A website where US was nuked and Brazil became superpower

 

 

United States, China, and Russia were nuked. Brazil rose and became superpower. Indonesia survived a nuclear war and grew significantly. Africa became a safe haven for European refugees. China modernized itself and defeated Japan. Hitler became President of the United States. These were just a handful compared to more than 22,000 articles currently published in althistory.wikia.com, a website dedicated for alternate-history enthusiasts, those who ‘changed the course of history’ through this page.

This might seem irrational, or even irrelevant. Nevertheless, we often need such entertainment, or even attain such ‘on-Queer-street’ knowledge. It’s a good place to expand our imagination, to explore the universe of ‘what-ifs’, and a source of limitless creativity to alter world history. Who knows such occurrence were really true in parallel universes?

Click that link, anyway, for more ‘enlightenment’.

Revisiting history: a Russian community in 1920s’ Harbin

 

 

China was a hybrid, an interchange of Western and Eastern cultures. Colonization had reshaped the nation in many ways; every European major power held control of a handful of the country’s major cities. Great Britain had Hong Kong in her arms for 99 years, Portugal had Macau, Germany had Qingdao, France with some portions of Shanghai, Japan with Manchuria, but Russians had a different touch on Harbin. They did not only ‘colonize’ it; they lived within. Harbin was their home. A safe home from persecution, a promising haven free of intimidation far in their homeland, far from the dictator’s relentless grasp. Historians estimated as many as 100,000, or even 200,000, white Russians had been living in China’s most northern metropolis during its peak in 1920s, mostly Russian Jews. Nevertheless, by the advent of Second World War, when Japanese occupation was becoming more brutal than ever imagined, the community began to shrink. It even shrank further when Soviet troops entered the city by the end of the bloodbath in 1945. As of 1949, the community was virtually empty; some moved to United States, and the rest migrated to Australia via Philippines (only after having been stateless in Tubabao Island’s refugee center for a few years).

A website here attempts to recall all the bitter-sweet memories the community had faced while living in, and building the city into one that is distinct from the others today.

 

Visit it here.

Nauru, the smallest, and the heaviest, nation on Earth

Its population is approximately 10,000. A member with a permanent seat in United Nations. It occupies an area no larger than 20 square kilometers big. You can travel the whole country in less than an hour. But Western press seemingly overlooks the fact that almost every overweight person, man and woman, young and old, can be seen, with distances only stone’s throw away towards each other. Like a real-life scenario of future humankind as seen in ‘Wall-E’ movie.

United States, despite its surging obesity rate (now it’s approximately 25%), should be grateful that theirs is not as obviously severe as Nauru’s has. Standing at an exceedingly intolerable rate of 95%, Nauru is now at the forefront among the planet’s ‘unhealthiest’ nations. In early 20th century, Nauruans still lived a decent, healthy life by sustaining themselves on seafood; a century later, everybody is turning into french fries, fried chicken, and roasted pigs. With its citizens overtly addicted to tinsel junk food (Nauru is a heavily indebted and less developed nation, thus the people sustain themselves by consuming fast food which is many times cheaper compared to conventionally cooked dishes), Nauru faces a health problem no others can match, a deteriorating decline in health standards within less than a century.

ABC News makes a special coverage on Nauru. Watch it here:

 

 

‘I’m an American father of two Asian kids, not a pedophile.’

The Italian tourist the blogger captured, a humiliation to herself and the mistaken ‘rapist’.

 

An American expat living in Cambodia shared his quirky experiences of being mistaken by an Italian tourist – thinking herself as a ‘Nick Kristof-esque’ heroine –  as a ‘flirtatious old European guy being serviced by two underage prostitutes’, when indeed these two kids are his own children.

 

‘She held up her camera, pointed at it and said, “Internet!” I wasn’t sure I got the meaning so I said “what?” She pointed at her camera again and said with a smirk, “Internet,” pointed at me and said, “you pedo!” Hearing clearly but not wanting to make a mistake I stepped closer to her and asked again. She repeated, “Photo you, internet, you pedo…for police,” in a distinctly Italian accent. I said something like “These are my children.” She just shook her head and started to raise her camera again. I said, “You want police? You want to call the police?” She nodded. I said, “I’ll call police.” She nodded again and we stepped to the side of the pavement together. My children backed off a few steps, frightened by the obvious tension in our voices. I pulled out my phone, called my staff and asked them to call the police and I called the police myself as well. I told them where I was and asked them to come quickly.’

 

Read it more at LTO Cambodia.

The thorn in Minami Minegishi’s mind

 

 

Things have gone too far for Minami Minegishi.

Having slept with the Japanese kawaii-esque 90-personnel girlband AKB48’s dancer, Alan Shirahama, Minami faced her personal armageddon, dubbed by the management to have violated the band’s ‘no-date’ rules, and had her lifelong dream of maintaining her fame in the entertainment industry shattered, by her own ‘misdeed’. She even went beyond the limits to express contrition: she, for whatever reasons, either being ‘forced’ or by self-initiative, shaved her head previously laden with long straight hair, and repeatedly sobbed in front of the camera, begging for forgiveness from the band’s management.

While some lauded what she had done to express her remorse, some had indeed questioned the clarity of using such technique only taken in times of authoritarian rules. Had she gone too far, to the extent of extreme self-humiliation, in expressing her contrition? Or such ‘punishment headshaving’ is still applicable even in contemporary societies?

 

Read it more at International Business Times.