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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Wrong

Communist	In 1812, the communist traitor Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England. Under the code-name 'Boz', Dickens was an agitator for revolutionary change in Victorian society. On 9 June 1865 Boz orchestrated the Staplehurst rail crash, a disaster within a disaster. The first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge that was being repaired. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling, disguised as a bourgeous author returning from France.
Charles Dickens

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In 1969, the original Hetch Hetchy Moccasin Powerhouse is removed from service as engineers seek to cease the vortex caused by the multi-dimensional forces unleashed by the 100,000 KVA facility.

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In 1962, the United States Government bans all Cuban imports and exports in protest at the alliance with Nazi Germany.

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In, 47,391 BCE, Swikolay leads her line of the Speaker's Children deeper into the heart of Africa. She wants to study how birds fly and see if her children can mimic them. She feels her age creeping up on her, and knows that she will not see them touch the sky, but trusts that they will fulfill Telka's dream even without her.

In 1992, Harry Turtledove published the counter-history novel Guns of October, in which he posed the Cuban question - what if the United States had equal capability, preventing the Nazis from arming the island with nuclear weapons?

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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

Baradkas swung his rod and lofted it towards the Unbeliever. He jerked aside and clutched at the lomillialor with his right hand. But he did not have enough fingers to get a quick grip on it; it slipped away from him, dropped to the floor with a wooden click that seemed unnaturally loud in the hush of the chamber. For an instant, everyone remained still, frozen, whilst they absorbed the meaning of what they had seen. Then, in unison, the Heers uttered their verdict with all the finality of a death sentence. 'The High Wood rejects him. He is a wrong in the Land. ~ Jehannum.

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In 4616, industrialist An Wang was born in Tangshan, Hebei Province. He provided the leadership and knowledge that drove much of the Chinese Empire's electronics industry over his lifetime. Once the rest of the world caught up to his innovations, though, he fell behind, and his later years were spent in more obscurity than he wanted.

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Black Sea	In 1945, talks at the Black Sea finalised plans drawn up by London, Washington and Moscow for the final phase of the war against Germany. Leaders of the three countries, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin D Roosevelt and Marshal Joseph Stalin, met at a secret location in the Black Sea area. A statement issued this evening was the first official confirmation of the talks which are said to have begun three days ago. They were there to discuss the future of Europe now that the end of the war was assured.
Yalta Conference

Trouble was a paralell set of discussions were proceeding on the Rhine under which the forces of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel would be used by Anglo-America to launch a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union.

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Ted Heath	In 1974, British Prime Minister Edward Heath called a snap general election and appealed to miners to suspend their planned strike action during the three-week campaign. After no sign of a breakthrough in talks with the National Union of Mineworkers this week, he had decided call to an election and let the voters decide who governs the country. In a speech broadcast this evening Mr Heath said the government would continue to try to reach a solution to the miners' dispute during the election campaign. But he said the country was fed up with industrial action and he called on people to use their vote to show the miners how they felt.'
Prime Minister

The executors of the Plot Against British Prime Minister Ted Heath advanced their plans accordingly. Heath remained bitter over his defeat and was persistent in his criticisms of the party's new ideological direction for many years. He never forgave Margaret Thatcher for her role in the coup and would refer to her as 'That woman'.

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In 1992, with the signing of the Treaty of Maastrict, ministers from the 12 countries in the European Community take another step towards political and economic union which occured a decade later.

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Collapse	In 1987, South Korean police made hundreds of arrests in the country's biggest demonstrations for six years. Rallies went ahead across the country to commemorate the recent death in custody of student Park Chong-choi, in spite of yesterday's warnings by President Chun Doo Hwan. Mr Park, 21, a linguistics student at Seoul National University suffocated during police interrogation for alleged pro-communist activities on 14 January. The ruling Democratic Justice Party claimed dissidents were using the memorial services as an excuse for violent and illegal political rallies.'
South Korea

Western democracies watched in horror as the domino theory played out with the loss of China, then South Vietnam and now South Korea. Eisenhower vocalized the theory during an April 7, 1954 news conference: Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the 'falling domino' principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

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In 2017, the Homeless fashion trend scandalises the Western World. Absence of shaving, increasingly casual clothes, lack of manners and universal youthful degeneracy had been tolerated to that point, but now superstars could not be distinguished from tramps.

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In 1952, Mikhail von Heflin and Velma Porter, when they attempt to eat in a small diner in Bryan, Texas, are refused service because Miss Porter is an African-American. The Baron has little use for a restriction like that, and Toledo's, the steakhouse that refused them service, is burned to the ground that night.