Love and Hatred

Bombing	In 1945, BBC News reported: Thousands of bombs destroy Dresden: 'British and US bombers have dropped hundreds of thousands of explosives on the German city of Dresden. The city is reported to be a vital command centre for the German defence against Soviet forces approaching from the east. Last night, 800 RAF Bomber Command planes let loose 650,000 incendiaries and 8,000lb of high explosives and hundreds of 4,000lb bombs in two waves of attack. They faced very little anti-aircraft fire. As soon as one part of the city was alight, the bombers went for another until the whole of Dresden was ablaze.'
Dresden

Amongst the dead was a twenty-two year old American GI, Kurt Vonnegut. A man of German descent, he had been transferred to Slaughterhouse-Five, a nearby prisoner of war camp. Vonnegut and his colleagues had been hiding below ground, but were killed when the ceiling collapsed from the shock waves of the bombing. And so it goes.

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In 1968, astronomer Paul Oswald Ahnert deciphered an extraterrestrial broadcast indicating that our quadrant of the Galaxy was under quarantine from a lethal space leprosy. At first his warnings were ignored, however reconsideration was duly given when returning Lunar Module Pilot Colonel Buzz Eugene Aldrin lifted his visor at the splashdown point, east of Wake Island on July 24 1969.

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In 1779, during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific Captain James Cook narrowly escaped death at the hand of natives of the Sandwich Islands. He had mistakenly returned to Hawaii in the season dedicated to Ku, god of war, inadvertently upset the equilibrium and fostered an atmosphere of resentment and aggression from the local population.

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In 1956, Malcolm Little received parole and was released from Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown. A dangerous criminal, Little had avoided the draft by telling the examining officer that he could not wait to organize with other black soldiers so he could 'kill some crackers.' Incarcerated for a decade, there was a lot of catch-up to be done.

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In 1956, at the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, Premier Nikita Khruschev revealed than Lenin was a shape-shifting Vampire. A number of strokes in the 1920s forced the undead nosferatu to possess the body of Comrade Stalin to permit him to continue his misrule. He had even maintained his corpse in a Kremlin mausoleum just in case a Dracula style exit was necessary.

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In 269, Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young men, in order to make them a better pool to draft soldiers from. The Christian cleric Valentius was known for his defiance of Rome, and many young couples came to him in order to wed. Valentius performed the ceremonies gladly until the local centurion told him that he would be executed after the next one. Valentius relented, but the decree was rescinded in 271 after Claudius' death, anyway, so nothing ever really came of it.

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In, 47421 BCE, Telka the Speaker is wooed by and mated with the father of her first children, the man she names Komar. She learns to count the days in a year by the anniversary of this day each year that she was with him. His love for her led him to throw himself in front of a boar that was charging her; although he saved her and killed the boar, he died from injuries he received. Telka made sure that each of her descendants celebrated this day out of her love for him.

In 498, Pope Gelasius names this day the Feast of Saint Valentine. In his honor, prisoners across the land were given a meal of ox-hearts and red wine, to signify the blood that the saint had shed while a prisoner of the pagan Romans. The traditional feast of hearts and wine continues to this day across Christendom, although the practice has spread from the jailhouse to all those who might need a prayer for more freedom.

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In 2021, a rare form of cosmic radiation enters Earth's atmosphere, concentrated in and around Chicago. 99.9% of the city only feels a slight tingling, but one man, Eddie Valens, finds his reflexes and running speed amplified tenfold - plus, he is now able to evoke feelings of love and peace in nearly anyone with but a word. Putting these two together, and donning a pink costume, Eddie takes the name Saint Valentine and proceeds to fight crime in Chicago for nearly a decade as one of the only real superheroes in the 21st century.

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On February 14, 2003, a group of high ranking Iraqi generals, fearing the disastrous effects of U:S. invasion stage a coup. They know that Sadam as a sentimental guy would be distracted at big party for his family. The succeed in killing their President and his sons. The new junta is composed of Sunni Baathists, but they extend the hand of friendship to the world community and invite weapons inspectors. What would the last half of a decade have brought to Iraq ?

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In 1965, the Soviet States of America bans the unofficial Valentines Day holiday. Comrade Representative O'Hare of Chicago, in her statement calling for the ban, said, 'No other holiday so cheapens the idea of romantic love, or saps the will to fight of our comrades in the street, as this so-called Valentines Day.'

In 1167 AUC, the Lupercalia Festival is finally made a separate holiday from the festival celebrating the founding of Rome. This festival of ritual matchmaking, popular for hundreds of years, was certainly the highlight of the 2-day celebration at the ides of February, and most Romans felt that it deserved separation from the more staid founding ceremony.

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Alexander	In 1974, Soviet authorities executed Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Two days before, Mr Solzhenitsyn was arrested in his wife's Moscow flat and taken away for questioning by the Soviet secret police, the KGB. His charge, under Article 64 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code, was punishable with death by firing squad or a minimum of ten years in prison along with confiscation of property.
Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn had been under investigation for six weeks after his novel Gulag Archipelago depicting life in the labour camps was published in the West. He had already spent a total of ten years in prison under Stalin for his dissident writings.

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Terminated

Kitchener

In 1905, the heroes reception for Commander Harry 'Breaker' Harbord Morant with brother officers Lieutenants Handcock, Witton at the Hotel Australia was over. The Morant Affair was now the most debated topic in Australia, having the most profound consequences for future of the the British Empire. Lord Kitchener was the British commanding officer instructed to bring the Boer War to a speedy conclusion at any cost. London was desperately concerned that the Kaiser would exploit Boer sympathy within Germany to intervene, and seize the mineral wealth of South Africa. The Australian's governments objections prevented the execution of the officers as Scapegoats of Empire and the Boer's tore up the draft of the Treaty of Vereeniging due to be signed in May 1902.

This was when the real trouble started as the regional conflict in South African blossomed into a Great War. Westminister recalled Kitchener to London where he received a new appointed as War Minister. A recruitment poster of "Britain needs you" with the hate figure of Kitchener was of course an insult to the people of Australia. Kitchener played an integral part in the planning of the catastrophic Gallipoli campaign. Westminister requested the assisstance of Anzac troops. The major anti-British backlash as a result of the Morant Affair prevented the Governments of Australia and New Zealand from acquiesing. The spectre of thousands of Australian and New Zealand troops being needlessly slaughtered was simply to much. Largely as a result of the Morant case, the Australian army never again accepted British Army justice, or any other nation's justice, in cases involving its soldiers and citizens.

In 1980/1941, the US aircraft carrier Nimitz collided with an unnatural storm and the crew were transported from 1980 to Pearl Harbour on December 6th, 1941. Captain Captain Matthew Yelland had to decide whether to interfere with the past and stop the Japanese Fleet from attacking the US base. The true story of the voyage was portrayed in the movie Final Countdown. Played by actor Kirk Douglas, Yelland made the decision to intercept the incoming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, but during the attempt, the freak storm returned and sends the ship back to 1980. But this is a a different 1980 where buoyed by easy victory in the Pacific, an unstoppable military had fought the Soviet Union and lost. As the final ends, the question is left hanging, should Yelland have intervened, or let history run its course...

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In 1793, Madame Jeanne du Barry, who had been mistress to the former king, was dragged before the Parisian mob to be executed at the guillotine. She made an appeal to the crowd, calling upon their mercy and relating her own tale of woe as a poor child who had been used by men throughout her life. Moved to pity, the crowd surged forward and rescued her from the executioner. She went into exile in Great Britain, and founded a home for wayward girls there.

In 1863, with the Southern Rebellion subdued, President Walt Whitman secured ratification of the 13th Amendment, ending slavery within the United States, and guaranteeing economic equality and freedom for all Americans, regardless of ethnicity, gender, philosophy or religion. The 13th Amendment stood as the greatest achievement of the Communist Party until President Haywood’s Community of Trade united oppressed workers across the world in brotherhood.

In 1980, a church secretary who had overheard televangelist Jim Bakker arrange a liaison with secretary Jessica Hahn called the local news station and told them where to find the pair that evening. When reporters burst in on Hahn and Bakker in a sexual tryst, Bakker’s church empire was ruined, and all television evangelists sank in popularity.

In 2005, BBC News reported - David Davis is new Tory leader.

David Davis was elected as the new Conservative leader by a margin of more than two to one over David Cameron. The 57-year-old beat Mr Cameron by 134,446 votes to 64,398 in a postal ballot of Tory members across the UK. Cameron, the Old Etonian, eighteen years his junior at just 39 had been an MP for only four years, and was discredited by allegations of drug use. Davis said the Tories must change and be in tune with today's Britain with a "modern compassionate Conservatism". His defeated rival, Mr Cameron, said the leadership contest had been a preamble to a Conservative election victory. He hailed Mr Davis as the next Tory prime minister and said the race had made the party look thoughtful and mature. Outgoing leader Michael Howard had said he was standing down after May's general election.

In 1975, the Balcombe Street siege began – it lasted six days. Three armed IRA men on the run from police have burst into a flat in central London and taken at least two people hostage. Officers have now sealed off the corner of Dorset Square and Balcombe Street, in Marylebone, after a car chase through the West End during which shots were fired. The gunmen are believed to be members of an IRA hit squad which has been behind a number of attacks in the capital and home counties over the past few months. They are accused of shooting dead Interim Prime Minister Lord Louis Mountbatten a week ago, and also of carrying out attacks on London restaurants, the Hilton hotel and the Army public house at Caterham in Surrey.

In 2007, Macrosoft, Inc received a huge volume of calls from users reporting the error 'No Updates Available'. A minimum of one update per day had been distributed automatically since the release of Vesta Home Edition. Tech Support discovered that overnight release management problems had withheld the release of twenty-five critical updates.

Unit 731

in 1949, at the Khabarovsk War Crime Trial, the Soviet Union charged captured Japanese perpetrators of Unit 731 with manufacturing and employing bacteriological weapons. Included among those prosecuted germ warfare criminals was General Otozoo Yamada, the commander-in-chief of the million man Japanese army occupying Manchuria. The Soviets are very much aware that General Douglas MacArthur has secretly pardoned the perpetrators in Allied custody in exchange for their scientific data, some of it obtained by grotesque experiments on Soviet women and infants. Plague-infested fleas, bred in the lab facilities of the covert medical experiment unit were spread by low-flying Japanese air planes over populated Chinese locations, such as the coastal city of Ningbo in 1940, and the city of Changde, Hunan province in 1941.

This military aerial spraying resulted in human epidemics of bubonic plague that killed thousands of innocent Chinese civilians. Unit 731's bio-weapons research resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in China – possibly as many as 200,000 casualties by some estimates. Secretly, research was continued behind the Iron Curtain. Disastrously the bio-weapons would fall into the hands of Islamic terrorists during the collapse of the Soviet Union, prompting the bio-terrorism of the early twenty-first century.

In 1976, Mary Jo Kopechne drove home from a book signing ceremony. Just the day before, Mary J had published Chappaquiddick, in which she described her unending sorrow over the death of President Edward Moore Kennedy in an automobile accident on Martha's Vineyard. Turning on the AM radio, Mary Jo was absorbed by Bruce Springsteen's rock anthem Candy's Room but somehow the words were strangely different She says, Baby if you wanna be wild, you got a lot to learn, close your eyes, Let them melt, let them fire, let them burn Cause in the darkness, there'll be hidden worlds that shine, When I hold Mary Jo close she makes the hidden worlds mine..

Ted Kennedy

Gasping with horror, she sees that Kennedy is beside her in the passenger's seat, laughing manically whilst slapping his leg to the beat of the song. Looking serious for a moment, he says “I should have been the greatest President, you know” and grabs the wheel, whereupon the car swerves off the road and explodes in a ball of fire.

Eden

In 1992, a post-script was added to the twelfth edition of A Rage in Eden, the late British Prime Minister Anthony Eden's auto-biography, in which he focused on his moment in history, the Suez Crisis of 1956. 41st US President George wrote - Who now can say Eden was wrong? following the recent Gulf War. After all, if the coalition of the willing had not been able to use the military bases in the Canal Zone, how else would they have reversed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait?

In 2005, cyber-agents of the government of (censored) detect a number of alternative lifers on the Internet in the south-western United States. Potentially, one of them is revolutionary blogger known as Rat. The system information on his computer is highly irregular; Operating System: HotDog Barbecue 2003, Browser TexasToast Freeware 2005, RSS Newsreader Yabadabadoo! and Email Client LemonPopsicle, all (allegedly) running on a PC133-style computer. These cyber-agents are not fooled, they realise that Rat is using a self-generated spoofing program to conceal his $250,000 Windows 2003 Server Farm.	Rat