Ryugyong Hotel

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Memorial stone to the Ems dispatch in Bad Ems

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North Korea's 105-story pyramid hotel has been under construction since 1987, was capped in 1992, and has never hosted a single guest — its empty windows visible from Pyongyang for 30 years like a concrete tombstone.

Lee's most brilliant tactical victory was also the shot that doomed the Confederacy: returning from a night reconnaissance, Stonewall Jackson was fired upon by his own men and died eight days later.

Bismarck received a routine diplomatic telegram in 1870, redacted it to read as a deliberate insult, and released it to the press. France declared war within days, and the German Empire was born from the fallout.

The Chevalier d'Éon served Louis XV as a spy, a soldier, and a diplomat — then lived thirty-three years as a woman after a royal decree settled a wager about her birth sex, dying in London in 1810 with the question still unresolved.

KKR, Vornado, and Bain Capital bought Toys 'R' Us in 2005 for $6.6 billion, immediately saddled it with $5 billion in debt, and spent 13 years watching 33,000 employees lose jobs as the debt ate the stores.

Elfego Baca, a nineteen-year-old self-appointed lawman, barricaded himself in a one-room jacal in New Mexico in 1884 and held off eighty armed Texans for thirty-six hours. They fired over four thousand rounds. He had nine bullets in his door.

A boy stumbled into Nuremberg in 1828 able to write one name — Kaspar Hauser — and say one sentence. He claimed a dungeon, a single jailer, and no sunlight, ever. He was stabbed to death five years later.

Liu Ziye forced his own aunts into his imperial harem, declared them imperial concubines, then was stabbed to death by a palace servant at sixteen — his ministers had arranged the blade.

Recorded in 2005 on an Access Hollywood bus, Trump told host Billy Bush he grabs women 'by the pussy' without asking. Released eleven days before the election, it moved no needle.