介绍:
This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Liu Yan in Beijing. Here is the news.
China will provide an emergency water supply to countries along the Mekong River to help deal with drought.
China's Foreign Ministry says a hydropower station in South China's Yunnan province will make the emergency supply available to the lower reaches of the river through April 10.
Countries along the river on the Indochinese Peninsula have faced drought since the end of last year.
Vietnam, which is in the lower reaches of the Mekong River, has requested that China increase water discharges to help ease the drought.
The Mekong River, whose upper part is known in China as the Lancang River, is an important water source for the five countries on the Indochinese Peninsula, namely Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. China has decided to provide the emergency water supply to benefit the five countries.
The Foreign Ministry says China is willing to strengthen communication and practical cooperation with its neighbors on the management of water resources and disaster response under the Lancang-Mekong River Cooperation Mechanism.
China and the five countries set up the cooperation mechanism when their foreign ministers met in Yunnan in November. In a joint statement, all the foreign ministers promised to promote cooperation on water resources.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
A senior official says China should speed up the standardization of its high-speed railway technology and take the lead in setting international standards.
An executive of China Tiesiju Civil Engineering Group in Anhui province Xu Baocheng says standards are crucial to facilitating Chinese railway enterprises' overseas expansion.
Xu says seizing the international railway market is of strategic and economic importance to China; and it will help resolve the overcapacity in industrial manufacturing, engineering and construction industries. In addition, the overseas railway market is an ideal field to invest in and thus to increase the country's foreign exchange reserves.
The senior engineer adds that the government will strive to have the international railway community recognize and accept Chinese high-speed railway standards and take the lead in setting universal standards.
He says currently, technological standards are dominated by several industry giants from Western nations, while China has yet to even make an English-language version of high-speed railway standards.
China released its first standards for high-speed railways in 2014, governing almost 20 aspects of design and construction of high-speed lines operating at speeds from 250 kilometers per hour to 350 kilometers per hour.
By the end of last year, China had built a high-speed rail network of more than 19,000 kilometers, accounting for more than 60 percent of the world's entire high-speed lines.
You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Liu Yan in Beijing.
The minister of transport has criticized car-hailing app operators for the subsidies they offer to users, describing the practice as unfair competition.
Transport Minister Yang Chuantang has also pledged to better regulate paid rides offered by private drivers.
Speaking at a news conference in Beijing, Yang says the subsidies are a short-term tactic to gain a bigger market share; and the apps are profit-driven and the subsidies will not be handed out forever.
Taxi-hailing app Didi Kuaidi is in fierce competition with Uber Technologies in China. Didi Kuaidi is backed by Internet giants including Alibaba and Tencent. The cash-rich companies are heavily subsidizing passengers and drivers to gain a bigger market presence.
Uber said earlier this year that the company lost more than one billion US dollars in China last year from subsidizing users.
Didi Kuaidi did not disclose the amount given in subsidies. Before a high-profile merger of two local apps last year, the Chinese company had pledged to subsidize projects worth more than 2 billion yuan, roughly 310 million dollars.
Didi Kuaidi and Uber face a regulatory dilemma in China. Regulations do not allow private cars to be used for paid journeys, but tens of thousands of such vehicles carry paying passengers in around 200 cities every day.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
Roman Catholics in China face a severe shortage of clergy as the number of followers continues to rise.
According to church leaders, the 6 million-plus Catholics in China are served by more than 3,000 priests and 6,000 nuns from 106 parishes.
At a Bishops Conference of the Catholic Church in China, vice-president of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association Liu Yuanlong said the number of recruits to the priesthood in the Catholic Church in China has dropped sharply in recent years. Fewer than 800 trainee priests are receiving training at the nation's 10 major seminaries.
Liu says the shortage of new recruits is a major problem for the Catholic Church in China; and some seminaries are smaller than a rural middle school and have just one or two newly recruited trainee priests each year.
Liu says the talent shortage is caused by a variety of factors, including underground churches; and the lack of attention paid to church recruits by bishops has also made the problem more serious.
He adds that a rise in living standards has also resulted in fewer people who are willing to devote themselves to church service.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
Researchers from China and the United States have developed a new cataract treatment with stem cells that has restored vision in infants in a trial. It may eventually be used in adults.
The new procedure was developed by doctors and staff members at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, as well as Sichuan and Sun Yat-sen universities in China. It was published in the March 9 edition of the scientific journal Nature.
A cataract is a clouding of the normally clear lens of an eye. Typical cataract surgery involves the removal of the cloudy lens and the insertion of an artificial one.
The new surgery has been tested in animals and during a small, human clinical trial. It resulted in fewer surgical complications than the current invasive surgery. It showed superior visual function in all 12 of the pediatric cataract patients who underwent the procedure.
Congenital cataract, lens clouding that occurs at birth or shortly after, is a significant cause of blindness in children.
The human trial involved 12 infants under the age of 2 who were treated with the new method, while another 25 infants received the standard surgical care. The scientists reported fewer complications and faster healing among the 12 infants who underwent the new procedure.
You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Liu Yan in Beijing. You can access the program by logging onto NEWSPlusRadio.cn. You can also find us on our Apple Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know by e-mailing us at mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. That's mansuyingyu@cri.com.cn. Now the news continues.
Glib Chinese Internet users have raised a challenge to the artificial intelligence program that recently dethroned one of the top human Go chess players, demanding tongue-in-cheek that the AlphaGo program learn the nation's real pastime, the mahjong.
China's reaction towards the historic duel between human and artificial intelligence has been mixed. At first, there were questions on why the human player did not come from China, where the game was invented more than 2,500 years ago.
Then, as AlphaGo marked three victories in the five-game match, defiant web users began calling for a challenge in an arena average Chinese are more comfortable in.
Can Artificial Intelligence beat mahjong masters? This question was posted several times in the comment section of stories about the AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol match on Chinese microblog Sina Weibo. The match attracted a deluge of comments on defending humanity' glory in mahjong.
Mahjong is China's answer to poker, and is played by four people. Each turn, players draw tiles from a 144-tile pool, discard or intercept others' to form sets of tiles that can win. Scientists say compared with Go chess, mahjong has far fewer permutations for artificial intelligence calculation, but involves a degree of chance and other factors in favor of humans.
One blogger commented that unlike Go chess, mahjong is not a quiet game that focuses only on calculation. It involves a lot of interactions and teamwork between players.
Some people described mahjong as a competition in both IQ and EQ. They say computers can undoubtedly blow humans out of the water in math, but how about their ability of communication and interpreting emotions?
You're listening to NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Liu Yan in Beijing.
Internet giant Baidu claims the company has made great strides in artificial intelligence and is applying it to the company's online-to-offline food delivery service.
Sina.com reported that it was a response to a joke among Internet users that Google's technology can beat a champion at a board game while Baidu's technology just concerns food delivery, making fun of its online-to-offline app.
But it may be a little quick to say Baidu's food app is low-tech.
Three elements affect the time that food ordered from restaurant kitchens reach the clients' door: how long it takes couriers to arrive at the restaurant, how long they take from the restaurant to the client's door and how long it takes for kitchens to prepare food.
According to Baidu, it has been impossible to calculate how long kitchens will take to get food ready due to different cooks and volumes of clients in restaurants.
If cooks get food ready too fast, the food may go off by the time it's delivered; if couriers arrive at the diner too early, they have to wait and lose other orders.
That is where artificial intelligence steps in.
It is used in the automatic system to precisely calculate every step.
The system tells couriers how long it will take for the food to be ready and offer a route plan for them.
Baidu says all data have been collected including the time cost of every order and every meal from every restaurant. Artificial intelligence can estimate the time a meal is ready based on the data.
Baidu says the model has been used in their food delivery logistics system for people to have a better experience when ordering food.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
（全文见周日微信。）
