Long Beach, a 28-mile area of beach, lies in southwestern Washington, and is generally called Long Beach Peninsula. Communities there take you back to old days of a simple life. Here, visitors can relax and enjoy the good of a total rest.

    Bird watching

    There are different kinds of birds on Long Beach. It's best if you watch them from a distance and don't try to frighten them. The Southwest Loop Route Map can be got through the Long Beach Peninsula Visitors Office by calling 1-800-451-2542.

    Horses

    A popular activity on Long Beach is horseback riding. Two businesses in the city of Long Beach offer guided horseback tours along the beach: Black Country Wilderness Outfitters and Skipper's Equestrian Center. You may also bring your own horse. Among the adventures offered with horses is a wagon（四轮马车）ride along the beach, a carriage ride through Seaview or Long Beach, a back country pack trip, or a sunset ride by horseback on the beach.

    Camping

    RV（活动房屋式旅游车）and tent camping aren't allowed on the beach. Camp fires are allowed within 100 feet off the beach, but must be away from the dry grass.

    Swimming and other activities

    Swimming is allowed, but you must be careful. The waters are very cold and dangerous. Surfing（冲浪）is advised only for experienced surfers. Beach driving is allowed at certain areas on the beach. The speed limit is 25 mph. Building sand castles, digging sand to find something, riding bicycles and flying kites are also popular activities in the area.

    Enjoy your trip to Long Beach, Washington!

    Sunday is more like Monday than it used to be. Places of business that used to keep daytime“business hours” are now open late into the night. And on the Internet, the hour of the day and the day of the week have become irrelevant（不相关的）. A half century ago in the United States, most people experienced strong and precise dividing lines between days of rest and days of work, school time and summer time. Today the boundaries still exist, but they seem not clear.

    The law in almost all states used to require stores to close on Sunday; in most, it no longer does. It used to keep the schools open in all seasons except summer; in most, it still does. And whether the work week should strengthen its legal limits, or whether it should become more “flexible,” is often debated. How should we, as a society, organize our time? Should we go even further in relaxing the boundaries of time until we live in a world in which every minute is much like every other?

    These are not easy questions even to ask. Part of the difficulty is that we rarely recognize the “law of time” even when we meet it face to face. We know as children that we have to attend school a certain number of hours, a certain number of days, a certain number of years — but unless we meet the truant officer (学监), we may well think that we should go to school due to social custom and parents' demand rather than to the law. As adults we are familiar with “extra pay for overtime working,” but less familiar with the fact that what constitutes（构成）“overtime” is a matter of legal definition. When we turn the clock forward to start daylight-saving time, have we ever thought to ourselves: “Here is the law in action”? As we shall see, there is a lot of law that has great influence on how we organize and use time: compulsory education law, overtime law, and daylight-saving law — as well as law about Sunday closing, holidays, being late to work, time zones, and so on. Once we begin to look for it, we will have no trouble finding a law of time to examine and assess.

    It's just been three months after the first bike-sharing company arrived in Singapore, but reports of abuse and vandalism（故意破坏）of shared bikes in the city keep appearing on social media.

    The majority of these shared bikes are stationless, which means they don't need to be stopped at a designated（指定的）spot. They lock themselves after your ride is over, and you're meant to just leave the bike at the side of a road.

    But users have been chaining up bicycles outside their apartments, preventing others from using them. Some people bring them up to their apartment floors, so they can't be found easily by other users. Some people have removed the bikes' number plates or codes, and some even have painted over the bikes to claim the bikes for themselves. Most of the abused bikes belong to either Singapore-based oBike, or ofo, a bike-sharing giant based in China.

    ofo has encouraged Singaporean users to report issues. oBike said that the number of bicycles that were damaged made up less than one percent of its fleet. The company said in February that it planned to bring in “tens of thousands” of bikes by mid-2017. The company has yet to ban anyone from its service, but said that it would take appropriate action – including making reports to the police.

    oBike also introduced a shortcoming system, similar to that of its competitor, China-based Mobike. Users start with 100 points, which get taken away for errant（出格的）behaviour such as forgetting to lock the bike, or parking at non-designated areas. Users are banned from using oBike when their scores reach zero. oBike has an eight-man operation team that can remove bicycles parked casually.

    When approached for comment, Mobike said, “In China, just as in Singapore, there are always a tiny minority of people who abuse the bikes, so we designed our system to prevent this type of abuse.”

    In 2011, the old style Malta buses were taken off the road and replaced by modern vehicles. Most of the old buses were deserted, a few were sold, and about 100 of them were put into storage in the hope of showing them in a museum at some stage.

    A pre-2011 visit to Malta wouldn't have been complete without a ride on one of the colorful buses. Until 1973 you could tell the destination of the bus just by looking at its color — Sliema was green and white, Zabbar was red and white with a blue stripe(条纹)etc. . Later, the buses all had numbers. For a while, they were all painted green and white before the ‘final' orange, yellow and white.

    In their prime, walking around the Triton fountain at the Valletta bus station, you would have found it very difficult to see two buses of exactly the same design. Most of them had locally built bodies. On the front of the buses carried names like Dodge, Leyland, Bedford etc. You were equally likely to find football pennants(锦旗)and the like decorating the cabs. Real bus experts would have recognized that these were there mainly for decorative reasons, and were seldom an accurate reflection of the vehicle's origins.

    Nowadays much more modern buses are to be found at the Floriana bus station. They are more environmentally friendly and possibly even more comfortable than the older types. However, I miss the old buses. I remember, when you boarded your bus, you had to prepare the correct change to pay the usually bad-tempered driver as you got on. If you were seated anywhere near the front, you would have noticed that most drivers sat well to the right of their steering wheel. The reason for this, as any Maltese would tell you, was to leave space for their pet to sit alongside them. I wonder where the pet sits these days.

    Although toys packaging says it's educational, it doesn't make it so. That's the finding from a new study in JAMA Pediatrics that found some toys being marketed as language promoters got in the way of learning.

    Research shows that for kids to understand, speak and eventually read or write a language, they need to hear it - lots of it. And it's never too early for parents and to caregivers to get talking. That explains the booming industry in talking electronic toys that claim to help kids learn language.

    Professor Anna Sosa, of Northern Arizona University, led the study and says she gave families three different kinds of toys to play with: books, traditional toys like humble blocks and a shape sorter, and electronic toys. Sosa says she picked those toys because they are advertised in their packaging as language-promoters for babies between the ages of 10 and 16 months.

    "We had a talking on farm-animal names and things," Sosa says of the electronic toys. "We had a baby cell phone. And we had a baby laptop. So you open the cover and start pushing buttons, and it tells you things. The parent-child couples were asked to play separately with each type of toy over the course of three days."

    "When there's something else that's doing some talking, the parents seem to be sitting on the sidelines and letting the toy talk for them and respond for them," Sosa says. "That's bad because the best way a toy can promote language in infants and toddlers is by stimulating interaction between parent and child. There's simply no evidence that a young child can learn language directly from a toy. It isn't responsive enough. It isn't social."

    As for the other toys, traditional blocks and puzzles stimulated more conversation than the electronic toys, and books outscored them all. But don't underestimate the humble block. While traditional toys fell short of books in interaction quantity, Sosa notes, they kept pace in terms of quality.

Should you find yourself in possession of an additional sum of $100, how might you employ this financial increment to cultivate an atmosphere of benevolence within your local society? If you possess an imaginative reply to this inquiry, peruse our Frequently Asked Questions below and put forth your application for our recurring competition.

What is the nature of this initiative? Kindness-In-Action is a program dedicated to facilitating the realization of benevolent concepts. Individuals from across the globe proffer their proposals on the actions they would undertake if bestowed with an extra $100, and KindSpring designates a victor on a monthly basis.

What is the operational mechanism?Initially, you are to proffer your concept; upon its selection, you will be contacted by one of our volunteer adjudicators to coordinate a telephonic or Skype conversation. Subsequently, we will dispatch a check to you, and you will be granted a month to actualize your concept within your community. Following the implementation, you are to convey your narrative and photographic documentation to the KindSpring community. Moreover, your endeavor will be highlighted in our monthly bulletin, which has a readership extending to over 100 thousand individuals across 150 nations, thereby enabling the propagation of the concept and the amplification of its compassionate influence.

What are the evaluative standards for selection? The criteria for selection encompass your intrinsic motivation, the innovative utilization of Smile Cards, the prospective cascading impact within the local society, and the endorsements from the KindSpring community—current members are entitled to log in and cast their votes. Fundamentally, our objective is to incite modest acts of kindness, not grand gestures.

What was the genesis of this endeavor?In the month of May, we received an unforeseen contribution. In the spirit of sharing the elation, we posted a succinct announcement within our virtual community soliciting ideas. Within a fortnight, we received more than 50 submissions, and numerous individuals assisted us in the appraisal process by bestowing "smiles". On the first of July, we proclaimed our inaugural winner and pledged to perpetuate this initiative. The ongoing purpose of this venture is to: inspire inventive acts of kindness within local societies, to empower individuals to exercise munificence, to exemplify a trust-based philanthropic approach, and to disseminate beneficial concepts.Click Here to Apply. Or join our community and help us select the next winner.