When Beijing was awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) predicted the Games could improve human rights, and Chinese politicians hinted at the same. Such talk is all but absent this time as the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics open in just over a week. The Games are a reminder of both China’s rise and its disregard for civil liberties, which has prompted a diplomatic boycott led by the US. Rights groups have documented forced labor, mass detentions and torture, and the US has called China’s internment of at least 1 million Uyghurs genocide. China has also come under criticism over the near-disappearance from public view of tennis star Peng Shuai (彭帥) after she accused a former senior member of the ruling Communist Party of sexually assaulting her. But with more political, economic and military clout than it had 13 years ago, China appears to be worrying less about global scrutiny this time. And the COVID-19 pandemic has given it even more control over the Olympics, particularly with the isolation of visiting journalists, separated in a “bubble” from the Chinese population. “There’s nothing to ‘prove’ at this point; 2008 was a ‘coming out’ party and all this one does is confirm what we’ve known for the last decade,” Amanda Shuman, a China researcher at the University of Freiburg, wrote in an e-mail. “If anything, there’s a lot less pressure than 2008,” she said. “The Chinese government knows full well that its global economic upper hand allows it to do whatever it wishes.” The IOC had few options when it awarded China the Games for the second time. Six possible European candidates, led by Norway and Sweden, bowed out for political or cost reasons. Voters in two other countries — Switzerland and Germany — voted no in referendums. IOC members eventually picked Beijing — an authoritarian state
It speaks to the scale of the challenge that, in the month that I set out to have more fun, my Christmas and new year plans are derailed by COVID; I am relieved of half my savings by a phone scammer; and a man I’m meeting for a first date suggests that maybe I am depressed. I get my money back, and my date is a supply chain consultant, not a doctor — but fun certainly seems like a faraway prospect. I have been tasked with testing out the advice in The Power of Fun, a new book by the science journalist Catherine Price. Fun, she argues, is not something that’s nice to have, but actually essential to a happy, healthy life — and it’s possible to have more of it, even during a pandemic. I will admit that when Price and I first speak, the week before Christmas, I am sceptical. Omicron cases are surging, the official advice is to “deprioritize” socializing — and the sun goes down by 4pm. Meanwhile the back cover of Price’s book invites me to reflect: “When did you last feel exhilarated and lighthearted? When is the last time you felt fully alive?” I cast my mind back, and back, and back, to what feels like a different period in history. Maybe I am depressed — or maybe it’s just the pandemic. Simply living through the last two years is, for most of us, reason enough for an urgent “funtervention,” suggests Price. I had been steeling myself for our interview, anticipating the A-grade Pollyanna who would have the gall to exhort “the power of fun” through a deadly pandemic — but she’s delightful company: warm, knowledgeable and reassuringly down to earth. She has been only too conscious of how her pitch might land, Price tells me over Skype. “The idea that
Last year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (“COP26”) didn’t achieve as much as many people had hoped, but one of the agreements hammered out during the event gave Taiwan’s government an opportunity to brag. On Nov. 2, the EU and the US jointly launched the Global Methane Pledge. Countries that sign up to the accord — to date, 110 have done so — are committed to a collective effort to reduce global methane emissions by at least 30 percent from 2020 levels by the end of this decade. This is an important step, because methane is the number two greenhouse gas (GHG) driving climate change. It isn’t clear if global methane emissions have grown since the onset of the pandemic, yet a New York Times report of Jul. 14, 2020 quoted scientists as saying that, while they had some hopes that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions won’t increase by much, they had no reason to think that humanity was anywhere near “peak methane.” Tonne for tonne, methane traps far more heat than carbon dioxide. Fortunately, it doesn’t persist for so long. According to the World Resources Institute, carbon dioxide is responsible for about three quarters of the global warming caused by GHG emissions; the relatively small amount of methane humankind adds to the atmosphere contributes 17.3 percent; while the impact of nitrous oxide (emitted by agriculture, fossil-fuel combustion and certain industrial processes) is calculated to be 6.2 percent. SLASHED EMISSIONS Just after the Global Methane Pledge was announced, Major Environmental Policies, a digital monthly published by the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) Office of Sustainable Development, pointed out that Taiwan has already slashed its methane emissions, the 2019 total being just half of 2005’s. If anything, comparing numbers from 2019 with those from 2005 understates the progress Taiwan has made. According to a Mar. 13, 2013 presentation, given
The simplest theory of human nature is hedonism — we pursue pleasure and comfort. Suffering and pain are, by their very nature, to be avoided. The spirit of this view is nicely captured in The Epic of Gilgamesh: “Let your belly be full, enjoy yourself always by day and by night! Make merry each day, dance and play day and night… For such is the destiny of men.” And also by the Canadian rock band Trooper: “We’re here for a good time / Not a long time / So have a good time / The sun can’t shine every day.” Hedonists wouldn’t deny that life is full of voluntary suffering — we wake up in the middle of the night to feed the baby, take the 8:15am into the city, undergo painful medical procedures. But for the hedonist, these unpleasant acts are seen as the costs that must be paid to obtain greater pleasures in the future. Challenging and difficult work is the ticket to survival and status; boring exercise and unpleasant diets are what you have to go through for abs of steel and a vibrant old age, and so on. Plainly there’s something right here. Nobody could doubt we possess drives for food, sex, status and much else — and that much of our suffering is chosen with these ends in mind. NO PAIN, NO GAIN But I think hedonism is an awful theory. My latest book, The Sweet Spot: Suffering, Pleasure, and the Key to a Good Life, makes the case for a different theory of what people want. I argue that we don’t only seek pleasure, we also want to live meaningful lives — and this involves willingly experiencing pain, anxiety and struggle. We see value in chosen suffering. After all, people willingly climb mountains, run marathons or get punched in
From the dangers of letting women sit up front, to Hong Kong’s fishy lobster meatballs, here is a weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world: BEWARE! WOMEN A Ugandan traders association has banned women from riding up front in trucks saying short skirts and bare thighs could be distracting drivers and causing accidents. Even wives are banned. Patrick Opio Obote of the Lira vendors group said that some hussies even “take the drivers to bars and drink alcohol and they end up causing accidents.” Covering up is complicated by the fact that conservative Ugandans do not like women wearing trousers. While women’s rights groups denounced the lorry ban as more “male chauvinism,” some wondered if it would be safer if women took the wheel. LOCKED IN LOVE Relations between the sexes are running much smoother in China now after a woman stuck on a never-ending first date by a lockdown went viral last week by complaining that her suitor was “as mute as a wooden dummy” and a “mediocre” cook. This week Zhao Xiaoqing, a 28-year-old woman from northern China’s Shaanxi province, got engaged to her beau after they too were trapped on a date. This time however love rather than boredom blossomed, although some Chinese social media users were skeptical. “After a year or two you’ll get tired of each other and divorce... I’ve seen too many of these kinds of flash marriages,” one netizen wrote. BUT IS IT ART? A Russian artist has been arrested for creating a snow statue of a giant turd near a war memorial in central Saint Petersburg. Ivan Volkov, 30, painted his five-meter-long creation brown and drew a yellow puddle around it before posting pictures of it on Instagram with the legend, Caca. SHELL-SHOCKED It may look like lobster and taste like lobster, but if you are eating it in Hong
In the 17th century, something like a third of the world’s population died. Geoffrey Parker, in his monumental book on that terrible century, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the 17th Century, itemizes the climate disasters that overwhelmed Europe, Asia, India and the Americas. Japan suffered in 1616 its coldest spring ever, it snowed in Fujian in 1618, and successive waves of drought and flood in India and Europe in the 1620-30s savaged harvests in many countries. One of the “years without a summer,” 1628, followed 1627, the wettest summer in Europe in 500 years. The 1640s were a time of terrible floods, droughts, and cold around the world, as reflected in global tree ring data. In Scandinavia, 1641 was the coldest year ever recorded. The second half of the century continued the cruelties of the first. All over the northern hemisphere, 1675 was remembered as another “year without a summer.” In 1683-84, the Thames froze over for weeks, and bull baiting exhibitions were held on the ice. Between 1650 and 1680, the Russian population plunged as harvests repeatedly failed in the face of the coldest autumn-to-spring stretches of the last 500 years and unremitting plagues and warfare. From China to Catalonia, famine and plague ruled. Populations of towns and cities plunged, tax rolls evaporated, wars, revolutions and revolts broke out, the land and sea were the haunt of bandits and pirates, and cannibalism, infanticide and suicide stalked the poor. Town registers across Europe tell the same story of young males lost to war and populations decimated by plague and plundering. At least our science, the lineal descendent of Enlightenment inquiry, which, Parker argues, was called into being in part by the succession of crises, does not blame witches (900 accused were slaughtered in south Germany alone after one
Scientists have uncovered the world’s oldest social network, a web of connections that flourished 50,000 years ago and stretched for thousands of miles across Africa. But unlike its modern electronic equivalent, this ancient web of social bonds used a far more prosaic medium. It relied on the sharing and trading of beads made of ostrich eggshells — one of humanity’s oldest forms of personal adornment. The research by scientists in Germany involved the study of more than 1,500 of these beads, which were dug up at more than 30 sites across southern and east Africa. Careful analysis suggests that people who made the beads — which are still manufactured and worn by hunter-gatherers in Africa today — were exchanging them over vast distances, helping to share symbolic messages and to strengthen alliances. “It’s like following a trail of breadcrumbs,” said the study’s lead author, Jennifer Miller, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in the city of Jena. “The beads are clues, scattered across time and space, just waiting to be noticed.” The study, published in Nature last week, compared beads found at 31 sites in southern and eastern Africa, spanning more than 1,800 miles. By comparing the outside diameter of a shell, the diameter of the holes inside them, and the thickness of the walls of the eggshell, the scientists learned that about 50,000 years ago people in eastern and southern Africa started to make nearly identical beads out of ostrich eggs. Yet these groups and communities were separated by vast distances, which suggests the existence of a long-distance social network that stretched over thousands of miles, connecting people in far-flung regions. “The result is surprising, but the pattern is clear,” said the study’s other author, Yiming Wang, who is also based at the Max Planck. Ostrich eggshell beads are some
Taiwan’s history is full of three-digit numbers indicating the month and day of major events: there’s 228 denoting the pivotal White Terror incident in 1947 and 921 for the devastating Jiji earthquake of 1999. Not quite as well remembered are 823, which represents the start of the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1958 or, 524, the date of an attack on the US Embassy in Taiwan by rioters the year before. One date that is now forgotten by all except the staunchest Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) nostalgists is the snappiest of the lot: 123. On Jan. 23, 1954, over 14,000 Chinese prisoners of war arrived at Keelung aboard US ships following an 88-hour voyage from Incheon, South Korea. Incarcerated for up to three years, these men had decided — often under severe duress from fellow inmates — on resettlement in Taiwan. A further 7,000-plus chose repatriation to China. It was a huge PR coup for former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). To maximize the propaganda, his government devised World Freedom Day (WFD). The event began under the auspices of the Asian Pacific Anti-Communist League, cofounded by Chiang, South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee and Philippines President Elpidio Quirino that same year. As rightist regimes worldwide got on board, the organization was renamed the World Anti-Communist League in 1966 (though the Asian Pacific league continued as a separate wing). In 1990, it rebranded as the World League for Freedom and Democracy (WLFD, 世界自由民主聯盟總會). Since the first celebrations, the POWS have been feted annually. Early WFD events were held at the Grand Hotel and Zhongshan Hall in Ximending, until “budgetary constraints” forced a relocation to nearby Taipei Hero House (台北國軍英雄館), a hotel owned by the Friends of Armed Forces Association (軍人之友社). With their numbers dwindling, only eight former POWS attended last year’s event.
We weave our way through an old cemetery in the dark, as the sound of our quarry gets closer. At the foot of an old tomb, beneath a pile of rubble, we find what we are looking for. Tonight we embark on the seventh and final stage of the Taipei Grand Trail (台北大縱走). Starting with an ascent up to Zhinan Temple (指南宮), on past the famous Maokong Potholes (貓空壺穴), we then meander through the tea plantations and tea houses overlooking Taipei city, finally ending the epic adventure back down at National Chengchi University (國立政治大學). This section was deliberately left until the end of autumn as we hoped to include some Taipei tree frogs, their breeding season being the colder winter months. We are not sure whether or not we are too early in the season, or even whether or not there would be a breeding area along these trails. The first hour or so, we climb a well-maintained stone walkway out of the city and on up toward Zhinan Temple and its surrounding temples. We encounter a few frogs and many cats, which is fitting as this is Maokong, which literally translates as “cat space.” The temples themselves are a rewarding sight, with glowing red lanterns hanging above golden dragons and ornately carved stone motifs. Fourteen people, most of which are new faces, make up the final leg of our journey. We wind our way between the temples, forest paths and a short stretch of road. So far there are few animals out and no sound of the Taipei tree frogs’ mating call. But we have only begun and know there will be something on the trail ahead. SNAKES ON THE POTHOLES As we are about to re-enter the forest, we see that the trail has been closed off for maintenance. We are a bit baffled
It’s as if the outside world conspired to rob Yanshuei (鹽水) of its importance and prosperity. As waterways filled with silt, access to the ocean — which had made it possible for this little town, several kilometers from the sea in the northern part of Tainan, to become a major entrepot — was lost. The north-south railway, a key driver of economic development during the 1895-1945 period of Japanese rule, never arrived. Then, in the 1970s, the sugar industry went into terminal decline. Like Taiwan’s other old settlements, Yanshuei used to be a walled town. The defensive barrier is long gone, but there’s a reminder of the gates through which humans, horses and bullock carts entered and left in the form of street names. HISTORIC STREETS The Martial Temple (武廟), a co-organizer of the annual Beehive Fireworks Festival (鹽水蜂炮), is at the intersection of Beimen Road (北門路, North Gate Road) and Wumiao Road (武廟路). The festival, which celebrates the end of a cholera outbreak that ravaged the town more than 130 years ago, gets its name from the fireworks holders that are positioned around the town. When the fuse on one is lit, thousands of bottle rockets screech out, much like angry bees. Yanshuei’s most interesting place of worship stands at 19 Simen Road (西門路, West Gate Road). On the outside, the Holy Trinity Catholic Church and Monastery of St Clare (鹽水天主堂) is unexceptional. Its interior, however, is captivating. A huge depiction of the “last supper” is one of the highlights. In it, Christ and each of his apostles have Asian facial features and wear traditional Chinese garb. There are chopsticks and plates of steamed buns on the table. Part of Nanmen Road (南門路, South Gate Road) runs parallel with Ciaonan Street (橋南街, South of the Bridge Street), one of the oldest thoroughfares
The lights may be dim at the Eccles Theater and Park City’s Main Street will have fewer cinephiles packing the snowy sidewalks when the Sundance Film Festival begins its 44th edition today. But if last year proved anything, it’s that the world’s premier independent film festival is more than its ski town locale. This year Sundance is back online and armed with nine days of high profile documentaries about everyone from Kanye West and Princess Diana to Lucille Ball and Bill Cosby, buzzy first films from knowns and unknowns, virtual gatherings and filmmaker Q&As. The festival had planned to return to the mountains this year, but two weeks before thousands were set to gather in Park City, Utah, organizers decided to pivot instead of canceling or postponing, as many have done amid the Omicron surge. The experience of last year taught the programmers that not only could they run a successful festival online, but that films could still break through even when filmmakers, audiences, buyers, sellers and press weren’t all in the same physical place. Several films that premiered last year are in the awards conversation (from Summer of Soul to Passing). The festival also boasted a record acquisition too (Apple TV+ paid US$25 million for the heartwarming CODA). The price was at least partially fueled by streamers needing fresh entertainment — a demand that has only intensified during the pandemic. And this year the festival’s programming is as robust as ever, with dozens of conversation-starting films. Opening night selections include Emergency, a darkly comedic look at issues like race and assault, as well as Eva Longoria’s documentary La Guerra Civil, about Oscar De La Hoya and Julio Cesar Chavez’s 1996 fight and the questions of identity it raised for many Mexican Americans. “That fight really divided the Mexican community in the United States,”
Before he passed away in 2019, Dan Howard was a concept artist, working with major video game companies and posting his drawings online, where he had amassed a loyal fan base. Late last year, an anonymous account online started auctioning off Howard’s work as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a kind of digital asset often linked to an image or piece of artwork. Howard’s family only found out about the sales when a fan alerted them. “We felt like we’d been the victim of a high-tech grave robbery,” his brother Donovan, said. Donovan emailed OpenSea, the NFT marketplace where his brother’s work was posted, and the platform removed the auction a few days later — but within weeks, more images were up for sale. “We felt helpless,” said Donovan, who is still waiting for OpenSea to take down the latest forgeries. A spokesperson from OpenSea said “it is against our policy to sell NFTs using plagiarized content, which we regularly enforce in various ways, including delisting and, in some instances, banning accounts.” The NFT market has exploded over the past year, with NFT sales soaring past US$24.9 billion last year, compared to just under US$95 million the year before, according to market tracker DappRadar. That boom has coincided with a massive uptick in fraud, said Moti Levy, chief operations officer at DeviantArt, an online platform with 61 million registered users where artists display digital art and sell physical prints. Usually bought with cryptocurrencies, NFTs represent a digital item — often an image or video. The transaction is recorded on a blockchain — a public digital ledger — with a unique digital signature, giving NFT art owners a kind of digital “bragging rights.” On some NFT marketplaces anyone can upload any image, create an NFT linked to that art and put it up for sale, all without having to show any proof they own
There’s surely only one thing that unites Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the 1974 comedy horror Young Frankenstein and The Muppets’ most recent special on Disney+. Regrettably, it is not Kermit the Frog. The thing that appears in all of these works has no easily recognizable familiar name, although it is perhaps one of the most recognizable three-beat musical phrases in history. It starts with a dun; it continues with a dun; it ends with a duuun! On screen, a dramatic “dun, dun duuun” has appeared in everything from Disney’s Fantasia to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to The IT Crowd. In 2007, a YouTuber scored a video of a melodramatic prairie dog with the three beats, earning over 43m views and a solid place in internet history. Yet though many of us are familiar with the sound, no one seems to know exactly where it came from. Try to Google it and … dun, dun, duuun! Its origins are a mystery. DRAMATIC ‘STINGS’ Taken together, these three duns are what’s known as a sting — a brief bit of music that media producers can use to break up the action or punctuate a theatrical moment. While today’s dun dun duuuns are often employed jokingly to parody the dramas of days gone by, the suspenseful sound was once legitimately used to frighten and thrill. “One of the challenges of radio — and it’s the same now as it was 100 years ago — is how do you hook the listener?” says Richard Hand, a media professor at the University of East Anglia and author of Terror on the Air! Horror Radio in America, 1931-1952. Alongside orchestral stings, sound effects such as clock chimes, claps of thunder, and whistling wind were used to grab the audience’s attention in the early days of radio, as
At full gallop, the horse emerges from the darkness and races through a string of bonfires in an ancient ritual to ward off sickness performed every January in a tiny Spanish village. Known as Luminarias, the festival takes place every January 16 in San Bartolome de Pinares, a village perched high in the hills about 100km west of Madrid. By the light of an almost full moon, several local officials are sweating copiously, despite freezing temperatures, as they pile branches onto the bonfires blazing along the main street of this village of just 600 residents As the bells ring out, there’s a sudden clatter of hooves as the first horse and rider come charging out. After the first horse passes another follows, then a group of them, sparks flying from their hooves as they gallop down the street, cheered on by hundreds of onlookers here to witness this mystical, medieval-like spectacle. The tradition takes place every year on the eve of the feast of San Anton, Spain’s patron saint of animals, and dates back to the 18th century when an epidemic devastated the horse population. “Before when animals died because of infection, they had to be burned,” said Leticia Martin, a 29-year-old physiotherapist riding a horse called Fiel. “So when the epidemic disappeared, people began to believe that the smoke protected the animals.” PURIFYING FIRE “These fires, which purify animals from all diseases, are lit on the eve of San Anton’s day, which is celebrated on Jan. 17,” said Anton Erkoreka of the Museum of the History of Medicine in Spain’s Basque Country region. During the feast, masses are held across Spain to bless animals. “Fire is always a purifying element and this festival asks the saint for his protection on animals.” In other Spanish villages, bonfires are lit at different times of the year
On a frosty morning in London’s Hyde Park, onlookers aim their mobile phones at the top of the Serpentine Gallery. The large sculpture of a blue man sitting on the roof is invisible to the naked eye but it is there — in augmented reality. The sculpture is part of an installation by the American artist Kaws at the gallery, reproduced for the hundreds of millions of users of the video game Fortnite for the first time. Artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist said the New Yorker’s exhibition — “New Fiction,” which opened Tuesday and ends on Feb. 27 — has three “layers.” “It’s the Serpentine Gallery on Fortnite, it’s a Serpentine Gallery as a physical gallery with the exhibition of paintings and sculpture, and then as a third element, it’s the augmented reality AR component, which can be activated with a QR code,” he said. For one week, the 400 million followers of Epic Games’ phenomenon can access a fully accurate replica of the museum in the game, walk around with their avatar, and view the works. Epic Games has worked with internationally renowned singers in a similar way to perform in-game concerts. “This is the first time Fornite has collaborated with the visual arts, with a public gallery,” Obrist said. Seeing an exhibition in a game and physically is “very different,” he added, but the experiences were “complementary.” And he is hoping it may spark a mutual interest in both galleries and video games by all who attend in person or online. CROSSING AUDIENCES “For us, it’s about crossing audiences,” said Obrist. “We think it’s also interesting, the idea of a transgenerational dialogue, because, of course, the average age of the players of the game is definitely much younger ... than the average visitor to a museum, to an exhibition. “So we hope also that a whole new
People talk about original novels, but Chi Ta-wei’s (紀大偉) The Membranes (膜) is more than original. It’s extraordinary. Momo, the protagonist, lives under the sea, for a start. The year is 2200 and she’s 30 years old She was born, if that’s the right word, from inside a peach, and she works as a sort of masseur specializing in attaching membranes to her customers, so that they are completely covered by a new skin, independent of their original one. It’s called “dermo-maintenance.” She considers having intimate relations with some of her customers but largely refrains. It’s only after several chapters that you realize something is odd. There aren’t any male characters, at least not yet. Chi is 49 years old and he works as an assistant professor of Taiwanese literature at the National Chengchi University in Taipei. This novel was published in Chinese in 1995 when the author was 21. The present English translation, by Ari Larissa Heinrich of the Australian Centre on China in the World, Australian National University, appeared last year. So — a Chinese-language, lesbian, “cli-fi” novel. Daniel Bloom, an American journalist in Taiwan, has been advocating the use of the term for futuristic novels based on climate change since I don’t know when, and here’s an obvious candidate. Congratulations Danny! Your day has come. ALTERED WORLD By the middle of the 21st century, 99 percent of humanity has moved to the sea bed. Only immovable monuments, such as “the February 28th Memorial plaques ubiquitous on the island of Taiwan,” remain in the unrelenting sun from which humanity is no longer protected by the ozone layer. Only one percent of people remain ashore, like prisoners. With sunlight like that, “who needed the electric chair?” Only black skin provides some protection, and religions such as Christianity have become restricted to blacks only. Cyborgs, half human
Award-winning filmmaker Yang Yong-hi was just six years old when she watched her eldest brother leave Japan for North Korea as one of 200 “human gifts” for leader Kim Il-sung’s 60th birthday. As a North Korean anthem blared, through bursts of confetti, he handed her a note before his ferry departed Niigata port: “Yong-hi, listen to a lot of music. Watch as many movies as you want.” It was 1972, a year after her parents — members of the ethnic Korean Zainichi community in Japan — had sent their other two sons the same way, lured by the Kim regime’s promise of a socialist paradise with free education, healthcare and jobs for all. The boys never moved back. “My parents dedicated their entire lives to an entity that came up with such a senseless project and forced them to sacrifice their own children for it,” Yang, now 57, said. The trauma of being ripped apart from her siblings reverberates in all of Osaka-born Yang’s films, which document the suffering of her family across generations — from the end of Japanese colonial rule to decades after the split of the Korean peninsula. Her father was a prominent pro-North Korean activist in Osaka, and had sent his sons to live there in the 1970s as part of a repatriation program organized by Pyongyang and Tokyo. Around 93,000 Japan-based Koreans left for North Korea under the scheme between 1959 and 1984. Yang’s eldest brother was among 200 university students specially chosen to honor Kim Il-sung. The regime’s promises came to almost nothing, but the Zainichi arrivals were forced to stay. Their families could do little to bring them back. Yang’s parents “had no choice after having already sent their children. To keep the kids safe (in North Korea), they couldn’t leave the regime, and had to become even more devoted,” she
Persistently high levels of ozone pollution in Asia are costing China, Japan and South Korea an estimated US$63 billion annually in lost rice, wheat and maize crops, a new study says. While ozone forms a protective layer around the Earth in the upper atmosphere, it is a harmful pollutant at ground level. It is created by a chemical reaction when two pollutants, often emitted by cars or industry, combine in the presence of sunlight and it can interfere with plant photosynthesis and growth. REDUCE EMISSIONS The research published Monday harnesses pollution monitoring data from the region and field experiments to show ozone affects Asia’s crop yields more than previously thought. The study’s authors said the findings should push policymakers to reduce emissions that produce ozone. “Air pollution control in North America and Europe succeeded in lowering ozone levels,” said Kazuhiko Kobayashi, a co-first author of the study and professor emeritus affiliated with the University of Tokyo. “We need to repeat that success across East and South Asia,” he said. Previous estimates of ozone’s effects on staple crops such as rice, wheat and maize have sometimes used varieties that are not prevalent in Asia, or tested plants grown in pots rather than fields. To get a more accurate picture, the researchers looked at varieties common in the region and did experiments with crops in pots but also in fields. They exposed rice, wheat and maize to varying levels of ozone and used the resulting crop yields to model how different exposures affected plant development. They also tested the model with a second experiment in which the crops were treated with a chemical that protects against the effects of ozone, to see if the yield increased in line with their estimations. ‘THREAT TO FOOD SECURITY’ To determine real-world effects, the researchers then applied ozone data from more than 3,000 monitoring sites in China, South Korea
Are you in control of your smartphone or is it in control of you? Sometimes it is difficult to tell. One minute you might be using FaceTime to chat with loved ones or talking about your favorite TV show on Twitter. Next, you’re stuck in a TikTok “scroll hole” or tapping your 29th e-mail notification of the day and no longer able to focus on anything else. We often feel like we can’t pull ourselves away from our devices. As various psychologists and Silicon Valley whistleblowers have stated, that is by design. Many people are making efforts to resist and step away from their smartphones. A survey last year by research company GWI found that people of all ages limit the time they spend on social media — especially younger respondents. Twenty-five per cent of gen Z and 23 percent of millennials said they now look at social apps less to help manage their mental health. But as recent studies suggest, not all tech time is created equal. Passively scrolling Facebook and comparing your life with other people’s has never been a recipe for happiness. But actively using Twitter for social support can be. So instead of setting well-intentioned but ultimately unsustainable resolutions or signing up for some kind of extreme “digital detox,” think about changing the settings on some of your apps to make them less of a time sink. TWITTER: MUTE PEOPLE AND TOPICS Some people might call it canceling, but we prefer the term “curation.” You can improve your Twitter experience by muting anything you’d rather not see, such as fad diet tips, Black Friday offers or movie spoilers. It’s easy to do — and undo. For people, simply tap the three dots on their profile and hit “mute.” You’ll no longer see their tweets, but they won’t know. Do the same
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