Conflict is on the menu tonight at the café La Chope. This evening, as on every Thursday night, psychologist Maud Lehanne is leading two of France's favorite pastimes, coffee drinking and the “talking cure”. Here they are learning to get in touch with their true feelings. It isn't always easy. They customers - some thirty Parisians who pay just under $2 (plus drinks) per session - care quick to intellectualize (高谈阔论)，slow to open up and connect. “You are forbidden to say ‘one feels,' or ‘people think',” Lehane told them. “Say ‘I think,' ‘Think me'.”

A café society where no intellectualizing is allowed? It couldn't seem more un-French. But Lehanne's psychology café is about more than knowing oneself: It's trying to help the city's troubled neighborhood cafes. Over the years, Parisian cafes have fallen victim to changes in the French lifestyle - longer working hours, a fast food boom and a younger generation's desire to spend more time at home. Dozens of new theme cafes appear to change the situation. Cafes focused around psychology, history, and engineering are catching on, filling tables well into the evening.

The city's psychology cafes, which offer great comfort, are among the most popular places. Middle-aged homemakers, retirees, and the unemployed come to such cafes to talk about love, anger, and dreams with a psychologist. And they come to Lehanne's group just to learn to say what they feel. “There's a strong need in Paris for communication,” says Maurice Frisch, a cafe La Chope regular who works as a religious instructor in a nearby church. “People have few real friends. And they need to open up.” Lehanne says she'd like to see psychology cafes all over France. “If people had normal lives, these cafes wouldn't exist”, she says, “If life weren't a battle, people wouldn't need a special place just to speak.” But them, it wouldn't be France.

    When the evening is coming, my dear son and I are preparing for the tape time. “Shoes on,” I remind 9-year-old Sam. “Snakes are always waiting for the chance to kiss you. But with our feet stepped into my car, we are safe.” We take blankets and cups of milk and head out to the shelter that serves as our garage. This has become our bedtime habit.

    I press “play.” A motherly voice fills the car. My mother and my aunt send us books on tape obtained from secondhand shops or rescued from the back of drawer. Maybe no one in England lays cassettes anymore, but I still love them.

    Sam rests on his seat. He's sitting in the front seat. I am listening to the cassette. But I am also thinking. In a month's time, my boy will be 10. Next year, he will be 11. And so it will go on, until he leaves me and his father and his sister to live out his own stories— as it is only right and proper he should.

    Will he think back to the times when he sat in the dark in a car in Africa, listening to tales of Wales in World War Ⅱ, the finest lady detective of Botswana, or a country he has visited, and tells me he finds them “very interesting”? Will he think , when he is grown-up, the poor mum always makes the ancient tape player which is out of date work?

    I like to believe that he will recall those wonderful moments. By then, perhaps, my child will realize a deep love of sharing and understanding by listening to the old tape player. I hope Sam will think that these evenings we spend in the car are a story themselves. It is his own first chapter. In time my boy will ease off the hand brake and roll out into the world. Until then, I'll keep pressing “play”.

    Starbucks will stop using plastic straws from its stores globally by 2020, in a nod to the growing push for businesses to be more environmentally friendly. The Seattle-based company said on Monday it will instead use straws made from other materials, and lids designed not to need straws. McDonald's also recently said it would switch to paper straws in the UK and Ireland by next year, and test alternatives to plastic straws in some US locations. In February, Dunkin' Donuts said that it would refuse polystyrene foam (塑料泡沫) cups from its stores by 2020.

    Environmental activists have been pressuring businesses to ditch plastic straws because they can end up in the ocean and hurt marine life. The push gained great support after a video in 2015 showed rescuers removing a straw from a sea turtle's nose in great detail. Local governments have also been looking at the issue. Last week, Seattle's ban on single-use plastic straws and utensils in food service outlets took effect, and Starbucks says it already offers alternative straws there. Similar proposals are being considered elsewhere, including New York and San Francisco.

    While straws have become a highly-concerned issue, they make up only about 4% of the plastic trash by number of pieces, and far less by weight. Straws add up to only about 2,000 tons of the nearly 9m tons of plastic waste that hits waters each year.

    On her first day in New York City, teaching students from low-income families at an after-school program, Alyssa Kapasi noticed so many kids were lining up for free sandwiches and fruit in the cafeteria. Many of these poor students don't get enough food to eat at home, so a free school lunch or a free after-school meal might be the most food they would get all day.

    Kapasi, who graduated from private school, was shocked. Therefore, she was determined to help. “I want other kids to understand that if they meet a problem, they don't have to wait to be an adult to salve it,” says Kapasi. She and a group of friends are now putting their programming skills ta work to create an app called Food for Thought, which will allow parents, students and even kind-hearted strangers to donate to a lunch account for a student in need at a nearby school.

    About 20 million American kids receive free lunches. Two million more quality for reduced-price meals, and those students' families may pay for part of their food. When they don't have the money on any day, the students might have to choose an “alternative meal” such as a free cheese sandwich.

    One clever feature of the app which is being supported by donation from companies and social investors—is that it provides anonymity (匿名) to lunch recipients and donors. To receive financial help, a family will need only a recommendation from a school administrator, and no one else knows.

    “I want to make the application a platform where all users feel no shame in using it,” says Kapasi. She hopes to test the app in a school district next month. And then, she will devote herself to charity.

    Huawei Technologies Co. displayed its much-anticipated in-house operating system Harmony OS on Friday, marking what some call the Chinese tech giant's biggest push yet to build its own software ecosystem for the era of the internet of things.

    The move is also expected to weaken the influence of the United States government's restrictions on Huawei using Google's Android operating system in smartphones, analysts said.

    Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei's consumer business group, speaking in Dongguan, Guangdong province, said it is difficult to deliver a smooth experience across different devices with the huge amount of codes involved in the Android and Linux operating systems. Linux is an open-source operating system widely used in personal computers and other hardware.

    "Harmony is a next-generation operating system designed to address the challenge," Yu said, adding that it will be able to support a wide range of application situations, including smart TVs, automobiles and wearables.

    The internet of things refers to a network of devices and other objects that can connect with each other and exchange data.

    Yu said the US government's restrictions have accelerated the company's marketing of the system, which now has about 4,000 employees working on it.

    The senior executive said Harmony can be used in its smartphones. But Android is still Huawei's preferred choice for handsets if the company is allowed to use it.

    "But when Android is not available, Harmony can be applied immediately to smartphones. Harmony is ready," Yu added.

    Jia Mo, an analyst at market research company Canalys, said even if Huawei does not use Harmony in its smartphones in the short term, its smartwatches and smart TVs can be equipped with Harmony to widen its use and accumulate more experience in building an ecosystem.

    "Also, more importantly, Huawei chose to build Harmony into an open-source operating system and allow it to be compatible with Android. Thus Harmony will be more accepted by current Android users. This will prevent Huawei from repeating the fate of Microsoft in promoting smartphone systems," Jia said. Microsoft failed to popularize the use of its Windows system in smartphones years ago.