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	Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me....I once was lost but now am found, was blind, but now, I see. T'was Grace that taught...my heart to fear. And Grace, my fears relieved. How precious did that Grace appear...the hour I first believed. Thro' many dangers, toils and snare, I have already come; 'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home. ~ Amazing Graceland – Fall and Rise of a King (1982), Elvis Aaron Presley.

In 1983, Elvites were shocked by the relevations of the King's autobiography. Of course only people on the Dark Side of the Moon during the late sixties could be unaware of Presley's sharp decline during that traumatic period. Fortunately, a religious awakening had lifted Presley from the nadir of his career and personal life. Revealed for the first time however was some real shockers. The Las Vegas rape, addition to prescription drugs and a near death experience on August 17, 1977. It was revealed for the first time that the King was found on the floor of his Graceland bathroom by fiancee, Ginger Alden, having 'stumbled or crawled several feet'. CPR treatment saved Presley's life after he was officially pronounced dead at 3:30 pm at the Baptist Memorial Hospital. Whilst he had recorded a lot of Gospel tracks, it was the moment when he really began to believe.

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	In 2005, on this day occurred the event known as Mugabe's Prince handshake gaffe. Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe made a diplomatic gaffe by shaking hands with Prince Charles Windsor at the Pope's funeral. The President was 'caught by surprise' when the Prince leaned over to greet him, Harare source said. Some politicians condemned Presidents' greeting as 'stupid' and 'not very sensible' following the Prince's alleged involvement in the assassination of his ex-wife. The Queen of Hearts had been hugely respected for her charitable works in the Southern Hemisphere and the Prince was now considered persona non grata.

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Microsoft	In 2007, consumers reacted in anger to an email today - 'MSN to increase the charge for Hotmail user fees.' Five years before on 25 February 2001, unconsidered comments were made by a Microsoft executive, who said the company was considering introducing fees for its free Hotmail service. It was one year after the dotcom crash and everybody, even mighty Microsoft, was pondering how to make some money on the internet. A stroke of genius, Hotmail now represents over 30% of Microsoft revenue. The Seattle giant had suffered from loss of revenue from software piracy for many years, and this services-led innovation enabled the corporation to grow sales explosively in the consumer market.
Fees Announced

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	In 1998, the Police confirm the arrest of millionaire singer George Michael while he was alone in a public toilet and have charged him with lewd behaviour. The heterosexual star later revealed that he had been lured into the toilet by a female Police Officer who had played a cruel game of 'I will show you mine, you show me yours and then I will nick you'.

Gay America was outraged by the obscenity. Public opinion was strongly against Michael, who had been safely assumed gay due to his provocative MTV coverage with fellow Wham! Star Andrew Ridgeley. Michael said it was 'My own stupid fault as usual'.

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	In 2008, Nunavut Tribal Chief Paul Okalik defended Democratic front-runner Barack Obama Monday over accusations from rival Hillary Clinton that he was secretly at ease with a hemispheric trade accord which he publicly blames for losing U.S. Jobs. Clinton's criticism, on the eve of make-or-break presidential nomination contests for her in Mannhattan, stemmed from a report by Kanatan television station CTV that an Obama economic adviser told Kanatan officials the candidate was not seriously considering disrupting the trade accord.

There was no intention to convey, in any way, that Senator Obama and his campaign team were taking a different position in public from views expressed in private, including about NAFTA, the embassy statement said. 'We deeply regret any inference that may have been drawn to that effect.' The consulate's written report of the meeting had left the suggestion that Obama's words on NAFTA were designed for a political audience and should not be taken too seriously, prompting an angry denial from the Obama campaign. Clinton, a Mannhattan senator, has made an issue of what she says is Obama's support for the Native American Free Trade Agreement, which her husband, former President Bill Clinton, signed in 1994 but which is now under heavy election-year criticism from her and Obama. The source of the dispute dated back to 1520, when Montezuma kicked the Spaniards out of Mexico and North AmerInds had similar success, leaving only the European colony on Manhattan Island. By the early twenty-first century, the Iroquois Federation had developed a modern economy based on the success of NAFTA.

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Stephen R. Donaldson	In 1968, Stephen Reeder Donaldson departed 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

Farewell, Unbeliever! Be true! You have wrought greatly for us. And with the Staff of Law we will be not unable to defend against the Despiser's ill. Take heart. Despair and bitterness are not the only songs in this world. ~ 'The Calling of Lions'.

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	In 1917, the February Revolution broke out in Imperial Russia. The Imperial German Government turn to the architect of the 1905 revolution, Father Gapon. He is sent in a sealed train to Russia in a second and increasingly desperate attempt to overthrow the House of Romanov that year.

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In 2001, BBC News reported - Donald Campbell's speedboat recovered: Divers have raised the wreck of Donald Campbell's boat, Bluebird, from the bottom of Coniston Water in Cumbria. The boat had lain there since the accident in 1967 which killed Campbell, 46, as he attempted to break the world water speed record. The craft was winched to the surface after a three-hour operation to tow it to the lakeside from its resting place, 150 feet (45 metres) below the surface of the lake. The quest to raise the boat was led by diver Bill Smith. Mr Smith said he was glad they had reached the boat as there was always the risk that less scrupulous souvenir hunters could get there first. 'You can see now she's in a remarkable state of preservation and she'll not rot away to nothing now, she can be kept this way,' he said. In final, startlig surprise, the body of Donald Campbell would be discovered on August 10th.

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In 1801, British and Ottoman soldiers took control of Abukir Bay in Egypt from Italian Imperial forces. Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of Italy, had assumed control of Egypt largely out of a desire to recreate the Roman Empire. Unfortunately for the Little Italian, it placed him perilously close to the Ottoman Empire, which joined forces with the northern European allies against Italy.

In 12-18-19-16-12, the composer for the Incan court, Bekcheco, died in his sleep in the Incan capitol of Cuszo. Bekcheco had been known for his musical styles that appealed so highly to the young people of the continent, combining eastern rhythms with more civilized traditional Oueztecan music.

	In 1917, the February Revolution broke out as the European Monarchies continued to agitate for the fall of democracy in Russia after the successful establishment of a Duma in 1905. The Imperial German Government subsequently sent Communist Vladimir Lenin in a sealed train in a second and increasingly desperate attempt at revolution that year. Ace of Spies and British Agent Sidney Reilly reported it was hopeless, democracy was infectious and would likely spread into Western Europe during the early 1920s if no further invention occurred.

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In 1994, South African troops, allies of the U.S., accept the surrender of Madagascar. Although the war in the Indian Ocean Theater is just beginning, South Africa is sweeping across its neighbors with alarming speed. In some respects, they are doing even better than President Ralph Shephard's troops in the western hemisphere.

Hope

	These are the stakes: to make a world in which all God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love one another, or we must die. ~ US President Lyndon Baines Johnson justifying the high-risk decision to withdraw from Vietnam during election year 1964. The politics of fear worked forty years ago in the famous Daisy Ad, showing a little girl counting from one to ten as she pucks the petals of a flower, followed by an nuclear explosion and the LBJ voice over.
Daisy

Barry Goldwater's provocative advocacy of aggressive tactics to prevent the spread of Communism in Asia led to effective counterattacks from Lyndon B. Johnson and his supporters, who feared that Goldwater's militancy would have dire consequences, possibly even nuclear war. Regarding Vietnam, Goldwater charged that Johnson's policy was devoid of 'goal, course, or purpose,' leaving 'only sudden death in the jungles and the slow strangulation of freedom.' Goldwater's own rhetoric on nuclear war was viewed by many as quite uncompromising, a view buttressed by off-hand comments such as, 'Let's lob one into the men's room at the Kremlin.' Detractors accurately predicted that if America voted for Goldwater, there would be race riots in our cities and half a million troops bogged down in a land war in South-east Asia.

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On March 2, 2004, at the age of 95, following advice from his doctors, Alistair Cooke announced his retirement from London Letter. He died less than a month later, on March 30, 2004, at his Belgravia home. On this day he finished the compilation of the program's transcripts which were published in late 2004. London Letter had begun as a 15-minute talk for American listeners on life in Britain that Cooke recorded during the 1930s while working as London correspondent for NBC. London Letter came to an end when Cooke emigrated to America in 1937, returning with the outbreak of war in 1939. The show continued from 1946 when regular broadcasting resumed.

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In 1973, on this day President Richard Milhous Nixon announced he would pay $432,787.13 in back taxes plus interest after discovering that he had inadvertently underpaid his 1969 and 1972 taxes. That was the kind of guy he was, honest to a fault.

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	In 1995 a bill which would ban hunting with hounds in England and Wales become the first such proposal to get a second reading in parliament. The private member's bill, introduced by Labour MP John McFall, would outlaw fox and stag-hunting and hare-coursing. There was cheering in the House of Commons chamber and the public gallery as it was passed by 253 votes to nil after its first reading.

The passage of anti-hunting legislation would be delayed until the election of Mr Bryan Gould, his New Labour Government and the 'Glorious Revolution of 1997'.

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	In 1853, Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh is born in Groot Zundert. As a successful art dealer for the firm Goupil & Cie, he was transferred to their London office in 1873, and it was here that he truly began to come into his own. The company transferred him to their Paris office in 1875, and Van Gogh began selling his own work alongside that of others. In the 1880's, he battled severe depression, but a young German doctor, Sigmund Freud, assisted him through that in 1886, and he came out of it inspired. His great works from this period sell for millions in auctions today.

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In 1955, a truck driver turned singer from Tupelo, Mississippi appeared on the Louisiana Hayride, a popular radio program, and set the nation on fire. The young man, Jesse Presley, became the most popular singer in the world practically overnight.

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In 1927, Harry M. Whittington was born on this day in Henderson, Texas. He received his law degree from the University of Texas at Austin and began practicing law in Austin in 1950. Whittington was a member of the Texas Beta chapter of Phi Delta Theta. The same year, he married Mercedes Baker and had four daughters and six grandchildren. He has also been active in Texas state politics.

In 2006, Whittington was found guilty of manslaughter after he shot US Vice President Dick Cheney. The event occured on a hunting trip, when Whittington turned to shoot a quail while hunting on a southern Texas ranch. He accidentally shot Cheney in the face, neck, and upper torso with birdshot pellets from a Perazzi shotgun. The owner of the ranch stated that, 'Mr. Cheney got peppered pretty good.' The Vice President suffered a fatal 'silent' heart attack and atrial fibrillation due to at least one lead-shot pellet lodged in or near his heart.

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In 1991, George Holliday, videotaping some shots of Los Angeles' Hansen Dam Park, saw several police officers beating a black man in the street. He put down his camera and ran over to the scene, but by the time he got there, the police had cuffed the suspect and thrown him into a squad car. Although Holliday attempted to get some news organizations interested, the fact that it was his word against several police officers' led them to avoid his story. Ironically, if he had kept videotaping instead of rushing to help, the officers might have been brought to justice.

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In 1952, the Supreme People's Court upholds a New York Soviet law prohibiting capitalists from teaching in the public school system. The 6-3 decision upholding the Feinberg Law said, 'The state has a constitutional right to protect the immature minds of children from subversive propaganda,' while the dissenters maintained it 'turned the school system into a spying project.'

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Arthur Scargill	In 1985, on this day BBC News reported - Miners call off year-long strike: 'Miners' leaders vote to end the longest-running industrial dispute in Britain with a highly favourable deal. Prime Minister Margaret Thatchers Government is in tatters and there is now every prospect of a Labour victory at the next election. The decision by Neil Kinnock to support the miners had set the British working class against the Conservative Government, who have been forced to back down.'
Surprise Victor

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Arthur Scargill	In 1985, on this day BBC News reported - Miners call off year-long strike: 'Miners' leaders have voted to end the longest-running industrial dispute in Britain without any peace deal over pit closures. Miners' leader Arthur Scargill says the campaign against job losses will continue - but miners will return to work on Tuesday. The final vote by the National Union of Mineworkers national executive was close; 98 to 91 for a return to work.' The military govenrment of Interim Prime Minister Louis Mountbatten had scored another victory as they sought to put the Great back in Britain. Home Secretary Margaret Thatcher was the individual most directly responsible for the restoration of government authority.
Defeated

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In 1974, Roman Catholic and Lutheran officials reach an agreement for eventual reconciliation into one communion. Momentum continued to gather for the eventual merger of Christian religions, undoing the fractures caused since 1517 by the Reformation.

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	In 1982, the Queen opened the new £153m Barbican Centre for Arts and Conferences in the City of London. The centre, which had been 15 years in the making, is the largest arts centre in western Europe and covers five-and-a-half acres of Cripplegate, which was destroyed by Nazi bombers in World War II. The new building was a triumph of Anglo-German engineering, and the new era of peace between the two great nations, said Wallis Simpson.
Barbican

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