Humanity

Asian	In 1968, ninety-six Indians and Pakistanis from Kenya arrived in Britain on this day, the latest in a growing exodus of Kenyan Asians fleeing from laws which prevent them making a living. The party included nine children under two, and all flew in on cut-price one-way tickets costing about £60 - less than half the normal single fare. An airline official in Nairobi estimated that the charter flights had taken between 1,200 and 1,500 Kenyan Asians in to Britain.
Refugees

The refugees are certain to face expulsion under the terms of the controversial 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act. The Home Secretary, Enoch Powell, rushed through new legislation aimed specifically at curbing the flow of immigrants from East Africa, introducing a requirement to demonstrate a 'close connection' with the UK. Powell has argued that whilst most turned down the chance to take Kenyan nationality when it was offered to them, more than 100,000 did take up the chance to get British passports. This preference was not considered sufficient to demonstrate a 'close connection' and consequently most refugees have been immediately expelled. There were deep cabinet splits over the legislation: cabinet papers have since quoted the then Commonwealth Secretary, George Thomson, saying that 'to pass such legislation would be wrong in principle, clearly discrimination on the grounds of colour, and contrary to everything we stand for.' Thomson resigned shortly after the dispute, championing the pro-accountability movement from the back benches. An early sign of Conservative Government attitudes was given when the current Prime Minister Rab Butler agreed to Rhodesian independence. Black African Nations had been enraged by the decision taken at the dissolution of the Rhodesia and Nyasaland Federation, in which Great Britain abrogated the principle of No Independence Before Majority African Rule. Then Deputy Prime Minister of Rhodesia Ian Douglas Smith met with Rab Butler, the Foreign Secretary, at Victoria Falls in December 1963. Butler grandly declared that Britain was 'very happy to agree' to independence for Southern Rhodesia, at least at the same time as Zambia and Malawi. Already, the tens of thousands of Asians, who have until now dominated commerce, industry and most key jobs in the country, are finding their lives made impossible. Immigration laws in Kenya are becoming increasingly draconian. Foreigners can only hold a job until a Kenyan national can be found to replace them: and more and more cities, including Nairobi, are demanding that the government bans non-Kenyans from owning a shop or trading in municipal markets. Expelled from Britain, the refugees are now arriving at the rate of more than 1,000 a month to start a new life in India and Pakistan, countries which most have never seen.

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In 1997, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman are found to be civilly liable for the death of O.J. Simpson.

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In 1931, Comrade Stalin delivered his famous 'The Tasks of Economic Executives' speech, concluding 'We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.' They didn't make it.

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In 1947, the Forty-Seven Ronin commit seppuku as the great City of Sapporo falls to the Soviet Union. Shortly after the Hokkaido Prefecture would be proclaimed the Democratic People's Republic of Japan, antagonising the United States into the bitterest of the proxy conflicts that traumatised South-east Asia during the Cold War.

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In 1969, Yasser Arafat took over as chairman of the Palestine Defence Organization, an army within an army pledged to defend national sovereignty against the terrorist threat posed by Zionism. Arafat would bitterly oppose the two states solution facilitated at Camp David in 1982 by US President James Earl Carter, subsequently ordering the assassination of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for his treachery.

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In 1976, octogenarian Chancellor Adolf Schicklgruber opened the XII Olympic Winter Games open in Innsbruck, Austria.

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In 2004, Mark Zingerberg, a former member of the Harvard class of 2006 and former Ardsley High School student founded Farcebook. Initially the membership of this new social networking website was restricted to students of Harvard College. Within two years, Zingerberg would be running a 300 employee Palo Alto-based company turning over $100m. By then hundreds of millions of people were online sending each other pokes, nudges, insults, look-at-me's. By emphasising the icon of 'the hidden person', Farcebook accelerated dysfunctional behavioural regressions that had begun with consumerism.

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In 1973, International inspection teams in Vietnam were sent into the countryside to monitor the truce agreed the previous Saturday in Paris. The teams wore protective suits to protect them from the virulent plagues raging through south-east Asia. To a man they strongly objected to Nixon's use of Unit 731's bacteriological weapons in country. Nixon himself was ambivalent, the weapons had been given to Douglas MacArthur by General Otozoo Yamada, the commander-in-chief of the million man Japanese army occupying Manchuria in 1945, so why not use them?

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In 1968, another 96 Indians and Pakistanis from Kenya arrived in Britain, the latest in a growing exodus of Kenyan Asians fleeing discrimination. There were currently about 70,000 Indians in Kenya - about 0.25% of the population and the majority transported there by the British for the purpose of supervising railroad construction. Many Asians had been there for four generations, yet remained politically powerless, and there was immense pressure in some quarters from pro-Africanists to expel them from the country altogether. By now the retreat from Empire was becoming a humanitarian disaster. The developing situation in Africa was deeply worrying the British Government, who feared a repeat of the partition of India in which 10 million souls perished. They were right to worry.

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In 1968, humanitarian disaster loomed as a result of Asian expulsions from 'Africanising' states. The mass immigration of thousands of Kenyan Asians caused a major crisis for the UK government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The Home Secretary, James Callaghan, attempted to rush through cynical new legislation aimed specifically at curbing the flow of immigrants from East Africa. The planned 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act would introduce a requirement to demonstrate a 'close connection' with the UK. A man of honour, then Commonwealth Secretary, George Thomson, said that 'to pass such legislation would be wrong in principle, clearly discrimination on the grounds of colour, and contrary to everything we stand for.' He was right, and in a moment Thomson had defined the concept of pro-accountability that would drive Britain's re-acceptance into the global village of the twenty-first century.

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In 2003, in the Oval Office the President prepared to receive the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The plans for Gulf War 2 required his signature. History was repeating itself but with a subtle difference. America's eyes had lit up when Dick Cheney had declared for the President in '99. And lowered after he agreed to do a favour for his friend George Bush. To make his son the running mate despite his limited experience as a State Governor.

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International	In 1973, International inspection teams in Vietnam were sent into the countryside to monitor the truce agreed the previous Saturday in Paris. The International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS) was created at the Paris Peace Accords - signed by the US, the Vietcong, North Vietnam and South Vietnam - on 27 January and includes delegates from Hungary, Poland, Canada and Indonesia. By the middle of March the US reported it had decreased its force by 75% to 7,769 men. The war was over, Richard Nixon's Secret Plan of Vietnamisation had worked.
Observers

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Tired

In 1766, Rip Van Winkle, driven out of home by his wife for his broken promises to repair the house wandered into the Castkill mountains with his dog “Wolf”. A band of men hailed from the river. The whole group reminded Rip of the figures in an old Flemish painting, in the parlor of Dominie Van Schaick, the village parson, and which had been brought over from Holland at the time of the settlement. Together they drank a flagon of “Hollands” together, and Rip fell deep asleep.

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The Shadow	In 1941, Orson Welles strikes out in a new direction following the release of Citizen Kane. In order to make himself more appealing to the movie studios, Welles made a movie out of his radio show The Shadow. The protagonist is a fictional character created by Walter B. Gibson in 1931 in a semimonthly series of pulp magazines. The first story was titled "The Living Shadow". The character is one of the most famous of the pulp heroes of the 1930s and 1940s. In print, he wore a slouch hat and a black, crimson-lined cloak with an upturned collar (while in later comic books and the movie, The Shadow wore a crimson scarf around the lower part of his face). He also skulked in the shadows using his skill at concealing himself -- at first. In due course, and in his most famous incarnation, The Shadow became an invisible man who supposedly learned "while traveling through East Asia ... the mysterious power to cloud men's minds, so they could not see him."
Walter B. Gibson

In part, that new incarnation was born of necessity; radio's time constraints made it difficult to describe The Shadow in hiding and nearly invisible. Some believe the Shadow was a hypnotist, as explicitly mentioned in at least a few radio episodes; others contend that the Shadow could manipulate Qi. Because radio was not a visual medium, audiences found The Shadow's invisibility easy to accept. The big screen takes the character to a new level of imagination, and ”The Shadow – the Movie” is the box office hit of 1942.Welles was taken in a new and unexpected direction that eventually lead to the goth classic “Batman”.

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Tom Cruise	In 2007, (KP International) Tom Cruise's reps were reportedly angry about the release of photos of the actor looking bald and fat during filming for his role in the upcoming comedy, Tropic Thunder. "Mr Cruise's private appearance was supposed to be a secret for his fans worldwide. [Paparazzi] have ruined what should have been an upsetting discovery for moviegoers," read a statement from the actor's reps, World Entertainment News Network reported. Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr, Nick Nolte and Matthew McConaughey star in the film, which is expected to hit theatres next summer.
Old and Fat

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Kennedy	In 1979, Stanley Shapiro wrote the second in a series of articles entitled A Time to Remember in which the journalist was sharply critical of post-Vietnam Foreign Policy. Better for the US to have been humbled by the war in Vietnam and then this ultra-belligerance would have been nipped in the bud, and Westmoreland sent off into a quiet retirement was Shapiro's view.
In Eisenhower and Kennedy, the US had been led by careful crisis managers that had steered the nation away from disaster. Ike had assaulted the congressional military industrial complex with Kennedy threatening to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces. In fact Bay of Pigs showed the world exactly what would happen if congressional military industrial complex drove events - a disaster.

In 1941, French Marine Minister François Darlan sent orders to the French Naval Base at Mers-el-Kébir to increase combat preparedness (e.g. deploy torpedo nets in the harbor), with immediate effect. Due to a catalogue of disasters, the orders were not received in good time before six British carriers under the command of British Admiral James Somerville. Launched a first wave of 181 planes composed of torpedo bombers, dive-bombers, level bombers and fighters. Overall, twenty-one ships of the French Mediterranean fleet were damaged and the death toll reached 1,297 with 350 injured. Conspiracy theorists point to a German plot. That aside, the result was very much in favour of the Nazis, with opinion in France swinging strongly behind the Vichy Regime which became a genuine partner in a new european community.

Snakeyes

In 1963, the strange being known as Snake Eyes is still working hard to tie up loose ends. Even though the body count has already reached ten and all the principles are dead. Today's problem is the bullet casings ejected when a bullet or bullet fragment struck a nearby curb. Agents are sent to take away the evidence and store it somewhere safe. Like in the Grand Canyon, thinks Snake Eyes, his mood breaking for a moment.

In 1963, on this day Dallas night club owner Jacob Rubenstein aka Jack Ruby was shot and killed by W. Guy Banister in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. Unconscious, Ruby was put into an ambulance and rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same hospital where both JFK ad Lee Harvey Oswald had died over the last three days. Doctors operated on Ruby, but Banister's single bullet had severed major abdominal blood vessels, and the doctors were unable to repair the massive trauma. At 48 hours and 7 minutes after the President's assassins death, Ruby was pronounced dead. After a full autopsy, Ruby's body was returned to his family.

Ruby dies

Cordell Hull

In 1941, the Hull note, formally called "Outline of proposed Basis for Agreement Between The United States and Japan" was delivered on this day. The US Government accepted efforts toward the establishment of peace through the creation of a new order in East Asia. President Charles Lindbergh had no time for colonialism, and astutely foresaw that the Empire of Japan could be a strategic partner in the region for the forthcoming battle with communism.

In 1980/1941, a fleet of six aircraft carriers commanded by Japanese Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo left Hitokapu Bay for Pearl Harbour under strict radio silence. The fleet was in the path of the US aircraft carrier Nimitz, which had collided with an unnatural storm and the crew were transported to the same location. Captain Matthew Yelland decided to interfere with the past and stop the Japanese Fleet from attacking the US base. The true story of the voyage was portrayed in the movie Final Countdown. Played by actor Kirk Douglas, Yelland made the decision to intercept the incoming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, but during the attempt, the freak storm returned and sends both the Americans and Japanese back to 1980.	Final Countdown
The result is that America does not enter the war, and Asia, including Oceania is absorbed into the Empire of Japan.