I enjoy reading The Japan Times Weekly every week, but sadly most of the news does not leave much to smile about. I recenly found the article "al-Qaida threat" (May 31, page 16) distrurbing.

I'm indignant at the fact that terrorist groups such as al-Qaida depend on the young and disenfranchised in places like Nigeria. Young people worldwide are the driving force of economies and hearing that they are being enticed by groups like al-Qaida is not a good sign. It is essential that the young throughout the world are provided with good education so they can steer society in the right direction.

I checked international news Web sites such as CNN during the recent TICAD conference in Japan, which featured the participation of 40 world leaders, and was surprised to find very little coverage of the event. This left me very disappointed.

Although the conference was jointly organized with an international body other countries may have considered the event a part of Japan's drive to gain a U.N. Security Council seat. Or perhaps they think that the dramatic increase in participants at the conference was because of Japan's increased official development aid in recent years.

The article in the May 31 issue of The Japan Times Weekly titled "Pesticides linked to cancer in India" was most interesting. It shows, once again, that often people who are close to nature and use traditional methods do much better than we in the "developed" world with our sophisticated ways.

It is tragic that Indian farmers had to use Western methods to cultivate their crops, which in the end only brought them disease and pesticide-infected farmland.

I think if people from developed countries want to help those in poor countries by introducing their man-made, modern methods, they should first study thoroughly these peoples' ways and find out whether the modern methods will really bring about the betterment of people's lives.

In the case of northern India, they could have found that their methods wouldn't work.

Why do we often think our science and technologies are the best?

Are we overconfident in our knowledge, or arrogant, or simply greedy?

As a cram school teacher, reading The Japan Times Weekly gives me a chance to brush up on foreign and domestic current affairs that I may need to use in the classroom, and to brush up on my English.

In the May 24 issue I found the article about an AIDS anniversary very useful.

One of the textbooks I use for teaching has a chapter on the problems surrounding the AIDS epidemic, so I will use the article for supplementary material in my class.

I think the students will have a great deal of interest in finding out how research into the virus is going.

The Japan Times Weekly: June 21, 2008
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