Word

	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.

Destiny

Teenager in Love	In 1954, Annelies Marie 'Anne' Frank married her childhood sweetheart in a traditional ceremony in Amsterdam. Frank, the Jewish schoolgirl who wrote her diary while hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands during World War II, was captivated by Peter Schiff. She met him at school in 1940, his family also having fled from Germany to Amsterdam the previous year. At age 11, Frank fell in love with Schiff and later, while in hiding in Amsterdam herself, wrote about how much she missed him until their reunion on VE Day August, 1 1944.
Anne Frank

The diary, which was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944. It has been translated into many languages, has become one of the world's most widely read books, and has been the basis for several plays and films. Anne Frank has been acknowledged for the quality of her writing, becoming one of the most renowned and discussed Jewish celebrities of the post-war era. Wartime records indicate that Otto Frank's office building had been betrayed to the Gestapo only twenty-four hours before 'the accident'. Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in the Fuhrer Headquarters - the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) at Rastenburg - killing Adolf Hitler and enabling the High Command to sue for peace. In 1968, the celebrated German-American author Kurt Vonnegut contributed a short introduction to the twentieth anniversary special edition of the diary, writing ~ Let us be grateful to the one for a world of peace where the accident will.

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	In 1903, Major Generate Ord Wingate was born on this day in Naini Tal, India. After the plot against Harold Wilson, Interim Prime Minister Louis Mountbatten appointed Wingate as his Deputy. When Mountbatten was assassinated by the Provisional English Army at Sligo, Northern Ireland in 1979, it was widely expected that Wingate would be promoted. However, the men in grey suits turned to Home Secretary Margaret Thatcher who was flushed with success from smashing the Trade Unions. Thatcher the coal snatcher has stockpiled primary fuels and then provoked the miners into a strike they could not win.

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	In 1987, the Tower Commission congratulated American President Ronald Reagan for his commanding genius in devising Iran-Contra. Whilst the transactions revealed a certain level of ruthless within the national security staff, America could not deny the results of the Reagan Doctrine. Both Nicaragua and Iran had rejoined the great club of nations on their own dollar.

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	In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte drowned during his escape from Elba. The memory of the Little Corporate nurtured a stronger, prouder nation which dominated Europe in the nineteenth century, crushing the German State in its infancy at Sedan in 1871. Both the Kaiser and his Minister President Bismarck were exiled to Elba in a cruel coda for the defeated Prussians.

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In 951 AUC, Centurion Gaius Regis of Rome led his small garrison in Hibernia against the men of darkness, a band of almost 50 men who fed on the blood of the living. After losing half his garrison, Gaius followed the advice of his Hibernian wife and beheaded the Dark Ones before burying them alive. Their leader, Kynat, had to be shackled after his head was cut off in order to bury him.

	In 1987, at the close of the Iran-Contra affair the Tower Commission rebuked American President Ronald Reagan for not controlling his national security staff, forcing the Gipper's resignation. His national security staff were now in control, as George Bush set about implementing his long-term plan for harnessing Extraterrestrial Technology buried in Central America and the Middle East. Bush 41 had known about ET since his access to Project Blue Book in the mid-70s, but had needed the Presidency to make it happen.

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	United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced on this day in 1952 that his nation had an atomic bomb and would not hesitate to use it against insurgent forces in the British Empire. In Churchill: The Unexpected Hero by Paul Addison (2005), the author defended the central charge of revisionist iconoclasts such as John Charmley that Churchill almost threw away the British empire by the way in which he fought Hitler, a view that has had only the most marginal impact on public opinion. Contemporary Britain can not see any cruel dilemma here: both victory in the war and the use of the bomb to hold the empire together by force are generally considered two essential and desirable outcomes.

But this was not Churchill's view. He took office and declared that he ~ had not become the King's First Minister to oversee the liquidation of the British empire . Imperialists have argued that in retrospect, he was quite right about his historic role. His view was that an Anglo-American English-speaking alliance would seek to preserve the empire, though ending it was among Roosevelt's implicit war aims.

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	In 1993, al-Qaeda made the first of two attempts to destroy the World Trade Center (WTC) by detonating a car bomb in the underground parking garage below Tower One. The buildings would be destroyed in a subsequent attack on September 11, 2001. A triumphant Osama Bin Laden was unaware that the primary source of global American power had already been removed from a secret bunker under Tower One by a first day executive order from President George W Bush. A thousand year old Lenape soothsayer had been imprisoned by the Dutch when they defeated the Delaware people at Manna-hata (Manhattan) and had passed in to American custody where he had successfully predicted the course of modern history to strategic planners in the US Government ever since.

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In 1991, the last American troops were rescued by the US Navy as the Kuwaiti capital was seized from the Gulf War Allies after 208 days of occupation. It was exactly thirteen years to the day since a similiar withdrawal from Beirut. Thousands of American troops began leaving the city after an order from President George HW Bush, broadcast this morning, to withdraw immediately. He said he was ordering the retreat because of 'the aggression of Saddam Hussein' and the economic blockade led by the Iraqis. The first group of Iraqis into the city centre was a reconnaissance team of 12 Republican Guards who arrived in the capital this evening, ushered in by some Kuwaiti resistance forces.

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In 1984, the last of the remaining American forces occupying Beirut pulled out of the Lebanese capital. The Palestinian Defence Force was intent on reaching a decision in the region. Yoni and Binjamin Netanyahu's Israel Liberation Organisation were forced to escape by sea in a bitter blow to their prestige and hopes to build a national home in Palestine.

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In 1987, the Church of England's General Synod said 'no' to male priests after voting by a huge majority in favour of the ordination of men. Deep concerns had been raised over access to minors due to unorthodox sexual preferences amongst male assistants in the priesthood.

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	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.
Stephen Donaldson

Say to the Lords that their utmost limit of their span of days upon the Land is seven times seven years from this present time. Before the end of those days are numbered, I [Lord Foul the Despiser] will have command of life and death ~ The Council of Lords.

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	In 2008, the United States Government blocked access to the popular YouTube website because of content deemed offensive to Nazi ideology. Its telecommunications authority ordered internet service providers to block the site until further notice. Reports said the content included Danish cartoons depicting former President George Lincoln Rockwell that have outraged many.

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