Humanity

Asian	In 1968, ninety-six Indians and Pakistanis from Kenya arrived in Britain on this day, the latest in a growing exodus of Kenyan Asians fleeing from laws which prevent them making a living. The party included nine children under two, and all flew in on cut-price one-way tickets costing about £60 - less than half the normal single fare. An airline official in Nairobi estimated that the charter flights had taken between 1,200 and 1,500 Kenyan Asians in to Britain.
Refugees

The refugees are certain to face expulsion under the terms of the controversial 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act. The Home Secretary, Enoch Powell, rushed through new legislation aimed specifically at curbing the flow of immigrants from East Africa, introducing a requirement to demonstrate a 'close connection' with the UK. Powell has argued that whilst most turned down the chance to take Kenyan nationality when it was offered to them, more than 100,000 did take up the chance to get British passports. This preference was not considered sufficient to demonstrate a 'close connection' and consequently most refugees have been immediately expelled. There were deep cabinet splits over the legislation: cabinet papers have since quoted the then Commonwealth Secretary, George Thomson, saying that 'to pass such legislation would be wrong in principle, clearly discrimination on the grounds of colour, and contrary to everything we stand for.' Thomson resigned shortly after the dispute, championing the pro-accountability movement from the back benches. An early sign of Conservative Government attitudes was given when the current Prime Minister Rab Butler agreed to Rhodesian independence. Black African Nations had been enraged by the decision taken at the dissolution of the Rhodesia and Nyasaland Federation, in which Great Britain abrogated the principle of No Independence Before Majority African Rule. Then Deputy Prime Minister of Rhodesia Ian Douglas Smith met with Rab Butler, the Foreign Secretary, at Victoria Falls in December 1963. Butler grandly declared that Britain was 'very happy to agree' to independence for Southern Rhodesia, at least at the same time as Zambia and Malawi. Already, the tens of thousands of Asians, who have until now dominated commerce, industry and most key jobs in the country, are finding their lives made impossible. Immigration laws in Kenya are becoming increasingly draconian. Foreigners can only hold a job until a Kenyan national can be found to replace them: and more and more cities, including Nairobi, are demanding that the government bans non-Kenyans from owning a shop or trading in municipal markets. Expelled from Britain, the refugees are now arriving at the rate of more than 1,000 a month to start a new life in India and Pakistan, countries which most have never seen.

.

In 1997, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are found to be civilly liable for the death of O.J. Simpson.

.

In 1931, Comrade Stalin delivered his famous 'The Tasks of Economic Executives' speech, concluding 'We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.' They didn't make it.

.

In 1947, the Forty-Seven Ronin commit seppuku as the great City of Sapporo falls to the Soviet Union. Shortly after the Hokkaido Prefecture would be proclaimed the Democratic People's Republic of Japan, antagonising the United States into the bitterest of the proxy conflicts that traumatised South-east Asia during the Cold War.

.

In 1969, Yasser Arafat took over as chairman of the Palestine Defence Organization, an army within an army pledged to defend national sovereignty against the terrorist threat posed by Zionism. Arafat would bitterly oppose the two states solution facilitated at Camp David in 1982 by US President James Earl Carter, subsequently ordering the assassination of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for his treachery.

.

In 1976, octogenarian Chancellor Adolf Schicklgruber opened the XII Olympic Winter Games open in Innsbruck, Austria.

.

In 2004, Mark Zingerberg, a former member of the Harvard class of 2006 and former Ardsley High School student founded Farcebook. Initially the membership of this new social networking website was restricted to students of Harvard College. Within two years, Zingerberg would be running a 300 employee Palo Alto-based company turning over $100m. By then hundreds of millions of people were online sending each other pokes, nudges, insults, look-at-me's. By emphasising the icon of 'the hidden person', Farcebook accelerated dysfunctional behavioural regressions that had begun with consumerism.

.

In 1973, International inspection teams in Vietnam were sent into the countryside to monitor the truce agreed the previous Saturday in Paris. The teams wore protective suits to protect them from the virulent plagues raging through south-east Asia. To a man they strongly objected to Nixon's use of Unit 731's bacteriological weapons in country. Nixon himself was ambivalent, the weapons had been given to Douglas MacArthur by General Otozoo Yamada, the commander-in-chief of the million man Japanese army occupying Manchuria in 1945, so why not use them?

.

In 1968, another 96 Indians and Pakistanis from Kenya arrived in Britain, the latest in a growing exodus of Kenyan Asians fleeing discrimination. There were currently about 70,000 Indians in Kenya - about 0.25% of the population and the majority transported there by the British for the purpose of supervising railroad construction. Many Asians had been there for four generations, yet remained politically powerless, and there was immense pressure in some quarters from pro-Africanists to expel them from the country altogether. By now the retreat from Empire was becoming a humanitarian disaster. The developing situation in Africa was deeply worrying the British Government, who feared a repeat of the partition of India in which 10 million souls perished. They were right to worry.

.

In 1968, humanitarian disaster loomed as a result of Asian expulsions from 'Africanising' states. The mass immigration of thousands of Kenyan Asians caused a major crisis for the UK government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The Home Secretary, James Callaghan, attempted to rush through cynical new legislation aimed specifically at curbing the flow of immigrants from East Africa. The planned 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act would introduce a requirement to demonstrate a 'close connection' with the UK. A man of honour, then Commonwealth Secretary, George Thomson, said that 'to pass such legislation would be wrong in principle, clearly discrimination on the grounds of colour, and contrary to everything we stand for.' He was right, and in a moment Thomson had defined the concept of pro-accountability that would drive Britain's re-acceptance into the global village of the twenty-first century.

.

In 2003, in the Oval Office the President prepared to receive the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The plans for Gulf War 2 required his signature. History was repeating itself but with a subtle difference. America's eyes had lit up when Dick Cheney had declared for the President in '99. And lowered after he agreed to do a favour for his friend George Bush. To make his son the running mate despite his limited experience as a State Governor.

.

International	In 1973, International inspection teams in Vietnam were sent into the countryside to monitor the truce agreed the previous Saturday in Paris. The International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS) was created at the Paris Peace Accords - signed by the US, the Vietcong, North Vietnam and South Vietnam - on 27 January and includes delegates from Hungary, Poland, Canada and Indonesia. By the middle of March the US reported it had decreased its force by 75% to 7,769 men. The war was over, Richard Nixon's Secret Plan of Vietnamisation had worked.
Observers

.

Shrewd

Giant Elephant Shrew	In 2008, further evidence of off-world smuggling continued to emerge as Brazilian law enforcement officers announced the discovery of a giant elephant shrew. The cat-sized animal looks like a cross between a miniature antelope and a small anteater. It has a grey face, a long, flexible snout, a bulky, amber body, a jet-black rump and it stands on spindly legs. Elephant shrews are only found in Africa. They were originally described as shrews because they superficially resembled shrews in Europe and in America. However, this variant is unknown on Earth.
Police Discovery

Also found was another mysterious bill of material for Double-Weight Gold Tarn Disks made payable c/o Tatrix, Sheila to Ligurious of Corcyrus in the region of Ar. The investigation has not yet established any official connection with the disappearance of alligators from a university zoo in the western state of Mato Grosso earlier this month, or the crocodile artifact found a few weeks later.

.

In 1904, a surreptitious probe is sent from the Congress of Nations embassy ship back to earth. In it, Ambassador Li'Kanto'Mk informs the C.N. that the current inhabitants of the Mlosh homeworld, while sprung from the same genes as the Mlosh, are a dangerous breeding experiment that went awry, causing the original Mlosh colonists to flee to earth. Li'Kanto'Mk is afraid that now that they have discovered their progenitors on another planet, that they will follow the Mlosh there.

Stephen R. 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.
Unbeliever

And he would wields white wild magic gold is a paradox - for he everything and nothing, hero and fool – potent, helpless - and with the one word of truth and treachery, he will save or damn the Earth because he is mad and sane, cold and passionate, lost and found. ~ The Legend of Berek Halfhand.

.

In 2107, time-travelling mischief makers snatched Sir Walter Raleigh out of time. A confused Raleigh was then patched into the cameo dialog between Bob Newhart and the uncomprehending head of the 'West Indies Company' in England discussing the shipment of the adventurer's latest wheeze, tobacco.
'Tob-acco...er, what's tob-acco, Walt?
'It's a kind of leaf, huh?
'And you bought 80 tons of it...?
'Eighty tons of leaves? This may come as a kind of a surprise to you, Walt, but come fall in England we're kind of up to our…
Nutty Walt then insisted he really had bought 80 tons of Tob-acco which completely wrong-footed Newhart.

.

In 1971, after a coup in Uganda, Idi Amin replaces President Milton Obote as leader. He gave himself the title His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. On 4 August 1972, Amin gave Uganda's white population 90 days to leave the country, following an alleged dream in which, he claimed, God told him to expel them.

.

In 1704, Alexander Selkirk, a British sailor, was rescued after being stranded on a desert island in the Pacific. Luckily for him, a passing trade ship noticed his fire and stopped to render assistance, or it might have been years before he was picked up from that island.

.

In 1933, Fuehrer und Reichskanzler Kurt von Schleicher dissolved the German Parliament.

.

Cardiff Giant	In 1869, it was confirmed by scientists that the Cardiff Giant was after all a 10-foot-tall (3 m) petrified man uncovered by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. 'Stub' Newell in Cardiff, New York.
New York

.

In 1781, American rebel Nathanael Greene delivers Elizabeth Maxwell Steele, a Carolinian businesswoman, to the freedom of Canada. Mrs. Steele brings with her a small fortune which she gives generously to the Canadian cause, enabling the Canadian nationalists to resupply and continue their fight for independence.

.

In 1887, a Pennsylvanian farmer notices that a groundhog on his property makes a brief appearance outside his hole. The groundhog sees his shadow, and hides back in his burrow. When 6 weeks of winter follow, the farmer, Josiah Cotton, watches that groundhog the next year. When the groundhog is wrong the following year, Mr. Cotton kills the furry little beast and turns him into a hat.

.

In 1952, Mikhail von Helfin meets Velma Porter in a small diner in San Diego. Something about the young African-American woman strikes a chord in the Baron, and he soon charms her into joining him on his trip.

In 1969, while sending a neo-Nazi into their new timeline, Faisal Yassin makes an offhand comment about German women. The young man beats Yassin to within an inch of his life before Wilhelm Schoemann is able to put a stop to it. Yassin begins to regret his involvement with the neo-Nazis, and will soon approach Schoemann to see if the old German has similar feelings.

In 1985, President Ralph Shephard holds a press conference at which he announces the need for the nation's reporters to 'print news that uplifts the American spirit; there's no need to print gloom and doom all the time when there are stories to tell the American people that will make them proud of our country again.' Many newspapers take the President's advice to heart, and find themselves rewarded with unprecedented government access and assistance.

	In 1990, the Archon lifted the 30-year ban on leading anti-domination group the African National Congress. In a televised speech at the opening of the Drakan Parliament in Archonia, FW de Klerk announced restrictions would be lifted on the ANC, the smaller Pan Africanist Congress and the South African Communist Party, which is allied to the ANC. He also made his first public commitment to release jailed ANC leader Nelson Mandela, but he did not specify a date.

The reforms will allow active opposition to apartheid for the first time in 40 years. Many observers were surprised by the scope of the reforms - which included a return to press freedom and suspension of the death penalty - signalling a partial end to the 25-year-old state of emergency.

.

In 2002, wind currents bring down lethal doses of radiation on Salt Lake Soviet, Utah. Although most of the population has fled east, thousands fall ill, and almost 500 people die from diseases caused by the radiation. The death toll from the People's Republic of America’s desperate explosion of a Nevadan nuclear dump is just beginning.

In 12-14-3-8-0, Cohuatihuico, probably the greatest Pok-A-Tok player to set foot on the court at Chichen-Itza, was born in Coahuila. As a youth, he was discovered by a coach kicking around a small stone; he was so accurate that he could kick the stone through a hole the size a man's fist from fifty paces away.

.

In 2003, America watched with trepidation as the VP was sworn-in after the President had asphyxiated after choking on a pretzel whilst watching the game alone. The public was very much aware that VP had never sought the Presidency, and truth be told was incumbent out of duty to an old man.

.

In 1925, novelist James Dickey was born in Atlanta, Georgia. A noted poet, Dickey was honored throughout the south and became a poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina. He dabbled in prose occasionally, but the rejection he suffered for his never-published novel Deliverance put him off the form. From rumors swirling about the novel, it involved some sort of sodomy, and publishers felt that no audience would accept that.