It was a very cold morning as it had been raining very heavily the previous night. As my mother was feeling a little uncomfortable, my sister volunteered to drive me to school. I overslept and as a result, was a bit late for school. We got into the car hurriedly. The roads were already jammed with traffic. It appeared that everyone was late as well.

My sister was a careful driver and despite the fact that I was late, she refused to drive fast on the slippery road. I was lucky she was such a determined and careful person because a few hundred meters away from the school, we witnessed an accident.

It all happened in an instant, as most accidents do. A car took a left turning without signaling and a school bus crashed into it heavily. A few cars behind the school bus hit the bus as they could not stop in time and soon it became a pile-up. The car was damaged badly while the school bus also had some damage. And the already crowded road became more jammed with vehicles, which came to a mess. We wanted to help the victims. My sister drove to a stop at the roadside not too far from the accident spot.

The scene that greeted us was terrible. I first rushed to the car. The driver, a lady, lay trapped behind the wheel, unable to move. Three schoolchildren were in the back seat, their faces white with fear. Two of them were seriously hurt and bleeding from the head and hands. They were conscious although too weak and frightened to realize what had happened. We called an ambulance and while waiting, we tried as much as possible to help the victims. As a result of our joint efforts, the driver and the children were moved to safety and taken care of.

Then, I rushed to the bus filled with children’s cries.

After the ambulance had left, two policemen asked me about the accident.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Good morning. I’m Li Hua. It’s my great honor to say something about the global water shortage.

That’s all. Thank you.

I received an urgent call from my aunt. “Turn on the TV. Granny’s on the Channel 10 news.” It turned out that Granny had made a sandwich run for her office and was stopped at a red light downtown. She had the window rolled down to enjoy the breeze when a man rushed up to the driver’s side window, intending to carjack (劫车) her.

Now, what the would-be carjacker couldn't have known was that this woman simply wasn’t “a granny”. This was Nancy Johnson — the same woman who owned and lived on a Texas cattle farm, drove her own tractors, and dug her own post holes to lay fence. The week before, she had shot a rattlesnake and chopped off its head with a shovel. She was the proud owner of the new minivan (小型货车) she was driving. In other words, she was not your normal kind of granny.

The carjacker leaned into the open window, one hand stuffed in his pocket, and said, “Get out of this car. I have a gun, and I will shoot you.” A statement like that would have terrified anyone else. Instead, Granny saw it as a challenge. “If you really had a gun in your pocket, you would've pulled it out and led with that first,” she shouted at him, apparently unworried.

She was right. The criminal didn't have a gun. He instead reached into the window, grabbed her, and tried to pull her out of the van. He pulled open the door, wildly catching Granny’s arms. Granny leaned her shoulder inside to press the horn (喇叭) and started yelling to make people around notice what was happening. With the door now open, she held tight the steering wheel with one arm and started kicking the man anywhere her foot could make contact. This tall woman had quite a reach.

After a well-placed kick, the man was done, and attempted to release her and run.

Later, we asked “Granny ,don’t you realize you could have got yourself killed?”

The biggest threat posed by the covid-19 outbreak is,of course, the health risks it poses. But that is not the only risk: Avoidance, social distancing and panic may have great economic consequences, large enough to significantly slow growth, push up unemployment and ever drag the economy into a decline.

In this respect, people who suffer most are low-waged workers in low income households without paid leave. Many employers are already telling their white collar workers to work home. But low wage workers such as cleaners, food service workers and cashiers can’t work remotely. If these workers are temporarily free by specific quarantines(隔离）， they won’t get paid. Their families tend to have little savings and live in a terrible state . Without work, these families face risks of intense economic hardship.

So we need a quickly effective policy that will maintain earnings for those who most depend on them. Many of these workers will be employed but temporarily free;others may lose their jobs as their employers try to manage shocks to their own business.

A better solution is for employers to continue paying workers directly during shutdowns, In most cases, employers will want the workers back once the threat of the viruses weaken, According to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, about 40 percent of private company workers paid below the median lack laid leave benefits.

As this crisis unfolds, the government in the world will be forced to launch some sort of quick response to reduce the effect of the virus. The question is: Will the measures be targeted to those who need them, or will it adopt the tax-cut mode? Millions of economic despair depend on policymakers getting this right.

Rescue in a Bottle

Curtis Whitson had rafted (v.乘筏) down the Arroyo Seco, a river in central California, several times before.

This year, Curtis Whitson knew the water-fall was coming. He figured he would get out of his raft into the shallow water, get down the rocks along ropes on either side of the falls, and continue on his way, as he had on a previous trip.

But this year was different. Heavy snow and spring rains had turned the usually manageable falls into something fierce. And this year, instead of his friends, Whitson’s companions were his girlfriend, Krystal Ramirez, and his 13-year-old son, Hunter. As the three of them approached the falls late in the afternoon of the third day of their camping trip, Whitson could tell from the increasing roar of water in the narrowing canyon(峡谷) that they were in serious trouble. There was no way they’d be able to get down the rocks as planned.

“The water was just roaring through there with tremendous force,” recalls Whitson, 45.

They had no smart phone service, and they hadn’t seen a single person in the past three days. And Whitson knew that they’d be sharing the ground there with rattlesnakes and mountain lions.

As he was thinking what to do, Whitson hit on a bit of luck---he heard voices coming from the other side of the falls. He yelled, but the sound of the rushing water drowned him out.

“We have to get these people a message,” Whitson thought.

He grabbed a stick and pulled out his pocketknife to carve “Help” in it. Then he tied a rope to it so the people would know it wasn’t just any stick. He tried throwing it over the falls, but it floated away in the wrong direction.

“We’ve got to do something!” Whitson yelled to his son. “Have we got anything else?”

Then he spotted his water bottle. Whitson grabbed it and carved “Help!”on it. Ramirez also reminded him that he had a pen and paper in his backpack.

Whitson knew it was a slim hope. But he wrote “6-15 19:00 We are stuck here@ the waterfall. Get help please” and pushed the note into the bottle. This time, his throw over the waterfall was perfect.

“All right, that’s all we can do,” Whitson told Hunter.

It took 30 minutes to get back upstream to the beach where they’d had lunch.

The next morning, the helicopter returned.

It was late, about 10:15 p.m., when Janice Esposito arrived at the Bellport, New York, train station, jumped into her minivan and began the 20-minute drive home to her husband and seven-year-old son. She’s just returned from visiting her mother and had traveled the route so many times, she practically drove on autopilot: a left onto Station Road, then a left on Montauk Highway, and then ----wham! Out of nowhere on that awful night of October 10, 2017, a car hit Esposito's minivan, forcing her backward some 100 feet onto the railroad tracks. She sat in the minivan, injured but mostly just stunned(吓晕) by the impact and by the vehicle's airbags.

As it happened, Pete Dipinto was getting for bed. He'd just closed his book and was ready to sleep when he heard the loud noise of metal on metal and broken glass coming from not far outside his bedroom window. A volunteer firefighter and retired teacher, DiPinto, 64, never stopped to think. He grabbed a flashlight and, still in his pajamas(睡衣), ran out of the door. ''Any firefighter would have done what I did,'' he said. ''We're always on duty.''

The first car he came upon, 2000 feet from his front yard, was the one that had hit Esposito. Once DiPinto concluded the driver was OK, he looked around and spotted Esposito's minivan straddling(横跨) the railroad tracks. And then he heard a shocking sound: the bells signaling an oncoming train.

''I see the headlight of the train. '' he said. DiPinto ran to Esposito's minivan and banged on the driver's side window. She just looked at him, her eyes unfocused. ''I don't know where I am,'' she said. She seemed unhurt.

''Honey, you're on the railroad tracks, and we have to get you off right now! '' DiPinto shouted.

Esposito was rushed to the nearest hospital and DiPinto kept her company until her family came.