I've never been the kind of person to say, “it's the thought that counts” when it comes to gifts. That was until a couple of weeks ago, when my kids gave me a present that blew me away.

    For years now, I've been wanting to sell our home, the place where my husband and 1 raised our kids. But to me, this house is much more than just a building.

    In the front room, there's a wall that has hundreds of pencil lines, marking the progress of my children's growth.

    Every growth stage is marked in grey, with each child's name and the date they were measured. Of all the objects and all the memories, it's this one thing in a home that's the hardest to leave behind. Friends I know have returned home after work only to discover their wall of heights has been freshly painted over. A new paint job wouldn't normally be greeted by tears, but erasing that evidence of motherhood hurts more than it should. Our kids grow in so many ways, but the wall is physical evidence of their progress, right there for everyone to see.

    Over the years, I've talked about how much I would hate leaving that wall behind when I moved, even though the last marks were made 10 years ago when my kids stopped growing.

    So one day, while I was at work, my children decided to do something about it.

    They hired Jacquie Manning, a professional photographer whose work is about capturing (捕捉) the beautiful things in life, from clear lakes and skies to diamonds and ballgowns (舞会礼服).

    She came to our house while I was at work, and over several hours, took photos of the hundreds of drawings and lines, little grey fingerprints (手印), and old marks. Somehow, she managed to photograph all those years of memories perfectly. Afterwards, she put all the photos together into one image, transforming them into a beautiful history of my family.

    Three weeks later, my children's wonderful gift made its way to me—a life-size photo of the pencil lines and fingerprints that represents entire lifetimes of love and growth.

    The Pew report—which was based on surveys carried out in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Poland and the Czech Republic—concluded that the European Union was “ the new sick man of Europe”.

    The percentage of Europeans with a favorable view of the EU has plunged from 60 percent last year to 45 percent now.

    The UK may be considered the most Eurosceptic（欧洲怀疑论者）country, but its support for the union has barely changed in the past 12 months, slipping only two points to 43 percent.

    By contrast, France's backing for the EU has slipped sharply, from 60 percent last year to 41 percent today.

    On the question of whether to remain in the EU, 46 percent of the British want to leave the union and surprisingly, the same percentage want to stay.

    The Pew report's authors said, “The long-drawn economic crisis has created bad forces that are pulling European public opinion apart, separating the French from the Germans and Germans from everyone else.”

    They added, “The effort over the past half century to create a more united Europe is now the main disaster of the euro crisis. The European project now stands in a bad reputation across much of Europe.”

    The only European leader rated highly by their own voters was the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with 74 percent voters in favor of her.

    Prime Minister David Cameron was the next highest with a positive score of 37 percent among the British public, although he can take some comfort from the fact that 58 percent of Poles（波兰人）and half of all French people think he is doing a good job.

    In spite of the dark economic future and growing doubt of the EU, there were strong majorities of more than 60 percent in favor of keeping the euro in the five countries surveyed that use the single currency.

Work and the Young: Generation Jobless

    “YOUNG people ought not to be idle (闲置的) . It is very bad for them," said MargaretThatcher in 1984. She was right: there are few worse things that society can do to its young than to leave them ignored.

    Yet more young people are idle than ever. The International Labour Organization reports that 75m (m=million) young people globally are looking for a job. World Bank surveys suggest that 262m young people are economically inactive. The number of young people without a job is nearly as large as the population of America (311m).

Two factors play a big part. First, the long slowdown in the West has reduced demand for labour, and it is easier to put off hiring young people than it is to fire older workers. Second, inemerging economies population growth is the fastest in countries with disordered labour markets, such as India and Egypt.

    One possible way to settle this problem is to stimulate growth. That is easier said than done in a world suffering from debt, and is anyway a possible answer. The countries where the problem is worst (such as Spain and Egypt) suffered from high youth unemployment even when their economies were growing. Throughout the recession ( 经济不景气)，companies have continued to complain that they cannot find young people with the right skills. This underlines the importance of two other solutions: reforming labour markets and improving education.

    Youth unemployment is often at its worst in countries with inflexible labour markets. High taxes on hiring, strict rules about firing, high minimum wages: all these help force young people to the street corner. South Africa has some of the highest unemployment, in part because it has powerful trade unions and inflexible rules about hiring and firing. Many countries with high youth unemployment rate have high minimum wages and heavy taxes on labour. India has around 200 laws on work and pay.

    Across the OECD (经合组织) , people who left school at the earliest opportunity are twice as likely to be unemployed as university graduates. But it is unwise to conclude that governments should simply continue increasing the number of people who graduate from university. In both Britain and the United States many people with arts degrees are finding it impossible to get appropriate jobs. In North Africa university graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed as non-graduates.

    What matters is not just number of years of education people get, but its content. This means expanding the study of science and technology and closing the gap between the world of education and the world of work-for example by upgrading vocational education and by building closer relations between companies and schools. Germany, which has the second lowest level of youth unemployment in the rich world, owns long-history system of vocational schooling and apprenticeships (学徒制).

    The problem of youth unemployment has been getting worse for several years. But there are at last some reasons for hope. Governments are trying to address the mismatch between education and the labour market. Companies are beginning to take more responsibility for the young. The world has a real chance of introducing an education-and-training revolution worthy of the solution to the problem.

    I was desperately nervous about becoming car-free. But eight months ago our car was hit by a passing vehicle and it was destroyed. No problem, I thought: we'll buy another. But the insurance payout didn't even begin to cover the costs of buying a new car－I worked out that, with the loan, we'd need plus petrol, insurance, parking permits and tax, we would make a payment as much as £600 a month.

    And that's when I had my fancy idea. Why not just give up having a car at all? I live in London. We have a railway station behind our house, a tube station 10 minutes' walk away, and a bus stop at the end of the street. A new car club had just opened in our area, and one of its shiny little red Peugeots was parked nearby. If any family in Britain could live without a car, I reasoned, then surely we were that family.

    But my new car-free idea, sadly, wasn't shared by my family. My teenage daughters were horrified. What would their friends think about our family being "too poor to afford a car"? (I wasn't that bothered what they thought, and I suggested the girls should take the same approach.)

    My friends, too, were astonished at our plan. What would happen if someone got seriously ill overnight and needed to go to hospital? (an ambulance) How would the children get to and from their many events? (buses and trains) People smiled as though this was another of my mad ideas, before saying they were sure I'd soon realize that a car was a necessity.

    Eight months on, I wonder whether we'll ever own a car again. The idea that you "have to" own a car, especially if you live in a city, is all in the mind. I live—and many other citizens do too—in a place that has never been better served by public transport, and yet car ownership has never been higher. We worry about rising car costs, but we'd be better off asking something much more basic: do I really need a car? Certainly the answer is no, and I'm a lot richer because I dared to ask the question.

    The year of 2017 marked the 100th birthday of the honoring Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei.

    From museums to business headquarters, Pei had designed many notable buildings around the world throughout his long professional career. According to the organizers of ''Rethinking Pei: A Centenary Symposium (百年纪念座谈会)" held that year, Pei remained one of the most celebrated architects of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

    The Hong Kong Bank of China Tower is one of his most famous works in Asia. As the bank itself also celebrated its centenary in 2017, it's worth examining the building's historical and architectural background to gain a deeper understanding of the architect who changed Hong Kong's skyline forever.

    The Bank of China Tower (BOC Tower) was completed in 1989, a year which the "New York Times" called, the year of I.M. Pei." For it was in this same year that Pei also completed the glass pyramid of the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, the Creative Artist Agency Headquarters in Los Angeles, and other marvellous architectures all around the world.

    Pei was commissioned (委托)in 1982 by the Beijing-based Bank of China to design it shead quarters in Hong Kong, but construction did not start until 1985.

    There were many reasons for the delay. One of the biggest was the huge challenges posed by the location. The land parcel had been the address of a Victorian building which served as a prison during Japanese occupation of Hong Kong between 1941 and 1945. This terrible heritage might be one of the reasons why it was dismantled in 1982.

    For I.M. Pei, the challenge of the site was not its past, but its present: the relatively small land parcel was surrounded on three sides by elevated roadways serving high-speed heavy traffic, meaning there was no possible public pedestrian access. Then there was its awkward trapezoidal (梯形)shape and the fact that the site also had a deep north-south height difference.

    Another challenge was the unavoidable comparison of the BOC Tower to the neighboring Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters(HSBC), which was also under construction. A spectacular building generously funded, its architect Norman Foster was simply told to create "the best bank building in the world." At that time it was also the world's most expensive building, costing $668 million. The Bank of China Tower's budget was approximately one fifth of the budget allowed by HSBC.

    The Hong Kong government had promised HSBC that no tall buildings would ever be built in front of its headquarters. Besides, in between the site of the Bank of China and the harbor, there were already a few buildings over 70 meters tall blocking views.

    Recognizing that going tall was the only way to create a landmark at this site with his budget, Pei came up with an architectural tower design that was simple, expressive, innovative, and upon its completion, the tallest building outside of America and the fourth tallest in the world.

    After the Bank of China officially moved into the tower in 1991, noted architect and critic Peter Blake visited the building and declared it to be "probably the most innovative skyscraper structure built anywhere to date."

    Now 30 years after the building^'s construction, the Bank of China Tower continues to offer valuable lessons of architectural and structural creativity under the most demanding conditions. Most importantly, the tower has become one of the most important cultural icons for the city of Hong Kong.

    Devon Gallagher, a college graduate from Philadelphia, wants the world to know exactly where she's been while she's on her worldwide vacation in a special way. The traveler, who was born with a bone disease, had her right leg amputated (截肢) at the age of four. Although the amputation caused inconvenience for Gallagher early on, she now sees it as nothing short of inspiration for living her best life.

    To spread that message. Gallagher has gone to social media, where she shares photos of her travels across the world, but instead of simply using a geo-tag (地理位置标签), she writes her location on her artificial leg before taking a picture.

    Now she has been taking pictures across the Continent, which show her cycling over the canal in Amsterdam relaxing on a wall overlooking the city of Barcelona, posing with a waffle in Brussels, taking in the beautiful Parthenon temple in Athens and enjoying a river ride in Budapest, all with the well-known locations written on her artificial leg.

    "I get a new leg every two years and I can choose the design on it. One day I had a sudden thought to get a chalk-board," Gallagher said. "My mum and grandmother didn't like the idea, but my friends thought it was great and told me to go for it, so I did."

    Gallagher said people often stare when she's writing on her leg, but once she shares the photos, she receives only positive feedback (反馈), "My leg hasn't stopped me from doing anything I've wanted to do," she said. "I don't know if it's my determination to prove to myself that I can do it, anyway, I've been able to keep up with people at my age and lead a pretty great life."

    Gallagher shows us that you should never let anything stand in the way of your dreams. And if life gives you an artificial leg, make art.