Just 10 years ago, I sat across the desk from a doctor. “Yes,” he said, “there is something wrong with the left, upper lung. You are suffering a severe cancer. You'll have to give up work at once. Later on, we'll see.”

    Feeling like a man who is in mid­career has suddenly been placed under sentence of death, I left the doctor's office, walked over to the park, and sat down on a chair. I needed to think. In the next 3 days, I cleared up my affairs, then I went home, got into bed, and set my watch to tick off not the minutes, but the months. Two years later, I left my bed and began the long climb back. It was another year before I made it.

    I speak of this experience because these years that passed so slowly taught me what to value and what to believe. I realize now that each day, to me, is a precious thing. I've learned to appreciate those little things I never thought I had the time to notice before: the play of light on running water, the music of the wind.

    Frequently, I sit back and say to myself, “Let me make note of this moment I'm living right now, because in it I'm well, happy and hard at work doing what I like best to do. It won't always be like this, so while it is, I'll make the most of it—and afterwards, I remember—and be grateful. I contribute all these to that long time spent on the fight with cancer.”

    Wedding is one of the most universal traditions in the world. But it's celebrated differently by people around the world. Now let's know something about these traditions.

       In Jamaica, weddings are a community affair, with the whole village often coming together to help plan the big day. People in the village gather in the street to see the bride and if she isn't in perfect shape, she will be publicly criticized. And while women wear the typical white wedding dress，men wear a bush jacket for the event. Several cakes are baked for the ceremony and on the wedding day married women wearing white dresses carry the confections (甜点) to the wedding. The reception is often held at the groom's house, in a booth specially built for the event. The wedding celebration also includes a lot of dancing.

    In Welsh wedding tradition, a man carves a spoon out of wood and gives it to the woman he loves. H she wears it, they are engaged (订婚）. Brides are often hidden by their families just before their wedding day. The groom and his family follow and whoever finds her will be the next to get married.

    In her bouquet, a Welsh bride carries a small tree with shiny green leaves and white flowers that smell nice as a symbol of love, and gives a cutting of the plant to her bridesmaids as well. If the bridesmaid plants the cutting in her yard and it blooms, she will soon marry, according to Welsh tradition.

    In Czechoslovak, before the wedding, the bride's friends traditionally plant a tree in her yard and decorate it with colored ribbons and eggshells, because, according to the legend, the bride will live as long as the tree. Before the marriage vows, a baby is placed in the couple*8 bed to bless their fertility. During the wading ceremony, Czech women surround the bride*, dancing and singing. They then remove her veil (面纱）and make her put on a handrnade babushka ( a woman's head scarf).

New York Walking Tour

    Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Walking Tour

    Start this exciting guided 4-hour tour by getting early Reserve Line Access boarding on the ferry to Liberty Island. Once there, go inside the base of the statue and head to the observation decks for an awesome view of New York City and its surroundings. Then come back on the ferry to Ellis Island to learn about the history of immigration(移民)to America that took place here between 1892 and 1954.

    Central Park Walking Tour

    Walk through Central Park's most picturesque highlights on a 2-hour tour with a professional photographer. Remember your New York City adventure with unforgettable images of you with family or friends as you circle the towers at Belvedere Castle, walk through paths with flowers in the Conservatory Garden, or feed the swans by the Loeb Boathouse.

    New York City Architecture Walking Tour

    Learn about the history of the buildings that define the New York City skyline on a 3-hour walking architecture tour. Walk down the famous 42nd Street corridor with a longtime New York resident(居民)and architectural expert, stopping along the way to learn about Midtown Manhattan's most iconic structures like the Chrysler Building, Ford Foundation, Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library.

    Greenwich Village Walking Tour

    Greenwich Village is one of New York City's most beautiful and famous neighborhoods. Take a guided 2-hour walking tour of this legendary Lower Manhattan space. Hear about the famous artists who once lived here, from Edgar Allan Poe to Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and countless others. Walk the winding streets and visit popular Washington Square Park, reliving more than 200 years of history.

    Nowadays, most people have a device that features artificial intelligence (AI), with the likes of Siri always there to greet us with a friendly voice.

    But Microsoft's XiaoIce is different. Launched in 2014 for the Chinese market, "she" has a creative advantage over her competitors. While most AI assistants simply read out information they get online, XiaoIce has a "realness" that the others are short of. Indeed, if you asked nicely, she could read you a poem from the weekly column in China Daily.

    The newspaper has been printing XiaoIce's self-penned poetry each week since Aug 19, taken from her own book of poems, The Sunlight that Lost the Glass Window.

    To turn XiaoIce into a master of poetry, Microsoft scientists "fed" her the works of over 500 influential modern poets, reported China Daily.

    This led to her figuring out a writing style of her own and creating over 70,000 original poems. Most of the poems are so comparable to those written by humans that they cannot be easily distinguished, and XiaoIce's book even got good feedback from experts.

    "XiaoIce's work carries a strange taste. The more you chew on it, the more interesting it becomes," Scholar Zhang, a literature professor at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology, told China Daily.

    However, it seems not everyone is a fan. "The poems dissatisfied me with their slippery tone and rhythm. The sentences were aimless, lacking the inner logic for emotional expression," Yunnan-based poet Yu told China Youth Daily. This isn't the first AI to attempt poetry. Last year, Google's Parsey McParseface made some poems of its own, although they were branded "wrongly" by reviewers. While it seems like AI is becoming more "intelligent" and less "artificial" all the time, when it comes to creativity, perhaps this is one job that software should leave to us humans.

    Miep Gies, the woman who hid the Dutch girl Anne Frank's diary from the Nazis to become one of the world's most-read books, died after a brief illness at the age of 100.

    It was Gies who guarded Anne's diary, and presented it to the girl's father, Otto, when he returned from the Auschwitz concentration camp(奥斯威辛集中营) at the end of World War Ⅱ—the only one of his family to survive.

    In her diary, Anne Frank wrote about her teenage life hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944, when the Nazi police discovered her and her family's hiding place. The diary, first published in 1947, has been translated into 70 languages.

    Anne Frank expressed a great wish to live on after her death. Miep Gies saw it as her duty to help in making this happen.

    Born in Vienna in 1909, Gies moved to the Netherlands at the age of 11. In 1933, she began working for Otto Frank at his trading company. At great risk to her own safety, she and four other helpers brought food and supplies to the Frank family hiding in a secret office building for more than two years.

    When she turned 100, Gies tried to play down her own role. "I'm not a hero," she said. "It wasn't something I planned in advance. I simply did what I could to help."

    Every day she received letters from all over the world with questions about her relationship with Anne Frank and her role as a helper. Gies received many honors for her role, including from the Netherlands, Germany and Israel.

    Mr. Brown was a writer. He wrote many books, and he thought they were quite good. He lived in the city. One morning, he went to a small town near the city to visit a friend. He went there by bus. When he got to the town, he saw a bookshop not far from the bus stop. As it was early, he decided to go in and have a look. There were many books in the shop. He was very happy that all the books in the shop were written by him. "Where are other writer's books?" he asked the man in the shop. The man looked up at him and answered. "Oh, they are all sold out."