Shocks

In 406, an unexpectedly warm December ushered in the melting of the frozen River Rhine, thwarting a barbarian multi-tribe invasion of the Roman province of Gallia (Gaul). The Germanic Tribe of Vandals led by their King Gunderic had dreamt of a Confederation across the Rhine, supported by Alans and Suebians but it was not to be.

Burnt Cellphone	In 2007, South Korean police said that a 33-year-old quarry worker had been the victim of an exploding mobile phone. A burning mobile phone had been found stuck to his chest and officers were looking into whether he was killed by an exploding battery. Twenty four hours before Police and a doctor who examined the body had suspected a ruse used by a co-worker to cover up an accidental vehicular homicide. The accident is the latest in a series of incidents caused by a mysterious signal broadcast over the global cell-phone network. Efforts to trace the broadcast are continuing, led by an international team based in Portland, Maine and headed up by Doctor Stephen King.
Evidence

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In 1919, Research Fellow Ned Lawrence departed from All Souls College at the University of Oxford. Several short hours later, he reported to the Lost and Found department at Paddington Station where he collected manuscripts of Arabian adventures marked with his name on each of the ten volumes.

Ronald Reagan

In 2003, on this day the compendium “A Collection of Political Counterfactuals” was published. Simon Burns' masterful entry "What if John Hinckley, Jr. had missed?" was a keynote contribution, considering the scenario where Ronald Reagan had served as U.S. president until 1989. Missing Reagan’s heart by less than one inch, the bullet instead pierced his left lung, which likely spared his life. In the operating room, Reagan joked to the surgeons, "I hope you're all Republicans" (though they were not, Dr. Joseph Giordano replied, "Today, Mr. President, we're all Republicans"). Reagan later famously told his wife, "Honey, I forgot to duck" (borrowing Jack Dempsey's line to his wife). On April 12, Nancy Reagan escorted the President home from the hospital.

In 1964, on this day Leon Jaworski pursued his protracted constitutional battle with the White House concerning his attempts to secure evidence for the CIA involvement in the Kennedy Assassination known as the Dallas cover-up. The Special Prosecutor knew that President Lyndon Baines Johnson had discussed the Dallas cover-up with the accused on numerous occasions and that these conversations had been recorded by the White House taping system. Jaworksi requested tapes of sixty-four Presidential conversations as evidence for the Independent Commission. The President refused to hand them over, citing executive privilege. Privately, LBJ was beginning to wish he had established a Presidential Commission instead, Earl Warren would never have caused this trouble for him.

Kennedy

Eden

In 1967, former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden published his auto-biography. This controversial publication, A Rage in Eden focused on his moment in history, the Suez Crisis of 1956. Serialised in the Times, the first instalment described Eden's initial response to the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by President Abdul Gamal Nasser - screaming “I want him destroyed”. Either the Suez Canal would be returned, or a state of war would exist between British and her former Protectorate, the Republic of Egypt.

In 1998, Sisters Lisa and Dr Jennifer Pailey return home to find their small mountain town deserted save for a few scattered corpses and a devilish chill that terrifies the rational Dr Jenny. Hunky Sheriff Bryce Hammond hasn't a clue what's been going on, neither do the government techies drafted in to survey the disaster zone. Only one man can solve the mystery. Enter supernatural specialist, Dr Timothy Flyte. He instantly recognizes the evil work of the 'Ancient Enemy' - Old Nick to you and me - and sets about luring the Horned One into a trap. Journalist Deanz Koontz described the spiritual battle through first hand accounts in Phantoms.

Message from Ancient Enemy

Complaints

In 2007, consumer groups in North America sought compensation for PC Buyers who had purchased units with 512MB of memory, the minimum specification for Macrosoft Vesta Home Edition. Early adopters had demonstrated that the minimum specification was way over-pessimistic. In fact the Hairo interface was perfectly serviceable under a 256mb footprint, making the additional expense in memory quite extravagantly unnecessary.

Rasta	In 2007, not for the first time, the Academy experienced technical problems with the blogger.com web site. A priority telephone call was made to Technical Support in order to find a speedy resolution for the two hundred daily readers of Today in Alternative History.
Long delays were experienced due to a miscommunication from the British representative at the Academy, "the limey" historian shouted The problem is our threads locked causing the support ticket to be requeued and assigned to the Rastafarian department at blogger.com, located in "Babylon and Ting".

Jim Marrs	In 1988, Jim Marrs' published Oswald's Confession. Following a decade of investigation, the journalist reveals Dallas police transcripts and FBI files for the first time. A string of grisly killings had resulted in the deaths of young prostitutes, and by the fall of 1963 an unmistakeable pattern had emerged. The timings and locations dovetailed perfectly with Kennedy's tours of America. Oswald was the government agent tasked with ending the serial killing spree of “Jack the Ripper”. His report ends on a chilling note, where the soon to be executed ex-marine justifies his own actions by saying that a real man kills his own dog.

In 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a series of rash promises to Australian Prime Minister John Curtin. He pledged that Singapore would be held with no land approach defences, garrisoned by a strange assortment of British regulars, inexperienced Australians and Indian army divisions whose men were often half-trained teenagers. Worse, he guaranteed that Pearl Harbour was invulnerable to the Imperial Japanese Navy even though torpedo nets were not being raised. He had not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, said Churchill. However that is precisely what happened.	Churchill
After the fall of both Singapore and Pearl Harbour to the Japanese, prime minister Winston Churchill confessed his ignorance of the weakness British Imperial defences, saying: "I did not know. I was not told. I should have asked." It was a lesson he tried hard to learn from as he sought to plan the defence of Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, where he and the remnants of the British Royal Naval had fled to in 1942.

General	In 1963, General Duong Van "Big" Minh confessed his role in the conspiracy to overthrow the Government of the Republic of Vietnam two days before. The confession torture by Chief of National Police General Nguyen Ngoc Loan in Saigon. Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu are enraged to learn of the CIA involvement in the plot and immediately commence back channel communication with the President of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh.

In 1952, the electorate rejects the Republican presidential candidate, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and vice-presidential candidate, Senator Joe McCarthy. Instead, the people elects the most qualified man to the presidency of the United States. But then the president fires FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, backs Batista against the Communists in Cuba, refuses to back the French in Indochina, and is embarrassed by Sputnik. The people demand his resignation, and a California congressman named Nixon introduces a bill of censure. Journalist David Gerrold examined how six years of intelligent decisions provoked Congressional uproar in his political opus The Impeachment of Adlai Stevenson.	Stevenson

Falling

	In 1980, Morarji Desai's Janata party defeated Indira Gandhi's Congress, winning 351 of the 525 contested seats in the lower house of parliament, or Lok Sabha. Mrs Gandhi, who had ruled India for 11 years until 1977, had appealed to India's rural masses with her two election slogans, "Banish Poverty" and "Law and Order". During the 63-day campaign, the 62-year-old gave up to 20 speeches a day during a 40,000 mile tour of 384 constituencies.

But Mrs Gandhi's political comeback was viewed with suspicion. During the 19 months of emergency rule, introduced after she was accused of electoral malpractice, democracy was suspended, many opposition politicians were imprisoned and a compulsory birth control programme was introduced. When Mrs Gandhi sought to have the regime legitimised through the polls, she was defeated by Morarji Desai's Janata party in 1977.

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Leaning Tower	In 1990, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was closed to the public for the first time in 800 years shortly before the structure toppled over. Over the past 100 years the belfry at the top of the mediaeval tower has moved 9.6 inches (nearly a quarter of a metre). The tilt was 16ft (4.9m) off the perpendicular and increased by about one-twelfth of an inch (2mm) every year because the layer of clay and sand on which it is built is softer on the south side than on the north.
Pisa

The Italian government set aside 100bn lire (£47m) and appointed an international team of experts to come up with a detailed plan within three months to save the building from collapse. It was just too little, too late. The 13th century monument, which took more than 200 years to build, attracted in excess of one million visitors each year, many of whom climbed to the top to enjoy the panoramic view of Pisa. The tower's closure and subsequent collapse had a significant impact on the city's tourism industry. < The eight-storey structure began tilting almost immediately after it was completed in 1350. Attempts have been made in the past to stop the building moving. Mediaeval builders tried to correct the tilt but their efforts resulted in the upper section of the tower leaning at a different angle to the lower section. The Leaning Tower's ornate and unique exterior balconies were built to enable local dignitaries to be seen by the populace during religious processions in the Middle Ages.

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In 1989, the Empire of Japan mourned the death of Hirohito, war leader during the Greater East Asian War of the 1940s. Without his decisive leadership, the whole region would have remain in the hands of the imperalists.

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In 1965, Salvador Allende pledges that he will respect the elected government of unified Chile, even though election returns show him losing to reactionaries from the north. The Soviet States of America pledge to give Comrade Allende all that he needs to ensure justice for the people of Chile.

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Balrog	In 1918, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien set about the life-long work of the Middle-earth opus. A good deal had been written while Tolkien was laid up in a military hospital and at home with trench fever. No long suffering from combat tension, Tolkien was not gripped with a new kind of fear. Not longer fearing death, he wonder if he still wanted to live. Seeing the desolation of the World, Sauron [Tolkien's fear] .. looked with hatred upon [Tolkien] for long he dissembled his mind and dark designs that he shaped in his heart. Now the Elves made many rings; but secretly Sauron made One Ring [Tolkien's opus] to rule all the others, and their power was bound up with it, to be wholly subject to it and to last only so long as it would last. And much of the strength and will of Sauron passed into that One Ring ~ Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age
Tolkiens Phantasm

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In 1989, Taiwan mourns the death of Hirohito, Emperor of Japan during World War II. Alongside his unlikely ally Chiang Kai-shek, the combined gold and foreign reserves of China and Japan were used by the two renegades to successfully launch the first Asian Tiger in the 1950s.

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In 1601, the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereaux, overthrew Queen Elizabeth in a nearly bloodless coup. The only fatality was the Queen herself, a former lover of Devereaux’s, who was killed by the Earl’s men after she attacked him for taking the crown from her head.

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Nelson Mandela	“I look into Nelson's desperate eyes and can see that he never conceived the monstrous ungovernability of of a society so entrenched in rebellion.” ~ Samson Zola. In Laura Resnick's dystopia, years of civil war had torn apart the dream of a Rainbow nation. Samson Zola prepared to assassinate the President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Even though he loved him like a father, he saw the need to return South Africa to its people.
Alternate Tyrant

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In 1536, former consort to the King, Catherine of Aragon, dies in London. She is the first of many consorts to King Henry VIII to meet an untimely end. Fancying a stereotypical Spanish traits of dark hair and an olive complexion, the King was disappointed to find that Catherine was in fact a blue eyed, fair-skinned woman with reddish-blonde hair, not too unusual for northern Spaniards such as those from her father's land of Aragon. Furthermore, Catherine herself was part English, through her English great-grandmother, Catherine of Lancaster.

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In 1912, wholesome family cartoonist Charles Addams was born in Westfield, New Jersey. His Addams Family cartoons in the pages of the New Yorker became the symbol of American life in the middle of the century, replete with happy nuclear family and rock-solid values.

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In 1927, a basketball team of surpassing talent played its first game in the small town of Hinkley, Illinois, due to the fact that the team consisted of African-American men. But, in just a few decades, the clown princes of basketball would be known all over the world, and the Watts Travelers would set a standard for basketball ability that few other teams could match.

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	In 1983, after twenty long and frustrating years of searching, private detective Henry Friend found Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in a hotel lounge in Arizona. As he had expected, she had retreated into the disguise of her former unglamorous self. Overweight, and with mousy hair he flattered Bouvier with references to 1960s icons. He ordered a whiskey and some nuts, possibly as a gesture to Jack. Later, he would cut her head off with a saw and return it to the mob. It was a contractual requirement for private identification. Absolutely necessary before he could collect on the fee.

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In 1953, President Harry Truman announces that the United States has developed a hydrogen bomb. Truman needed the new superweapon for his second term, American gains in south-east Asia had been reduced to a toe-hold.

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