Happiness

2 Hong Kong college students emerge as leaders in mass protest

Alex Chow, head of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, speaks to reporters on Oct. 4. Next to him is Joshua Wong, 17, leader of a high school activist group. (Alex Ogle / AFP/Getty Images)

Just months after being elected leader of Hong Kong's biggest university student group, Alex Chow joined in the city's annual, orderly July 1 pro-democracy march. But in a move that foreshadowed last week's massive sit-ins, Chow and a committed core of activists decided to break from the usual script.

After the march, they sat down in a road in the Central District, locking arms and chanting, "Our own government, our own choice."

After midnight, police moved in to break up the unauthorized gathering, picking up the kicking and screaming activists and arresting 511, including Chow. As one of the biggest confrontations between Hong Kong police and the public in years, it left a deep impression on the 24-year-old comparative literature and sociology student, whose ponderous eyes are prone to welling up with tears.

"There were tattoo artists, massage therapists, construction workers, engineers, teachers, photographers, retired civil servants. I really felt sorry for them," said Chow, writing about the day's events a few days later in an online forum. "In the past 30 years, the democracy movement has been too slow and too painstaking. The power of civil disobedience lies … in the blood and tears of everyone who is behind the struggle."

Chow's frustration has catapulted him to the center of the biggest political crisis facing leaders in Hong Kong — and Beijing — in years. Whether more blood and tears are soon to come rests, to a large extent, on Chow's young shoulders.

Chow has worked closely with founders of two other groups, a 3-year-old high school student organization called Scholarism and a recent protest movement called Occupy Central With Love and Peace, to mobilize the largest and most disruptive demonstrations in the territory in decades.

But the government has shown a preference to deal with Chow's Hong Kong Federation of Students, a storied organization dating to 1958 that counts many of the territory's current leaders as alumni. And so it is that Chow and his more introverted 21-year-old deputy, Lester Shum, have emerged as first among equals as protest organizers and now, perhaps, negotiators.

A fast talker skilled at impassioned oratory, Chow in recent weeks has proved himself adept at rousing crowds who have poured into the streets to demand a free choice of candidates in the city's 2017 election for chief executive — a framework that Communist Party leaders in Beijing have explicitly rejected. On Saturday, dressed in dark blue jeans and matching blue nubuck oxfords, Chow told thousands of demonstrators occupying government headquarters: "This is not a student movement; this is a Hong Kongers' movement."

We are just ordinary students. What we're fighting for is our future, for a democratic system.- Lester Shum of the Hong Kong Federation of Students

Whether Chow and Shum can steer the movement to a peaceful conclusion and win real concessions remains unclear. Even many student protesters, let alone older demonstrators, say they aren't taking orders from Chow and Shum and have doubts about their strategy.

"This is a self-initiated, spontaneous protest and we'll go home when we want, not when someone tells us to," said Tony Tsang, 19, listening on Thursday night as Chow warned that the Beijing-backed chief executive of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, must step down or students would "occupy" government buildings. "I don't think he should be asking C.Y. Leung to quit; they would just replace him with another guy who's exactly the same."

Less than an hour later, as midnight approached, Leung offered to hold talks with Chow's group — but refused to resign — and Chow backed away from his threats. News of the detente was met with ambivalence among the demonstrators.

Veteran observers of the student-led movement, though, have praised Chow's and Shum's leadership — in particular their move Thursday to reach out to the government for dialogue. This may have averted, or at least delayed, an escalation of tension, these observers said.

"They are as passionate organizers as they are good strategists," said Dixon Ming Sing, associate professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a longtime researcher of the city's democracy movement.

Still, their meteoric rise to global attention has surprised some. Nelson Lee, a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who taught Shum in two politics courses, said the college junior "was always on the quiet side."

Shum, who switched his major to politics after one year studying engineering, was passionate about getting an intellectual grounding, Lee recalled. Lee's "Politics of Culture" class, which delves into Marxist theories and neocapitalism, is popular among young activists, and Shum appealed to Lee in person to enroll in the oversubscribed course.

Related story: In Hong Kong, the revolution will be catered

Julie Makinen

Shum, more casual in dress and deliberate in speech than Chow, was nervously chewing his thumb and index finger before Saturday night's rally. Taking the stage in white wrinkled shorts and black flip-flops, he appeared to be fighting a lingering cough.

"We are just ordinary students. What we're fighting for is our future, for a democratic system," he said, his voice growing hoarse. After wrapping up his remarks, he performed his trademark slight bow to the audience. "All of you have worked so hard," he said.

On Sunday, as protesters again appeared at loggerheads with the government and Leung said forcefully that demonstrators needed to clear the streets in time for the workweek to start Monday, Chow and Shum were facing calls from many quarters to declare victory and retreat.

Hong Kong University President Peter Mathieson urged all of his school's students and staff to leave the protest zones. "I am making this appeal from my heart because I genuinely believe that if you stay, there is a risk to your safety," he said, adding to an ominous sense that police might use substantial force to disperse the crowds.

Bao Tong, a former secretary to the reformist mainland China Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang, who sympathized with Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989, penned an open message Sunday to the protesters urging them to wind down the demonstrations:

"The seeds have already been sown, and they need time to lie fallow," Bao said. "No great task can be achieved all at once; they all need some time to gestate."

But Willy Lam, a political analyst and professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said Chow and Shum fear if they go home now, they'll lose all momentum.

"They don't want to give up without achieving something tangible," he said. "Even if police are to come out in force, they are determined to hang on."

Lam said that stance was understandable "because they are the first ever student leaders from Hong Kong to have made this big achievement, to apply really big pressure and assemble more than 150,000 people on the streets."

But what is unclear, Lam said, "is whether their decision to hang tough, to hang on, might be the best solution going into the next step." To achieve serious revisions to the election rules dictated by Beijing, Lam said, the students need to build a united front with other stakeholders, including Occupy Central and liberal lawmakers in Hong Kong's legislature, as well as nongovernmental organizations.

At Saturday night's rally, Shum acknowledged that he and Chow — who have been arrested several times for civil disobedience — were taking serious personal risks. "We might be in for big trouble," he said. "We might have to go to jail. Alex and I each have got five charges on our back."

But he and Chow seemed to have made a clear choice.

Before the July sit-in, Chow said he received an email from his father, who was overseas. His dad expressed support for his son but also concern that he might end up like a "Tiananmen mother," a reference to a group of women who lost children in the 1989 crackdown.

Addressing the crowd that night, Chow choked up and covered his tear-streaked face.

"Even if we can win a bit of democracy," he said before his arrest, "that should be the best reward for my parents."

Law is a special correspondent.

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

Happiness Quotes

Happiness Quotes

“Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.”

“We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.”

Frederick Keonig

“People love others not for who they are but for how they make them feel”

Irwin Federman

“Each moment of a happy lover’s hour is worth an age of dull and common life”

Aphra Behn

“The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be”

Marcel Pagnol

“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”

Albert Einstein

“Don’t rely on someone else for your happiness and self worth. Only you can be responsible for that. If you can’t love and respect yourself – no one else will be able to make that happen. Accept who you are – completely; the good and the bad – and make changes as YOU see fit – not because you think someone else wants you to be different.”

Stacey Charter

“Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them.”

“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.”

“It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.”

Dale Carnegie

“It was only a sunny smile and little it cost in the giving but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.”

“There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.”

George Sand

“Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.”

Maxim Gork

“To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.”

Robert Muller

“Happiness is like a kiss…you must share it to enjoy it.”

“To be happy with a man you must understand him a lot and love him a little. To be happy with a woman you must love her a lot and not try to understand her at all.”

Helen Rowland

“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”

Albert Ellis

“There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.”

Anthony de Mello

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”

Epictetus

“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you”

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Maze runner - Một bộ phim đáng xem

Hãy đọc giới thiệu chung về bộ phim khi google:

1. The Maze Runner

   2014 Film
2. Thomas (Dylan O'Brien), a teenager, arrives in a glade at the center of a giant labyrinth. Like the other youths dumped there before him, he has no memory of his previous life. Thomas quickly becomes part of the group and soon after demonstrates a unique perspective that scores him a promotion to Runner status -- those who patrol the always-changing maze to find an escape route. Together with Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), the only female, Thomas tries to convince his cohorts that he knows a way out.
4. Initial release: September 11, 2014 (Mexico)
5. Director: Wes Ball
6. Running time: 113 minutes
7. Adapted from: The Maze Runner
8. Sequel: The Scorch Trials

Below is the review of theguardian.com, unforturnately, it's not good at all:

The acting's great. Shame about the rest of it

The Maze Runner is not a good movie, but it wins points for omitting much of what makes typical teen films excruciating.

There’s no love triangle and no lengthy flashbacks of elders barfing up loads of mythology and exposition. It may be sad to consider this an accomplishment, but after years (years!) of having our standards systematically lowered by a ceaseless tsunami of Young Adult adaptations, The Maze Runner’s spry pace is noticeable and appreciated.

The Maze Runner has a sly way of seeming propulsive, even if not much happens. We enter the world of the film alongside a befuddled boy stricken with amnesia, placed in a world filled with other amnesiacs. As such, no one really knows what the hell they’re doing, which is a surprisingly effective storytelling trick. Our hero is Thomas, played by the 23-year-old Dylan O’Brien. He’s the newest “greenie” in “the Glade,” and arrives with boxes of farming supplies.

In the Glade, under the enlightened leadership of the strong Alby (Aml Ameen), everyone is put to work according to their skills. Crops grow, shelter is built, and a rainbow coalition of fit-looking boys seem to enjoy their time in what is ostensibly a prison. Surrounding them, though, are enormous cement walls with one opening. It closes in the evening and the interior re-arranges itself like a puzzle.

For years, a group of the kids (the runners) have been charging in to the maze to try and hunt for a way out, but if they don’t come back in time they’re doomed. No one has ever survived a night because the “Grievers”, who we eventually realize are nasty cyborg spiders, will come and get them.

The social structure in the Glade is complex. There are factions, and opposite Alby is Gally, a reactionary without much of a vision for the future. Gally, played by Will Poulter (who has a young Jerry O’Connell thing going) is an interesting villain. Thomas’s gang eventually includes Teresa (Kaya Scodelario, who can’t decide if she’s going with an American accent or not) whose sole purpose in this film is to look fetching in a blue Henley. One surmises she has more to do in the sequels.

Eventually, Thomas charges into the maze and outsmarts the Grievers. They look a little silly, but anything spider-like gets audiences gasping, especially when they are piercing and slicing young people to their doom. (Hats off to the Maze Runner – it isn’t afraid to violently kill kids. It pushes the envelope of PG-13.) Before this can happen, though, Thomas uses his wits to find out just a tiny bit about his past and why they heck he and his mates are in this predicament in the first place.

All of the performances (particularly Ameen’s) are top-notch. The film-making, unfortunately, leaves much to be desired.

The score is horrendous, and the sound design hasn’t an ounce of subtlety. The overall production design – including the opening titles – looks a lot more like TV than a feature film. Were it not for the expansion into the larger world in the last few minutes, I’d compare the movie to a season one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Commander Riker loses his memory but retains his leadership skills (and dashing good looks) on some crazy prison planet. That’s not necessarily a bad bit of entertainment, but maybe not something worth heading to the cinema for.

The ending scenes elicited laughter at the screening I attended, yet the “whoa” factor is high. Maybe it’s just because the secrets of The Maze Runner are so half-baked, but if I was told that part two was about to begin I’d have stayed in my seat. Not entirely because I cared about the characters, but more out of sincere curiosity to see where this peculiar story was running next.

Singapore Culture, Language and People

A Multicultural Kaleidoscope

One of the more remarkable aspects of Singapore is the truly cosmopolitan nature of her population, a natural result of the country’s geographical position and commercial success. Established by Thomas Stamford Raffles as a trading post on 29 January 1819, the small sea town of Singapore soon attracted migrants and merchants from China, the Indian sub-continent, Indonesia, the Malay Peninsula and the Middle East. 

Drawn by the lure of better prospects, the immigrants brought with them their own culture, languages, customs and festivals. Intermarriage and integration helped knit these diverse influences into the fabric of Singapore’s multi-faceted society, giving it a vibrant and diverse cultural heritage. By the end of the 19th century, Singapore had  become one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Asia, with major ethnic groups in the country being the Chinese, Malays, Indians,  and Eurasians.

Today, the ethnic Chinese form 74.2% of the Singaporean population, with the country’s original inhabitants, the Malays, comprising 13.3%. The Indians make up 9.2%, and Eurasians and Asians of different origins making up a combined 3.3%. Singapore is also home to many expatriates  coming from countries as diverse as North America, Australia, Europe, China, Japan and India.

As a reflection of its collage of cultures, Singapore has adopted one representative language for each of the four major ethnic or 'racial' groups. The four official languages in Singapore's constitution are English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. Although Malay is the national language, English is the common language used for business, government and medium of instruction in schools.

The presence of other languages, especially the varieties of Malay and the Chinese dialects, has obviously had an influence on the type of English that is used in Singapore. The influence is especially apparent in informal English, an English-based creole that is commonly known as Singlish. A badge of identity for many Singaporeans, it represents a hybrid form of the language that includes words from Malay, as well as Chinese and Indian languages.

 Almost everyone in Singapore speaks more than one language, with some speaking as many as three or four. Most children grow up bilingual from infancy, learning other languages as they become older. With the majority of the literate population bilingual, English and Mandarin are the most commonly used languages in daily life. While English is the main language taught in schools, children also learn their mother tongues to ensure that they stay in touch with their traditional roots.

For the Chinese majority, Mandarin is  the main language  instead of dialects like Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka, Hainanese and Foochow.  Mandarin became the second most commonly spoken language among the Singaporean Chinese after the start of the Speak Mandarin campaign during 1980 that targeted the Chinese. In 1990s, efforts were undertaken to target the English-educated Chinese. 

Explore the various cultural precincts and religious landmarks around the island and get acquainted with Singapore’s multicultural society. Whether you join a tour or discover your own Singapore, you’ll be sure to catch a glimpse of the impressive history, cultural diversity and lifestyles of Singaporeans during your visit to our city-state.

Sourse: yoursingapore.com

10 AMAZING PHOTOS FROM NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’S 2014 PHOTO CONTEST

Harrison Jacobs

National Geographic opened up its annual photo contest for submissions last month, and the photos have been pouring in. With only a month left until the call for entries closes, this year’s batch of entries looks to be as strong as the previous year’s, with tons of breathtaking moments and stunning scenes captured on film.

Photos are divided into three different categories: People, Places, and Nature. The winning photos in the contest, chosen by a panel of National Geographic photographers, will be published in an upcoming issue of National Geographic and each photographer will receive $2,500, with the grand prize winner receiving $7,500 and a trip to National Geographic headquarters in Washington, DC.

National Geographic shared a selection of this year’s entries with Business Insider. You can enter your own photos here up until October 31st. The winners will be announced in early December.

Photographer Carey Nash visited Ethiopia for a three-week adventure. He camped near this woman’s village in the Omo Valley. The Omo Valley is home to some of the most unique and ancient tribes in the world, and they are currently in danger of being pushed off their land.

National Geographic 2014 Photo Contest/

This stunning sunset was seen over Jokulsarlon Glacier Lagoon in South Iceland. Francesco Riccardo Iacomino photographed the sky using a long exposure to capture incredible detail.

National Geographic 2014 Photo Contest/Francesco Riccardo Lacomino

In the Strezlecki Desert in Australia, a flock of Galahs drink from the only water available at the base of this tree.

National Geographic 2014 Photo Contest/Christian Spencer

Photographer Colin MacKenzie caught this Polar Bear cub playing on iceflows in Svalbard near Norway. This is the male cub.

National Geographic 2014 Photo Contest/Colin MacKenzie

This photo shows an authentic industrial diver system. It is part of a collection of a retired diver who worked during the 1950s with this equipment in Lake Geneva. The equipment weighs 140 pounds and air is supplied by a manual pump operated by two people.

National Geographic 2014 Photo Contest/Marc Henauer

This photo was taken on Baronda Trail in Big Sur. It’s hard to see because of the fog, but the sea is in the distance.

National Geographic 2014 Photo Contest/Douglas Croft

This beautiful jellyfish was seen floating horizontally in Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco, California.

National Geographic 2014 Photo Contest/

There are many curious green turtles off the coast of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Photographer Montse Grillo spends much of his time photographing the affectionate creatures.

National Geographic 2014 Photo Contest/Montse Grillo

Young women dress up and have their faces painted to celebrate the Mexican holiday La Dia De Los Muertos in Oaxaca, Mexico.

National Geographic 2014 Photo Contest/Daniel Kudish

At Burning Man, nothing is more intense than the Thunderdome, run by a group called The Death Guild. In the Thunderdome, combatants use foam bats to assault each other for five minutes while the crowd cheers on from on top the dome. 

National Geographic 2014 Photo Contest/Aaron Feinberg