January 20  is "Saint Agnes's Eve", which is regarded as a time when a young woman  dreams of her future husband.
     
 Google is actually the  common name for a number with a million zeros.
  
 It takes glass one  million years to decompose, which means it never wears out and can be  recycled an infinite amount of times!
  
 Gold is the only metal  that doesn't rust, even if it's buried in the ground for thousands of  years.
  
 Your tongue is the only  muscle in your body that is attached at only one  end.
  
 If you stop getting  thirsty, you need to drink more water. When a human body is dehydrated,  its thirst
 mechanism shuts  off.
  
 Each year 2,000,000  smokers either quit smoking or die of tobacco-related  diseases.
     
 Zero is the only number  that cannot be represented by Roman numerals.
  
 Kites were used in the  American Civil War to deliver letters and  newspapers.
  
 The song, Auld Lang  Syne, is sung at the stroke of midnight in almost every English-speaking  country in the world to bring in the new year.
    
 Drinking water after  eating reduces the acid in your mouth by 61  percent.
  
 Peanut oil is used for  cooking in submarines because it doesn't smoke unless it's heated above  450°F.
     
 The roar that we hear  when we place a seashell next to our ear is not the ocean, but rather  the sound of blood surging through the veins in the  ear.
  
 Nine out of every 10  living things live in the ocean.
  
 The banana cannot  reproduce itself. It can be propagated only by the hand of  man.

lunes, 21 de marzo de 2011

TEACHER MAN. Pre-reading work.

Activity 1 (groups of 4 people)
Each group does a different research:
  • Search the Internet to find some background information about the social and economic situation of Ireland in the 1930s.
  • Look for some more information about the situation of the Irish immigrants in America at that time.
  • Look for films that deal with the topic of immigration in America. E.g. The Immigrant (1917), West Side  Story (1961), The Godfather (1972), El Norte (1983),  Stand and Deliver (1988), My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), etc.
Final task: Write a summary of each research and explain to the rest of the class (max. 200 words). They'll be published on the blog.
Deathline: Monday 28th March

Women and Islam. Dr Wafa Sultan

This is a very interesting video with the speech of an American-Sirian psychyatric who strongly fights in favour of Muslim women rights.
It has subtitles in Spanish, but I'm sure they won't be necessary for you to understand her despite her strong accent.

Dr Wafa Sultan

martes, 15 de marzo de 2011

FRANK MCCOURT

                          

Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Irish immigrant parents in 1931. Unable to find work in the depths of the Depression, the McCourts returned to Ireland, where they sunk deeper into the poverty McCourt describes so movingly in his memoir, Angela's Ashes.
McCourt's father, an alcoholic, was often without work, drank up what little money he earned and eventually abandoned the family altogether. Three of the seven children died of diseases aggravated by malnutrition and the squalor of their surroundings. Frank McCourt himself nearly died of typhoid fever when he was ten. McCourt's memoir describes an entire block of houses sharing a single outhouse, ground floor dwellings flooded by constant rain, a home infested with rats and vermin. Despite the horrors of McCourt's childhood, he tells his story with humour, brilliant description, and deep compassion for his family, even for the shiftless father who instilled in him a love of language and storytelling.
After quitting school at 13, Frank McCourt alternated between odd jobs and petty crime in an effort to feed himself, his mother, and four surviving brothers and sisters. At 19, he returned to the United States and worked at odd jobs until he was drafted into the United States Army at the onset of the Korean War. McCourt spent the war stationed in Germany and on his return to civilian life was able to pursue a college education on the G.I. Bill. Although he had never attended high school, he was able to persuade the admissions office of New York University to accept him as a student. Although his childhood interest in language and storytelling were fed by creative writing classes and his own constant reading, he did not feel ready to pursue a career as a professional writer. On graduation, he went to work for the New York City Public School system, where he taught for the next 27 years.


"I taught what they call 'Creative Writing' though you and I know how hard it is to teach anyone anything," McCourt says. "Instead of teaching writing I 'conducted' writing classes. I tried to show my students the significance of their own lives which they sometimes thought insignificant. I hoped they'd realize the value of their own lives, that they were good enough to write about. So they took the plunge and they wrote and some were willing to read to the class and I think they were glad they did. Then they'd say to me, 'Why don't you write something and read it to the class?' And I did -- more and more."
Although McCourt spent his summers working on a novel drawing on his youth in Ireland, he was unable to find his own voice until he retired from teaching. After years of teaching creative writing to young people, McCourt determined to write his own life story. Angela's Ashes has sold over 4 million copies, has been published in 27 countries and has been translated into 17 languages. It won McCourt the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the ABBY Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
His second book, 'Tis, picks up the story of his life where Angela's Ashes left off, with his arrival in America at age 19. It shot to the top of the best-seller lists as soon as it was published. His 2005 memoir, Teacher Man, chronicles his 27-year career in the New York City school system. Like its predecessor, it was an instant bestseller.

viernes, 11 de marzo de 2011

Powerful quake triggers tsunami in Japan

Imagen de la destrucción causada por el tsunami en la localidad de Sendai | AP VEA MÁS FOTOS 

Hundreds of people are feared dead after an 8.9 magnitude earthquake off the northeast coast of Japan sent a 10m tsunami ploughing into its coast. The quake was the most powerful ever recorded in Japan and sparked a tsunami alert across the Pacific basin.

• Strong tremors shake buildings in Tokyo
• Major fire at Chiba refinery
If you click here, you can see some impressive images of how the tremendous tsunami sweeps fields and villages and even the airport and a refinery.

miércoles, 9 de marzo de 2011

TEACHER MAN by Frank McCourt

Read actively after class!

This is the next book we are going to read. Try to get your copy this week to begin to read it as soon as possible. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

miércoles, 2 de marzo de 2011

Shot because he was against the blasmefy laws

The radicals in Pakistan kill a Christian minister because he was against the new blasfemy laws, which punish everyone who is not a Muslim.

Pakistan minister shot dead on way to cabinet meeting in Islamabad

Shahbaz Bhatti – a Christian and critic of Pakistan's blasphemy laws – killed by assassins who left behind Taliban-linked leaflets, say reports
Shahbaz Bhatti (r), pictured in 2005, was Pakistan's minorities minister. 
Shahbaz Bhatti, pictured in 2005, was Pakistan's minorities minister. Photograph: Faisal Mahmood/Reuters
Pakistan's minorities minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, has been assassinated by unidentified gunmen in the capital, Islamabad.
Bhatti, a Christian, was an outspoken advocate of reforms to Pakistan's controversial blasphemy laws, and his death comes two months after the Punjab governor, Salmaan Taseer, was gunned down just a few miles away.
Television stations said up to four gunmen opened fire on Bhatti at close range as he left his Islamabad home on Wednesday with his niece on his way to cabinet meeting.
The gunmen pulled Bhatti's niece and guard out of his vehicle, then shot him several times inside the car. The minister was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead. The killers escaped. TV stations reported they left behind pamphlets for a Taliban-affiliated group.
One report said the pamphlet has been signed by a group named "Fidayeen e Muhammad" and "al-Qaida in Punjab", strongly suggesting a link between the killing and the blasphemy controversy.
Television pictures showed Bhatti's bullet-ridden car and police officers entering the house amid heavy rain.
Bhatti had joined Salmaan Taseer in championing the case of Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman who was sentenced to death last November for allegedly committing blasphemy against the prophet Muhammad.
Human rights campaigners reacted with anger and dismay to the death of Bhatti, calling it a further sign of crumbling tolerance that highlighted the chronic failure of President Asif Ali Zardari's government to safeguard liberal voices.
"Shahbaz Bhatti was one of the few people in the government who took a brave and principled position on the blasphemy law. It appears like Salmaan Taseer before him that he has been killed for espousing this position," said Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch.
 If you want to read more, click here
The Guardian

martes, 1 de marzo de 2011

Review in class - KEY

As promised, I attach the answers to the review we've done in class. Make sure you do it first and then you make corrections, not the other way around!

Review KEY