Fast-talking

Offred	In 1991, the following notice was published ~ With due respect to sworn testimony of God-fearing citizens, - Deeply regretted by the Commander and his good wife Serena Joy,- In accord with the laws of the sons of Adam in this Republic of Gilead,- the patronymic, concubine Offred to be hung at "The Wall" this evening. Dereliction in duty per "The Ceremony", yet guilty of fornication with the Commander's chauffeur by magistrates of this good parish of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Guilty

Persuant to Holy Scripture, Mark 5:29 refers, - And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee, for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. On this day of our Lord, 1991 Anno Domini. Not the potter, but the potter's clay. Amen.

.

In 2012, the author Stephen King awoke to a knock on his home in Center Lovell, Maine. Stranger : You stole my story. [King looks at a loss for words] Well? King : I'm sorry.. do I.. I don't believe I know you. Stranger : I'm Constant Reader. But that doesn't matter. I know you, Mr. King. That's what matters. You stole my love.

In 1919, Text 1 of the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" entered the possession of NILI, a secret intelligence group led by the Zionists Sarah and Aaron Aaronsohn. Text I was an accurate record of Lawrence's capture at Deraa in November 1917, yet Lawrence had mislaid the manuscript whilst changing trains at Reading Station. Chaim Weizmann immediately understood the bargaining potential of the document as “in” to British Foreign Policy in the Middle East. Inside the British Foreign Office, Lawrence was “turned” becoming a powerful advocate for the creation of the State of Israel, an event which occurred in 1924 despite the original plans for a British mandate as set out in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

Shawnee

In 1970, Southern Airlines Flight 932 crash landed in the mountains near Huntington, West Virginia. The seventy-five passengers including members of the Marshall University football team were carried from the burning aircraft and taken for parley. Chief Blackfish and Blue Jacket explained they had taken the corrective action necessary to save their lives, but needed to understand why the Americans were trespassing west of the Appalachia mountains in contravention of the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

1979, in an act of treachery renegade CIA Agent Aldrich Ames informs his Soviet handlers that Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan “Yoni” Netanyahu and members of his elite Sayeret Matkal unit have arrived in the United States. Their objectives are to post mortem Operation Eagle Claw, the failed military operation to rescue the 53 hostages from the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran on April 24, 1980 and come up with a new, improved plan. Meanwhile in Tehran, the hostage takers pursue another agenda. Consideration is give to a plan to “return” the hostages to an independent such as Jesse Jackson, only to seize that individual to deepen the sense of national humiliation in the United States.	Hostages

Tunguska	In 1966, Lyndon Baines Johnson received an alarming update regarding the two deep-underground nuclear detonations. Scientists were confident that the detonations were the result of the Tunguska Event in 1908. A singularity had penetrated the Earth, causing an explosion that flattened 20 miles of Tunguska in central Siberia. An elliptic course had been pursued by the singularity for fifty-eight years. As a result, they believed the singularity would re-emerge on the Eastern Seaboard during 1971.

In 1965, echoing a charge made of his predecessor Anthony Eden a decade before, the political enemies of Harold MacMillan accuse the British Prime Minister of failing to provide “the firm smack of government”. They begin to exploit the national humiliation caused by the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in Zimbabwe. The affair may have exacerbated Macmillan's ill-health. He was taken ill shortly afterwards, diagnosed incorrectly with inoperable prostate cancer. Consequently, he resigned and was succeeded by the Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home in a controversial move; it was alleged that Macmillan had pulled strings and utilised the party's grandees, nicknamed "The Magic Circle", to ensure that Butler was not chosen as his successor.	Macmillan

Change the only constant

In 2012, on the morning following his combined sixty-fifth birthday and retirement party, the author Stephen King awoke to find a threatening note had been pushed through the letter box of his home in Center Lovell, Maine. A man who would steal your love when your love was really all you had was not much of a man. I have, therefore, decided to kill you. Signed, Constant Reader.

In 1992, the Federal Government introduced Chapter 419 Criminal Code to protect the wealthy citizens of oil-rich Nigeria from the Advance fee fraud. The collapse of western economies in the early 1980s encouraged desperate individuals to attempt to persuade victims to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. Among the variations on this type of scam are the English Letter and "The Spanish Prisoner." The Spanish Prisoner is a confidence trick dating back to 1588. In its original form, the confidence artist tells his victim that he is in correspondence with a wealthy person of high estate who has been imprisoned in Spain (originally by King Philip II) under a false identity. The alleged prisoner cannot reveal his identity without serious repercussions, and is relying on the confidence artist to raise money to secure his release. The confidence artist offers to let the mark supply some of the money, with a promise that he will be rewarded generously when the prisoner returns; financially and perhaps also by being married to the prisoner's beautiful daughter. However, once the mark has turned over his money, he learns that further difficulties have arisen, requiring more money, until the mark is cleaned out and the game ends. More recently, though most 419 scams are perpetrated by e-mail alone, some scammers enhance the believability of their offer through the use of a sham website. Such websites can imitate real sites such as eBay, PayPal or a banking site like Bank Of America for the purposes of phishing, while others are totally fictional and used to lend credibility to a scammer's story. For example, a scammer may create a website for a fictional bank, then give the victim details to login to the site, where the victim then sees the money that the scammer has promised sitting in the account. The victim is then more likely to believe the scammer and send the requested advance payments. Fake websites are the centerpiece of false online storefront scams. The journalist Robert Harris investigated the use of sham web sites in his 2005 publication Enigma: from Alan Turing to the Spanish Prisoner. The title of the book is cruel reference to the glory days of British computing technology at Bletchley Park, when the cracking of the German military code proved vital in winning World War Two.

European Defendants

in 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) also known as the Tokyo Trials were adjourned. Leaders of the Empires of Britain, France and Holland were tried for three types of crimes: "Class A" (crimes against peace), "Class B" (war crimes), and "Class C" (crimes against humanity) committed during the Pacific War. Twenty-seven European military and political leaders were charged with Class A crimes, and more than 300,000 European nationals were charged with Class B and C crimes, mostly over prisoner abuse. Executions at Sugamo Prison in Ikebukuro went ahead on December 23, 1948.

In 1979, due to the Tehran hostage crisis, US President Jimmy Carter halted petroleum imports from Iran. He considered a range of military option; most appealing was an offer from the IDF to loan the elite Sayeret Matkal unit for an Entebbe style Raid.	Jimmy Carter

Tunguska

In 1966, Lyndon Baines Johnson received the most alarming and unexpected briefing of his presidency. The two deep-underground nuclear detonations were not initiated neither in nor out of the nuclear club of sovereign nations. Three possibilities had emerged. Aliens. Nations as theorised by Edmond Halley's postulation that the Earth was hollow. Or the singularity that penetrated the Earth at the Tunguska Event in 1908.

In 1965, British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan received a decidedly unpleasant telephone call from the White House. Eisenhower might have let Suez go, after all, it was election month and he had just suffered a heart attack. However, this President did not live in the nineteenth century and would not tolerate gun boat diplomacy in Zimbabwe. “Don't even think about it, Mac” and hung up the telephone abruptly.

Macmillan