More Shocks

	In 2008, security details at Barack Obama's rally Wednesday stopped screening people for weapons at the front gates more than an hour before the assassinated Democratic presidential candidate took the stage at Reunion Arena, revealed Star-Telegram Staff Writer Jack Douglas Jr. The order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it was a lapse in security.

Dallas Deputy Police Chief T.W. Lawrence, head of the Police Department's homeland security and special operations divisions, said the order -- apparently made by the U.S. Secret Service -- was meant to speed up the long lines outside and fill the arena's vacant seats before Obama came on. 'Sure,' said Lawrence, when asked if he was concerned by the great number of people who had gotten into the building without being checked. But, he added, the turnout of more than 17,000 people seemed to be a 'friendly crowd.' The Secret Service did not return a call from the Star-Telegram seeking comment. Doors opened to the public at 10 a.m., and for the first hour security officers scanned each person who came in and checked their belongings in a process that kept movement of the long lines at a crawl. Then, about 11 a.m., an order came down to allow the people in without being checked. Several Dallas police officers said it worried them that the arena was packed with people who got in without even a cursory inspection. They spoke on condition of anonymity because, they said, the order was made by federal officials who were in charge of security at the event. 'How can you not be concerned in this day and age,' said one policeman.

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	In 1981, Spanish democracy faltered as soldiers led by Lt. As Colonel Antonio Tejero seized control of Spain's parliament to launch a coup d'etat.

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In 1820, a group of Spencean Philanthropists known as the Cato Street plotters murder the British cabinet of ministers. Angered by the Six Acts and the Peterloo Massacre, the plan was to assassinate a number of cabinet ministers, overthrow the government and set up a Committee of Public Safety to oversee a radical revolution. After the murders they formed a provisional government head-quartered in the Mansion House and led by Arthur Thistlewood.

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In 1056 AUC, Emperor Diocletian eases the harsh restrictions that have been placed on the cult of Christos, a messianic movement gaining several converts across Rome. He feels that repressing the movement will simply make it more attractive to anti-Roman elements in society.

In 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Baltimore, Maryland, delivering the White House to Vice President-elect Hannibal Hamlin. A key proponent of sending black slaves in the District of Columbia back to Africa as a partial means to resolve the slavery issue, Hamlin himself was executed in the so-called year of the four Presidents as the Union accelerated towards dissolution.

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In 2011, in Canada under anti-obesity laws it becomes a crime to discriminate against a person with body fat measurement of 30% or above.

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	In 1945, the US flag was lowered over Iwo Jima by the 28th Regiment of the 5th Marines. The extinct volcano offered a strategic vantage point for the ongoing battle for control of the island. Lying in the north-west Pacific Ocean 650 miles (1,045 kms) from Tokyo, Iwo Jima would serve as a useful base for long-range fighters to cover B-29 Superfortresses in a bombing campaign against the Japan's capital. By now, the island hopping strategy was running in reverse, and Americans were in ful retreat from Mount Suribachi as the battle for control of Japanese-held Iwo Jima raged on.

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In 1959, BBC News reported - Macmillan and Khrushchev talk peace: 'On his ten-day visit to the Soviet Union, the British Prime Minister forges cultural and trade links between East and West. Britain and the USSR have expressed a willingness to expand Anglo-Soviet trade and cultural ties during the first official meeting between British prime minister Harold Macmillan and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. On the second day of his ten-day visit to the USSR - the first by a British prime minister since Sir Winston Churchill during the war - Mr Macmillan was driven to the Moscow Kremlin this morning for talks. The world's two superpowers were now entering a period of detente. Misunderstandings had followed the Fall of Hitler. Leaders were now eager to define spheres of influence and focus on secessionst pressures within their own borders.

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In 1836, Santa Anna reached the Alamo, a small mission in Texas, and besieged it. Knowing that reinforcements were unlikely to reach them on time, the men manning the mission surrendered to the general. Santa Anna had them all put to death, despite their surrender, and enslaved their women and children. This enraged the population of Texas, who declared independence from Mexico, and used the battle cry: 'Remember the Alamo'.

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In 1455, An inventor named Johann Gutenberg who had re-invented a 'printing-press', originally from China, published his first book, a novel intended for the enjoyment of the lords. The novel was laughable, although the writing was good, there was none of the calligraphy, word spacing, or rich leathers expected by the lords, and the lessers had no need of such a volume. Gutenberg immediately went bankrupt, and his financier, Johann Fust, sold his equipment for a pittance.

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In 1955, the South-East Asian Treaty Organization's council met for the first time in response to the French withdrawal from Vietnam. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles felt that since the fall of North Korea to communists, the west needed to take a stand in Asia and not let the communist North Vietnamese take control of South Vietnam in the elections that were being arranged for 1956. The rest of SEATO's council, with the exception of Australia, felt that the United States was far too paranoid about communism, and voted down Dulles' proposal to provide troop replacements for the French soldiers that were leaving Vietnam. In fact, President Eisenhower felt that Dulles had gone too far - he remembered the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, as a solid ally in the fight against the Japanese in World War II. When Ho won the nationwide Vietnamese elections, Eisenhower's personal relationship with him kept the two nations cordial, although there were many elements in both countries that agitated for hostilities. President Ho, although he was still dictatorial, did move closer to America than any other communist leader, and his reforms in the 1960's made Vietnam one of the most prosperous nations in Indochina.

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	In 1777, Benjamin Franklin is arrested in London while on a last desperate mission to appeal to Parliament for 'an equitable solution to the grievances between the colonies and the Crown.' Because Franklin still has influential friends in England, he is not executed; instead, he is sent to prison, and, in September of 1788, will be transported to the newly established Botany Bay penal colony in Australia.

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Destiny

Al Gore	In 2009, with an appropriate sense of history the long awaited re-unification talks finally began in Richmond, Virginia. In a powerful opening speach, CS President Al Gore masterfully connected the unfinished business of former President Bush's last State of the Nation address with the 'unfinished work' of Lincoln's Gettysburg address ~ The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
CS President

Startled, Hillary Rodham accidentally knocked over a glass of mineral water. Gore remarked that the US President looked like she had seen a ghost. Joked, shall we say, because the Confederate delegation was fully aware that Rodham had seized upon the dissolution as a populist issue to seize the White House. But in fact, the restless ghost of Abraham Lincoln was the primary reason for Rodham's arrival in the Confederate capital. It's well known how Lincoln anguished over the horrors of the Civil War. His spirit may have continued worrying long after his death. Calvin Coolidge's wife reported seeing on several occasions the ghost of Lincoln standing with his hands clasped behind his back, at a window in the Oval Office, staring out in deep contemplation toward the bloody battlefields across the Pototmac. Lincoln's ghost seems to have been most active during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, perhaps because they were both in power at times of great war for the United States. During their 13-year occupancy of the White House, the Roosevelts used the former Lincoln bedroom as a study for Eleanor, the first lady. Although she never claimed to have seen Lincoln's spirit, Eleanor spoke of the sense of someone watching her as she worked in the room. She believed Lincoln was there with her. ~ Paranormal Phenomena.

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Wrathful Boy King	In 1923, in an act of impatient curiosity Howard Carter unsealed the burial chamber of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt. Whilst unwrapping the linens of the mummy the skull of the ancient king fell away from the body causing a dent in the skull. Egyptians believed a king could only be immortal if the body rested undisturbed, and so it proved to be the case as the wrathful boy king rose to kill not only Carter and fellow grave-robbers Lord Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn Herbert but all the British on the Nile.
Tutankhamun

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In 1000, millenialists capture the Vatican in Rome and assassinate Pope Silvester II. Their leader, Budo de Stella, crowns himself Pope and decrees that all who oppose him oppose Christ; he claims to be the risen savior. Over the next three decades, the Catholic Church is wracked by religious war as the millenialists fight those who consider de Stella the Anti-Christ.

In 2008, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was informed that the Middle East master plan emailed to President Mahmoud Abbas was virus infected. An assistant at State had plugged a personal storage device into his laptop and infected the document pack. Now Mr Abbas was viewing some remastered Baywatch scenes from the mid-eighties.

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In 1940, the German tanker Altmark is boarded in neutral Norwegian waters by sailors from the British destroyer HMS Cossack, a breach of Norwegian neutrality known as the notorious Altmark Incident at the beginning of World War II. By then the fascist powers of Anglo-America were well set on the path to war and had stopped trying to keep up appearances to the contrary; rather they were agitators, keen to reverse the unbroken series of misadventures that had beset both nations since the Treaty of Versailles.

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In 1951, the Soviet Union's leader, Joseph Stalin, announces that his country will enter the war in Korea in support of the northern Communists, in an effort to balance what he calls the 'warmongers' of the west. The attack splits the United Nations, crushing the hopes of those who wanted to use the world body as a forum for ending wars, rather than starting them. Soviet troops in North Korea soon overwhelm the meager forces that the UN had in place there, and the United States responds to the escalation by throwing in almost a half-million troops. The war then spills beyond Korea's borders when British troops invade the Chinese mainland, and by 1952, all of east Asia is embroiled in the conflict. China urges the Soviets to use nuclear weapons, but Stalin resists - he wants territory, and feels that irradiated territory is useless to him. Similarly, President Truman of the United States resists calls to 'nuke the commies' from the right-wingers in his own ranks. Although in public he supports his decision to use atomic bombs against the Japanese, in private he has vowed never to use such weapons again. The war drags on for 11 years until the two sides finally realize that neither can win, and declare a truce in 1961. Privately, President Johnson of America and Premier Khrushchev of the Soviet Union promise that the proxy wars between their two countries are over.

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In 1959, Cuban Prime Minister Miro Cardona has his rival, Fidel Castro, deposed from his position as commander of the armed forces, in an effort to maintain power against the more radical elements in the Cuban revolution. Castro and his supporters temporarily take up arms against Cardona, but was convinced to reconcile with Prime Minister Cardona by his old ally and friend, Ernesto Guevara. Castro entered the Cuban parliament as a representative of his home region, the Oriente province, and became an outspoken check on the moderate wing of the revolution as they pushed democracy forward in Cuba. Prime Minister Cardona stepped down in 1965, and Castro began the first of his 7 campaigns for the office, all losing. He has been quite effective in Parliament, though, pushing universal health care and disaster recovery programs that are the envy of the developing world.

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In 301, Abu Dja'far Mohammed Djarir al-Tabari, historian of the early days of Islam, is called to the embrace of Allah at the age of 83. His powerful stories of Mohammed and the first faithful are credited with converting most of the pagan lands surrounding the holy land, and giving Islam its first great writer.

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In 2003, Washington soviet surrenders to the Soviet States of America, leaving Idaho as the sole remaining remnant of the People's Republic of America. In desperation, the soviet's leaders attempt to reconvene the peace talks with Washington, D.C., but they are rebuffed since the S.S.A. feels that victory is imminent.

In 1600, Giordano Bruno was released from the Inquisition's custody after a long discussion with the Pope. Bruno's work flirted with an almost atheistic view of the universe. Pope Clement VIII met with a mysterious end after this meeting, and Bruno fled Europe for the Americas to escape the reach of the Inquisition.

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In 1985, BBC News reported: Falklands' row civil servant resigns - Ministry of Defence assistant secretary Clive Ponting resigns from his post over the Belgrano affair. In a conscience attack, Ponting had revealed the details of Margaret Thatcher`s 'Bad Spells'.

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Stephen Donaldson	In 1968, Stephen Reeder Donaldson languished in Vietnam. By inclination a conscientious objector, he had been compelled to serve in the armed forces. Much later, and after dropping out of his Ph.D. program and moving to New Jersey in order to write fiction, Donaldson made his publishing debut with the first 'Covenant' trilogy in 1977. That enabled him to move to a healthier climate. He now lives in New Mexico. Donaldson's two year compulsory military duty would be the deep undercurrent of his escapist fantasy writing. In 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever', the protagonist was a leper struggled with disempowerment in a Land he did not really believe in.
Languishing

We are the Unhomed - lost voyagers of the world from desert shore to high cliff cragg, home of men and sylvan sea-edge faery lands-, from dream to dream we set our sails, and smiled at the rainbow of our loss ~ 'The Unhomed'.

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In 1804, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur of the U.S. Navy attempts to convince his superiors that his daring plan to destroy the frigate Philadelphia being held by Tripolitanians will succeed. Although none of them doubt his courage, they do doubt the wisdom of his plan, and order him not to proceed. The Tripolitanians add the Philadelphia to their navy, but it is sunk in an engagement with American ships in 1805.