This week's collection of whimsical and curious stories comes as a short Halloween edition and will take a brief look at efforts to regulate death and reincarnation:
Death and taxes - When Benjamin Franklin famously remarked that "in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes", he probably did not anticipate that 200 years later, in a small town in the deep south of Italy, taxation would be used to discourage its residents from dying. You see, the small town of Selia (as many others like it) has long suffered from depopulation while the remaining residents are growing ever older. In order to counter this trend, new regulation was passed in 2015 forbidding citizens to get ill and stating that "dying is prohibited" while urging all who remain to regularly attend health checks. Mayor Zicchinella stated that "those who […] put their health and that of our country at risk, will have to pay additional taxes."*
Permission to return - Since August 2007, it is illegal to reincarnate without permission in China. More specifically, you have to submit a reincarnation application to four governmental bodies for approval before you can recognize a reincarnated Buddhist teacher. The official government position states that the rules are "an important move to institutionalise [the] management of reincarnation […]" (Link) - something even the Germans have not tried to regulate so far.
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*Interestingly, most other recently passed "anti-death" regulation was triggered by insufficient local cemetery space (France: Cugnaux [2007] and Sarpourenx [2008], Brazil: Biritiba Mirim [2005], Spain: Lanjaron [1999], Italy: Falciano del Massico [2012]). Some of the publicity this generated helped to subsequently solve the problem. The exception to this is Longyearbyen in northern Norway, where the permafrost poses the main obstacle to burial (Guardian)
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