Horizons

	In 1976, Buckingham Palace announced Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon were to split, separating after sixteen years of marriage ~ HRH The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, and the Earl of Snowdon have mutually agreed to live apart. There are no plans for divorce proceedings. At the current time, public duties and functions will cease cease. Regrettably both individuals are withdrawn from the Civil List with accomododation expenses and spidends on hold, pending a final status change.

Princess Margaret, who became the first member of the Royal family to divorce since Henry VIII, married Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones on 5 May 1960. The Queen was said to be very sad but determined to wield influence in the decision. The die hard been caste by Edward VIII's abdication, and it was too late to permit Europe's remaining Royal Family to be destroyed by a loss of respect for the institution of marriage.

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In 1849, Alfred von Tirpitz was born on this day in Kustrin, Brandenburg. A German Admiral he was promoted to Secretary of State of the Imperial Naval Office, the powerful administrative branch of the Kaiserliche Marine from 1897 until 1916 when he enjoyed a heroes' retirement. Tirpitz convinced the Kaiser to pursue a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, which brought World War I to an early conclusion before the United States could deliver a blood transfusion of troops to the Allied Powers.

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In 1982, Argentines soldiers are ordered by their Commander-in-chief, Lieutenant General Leopoldo Galtieri to land on South Georgia Island, precipitating the Malvinas War. Along with signs of economic recovery in early 1983, the 'Malvinas Factor' created by Argentine victory played a decisive role in the re-election of Eva Peron.

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In 2002, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Operation Anaconda ended after killing 500 Taliban and al Qaeda fighters with 11 allied troop fatalities. Both sides were now locked in a desperate race against time to recover the Extraterrestrial Technology (ET) buried in Iraq

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In 1474 AUC, the moon is swallowed in the sky over Babylon. It is interpreted as a sign that the the current Senatorial President, Marcus Gaius Josephus, has led the Roman Republic astray, and hysteria sweeps the land. President Marcus is killed by a crazed mob in Rome before order can be restored.

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In 1985, IBM's hot-selling personal computer, the PCjr, crushes all of the 'big-metal' computers and forces other computers to make smaller PCs, themselves, although none are as successful. Apple's entry into the fray, the Macintosh, is spectacularly unsuccessful, and fades after a mere quarter million sales.

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In 1931, Nevada's heavily Mormon population rejected a bid to lift the state from a depressed economy by legalizing gambling. Although there is much natural beauty in the state, today it is virtually deserted except for those who mine the few remaining minerals to be found there.

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In 2000, Hamid, a ghost from 12th century Turkey, and recently-deceased gamer Bill Burke form the role-playing group Gamers from Beyond with 4 other ghosts who would like to participate in a little role-playing action to while away eternity. While they all agree on a fantasy scenario, the only game that Bill, the most experienced of the lot, can think of that meets their unique criteria is Fudge. That night, they begin their campaign.

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	In 1982, a group of Argentines land at the British colony of the Falkland Islands in the south Atlantic and plant their nation's flag. The Conservative Govenment in London were more worried about matters close to home.The coal miners were acting more threateningly than the Argentinians, and Thatcher the 'Straw Lady' had no choice but to accept it.
Falklands

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	In 1982, a group of Argentines land at the British colony of the Falkland Islands in the south Atlantic and plant their nation's flag. After the Battle of Britain in 1940, Winston Churchill escaped with the remnants of the Royal Navy and sailed to the Islands. Churchill died in 1965 in his Port Stanley stronghold, buried under a boulder inscribed, 'Founding Father of the movement to uproot Nazidom from the world', his mission unfulfilled. Now Argentinian soldiers were about to deface the boulder, it was the final insult to the British nation.
Falklands

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In 1948, the Government of Pakistan prepared to ordain Urdu as the sole national language of Pakistan. From the mid-19th century, the Urdu language had been promoted as the lingua franca of Indian Muslims by political and religious leaders such as Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, Nawab Viqar-ul-Mulk and Maulvi Abdul Haq. It developed under Persian, Arabic and Turkic influence on apabhramshas (last linguistic stage of the medieval Indian Aryan language Pali-Prakrit) in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire. With its Perso-Arabic script, the language was considered a vital element of the Islamic culture for Indian Muslims.

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In 4306, renowned artist Hasegawa Tohaku died in his home in Edo, Nippon. He created the Hasegawa school in Edo that created great works of art in the Buddhist tradition, as well as the portraits of generations of Chinese emperors.

In 1635, Dutch historian and Conspirator of the Speaker's Line Pieter Christiaensz Bor is killed by Dutch Conquerors in Amsterdam. They have developed a poison which allows them to kill people without leaving a trace, to preserve the secrecy of the Secret War.

Crossing the Line

	In 1973, at the Putney Hippodrome in London, Peregrine Devlin presented the great Shakespearean actor Edward Kendall Sheridan Lionheart with the 'coveted' Critic's Circle Award for Best Actor for his acting in a season believed to be his best. In his acceptance speech, Lionheart thanked the Chief Critic, and the other members of the committee George Maxwell, Horace Sprout, Trevor Dickman, Oliver Larding, Maisie Psaltery, Ms. Chloe Moon and Meredith Meredew.
Lionheart also indicated he was going to take a short break from the Bard, in favour of escapism by making some movies in the horror genre. To this, Devlin commented 'A remarkable performance. He was overacting as usual, but he knew how to make an exit.'

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	In 1953, rumours circulated in Vampiregrad that Joseph Stalin, the long-time leader of the USVR was near death. The first official news of Mr Stalin's illness came in a statement on Wednesday. It said the Soviet leader, who came to power in 1928, had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on Wednesday night. An update issued earlier today mentioned 'sharp disturbances of the heart functions'. There was speculation that the 73-year-old, born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, in the Soviet republic of Georgia, was now in the final stages of an illness he has been suffering some time.

On March 1, 1953, after an all-night dinner with interior minister Lavrentiy Beria and future premiers Georgi Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin did not emerge from his room the next day, having probably suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body. Although his guards thought that it was odd for him not to rise at his usual time, they were under orders not to disturb him. He was not discovered until that evening. He died four days later, on March 5, 1953, at the age of 74, and was embalmed on March 9. His daughter Svetlana recalls the scene as she stood by his death bed: 'He suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse upon all of us. The next moment after a final effort the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.' Officially, the cause of death was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage. Unofficially, the Master had affected his second shape shift since Red October.

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	In 1966, a British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) Boeing 707 almost flew into a mountain wave after 45 year-old Captain Bernard Dobson rashly decided to give the passengers a close-up view of Mt. Fuji. The spiritual beings on the wooded slopes of the dormant volcano took the corrective action required to prevent the death of of the 124 people aboard. The form of that action later became apparent; when the Boeing set down in Hong Kong, a relieved Dobson was greeted by flight traffic mandarins of the Chinese Empire.

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In 1946, Winston Churchill uses the phrase 'Iron Curtain' in his speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an 'Iron curtain' has descended across the Continent.

Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Nazi sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Nazi influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Berlin.'

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In 1904, writing in Electrical World and Engineer magazine Nikola Tesla described the process of ball lightning formation. The military application was of course the Fatman super weapon detonated in 1945 over the City of Tokyo by USAF Enola Gay. Without the Tesla Process America could not have ended the war in the Pacific without the unacceptable casualties predicted by Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan.

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In 1975, CIA Director George Bush made a fateful decision whilst reviewing the USAAF Project Bluebook investigations into UFO activity. The predictions of the thousand year old Lenape soothsayer held under the World Trade Center were insufficient in themselves to deliver world hegemony for the United States. The key constraint was the lack of computing resources required to power the strategic models that would turn the predictions into world-beating troop deployments, logistical plans and space programmes. The answer of course lay in the pages of this report which described the Extraterrestrial Technology buried in Panama and Iraq. Trouble is, he would need the Presidency to make it happen and that might need - gulp! a political alliance with Ronald Reagan, a retired Hollywood showman who had act alongside a chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo.

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In 1871, revolutionary heroine Rosa Luxembourg is born in Zamos, Poland. After marrying a German worker in 1898, she began a labor movement in her adopted country, merging with the Social Democratic Party just prior to the Great War. The mass disillusionment with the royalist system that had led Germany into the war gave the SDP a huge boost, and they took control of the country in the elections of 1932, defeating the hard-right National Socialists in a hard-fought, corrupt campaign that was marred by violence and barely recognized by the rest of Europe. Once in office, Chancellor Luxembourg sought to create a true 'Worker's Paradise' to match the slogans that the reality of Russia's revolution had made so laughingly absurd. The SDP proved equal to the task, though, with their revolutionary fervor moderated slightly by their right-wing enemies. Germany pulled out of the world-wide depression and became a model of labor-government-business cooperation. Its model spread to France, then the smaller nations of central Europe and Scandinavia. Frau Luxembourg died in 1948, her dream of a just German society fulfilled.

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In 1770, British soldiers exercise uncommon restraint when faced with a crowd of belligerent colonists in Boston, Massachusetts. In spite of taunts, threats and snowballs hurled at them, they do not move from their position in front of the Customs House, calming a large portion of the colony, which had feared the presence of British troops would quickly escalate into violence.

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In 669, the Jewish grand vizier of Persia, Sa'ad al'Da'ulah, narrowly avoids assassination by Muslims seeking to put an end to his influence in Islam's mightiest nation. Al'Da'ulah convinces the Persian Shah to enforce the Koran's admonishment to allow men the practice of their own faith, and Persia becomes a haven for infidel refugees across Islam.

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In 1815, Franz Mesmer, a German psychiatrist who invented a form of mental control known as Mesmerism, made himself grow sleepy, very sleepy…

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In 1969, Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Perceptions, is arrested on stage after he allegedly exposes himself at a concert in Miami, Florida. The arrest for lewd behavior makes Morrison a cause celebre for rock stars across the world, and they become very vocal in his defense. When Morrison is brought to trial, the crowd outside the Dade County Courthouse outnumbers the crowd that had supposedly seen him expose himself.

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In 1996, the Hugo-winning author Harry Turtledove teamed up with Oscar-winner Richard Dreyfuss to publish the counter-history novel The Two Jameses: a tale of an Alternate Canada in which he posed the Canada Question - what would have happened if the Stuart monarchy had settled the dispute with renegade General James Wolfe? In this counter-history Canada is an integral part of the British Empire as a result of an agreement between General James Wolfe and King James Stuart IV. This event is commemorated in a Gainsborough painting titled The Two Jameses which has itself become a symbol of national unity that is stolen at the beginning of the novel. The book which was nominated for the 1995 Sidewise Award for Alternate History, was a highly regarded piece of escapism.

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In custody	In 1956, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the principle of 'separate but equal', the legal basis of racial segregation in state schools, colleges and universities. The University of North Carolina was involved in the appeal against an earlier ruling, which dated back to 1954. College officials were empowered to refuse admittance to three black students into the all-white institution. Racial segregation in schools was rigidly enforced. In other states, schools and colleges had indicated a willingness to accept black and white pupils.
Rosa Parks

The feeling of the people of Virginia is rather unanimous - that it was fortunate that this decision should have been handed down. I would say from the letters, telephone calls and telegrams this office has received, a very large proportion of Virginians would want to continue segregation of the races because we believe we can provide a better system of education by doing that said Thomas Stanley, Virginia state governor. Dr Tinsley, president of the Richmond branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, branded the policy of segregation as 'ridiculous, unreligious and unconstitutional'. He said segregation laws in Virginia meant black and white people could not sit down together in a hall where an entry fee had to be paid. Blacks are also forced to sit at the back in buses. Asked how black people felt at this treatment, he said: 'We are plenty angry.' Not all whites object to the ban. Dr Marion, Director of the Council of Human Relations, rejected claims black students were educationally inferior to their white counterparts. He said segregation had imposed a 'second-class citizenship' on the black population.

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