 republican'..." Éponine rolled her eyes, "But, really. Baby is going to be able to manipulate you better than Cosette manipulates Marius."
"Ouch," Enjolras winced, "That was a low blow, 'Ponine. Do you really think I'm that weak?"
"Weak? Not at all," Éponine shook her head, "But everything will be different for Baby. Mark my words." Enjolras didn't push it further; Éponine had that look in her eye: the one that just made you know that she was right. And he honestly didn't want her to tell him just how easily Baby would be able to change his mind.
"We'll be fine," he repeated. Éponine nodded.
"The best parents there's ever been." She added.
"And Baby will be perfect."
"The best." Éponine and Enjolras shared a look that was rather rare between the two.
It was a look of complete agreement and understanding. It was a look that summed up their entire relationship and reminded both of them why they were now about to start a family and plans for their wedding.
It was the look that gave the other something to live for. And it truly was the best.
Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder Jose Maria Sison encouraged a gathering of Hong Kong-based Filipino groups on September 10 to “expand our ranks and broaden the widest resistance” against the government of President Rodrigo Duterte. “You must strengthen yourself for more intense struggle,” he said via a video recording.
Under the leadership of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan, or New Patrotic Front), a grouping of organizations spanning religious, migrant worker and cultural concerns, Sison, speaking from exile in the Netherlands, condemned the Duterte administration during an assembly held at the University of Hong Kong.
Criticizing the president’s first year in office, Bayan Secretary General Renato Reyes, Jr. told the assembly that the administration had failed the people on multiple accounts. In July, the government called off a fifth round of peace talks with the CPP following reports of attacks by the party’s militant wing in the countryside.
“No peace talks will ever succeed with these terms of surrender,” Reyes said of the long-running conflict in the southern island of Mindanao. “Marawi [on Mindanao] looks like Syria and every day there are bombings there,” he added, noting that 403,000 people have been forced to evacuate.
“We must not forget the wanton destruction of lives and property in Marawi City,” Sison said, referring to the ongoing conflict between rebels and security forces in Lanao del Sur province.
Sison also denounced “the relentless mass murder of the thousands of the poor who are suspected of being drug users and pushers.” According to Human Rights Watch, Philippine National Police have conceded that at least 7,028 people have died in Duterte’s war on drugs, although the agency has backtracked on that figure in recent months. “There have been 13,000 people… killed due to the war on drugs,” said Reyes.
Police officials have been granted widespread powers to bring to account individuals suspected of involvement in the drug trade. Over the past month, the high-profile deaths of three teenagers, however, has brought into question the efficacy of the program.
According to the Manila-based Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper, one of the latest victims was 14-year-old Reynaldo de Guzman, who was reported missing for 20 days, was found dead on September 6 with more than 30 stab wounds.
Recalling a recent visit to the country, Reyes told the crowd of the harrowing experience of listening to daily reports on the radio with the numbers increasing every day with no end in sight. “I was at the airport and you can see communities having wakes and funerals wherever you go,” he said.
Duterte has repeatedly expressed admiration for strongman Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, including nine years (1972-1981) under martial law. The president declared September 11 as an official holiday in Marcos’s native Ilocos Norte province to mark the 100th anniversary of the late dictator’s birth.
With the declaration of martial law in Mindanao earlier in May, the jailing of Senator Leila de Lima and the rejection by the Commission of Appointments of Bayan’s Rafael Mariano as agrarian reform secretary, one of three leftist cabinet nominees,, Reyes stated Duterte was taking “steps toward dictatorship” in the archipelago.
Worried about the improved relationship with both China and the United States, Reyes also suggested the country was becoming a pawn in a game between the two superpowers. “This is a government of rich people, the progressives in the cabinet are gone,” he said, hinting that Mariano’s rejection, which followed the failed ratification of interim social welfare secretary Judy Taguiwalo in August, was part of a politically motivated conspiracy to consolidate power in the country.
Reyes called on the 200-strong Hong Kong audience of mostly domestic workers to rally their compatriots to protest the excesses of the Duterte regime on September 21, the 45th anniversary of Marcos’s declaration of martial law. He acknowledged, however, that the replacement of the overseas employment certificate with a new Overseas Foreign Worker ID had been positive for the country’s army of migrant workers.
Suhas Bhat is a master’s degree candidate at the University of Hong Kong‘s Journalism and Media Studies Centre.This is the definitive ranking of 16 of Ray Bradbury’s most popular novels.
On Halloween night in 1954, a freshly hired scriptwriter is led to the graveyard located behind the film studio’s back lot. In the graveyard, he makes a terrifying discovery. Before he knows it, the writer is thrust into a world of mystery in scandal buried beneath the movie industry’s surface.
I had once heard her on a radio show describe herself as a snake charmer.
All that film whistling through her hands, sliding through her fingers, undulant and swift.
All that time passing, but to pass and repass again.
It was no different, she said, than life itself.
The future rushed at you. You had a single instant, as it flashed by, to change it into an amiable, recognizable, and decent past. Instant by instant, tomorrow blinked in your grasp. If you did not seize without holding, shape without breaking, that continuity of moments, you left nothing behind. Your object, her object, all of our objects, was to mold and print ourselves on those single fits of future that, in the touching, aged into swiftly into vanishing yesterdays.
A civil war breaks out in Green Town, Illinois. The sides of the battle are divided by age. As young versus old wages war over who will have control over the town, there are stark realizations waiting around the corner for the elderly and the juvenile alike.
Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it. It's like boats. You keep your motor on so you can steer with the current. And when you hear the sound of the waterfall coming nearer and nearer, tidy up the boat, put on your best tie and hat, and smoke a cigar right up till the moment you go over. That's a triumph.
A struggling author who bears a striking resemblance to Bradbury becomes a crime solver when his friends fall victim to mysterious accidental deaths. He pairs up with a homicide detective and a retired actress. In the midst of discovering the truth behind his friends’ deaths, the author also realizes his true potential.
This anthology of 22 short stories chronicles a spaceship’s flight into the sun. Bradbury’s third collection of short stories was received well, with reviewers saying that The Golden Apples of the Sun included some of the best imaginative stories by Bradbury or any other writer of the time.
"That's life for you," said McDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. 
Bradbury’s storytelling abilities couldn’t be stopped by a freight train going at full speed, and this collection of short stories illustrates his powerful abilities.
This saga follows H.G Wells’s time traveler, who has a Toynbee Convector allowing him to move through periods of time with ease. We also meet a ghost on the Orient Express and a man who becomes so bored with current times that he made his own genuine Egyptian mummy.
"No," said a voice, "the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it."
Published in 1996, this collection of short stories features tales of carnivals, marital strife, Victorian Era settings, a homage to Laurel and Hardy featured in earlier books, and even a psychiatrist who tries to draw parallels between submarines and the subconscious mind.
This novel tells the story of a family of immortal beings in Illinois. As everyone hustles and bustles in anticipation of the Homecoming, their family reunion, a sense of doom hangs over the family like a dark cloud. One young boy in the family was not blessed with immortality, and the rest of the family must come to terms with his mortality. What events will follow as this family congregates?
These are