An Italian Immigrant's love for gelato (video)

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In favor of legalizing driving while on the phone (video)

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Against a Distracted-Driving Ban in New Jersey

MORRISTOWN, N.J. — Texting, we have all come to admit, is the enemy of road safety everywhere. Applying makeup behind the wheel: more or less universally frowned upon. Few will condone driving while reading a book or eating anything that involves utensils.

In New Jersey things are slightly more complicated.

State Assemblyman John Wisniewski, the chairman of the Transportation and Independent Authorities Committee reintroduced a three-year-old bill that will impose fines of up to $800 on drivers caught engaging in distracting behavior behind the wheel.

Mr. Wisniewski’s bill does not ban drinking coffee, eating or any other specific activity. It does, however, empower police officers to issue a summons to drivers doing anything “unrelated to the operation of the vehicle, in a manner that interferes with the safe operation of the vehicle.”

Still, for some, Mr. Wisniewski’s bill poses an existential threat. NJ.com headline: “Cops Could Soon Ticket You for Drinking a Coffee While Driving in N.J.”

Critics of the bill are loud and persistent, arguing that the state’s existing laws against careless or reckless driving are sufficient. A few critics question whether police officers will take advantage of the bill’s intentional vagueness to abuse their traffic-stop powers.

To Steve Carrellas, a longtime driver advocate who is the head of the New Jersey chapter of the National Motorists Association, the proposal is merely the latest of many “shenanigans” intended to squeeze drivers.

“This bill has the appearance of a money grab,” he said.

Mr. Wisniewski denied this, saying the fines were intended to be a deterrent.

A survey of drivers in two mall parking lots in suburban New Jersey listed the things they had seen other drivers do: reading a newspaper draped over the steering wheel; watching a video; changing clothes; applying makeup; reaching down to pick up dropped food; fist-fighting with a passenger.

“The next thing, they’re going to be outlawing sneezing or coughing,” Vince Capano said. “Where does the line start?”Mr. Capano will probably not be happy to learn about another New Jersey bill, introduced in March, that willpunish pedestrians caught using their cellphones while walking along public roads with a fine.

edited from The New York Times

Burkini - Why the French keep trying to ban Islamic body wear

·         LIFEGUARDS in Australia wear them. A mainstream British retailer sells a fashion version of them on the high street. But the “burkini”, a body-covering swimsuit (named with the portmanteau of “burqa” and “bikini”), has been banned this summer by the mayor of Cannes from his stretch of Mediterranean beach, as well as by a dozen other mayors of French seaside towns. In countries with a tradition of liberal multiculturalism, such a ban is greeted by incomprehension, if not ridicule.

Why are the French so offended by Islamic body covering?

The government’s defence of the burkini ban rests on worries about religious tension and public order after recent terrorist attacks, coupled with two underlying principles. The first is laïcité, a strict form of secularism enshrined by law in 1905 after a struggle against authoritarian Catholicism. This principle is supposed to keep religion out of public life, and has been the basis of previous French bans: on the headscarf (and other “conspicuous” religious symbols, including the Jewish kippah and oversized crucifixes) in state schools (in 2004), and the face-covering niqab in all public places (in 2010).

The other principle is women’s equality. It may appear bizarre, or frivolous, to argue that women should bare more flesh. But many on the French left are willing to put it even before liberty, another founding value of republican France. The logic of the burkini, says Laurence Rossignol, the Socialist women’s minister, is to “hide women’s bodies in order better to control them”.

What outsiders fail to understand, the French argue, is that such body wear is not just a casual choice but part of an attempt by political Islamism to win recruits and test the resilience of the French republic. Prime Minister Manuel Valls dismisses as naive those who see it as being no different than a wetsuit. The burkini, he says, is part of a “political project”.

The difficulty is that, after a series of deadly terrorist attacks over the past 18 months, France is in a state of heightened tension. Perceived provocations on both sides are amplified.

 It is not just civil-liberty activists who consider the mayors’ ban excessive, or stigmatising. Some French scholars of Islam, such as Olivier Roy, consider it “absurd” to conflate the burkini with hard-line Islamism, not least because the latter does not permit women to bathe publicly in the first place.

Politicians, though, are unlikely to cede ground. France looks set to defend, if not tighten, its strict approach to head-covering.

Yet on Friday France's highest administrative court struck a blow against controversial 'burkini bans'. The Council of State suspended the prohibition in Villeneuve-Loubet, just west of Nice, saying it "seriously, and clearly illegally, breached the fundamental freedoms to come and go, the freedom of beliefs and individual freedom."

edited from The Economist

Burkini inventor

A swimmer wearing a burkini, left.Credit Fethi Belaid/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The woman credited with creating the so-called burkini said the controversy over efforts to ban the full-body bathing suit worn by some Muslim women has helped bolster demand for her invention, which she said was not meant to be a political statement.

Aheda Zanetti, the Lebanese-Australian inventor of the swimsuit, said officials in more than a dozen French beach towns seeking to prevent women from covering up have misconstrued the purpose of the bathing suit.

“They’ve misunderstood the burkini swimsuit,” Ms. Zanetti, 49, said in a telephone interview from Sydney. “Because the burkini swimsuit is freedom and happiness and lifestyle changes — you can’t take that away from a Muslim, or any other woman, that chooses to wear it.”

Ms. Zanetti said she designed the garment in 2004 for women who wanted to show less skin while bathing or exercising.

“I wanted to introduce a full range of clothing to suit a Muslim woman — or any woman — that wanted a bit of modesty and wanted to participate in any sporting activities,” said Ms. Zanetti, who is a Muslim and wears her own swimwear products.

A fashion designer and former hairdresser, Ms. Zanetti coined the name “burkini,” a blend of the words burqa and bikini, but said that the swimsuit was not intended to exclude non-Muslims and was not meant to be a political statement.

The French “burkini” bans have been good for business, she said, with online sales rising about 200 percent in recent days. Most demand is coming from Australia, Europe and Canada, she said, and some new customers include skin-cancer patients who are looking for ways to shield their skin from the sun.

Her company, Ahiida, has sold 700,000 swimsuits since 2008. The company sells its products in stores in Australia, Europe, the Middle East, the United States and Southeast Asia.

Ms. Zanetti, who moved to Australia from Lebanon as a 2-year-old, did not feel comfortable wearing traditional swimsuits as a young girl. She and her friends used to swim in full clothing but they did not linger in the water because they were embarrassed.

Years later her teenage niece wanted to play netball, a game similar to basketball that is played mostly by women, but was prohibited by her local Sydney league from playing while wearing a hijab. Ms. Zanetti said her sister wrote a letter of complaint to league officials, who reversed their decision.

Even so, Ms. Zanetti said that her niece’s hijab was “completely unsuitable” for athletics.

Ms. Zanetti designed the “burkini,” which covers everything except the face, hands and feet, so that women like her niece could cover and still participate comfortably in sport.

Ms. Zanetti said that her four children, who once “rolled their eyes” over her swimwear innovations, have recently become more interested and have noticed “that I have a strong voice on behalf of women, for freedom of choice, ” she said. “I can feel how proud they are, more than they’ve ever been.”

Aheda Zanetti, left, inventor of the burkini. Credit Jason Reed/Reuters

Edited from The New York Times

Banned Burkini (audio)

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London Night Tube

Passengers descending into the Oxford Circus station in central London on Friday night.CreditDaniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LONDON -The London Underground, the world’s oldest subway system, opened a new chapter in its history on Friday night and Saturday morning: For the first time, trains on two lines kept operating all night.

The late-night, weekend-only service, called the Night Tube, began on the Central and Victoria Lines Lines and will extend to three other lines in the fall. The idea was originally scheduled for September 2015, but was put off because of labor disputes.

The Central and Victoria Line trains will run about every 10 minutes between 12:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday, serving 51 stations. The two lines are among the busiest in the system, which serves 4.8 million passengers a day.

London joined a small club of cities — New York, Vienna and Copenhagen, among them — in offering weekend round-the-clock service. Like Berlin and other cities, London has a network of night buses, and Transport for London, the city’s transit agency, added eight new routes to its night-bus network to complement the new late-night subway service.

The agency estimates that the new service will shorten the average late-night trip by 20 minutes. About 200,000 people are expected to use the new service each weekend. Even before the new service, the number of riders using the system on Friday and Saturday nights had surged by around 70 percent since 2000.

Safety is a concern in a capital where public drunkenness is not uncommon, but on the first night at least, things seemed under control.

“We were worried people may fall off the escalators, or fighting on the platforms, but we’ve been lucky,” said Faisal Ahmed, a Tube worker at the Liverpool Street station on the Central Line.

Transport for London added about 500 employees to run the Night Tube, and invested 3.4 million pounds (about $4.4 million) in additional policing. By the time the three next Night Tube lines open, more than 100 officers will patrol a total of 144 stations at night.

“I was a bit worried about passengers’ alarms being pulled or drunk people causing issues, but it’s been absolutely fine,” a driver, Alicia Durant, 24, said as she walked to the northern end of a Victoria Line train at the Brixton terminus to begin the journey north. (Her shift ran from 9 p.m. to 5.30 a.m.)

The Night Tube was announced in November 2013 — along with 750 job cuts and the closing of ticket offices.

Labor unions quickly raised objections, and in 2014 and 2015, employees went on a series of strikes, including a four-day Tube disruption. An agreement on pay largely resolved the dispute in March, and the start date of the Night Tube was announced in May by the city’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Mr. Khan met with Tube employees at the Oxford Circus station (where the Central and Victoria Lines intersect) on Friday morning, and then boarded the Victoria Line at Brixton just after midnight on Saturday. “I’m really excited — 153 years after the first Tubes began in London, we are going to have a Night Tube.It’s about helping people get to work, doctors, nurses, porters, security guards, but also getting people to and from the theater, to live music venues, home safely,” the mayor said

Riders agreed.

“We’re always in London on weekends,” Clare Adamberry, 57, said as she sat next to a friend on a Victoria Line train at around 2 a.m. They had stayed out late after a day trip to the southern city of Brighton, on the English Channel. “I usually pay for cabs or Uber,” Ms. Adamberry said. “I have an 18-year-old who goes out and takes night buses. It took her two and a half hours to get home last week, taking different buses. I was on the phone with her the whole time. If she’s not using the Night Tube tonight, she’ll be using it tomorrow.”

Janka Horvatova, 27, is an assistant manager at a restaurant near King’s Cross station and is responsible for closing it. “I can never catch the last Tube, so I take two night buses, which can take up to 50 minutes,” she said as she got off the train at the Stockwell station in South London, still wearing her work clothes. “With the Night Tube, it took 15 minutes.”

edited from The New York Times

The cost of holding on (article)

Let’s start with a story from Jon Muth’s book “Zen Shorts”: 

      Two traveling monks reached a town where there was a young woman waiting to step out of her sedan chair. The rains had made deep puddles and she couldn’t step across without spoiling her silken robes. She stood there, looking very cross and impatient. She was scolding her attendants. They had nowhere to place the packages they held for her, so they couldn’t help her across the puddle.

      The younger monk noticed the woman, said nothing, and walked by. The older monk quickly picked her up and put her on his back, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other side. She didn’t thank the older monk; she just shoved him out of the way and departed.

      As they continued on their way, the young monk was brooding and preoccupied. After several hours, unable to hold his silence, he spoke out. “That woman back there was very selfish and rude, but you picked her up on your back and carried her! Then, she didn’t even thank you!”

     “I set the woman down hours ago,” the older monk replied. “Why are you still carrying her?”

There is an actual cost to holding onto things we should let go of. It can come in the form of anger, frustration, resentment or something even worse. The question is, can you really afford to keep paying the bill?

The faster we learn to drop our emotional dead weight, the more room we create for something better. I’m talking about everything from stewing about the guy who cut you off in traffic this morning to still refusing to forgive an old friend for an event 20 years ago.

We have only so much bandwidth. We have only so much time. We only have so much energy. Do we really want to invest any of our precious resources – financial or otherwise – into something that will return nothing but misery?

My question for you is, “What’s one thing you can set down this week?”

Go ahead and pick something. A fight with your spouse, something a politician said, your team losing the big game. Pick it, drop it and then pause. For just a moment, simply pause and savor what it feels like to no longer carry that burden and pay that price.

Then, I want you to invest that extra into something more productive. If it’s extra time, go for a walk. If it’s extra peace, take five deep breaths. If it’s extra money because you decided to just pay the stupid traffic ticket instead of letting it sit on your desk accruing late fees, then take that extra money and invest it in something that makes you happy.

Play with your kids. Take a nap. Just do something that makes you feel the opposite of how you felt before you let go. I can guarantee you, this is one investment you’ll never regret.

By Carl Richards, a certified financial planner and the author of  “The Behavior Gap” and “The One-Page Financial Plan.”

From The New York Times

The Cost of Holding On (audio)

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Pokemon Go and annoyed property owners

The frustrated resident of St Clair Shores, a Detroit suburb, asked a Pokemon Go player to leave her property. The player told Jayme Gotts-Dodich to "shut up, b……..,or else."
That wasn't the only incident. Private cul-de-sac residents Scott Dodich and Jayme Gotts-Dodich allege that since the smartphone game was launched in July, "Pokemon Go players parked their vehicles on their street and blocked driveways, ... trespassed on lawns, trampled landscaping and peeped into windows."
Plus, distracted pedestrians "walking in front of cars because they are looking down at their phones."
But the verbal threat against Gotts-Dodich was the straw that broke the camel's back. So the couple sued the makers of Pokemon Go. 
The game company (actually three collaborating companies) are culpable for damages, the couple's team of Beverly Hills-based attorneys claim, because Pokemon Go uses satellite mapping to scatter so-called Pokestops and Gyms all over the place, including a park near the couple's home. These digital hot spots attract hordes of players, whether nearby residents like it or not.
The couple requested the removal of the sites, but to no avail. So they summoned a team of attorneys who conceived a class action lawsuit on behalf of everyone who has been violated by the game. Based on the court document's legalize, if successful, anyone who becomes part of the lawsuit could receive a cut of Pokemon Go profits.  
The class action suit explains that "the Plaintiffs' once-quiet street degenerated into 'a nightmare' for Plaintiffs and their neighbors."
In the lawsuit, Gotts-Dodich reports that she has begun "seeking help for anxiety ... I guess you could say I had a nervous breakdown. I’ve never had to encounter this feeling in my life. ... We have veterans with PTSD and this traffic is getting to them as well."
The concept of a class action lawsuit against the creators of Pokemon seems to have taken root in Canada as well. 
An Albertan woman against California-based Niantic Inc., the creator of Pokemon Go, saying she's suffering from an invasion of privacy.
Barbra-Lyn Schaeffer said Wednesday that she's been inundated by Pokemon Go players at her home 160 kilometers (99 miles) northeast of Calgary ever since it became the site of a Pokemon gym. 
"The way I look at it, the game is fine. My kids play it, my grandkids play it but just don't do it at my house," Schaeffer said.
Schaeffer said people have been trying to crawl over her fence into the grounds of her home and added there are people sitting out in front of their home at all hours of the day and night.
"We moved out here to be in the quiet, not to have people climb up over my fence," she said. "The last thing we need is strangers trying to peer in our windows. On Saturday, someone flew a drone up into our yard to play the game."
The lawsuit was filed in Calgary and has not been certified by the courts, which determines whether it can proceed.
Schaeffer said she sent a request to Niantic asking her home be removed and only received a computer-generated response saying the company would look into it. The idea of launching the class-action lawsuit isn't about the money, she said. 
"I just want to be left alone. I just want it removed and apparently they're not doing that," she said.




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Article: Edited from Fox Live and The Times Picayne

Brexit The Tale of Two Towns (audio)

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English @ the Movies: 'There's A Lot At Stake' (video)

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High teen smoking rates in France (audio)

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Finland’s Baby Box

Credit Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

It  seems a strange place to put a newborn: a bit of bedding and a miniature sleeping bag arranged in a cardboard box.

Even so, that’s the first place that many Finnish infants lay their little heads. And the simple setup is believed to be one reason that Finland  now has one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world — 2.52 for every 1,000 births, less than half that of the United States.

Finland provides all mothers-to-be with a baby box, but there’s a string attached. To receive it, the mother has to undergo a medical exam during the first four months of pregnancy.

Each year the government gives away about 40,000 of the boxes, which come with bedding and about 50 other baby items, including clothes, socks, a warm coat and even a baby balaclava for the icy Nordic winter. (Mothers who don’t need all those items can choose to get 140 euros instead, or about $155.)

The program started in the late 1930s, when nearly 1 out of 10  infants in Finland died in their first year. The boxes were a low-cost way to encourage women to set aside old habits and see a doctor during pregnancy. They also provided a safe place outside of parents’ beds for infants to sleep, in homes that might have only rudimentary furniture.

Finland also offers considerable protection for the baby’s parents: up to 10 months’ paid leave, and a guarantee that whoever stays home with a child can return to his or her job any time before the child turns 3.

There are efforts to extend the baby-box idea to a wider audience. A hospital in London recently began giving out the boxes on a trial basis. In Minnesota, a nonprofit group distributed the boxes to low-income families, inspiring a proposal that state lawmakers are debating. A graduate student at Harvard formed an organization to distribute similar kits in South Asia.

“When you move abroad, you realize that, wow, not every place has a baby box,” said Sanna Kangasharju, who works in the Finnish Embassy in Washington.

“It’s a very efficient system.”

Credit Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

Edited from The New York Times

Flight attendant adopts Rubio (video)

English can be weird

‘The Girl From Ipanema’ Goes Walking Again

Gisele Bündchen. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

For about a week in 1964, a bossa nova tune was bigger than songs by the Beatles.

The melancholy pop gem, “The Girl From Ipanema,” which was penned by a Brazilian songwriting team, enchanted listeners around the globe after an English-language version was recorded in 1963.

More than 50 years later, with a little bit of help from the Rio Olympics, the song is once again in demand.

Spotify reported this week that “The Girl From Ipanema” was streamed more than 40,000 times the day after it accompanied the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen during the opening ceremony of the Olympics on Friday.

That streaming number represented a 1,200 percent increase, Spotify said.

Much of the spike came from users who searched for the song themselves, a spokeswoman for Spotify said. Several covers of the tune were included in the count. But a version of the song credited to the poet Vinicius de Moraes, one of its two Brazilian creators, appeared on a Rio playlist that was promoted by Spotify, where some new listeners may have found it, the spokeswoman said.

Mr. de Moraes and his frequent collaborator, the songwriter and composer Antônio Carlos Jobim, wrote the song, “Garota de Ipanema,” in 1962, while working on a musical about an extraterrestrial who visits Brazil. (Mr. Jobim’s grandson, Daniel Jobim, played the tune during Ms. Bündchen’s walk.)

The duo tried to imagine what might convince an alien visitor that Earth was worthwhile. They settled on a beautiful woman.

Heloísa Pinheiro in 2012

 Credit Andre Penner/Associated Press

In 1965, Mr de Moraes  publicly identified the muse of the song: Heloisa Pinheiro, or Helô, who was from Ipanema, in the southern part of Rio.

The song was popular in Brazil. But it became an international hit after Stan Getz, an American saxophonist, and João Gilberto, the Brazilian singer and guitarist whose name became synonymous with bossa nova, created the English-language version during a recording session with Mr. Jobim.

The English-language version surged in popularity in 1964, spending 12 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. It leapt from No. 87 early in the summer all the way to No. 5 by mid-July, ranking among songs by the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones.

The following year, at the seventh annual Grammy Awards, “The Girl From Ipanema” won record of the year.

 “The Girl From Ipanema” went on to be covered by entertainment luminaries like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Diana Krall.  

Let's fill in the blanks below while listening to Diane Krall

Tall and tan and young and handsome
The boy from Ipanema ____________ walking
And when he___________
Each girl he ___________       ___________ Ah!

When he ___________   ___________ like a samba
That ___________so cool and ___________so gentle
That when he ___________
Each girl he___________   ___________ Ah!

Ooh but I ___________ him so sadly
How can I ___________ him I___________ him
Yes I would ___________ my heart gladly
But each day when he ___________ to the sea
He ___________straight ahead not at me

Tall and tan and young and handsome
The boy from Ipanema ___________ walking
And when he ___________     

I ___________,  but he ___________

No, he ___________

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   Article Edited from The New York Times

The jobs we'll lose to machines — and the ones we won't (TED Talk)

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The Rise and Fall of the VCR (audio)

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Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever!

Professor David Crystal - Credit: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

LONDON — One of the oldest forms of punctuation may be dying

The period — the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages — is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age

So says David Crystal,  who has written more than 100 books on language and is a former master of original pronunciation at Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London — a man who understands the power of tradition in language

The conspicuous omission of the period in text messages and in instant messaging on social media, he says, is a product of the punctuation-free sentences favored by millennials — and increasingly their elders — a trend fueled by the style of Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter

“We are at a momentous moment in the history of the full stop,” Professor Crystal, an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor, said in an interview after he expounded on his view recently at the Hay Festival in Wales

“In an instant message, it is pretty obvious a sentence has come to an end, and none will have a full stop,” he added “So why use it?”

In fact, the understated period may have suddenly taken on meanings all its own

Increasingly, says Professor Crystal, the period is being deployed as a weapon to show irony, insincerity, even aggression

If the love of your life just canceled the candlelit, six-course, home-cooked dinner you have prepared, you are best advised to include a period when you respond “Fine.” to show annoyance

“Fine” or “Fine!,” in contrast, could denote submission or acceptance

Professor Crystal’s observations on the fate of the period are driven in part by frequent visits to high schools across Britain, where he analyzes students’ text messages

Researchers at Binghamton University in New York and Rutgers University in New Jersey have also recently noted the period’s new semantic force

They asked 126 undergraduate students to review 16 exchanges, some in text messages, some in handwritten notes, that had one-word affirmative responses (Okay, Sure, Yeah, Yup) Some had periods, while others did not

Those text message with periods were rated as less sincere, the study found, whereas it made no difference in the notes penned by hand

Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter and the reading of messages on a cellphone or hand-held device has repurposed the punctuation mark

“It is not necessary to use a period in a text message, so to make something explicit that is already implicit makes a point of it,” he said “It’s like when you say, ‘I am not going – period’ It’s a mark It can be aggressive It can be emphatic It can mean, ‘I have no more to say’

The shunning of the period, Professor Crystal said, has paradoxically been accompanied by spasms of overpunctuation

“If someone texts, ‘Are you coming to the party?’ the response,” he noted, was increasingly, “Yes, fantastic!!!!!!!!!!!”

But, of course, that exuberance would never be tolerated in a classroom

At the same time, he said he found that British teenagers are increasingly dodging emoticons and abbreviations such as “LOL” (laughing out loud) or “ROTF” (rolling on the floor) in text messages because they have been adopted by their parents and are therefore considered “uncool”

Now all we need to know is, what’s next to go? The question mark

edited from The New York Times

Pokemon Go? Nope! It's iNaturalist (audio)

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Kelly’s guitars: a piece of NYC’s history (video)

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Chocolatiers are following Starbucks

Posh chocolate shops are springing up in the hip neighborhoods where coffee culture long ago took root. All the talk is of aromas and sustainability and it seems stingy not to fork out £7.50 ($10) for something that disappears in a few mouthfuls.

Coffee has paved the way for chocolate. Established chocolatiers are trying to do for the stuff what Starbucks once did for coffee.

Last year Ferrero Rocher, an Italian brand, bought Thorntons, a UK chocolate retailer with almost 250 stores. Lindt and Sprüngli, owner of Switzerland’s best-known brand, aims to become the world’s biggest retailer of premium chocolate in four years. It expects to add 65 stores this year, after 50 new ones in 2015.

Euromonitor, a retail consultancy, says that worldwide consumption of all chocolate has been stagnant during the past five years, mostly because rich-world consumers are eating healthier snacks. But sales of dark chocolate grew by 5.1% and 3.3% last year in America and Western Europe, respectively.

Most cocoa is produced by smallholders who have not increased supply in recent years as much as other commodity producers, helping push up prices. Posh chocolatiers such as Britain’s Hotel Chocolat, with higher margins, can absorb that better than big brands such as Mars.

Mondelez International, owner of Cadbury, has bid for Hershey, another American firm. They are eying potential chocoholics in China and India. But again, it is quality chocolate that will most appeal to elites with purchasing power. As Euromonitor notes, it would take an Indian on average a month’s wages to buy the chocolate a Brit eats in a year.

Edited from The Economist

Silicon Valley More Than a Place (video)

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China's Elevated Bus Floats Above the Streets

A prototype of the Transit Elevated Bus. CreditLuo Xiaoguang/Xinhua, via Associated Press

BEIJING — If you’re driving in a Chinese city in the none-too-distant future and your car is engulfed in a  metallic belly, don’t panic. It may feel like an alien abduction, but probably it’s only a colossal, street-straddling bus.

The idea of a bus so large, high and long that it could virtually levitate above congested streets seemed surreal when presented at an expo in Beijing in May. But it came a step closer to reality this week, when a prototype went for an experimental spin in Qinhuangdao, a seaside city in northern China. 

The makers of the vehicle, known as the Transit Elevated Bus, declared the ride down a few hundred yards of street on Tuesday a success, but the controlled conditions hardly reflected the unpredictability of Chinese traffic.

 “I wanted to officially show people that this is entirely possible and that the bus can be up and running. We inspected and tested the vehicle for a range of functions, like ignition, braking and other processes, to see if they all work together and there are no problems,” Mr. Song, the designer of the elevated bus, said in a telephone interview from Qinhuangdao.

But a full trial run will not take place until the middle of next year in a city in central China.

To supporters, floating buses offer a solution to the traffic that chokes China’s cities. The prototype is 72 feet long and 26 feet wide. Most important, it is 16 feet high, creating room for a tunnel more than 6 feet high between the wheels for cars. Commuters will be able to float above two lanes of traffic, whisked on rails from one specially built elevated stop to another.

“The invention of the Transit Elevated Bus is considered as a revolution for the environment-friendly public transportation.No more traffic jams,” the maker of the bus, TEB Technology, says. with some optimism.

But skeptics say the bus is a magnificent example of a solution to a problem that is likely to create even more problems.

After the test run on Tuesday, China’s internet filled with questions. How will the bus negotiate turns? What about the many drivers who jump in and out of lanes? What about vehicles like trucks that are too large to fit under the bus? How will the giant buses use the bridges and overpasses in the capital city?

Mr. Song said that a full bus will have four connected carriages and be able to carry 1,200 passengers, which may make getting on and off an adventure in itself.

Turning at broad intersections will not pose a problem, Mr. Song added. The cars underneath the bus will come to a stop and wait while the bus curved the corner.

“Underneath the bus, traffic lights will be coordinated with the traffic lights on the road so that cars are notified,” he said.

But Mr. Song had something to reassure people worried about the new technology.

“At the moment, we can’t use driverless technology on the bus,” he said. “We have to have humans at the wheel.”

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edtited from The New York Times