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Saturday, January 24, 2009

The Legend of Three Kingdom

In the first month of 220, Cao Cao died and in the tenth month his son Cao Pi forced Emperor Xian to abdicate, thus ending the Han Dynasty. He named his state Wei and made himself emperor at Luoyang. In 221, Liu Bei named himself Emperor of Han, in a bid to restore the fallen Han dynasty. (His state is known to history as "Shu" or "Shu Han".) In the same year, Wei bestowed on Sun Quan the title of King of Wu. A year later, Shu Han troops declared war on Wu and met the Wu armies at the Battle of Yiling. At Yiling, Liu Bei was disastrously defeated by Sun Quan's commander Lu Xun and forced to retreat back to Shu, where he died soon afterward. After the death of Liu Bei, Shu and Wu resumed friendly relations at the expense of Wei, thus stabilizing the tripartite configuration. In 222, Sun Quan renounced his recognition of Cao Pi's regime and, in 229, he declared himself emperor at Wuchang.

Dominion of the north completely belonged to Wei, whilst Shu occupied the southwest and Wu the central south and east. The external borders of the states were generally limited to the extent of Chinese civilization. For example, the political control of Shu on its southern frontier was limited by the Tai tribes of modern Yunnan and Burma, known collectively as the Southern Barbarians (南蠻).

Soekarno's Family

Sukarno officially married eight wives, namely Oetari, Inggit Garnasih, Fatmawati, Hartini, Ratna Sari Dewi Soekarno, Haryati, Yurike Sanger, and Kartini Manoppo. Megawati Sukarnoputri, who served as the fifth president of Indonesia, is his daughter by his wife Fatmawati. Her younger brother Guruh Soekarnoputra (born 1953) has inherited Sukarno's artistic bent and is a gifted choreographer and songwriter, who made a movie Untukmu, Indonesiaku (For You, My Indonesia) about Indonesian culture. He is also a member of the Indonesian Parliament for Megawati's PDI-P party. His siblings Guntur Soekarnoputra, Rachmawati Soekarnoputri and Sukmawati Soekarnoputri have all been active in politics. Sukarno had a daughter named Kartika by Dewi Sukarno. In 2006 Kartika Sukarno married Frits Seegers, the Netherlands-born chief executive officer of the Barclays Global Retail and Commercial Bank. Other offspring include Taufan and Bayu by his wife Hartini, and a son named Toto Suryawan Soekarnoputra (born 1967, in Germany), by his wife Kartini Manoppo. Popular ladies' magazines such as Femina and Kartini regularly run features about newly discovered lookalike sons and daughters throughout the archipelago, who often miraculously disappear when pressed to take a DNA test by the official Sukarno children.





Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP), also called the Nazi Party. He was the ruler of Germany from 1933 to 1945, serving as Chancellor from 1933 to 1945 and as head of state (Führer und Reichskanzler) from 1934 to 1945.

A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the Nazi Party in 1920 and became its leader in 1921. Following his imprisonment after a 1923 failed coup, he gained support by promoting nationalism, antisemitism and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and propaganda. He was appointed chancellor in 1933, and quickly established a totalitarian and fascist dictatorship. Hitler pursued a foreign policy with the declared goal of seizing Lebensraum ("living space"), and directed the resources of the state, including the economy, toward this goal. His rebuilt Wehrmacht invaded Poland in 1939, leading to the outbreak of World War II in Europe.

Within three years, Germany and the Axis powers occupied most of Europe and large parts of Africa, East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. However, the Allies gained the upper hand from 1942 onward and in 1945 Allied armies occupied Germany from all sides. His forces committed numerous atrocities during the war, including the systematic genocide of an estimated six million Jews, known as the Holocaust, as well as various other groups of people.

During the final days of the war in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress Eva Braun. Less than 40 hours later, the two committed suicide.