Global Headlines Express: What the World Talked About in the Past 24 Hours
*Global Headlines* is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in its trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.
Global Headlines (《全球头条》) is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in its trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.
What the Agenda-Setters Are Talking About
The Economist: "Could Literature Be Virtual Reality's Next Target?"
To get young students interested in literary classics that look dull from the outside, Mika Johnson, a lecturer at the Prague Film School, decided to try something new in class: turn passages of literature into VR scenes and let students live inside them.
The text he picked was Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The project drew funding from Kafka's biographer Reiner Stach and from the Goethe-Institut, and was given the name "VRwandlung" — a pun on the German title, "Die Verwandlung." It runs through the end of March.
In one trial, a student named Michael Syrovatka stood in a ground-floor classroom at the Goethe-Institut in Prague and put on a VR headset. He saw the shape of a giant insect in the mirror and cried out. Around him, students who had been half asleep looked up and began arguing about what it would actually feel like to be Gregor, the protagonist, after the change.
If enough people have the same idea as Mika Johnson, literature may become the next field virtual reality moves into, after games and pornography. The technology delivers a direct, bodily experience, but its limits in literature are just as plain. Cost comes first: an immersive VR system tracks the user through sensors on the limbs and an infrared grid, which means the space has to be cramped, and every interactive effect costs a great deal of money.
Worse, most books reach no fixed conclusion, while VR works by laying out outcomes for the user to choose between. The metaphors packed into Kafka's story are not something a rig of hardware can match.
Mika Johnson ran into the same trouble while building the VR version of The Metamorphosis. He spent a long time stuck on the German word behind "vermin" — "Ungeziefer" — which carries far more than the name of a particular insect.
And The Metamorphosis is one of the easier texts to adapt. Joseph Nugent, who teaches at Boston College, once thought about turning Joyce's Ulysses into a VR experience and found that simply drawing the map was impossible. The scenes in The Metamorphosis, by contrast, were set from the start in one small, closed room, and consist largely of Gregor's thoughts as he hears his family knocking at the door and imagines his boss cursing him for turning up late.
Reiner Stach, Kafka's biographer, thinks that if Kafka were alive he would be glad to see people experiment with new technology, but would find it frightening "to make people believe the virtual beats the real."
As Susanne Reif-Breitwieser, a German teacher, put it after trying it: "I did feel immersed. I just couldn't be sure it was 'Kafka's' world."
Newsmakers of the Past 24 Hours
At 15:52 on March 11, 2018, the first session of the 13th National People's Congress voted to adopt an amendment to the Constitution of the People's Republic of China. Of the 2,964 deputies who voted, 2,958 were in favor, 2 against and 3 abstained; 1 ballot was invalid.
The adopted amendment added one item that the earlier draft did not have: the NPC Law Committee was renamed the NPC Constitution and Law Committee.
After the vote, the Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee took questions from Chinese and foreign reporters about the amendment. Its director, Shen Chunyao, said that under the Constitution the power to amend the Constitution belongs to the National People's Congress, while the power to interpret the Constitution and oversee its implementation belongs to the NPC Standing Committee. Turning the Law Committee into the Constitution and Law Committee, with powers of oversight and interpretation, helps push the Constitution into practice.
The Beijing News and Reuters then asked what thinking lay behind deleting the clause barring the president and vice president from serving more than two consecutive terms, and whether similar changes were being considered for other state leaders. Shen Chunyao answered:
"The highest leadership post of the Party's Central Committee; the highest leadership post over the armed forces of the Party and the state, the chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Chinese People's Liberation Army; and the state presidency, the highest leadership post of the state — these form a 'trinity.' For a party and a country as large as ours, such a leadership system and form of leadership are not merely necessary, they are the most appropriate. This system and this form are successful governing experience that the Communist Party of China has worked out and distilled from its long practice in power."
What Else Happened in the World
On March 11, voting began in Cuba's National Assembly elections. More than 8 million voters will choose from an official list of candidates, filling 605 seats in the National Assembly and 1,265 seats in the provincial assemblies of the country's 14 provinces. The process runs to April 19, when a new head of state will be picked to succeed Raúl Castro — the start of Cuba's "post-Castro era."
Chile's new president, Sebastián Piñera Echenique, was sworn in on March 11. Piñera is a conservative and already served as Chile's president from 2010 to 2014. Pro-business policies, rising copper export prices and the vast rebuilding that followed the magnitude-8.8 earthquake held average growth at 5.3% during that term.
Russia test-fired a hypersonic missile on March 11. President Vladimir Putin unveiled the missile, called Kinzhal ("Dagger"), along with a set of other new weapons, in his state-of-the-nation address earlier this month. He said it flies at ten times the speed of sound and that no missile-defense system in existence can stop it.
South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said on the 11th that Seoul had recently asked Washington to loosen or lift the emergency import restrictions on South Korean washing machines and solar cells and to pay compensation, and that the US side refused. The South Korean government plans to file a complaint with the WTO shortly.
On the evening of March 10, campaigning in Pennsylvania for Republican candidate Rick Saccone, US President Donald Trump unveiled his slogan for the 2020 re-election bid: "Keep America Great." He said: "We can't say 'Make America Great Again,' because I already did it."
According to the Belarusian Telegraph Agency, a blizzard hit the northeastern United States on March 10, including Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. Snow has piled up more than half a meter deep, badly disrupting road and air travel, and dozens of crashes have been recorded. Schools in some areas have closed, traffic has seized up, and at least a million people have lost power.
A bench of India's Supreme Court has ruled that terminally ill patients with no hope of a cure, and patients in a permanent vegetative state, may be allowed passive euthanasia. Where there is no chance of recovery, the ruling said, hastening death to shorten the suffering is "one of the rights of a person to live with dignity."
What People Are Saying
Kobayashi Nobuo is the chief priest of Kongoji, a temple in Kesen, Iwate Prefecture, Japan. By his account it is 1,200 years old. The earthquake and tsunami of March 11 killed 16,000 people and wiped out Kesen, where he lives. Next to the city of Rikuzentakata, it was among the worst-hit places: more than 200 residents died, and of 550 houses only 2 were left standing. The survivors left, all but 15 residents who refused to abandon the town and went on living in the rubble for months with no water or power.
The Kobayashis were among them. Kobayashi Nobuo's daughter, Kobayashi Mako, was 15 at the time; the family also included his wife, Kobayashi Kyoko, and their eldest son, Kobayashi Takamasa. Their house was gone, so the four of them moved for a time into a nearby temple. Kyoko and Mako cooked every day for the people who had stayed; Takamasa spent his days digging through the ruins for surviving Buddha statues and scriptures. Nobuo held funerals for the dead and planned the temple's rebuilding at the same time. The new temple had to stand on higher ground than the old one, which meant clearing a patch of dense forest, winning over the congregation and raising the money. He also had to rebuild his own house.
Mako, now 22, studies chemistry at a nearby university. She had wanted to develop cosmetics; instead she decided to take her brother's place, become a monk and succeed her father. Her brother went to medical school. She wrote her parents a three-page letter explaining why she was set on studying Buddhism, and held to it despite her mother's efforts to talk her out of it. For her training she went with her father last March to Chishaku-in temple in Kyoto, took the Buddhist name Eishin, and found herself one of the few young women in the room.
Months later, five years after the disaster, the new Kongoji was finished. Several hundred people came to the dedication, among them 50 monks from around the country. Mako had shaved her head by then; in white robes, she led the procession of monks in their colored vestments.
Kesen is still rebuilding slowly. Only 10 new houses stand near the temple. The wreckage has been cleared away, leaving wide stretches of empty ground. Many of the villagers who left have settled nearby.
The Kobayashis hope Kongoji can watch over the villagers as they find their way back to the lives they had before.
You Might Also Be Interested In
A new study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment finds that leopards prevent about 100 cases of rabies a year in Mumbai. Rabies kills roughly 20,000 people a year in India, and the country has 30 million stray dogs. The leopards around Mumbai kill some 1,500 strays a year, the study says, saving the city about US$18,000 in control costs. Stray-dog density near the park is also 10 times lower than across the city as a whole.
A similar study came out in the United States in 2016. It found that the fall in cougar numbers in the eastern United States let white-tailed deer multiply, which in turn drove up car crashes and helped fuel a rise in Lyme disease (an infectious disease spread by tick bites, causing rash, fever and other symptoms; the ticks usually ride in the fur of white-tailed deer).
A company called Goblatime has won the right to put up a building given over entirely to brothels in Magadino, an industrial town in Ticino, the Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland.
The company applied for the building permit back in March 2013. Town officials attacked the plan, arguing that the sex trade plainly clashed with the rules the town kept for industry, commerce and crafts.
The case went to the judges of the cantonal administrative court. In the end the Second Public Law Division of the Federal Supreme Court ruled that prostitution is both a commercial use and a service business, and therefore fits the rules of an industrial zone.
On This Day
March 12, 1782: the first set of the Complete Library in Four Sections (《四库全书》) was finished.
March 12, 1824: German physicist Gustav Robert Kirchhoff was born. In 1845 he formulated Kirchhoff's current law (KCL) and Kirchhoff's voltage law (KVL).
March 12, 1925: Sun Yat-sen died in Beijing.
March 12, 1929: Asa Candler, who created Coca-Cola, died.
March 12, 1947: the Truman Doctrine was announced, formally opening the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
March 12, 1990: Mikhail Gorbachev was elected the Soviet Union's first president.
March 12, 2009: Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at former US President George W. Bush in protest, was sentenced by an Iranian court to three years in prison.
March 12, 2012: an explosion at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant released radioactive material.
Cover image from: al.blog.com
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.