Parliamentary Elections in Afghanistan For the first time in three decades Afghanistan is holding parliamentary elections. It’s a momentous time for a country still trying to emerge from years of war. There’s been much criticism that these polls will only consolidate the power of the country’s powerful commanders, the warlords with dubious histories. But Lyse Doucet, who’s been covering Afghanistan since the late nineteen eighties, has discovered that in a nation where a new political culture is only slowly taking shape, the very existence of an election process has brought new energy to a lung-stagnant political life: Now there is a veritable forest of signs at every square and roundabout in Kabul and other cities, billboards selling luxury watches, promoting national unity the new Afghan army. But, for the past month billboard, walls and fences across this land have been telling another story. Everywhere you look there are the faces of election candidates, middle aged men in suits and ties, men with turbans and long thick beards as dark as the night or as white as the first Afghan snow, hardly anyone is smiling. Tradition says photography is serious business. Even. wedding photographs here barely coax a smile. And in a country where only 4 years ago, women were largely confined to their homes under an oppressive Taliban rule, there are their faces too: candidates like young Sabrina with a fetching canary yellow headscarf, Shukda with finely penciled eyebrow, gazing into the distance, cradling a pen in her hand. The faces are plastered everywhere, on every available bit of space, sometimes on top of each other. It’s led to Afghan cartoonists sketching someone’s face on top of someone else’s legs. At first glance, these walls are just an unsightly mess of photographs. But, like the carpets of old, if you know this nation’s history, you can read meaning .into what seem like random patterns. These layers of paper form a bright new canvas of a nation’s dark history. General Ulumi who once worked with the Soviet Red Army is running for parliament. There’s also Mullah Khaqsar who used to execute the writ of the Taliban. But there’s also Malalai Joya, the young woman who, a few years ago, bravely condemned the warlords in public. In this election, candidates must run as individuals, not as members of parties. But Afghans know who everyone is. They know their past. They know their father, their grandfather, or at least, they do in most cases. But what if they don’t? In the last month of campaigning, in towns and villages across this country, Afghans, from village elders with wizened faces, to wide-eyed teenagers too young to vote, have sat cross legged in the shades of mulberry tress, or in air-conditioned rooms cooled with electricity powered by generators. They’ve pondered and argued and debated the questions of this time. One dimensional photograph, after all, only tells part of this new story. As one Afghan friend put it, in real life, many candidates with a past are two-faced. If elected to Parliament, it’s still not clear which face they will show. But whatever happens, the opening of Parliament will be the start of a new chapter. And no one here can say with certainty how that Afghan story will unfold.
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Guitar Today we tell about a very popular musical instrument. Listen and see if you can guess what it is. If you guess it was a guitar, you are correct. The Museum of Fine Arts in the eastern city of Boston, Massachusetts, recently began showing a collection of guitars. The exhibit is called Dangerous Curves: The Art of the Guitar. It shows how the instrument developed during the past four centuries. Probably no other musical instrument is as poplar around the world as guitar. Musicians use the guitar for almost every kind of music. Country and western music would not be the same without a guitar. The traditional Spanish folk music called Flamenco could not exist without a guitar. The second of American blues music would not be the same without the sad cry of the guitar. And rock and roll music would almost be impossible without this instrument. Music exports do not agree about where the guitar first was played. Most agree it is ancient. Some experts say an instrument very much like a guitar was played in Egypt more than a thousand years ago. Some other experts say that the ancestor of the modern guitar was brought to Spain from Persia sometime in the twelfth century. The guitar continued to develop in Spain. In the seventeen hundreds it became similar to the instrument we know today. Many famous musicians played the instrument. The famous Italian violinist Niccolo Paganinni played and wrote music for the guitar in the early eighteen hundreds. Franz Schubert used the guitar to write some of his famous works. In modem times Spanish guitarist Andres Segovia helped make the instrument extremely popular. One kind of music for the guitar developed in the southern area of Spain called Adalusia. It will always be strongly linked with the Spanish guitar. It is called Flamenco. One guitar in the Boston Fine Arts display was played by Les Paul. It is a very old electric guitar. Mister Paul began experimenting with ways to make an electric guitar in the nineteen thirties. The Gibson Guitar Company began producing its famous Les Paul Guitar in 1952. The instrument has the same shape and the same six strings as the traditional guitar, but it sounds very different. Listen to a Les Paul recording. It was the fifth most popular song in the United States in 1952. The guitar has always been important to blues music. The electric guitar Mister Paul helped develop made modem blues music possible: There have been many great blues guitarists. Yet, music experts say all blues guitar players are measured against one man and his famous guitar. That man is B-B King. Every blues fan knows that years ago B-B King named his guitar Lucille. Here B-B King plays Lucille on his famous recording of The Thrill Is Gone B-B King’s guitar, Lucille, is so important to American music that the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC has asked for it. They want to display the large, beautiful black guitar in one of the museums because it is a part of American culture. Another famous guitar in American music also has a name. It belongs to country music star Willie Nelson. His guitar is as famous in country music as Lucille is in blues music. Its name is Trigger. Trigger is really a very ugly guitar. It looks like an old, broken instrument someone threw away. Several famous people have written their names on it. A huge hole was tom in the front of it a long time ago. It looks severely damaged. But the huge hole, the names and other marks seem to add to its sound. Listen while Willie Nelson and Trigger play of, Angel Flying Too Close To the Ground.
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Effect of the Great Depression It is difficult to measure the human cost of the Great Depression. The material hardships were bad enough. Men and women lived in lean-tos made of scrap wood and metal, and families went without meat and fresh vegetables for months, existing on a diet of soup and beans. The psychological burden was even greater4: Americans suffered through year after year of grinding poverty with no letup in sight. The unemployed stood in line for hours waiting for relief checks, veterans sold apples or pencils on street comers, their manhood—once prized so highly by the nation—now in question. People left the city for the countryside but found no salvation on the farm. Crops rotted in the fields because prices were too low to make harvesting worthwhile; sheriffs fended off angry crowds as banks foreclosed long overdue mortgages on once prosperous farms. Few escaped the suffering. African Americans who had left the poverty of the rural South for factory jobs in the North were among the first to be laid off. Mexican Americans, who had flowed in to replace European immigrants, met with competition from angry citizens, now willing to do stoop labor in the fields and work as track layers on the railroads. Immigration officials used technicalities to halt the flow across the Rio Grande and even to reverse it; nearly a half million Mexicans were deported in the 1930s, including families with children born in the United States. The poor—black, brown, and white—survived because they knew better than most Americans how to exist in poverty. They stayed in bed in cold weather, both to keep warm and to avoid unnecessary burning up of calories; they patched their shoes with pieces of rubber from discarded tires, heated only the kitchens of their homes, and ate scraps of food that others would reject. The middle class, which had always lived with high expectations, was hit hard. Professionals and white-collar workers refused to ask for charity even while their families went without food; one New York dentist and his wife turned on the gas and left a note saying, “We want to get out of the way before we are forced to accept relief money.” People who fell behind in their mortgage payments lost their homes and then faced eviction when they could not pay the rent. Health care declined. Middle-class people stopped going to doctors and dentists regularly, unable to make the required cash payment in advance for services rendered. Even the well-to-do were affected, giving up many of their former luxuries and weighed down with guilt as they watched former friends and business associates join the ranks of the impoverished. “My father lost everything in the Depression” became an all-too-familiar refrain among young people who dropped out of college. Many Americans sought escape in movement. Men, boys, and some women, rode the rails in search of jobs, hopping freights to move south in the winter or west in the summer. On the Missouri Pacific alone, the number of vagrants increased from just over 13,000 in 1929 to nearly 200,000 in 1931. One town in the Southwest hired special policemen to keep vagrants from leaving the boxcars. Those who became tramps had to keep on the move, but they did find a sense of community in the hobo jungles that sprang up along the major railroad routes. Here a man could find a place to eat and sleep, and people with whom to share his misery. Louis Banks, a black veteran, told interviewer Studs Terkel what these informal camps were like: Black and white, it didn’t make any difference who you were, cause everybody was poor. All friendly, sleep in a jungle. We used to take a big pot and cook food, cabbage, meat and beans all together. We all set together, we made a tent. Twenty-five or thirty would be out on the side of the rail, white and colored: They didn’t have no mothers or sisters, they didn’t have no home, they were dirty, they had overalls on, they didn’t have no food, they didn’t have anything.
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The Truth about Genetically Modified Food At almost every public lecture I give, someone asks me my opinion on genetic modification—whatever be the topic of the lecture. Genetic modification (GM) has the power to save lives through its use in medicine, such as the production of insulin for diabetics or the treatment of genetic disorders. The current outcry comes when it is used to produce food. Some of these public concerns reflect real problems, but others are fuelled by misinformation and overdramatisation. There is nothing new about crop modification; plant breeders have been doing it since agriculture began. The wonderful range of apples or potatoes we now enjoy is the result of crossing different varieties. Cabbages, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale and broccoli all originated from one botanical species. Modern molecular biology has enabled us to go much further. We can now isolate the gene for a particular characteristic of an organism and transfer it to another species. It is this practice of transforming a plant with alien genes—perhaps from an animal or bacterium—that is causing all the controversy. There are three main concerns. Scientists can now take a gene for resistance to a particular herbicide and transfer it to a crop: when these plants are sprayed with weed-killer, the weeds are destroyed while the crop is unharmed. A prime concern is the harmful effect this could have on the biodiversity of farmland, where so many insects, birds and other animals depend upon “weed” species. Another fear is that alien genes from a GM plant could escape into a wild population of a related species. Since plants are fertilized by pollen that is carried through their, often for great distances, this is entirely possible. A wild species modified in this way with pesticide resistance could become a “super-weed”, while a species that becomes unnaturally resistant to animals that feed on it could disrupt the food chain. The third worry concerns a proposal to produce seeds for cereals that cannot germinate to produce next year’s seeds. This “terminator technology” would be of obvious advantage to seed companies, since farms would be forced to buy new weed annually. But the same technology could be devastating to some farmers in the developing world who depend upon saving some seeds for next year’s crop. Fortunately this technology is not yet in use and there has been strong pressure to abandon it. I would not hesitate to eat a GM vegetable—it is most unlikely that the current modifications are harmful to the consumer, despite what we read in the press. However, the introduction of animal genes into food plants presents considerable ethical difficulties to vegetarinsarians and member of religious that forbid the eating of certain animals. This is one of the reasons people are demanding that tall genetically modified food products be clearly labeled. The public have a fight to know what they are eating and a fight to choose. I believe that in my own nation GM is well regulated, but this cannot be said for some other countries. One of the problems is that at the moment this technology is commercially motivated. Because the compositions developing GM food want to introduce it as quickly as possible, in my opinion, it is being rushed into without adequate research or precautions. Genetic’ modification is here to stay, and there is no doubt it will save lives. But ,like so many other scientific discoveries, such as splitting the atom, it can be seriously misused. Instead of condemning the technique, we, should ensure it is used wisely. We need to evaluate each application carefully, from environmental and ethical standpoints, and we must urge governments and companies to use it for good rather than for greed.
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Working Together Against the Infectious Diseases There is another area that really may sound like it’s outside the range of politics and Iraqi people where we’re cooperating together, but it’s an area that is vital to the well-being of the Chinese people, the American people, the people in the world, and it’s now we’re working together to deal with the dangers inherent in infectious diseases. China’s sobering experience with SARS stands as a lesson to all countries on the challenge of infectious diseases. I have called HIV/AIDS the world’s greatest weapon of mass destruction today. It threatens to kill tens of millions of men, women and children—in the Caribbean, in Latin America, in the subcontinent, especially in Africa—and yes, it is a danger to China as well. And China’s government is facing up to this crisis, working with us. The United States has told China we are ready to help. Last month, our Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson spoke in China of President Bush’s interest in furthering our practical cooperation on HIV/AIDS and other health issues. Specialists from our Centers for Disease Control are working on the ground with their Chinese counterparts. Our National Institute of Health has granted $14.8 million to help China upgrade its health care infrastructure. My friends, it is upon such concrete forms of cooperation on issues of regional and global importance that a 21st century US-China relationship will be built, issue by issue, experience by experience, challenge by challenge, initiative by initiative, program by program. As China participates more actively in world affairs, we will extend our welcome. Building and sustaining a healthy overall relationship is good for America, it is good for China, it is good for the region, and good for the international community.
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Robot Even before the first robot was built, the subject of robotics was controversial. The word "robot" was coined in 1921 by a Czech playwright who wrote about a colony of machines endowed with artificial intelligence that eventually turned against3 their human creators. Although that account was fictional, the first industrial robots were in use by the early 1960s. Today, we continue to be intrigued by robots and their potential for both good and evil. Basically, a robot is any machine that performs work or other actions normally done by humans. Most robots are used in factories to make products such as cars and electronics. Others are used to explore underwater, in volcanoes and even on other planets. Robots consist of three main components: a brain, which is usually a computer; actuators and mechanical parts such as motors, wheels and gears; and sensors for detecting images, sound, temperature, motion and light. With these basic components, robots can interact with their environment and perform the tasks they are designed to carry out. The advantages are obvious — robots can do things humans just don’t want to do, and they are usually more cost effective. Robots can also do things more precisely than humans and allow progress in medical science and other useful advances. But, as with any machine, a robot can break down and even cause disaster. There’s also the possibility that wicked people will use robots for evil purposes. Yet this is also true with other forms of technology such as weapons and biological material. Robots will probably be used even more in the future. They will continue to do tasks where danger, repetition, cost or the need for precision prevents humans from performing. As to whether they will be used for good or evil, that depends on the nature of the humans who create them.