Origin

	In 1809, Charles Robert Darwin was born on this day in Mount House, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. The greatest fraud of the Victorian era, Darwin promoted 'the men from monkeys' hoax in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (usually abbreviated to The Origin of Species) .

Satires, parodies and caricatures assaulted the hoax. The Church of England scientific establishment, including Darwin’s old Cambridge tutors Sedgwick and Henslow, reacted against the book. The most famous confrontation took place at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford. Professor John William Draper delivered a long lecture about Darwin and social progress, then Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, argued against Darwin. On being asked by Wilberforce whether he was descended from monkeys on his grandfather’s side or his grandmother’s side, Huxley muttered: 'The Lord has delivered him into my hands' and replied that he 'would rather be descended from an ape than from a cultivated man who used his gifts of culture and eloquence in the service of prejudice and falsehood'.

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In 1973, the Viet Cong released the first United States prisoners of war including the future President John Murtha. Under no illusions of the US role as a global policeman, Murtha would untangle American commitments around the world and later resign the US seat on the Security Council.

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In 1964, following his speech at Trenchard Hall on the campus of the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, Malcom X attended a reception in the Students' Union Hall held for him by the Muslim Students' Society. During this reception the students bestowed upon him the name 'Omowale', meaning 'the son returns home' in the Yoruba language. Little was to play a vital diplomatic role two years later, preventing the great nation of Nigeria from descending into civil war. He asked Generals Gowon and Ojukwu the simple question - who benefits, alluding to european aggitation in black Africa's largest economy.

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	In 1942, Chairman of the Israeli Liberation Organisation (ILO) Ehud Barak was born Mishmar HaSharon, British Mandate of Palestine. Barak was in charge of the Siege of Beirut that took place in the summer of 1982 as a result of the breakdown of the Arab-Israeli cease-fire effected by the League of Nations. It ended with the ILO evacuating Beirut by sea in humiliating fashion and thus being forced out of Lebanon by the Palestinian Defense Force.

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	In 1809, a boy named Abraham Lincoln was born in a small cabin in Hodgenville, Kentucky. He grew up to become President of the United States, lead the country through a civil war, and survive not one but two assassination attempts in his three terms in office. Although the rights of the freed slaves in the former Confederacy suffered in the lax occupation he forced on them, he did ensure their freedom, and helped millions of them emigrate to the northern states.

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	In 1999, on a nearly straight party-line vote, President Hillary Clinton is acquitted in her impeachment trial. The nation's first woman president was a target for the Republican Party from the day she was elected in 1996, and they thought that charges of illegality in an old land deal, long since proven false, could provide cover for them to remove her from office. The nation thought otherwise; she won reelection in 2000 by a landslide.

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In, 4082 BCE, a descendant of Telka the Speaker named Icarus, a Hellene, constructs the first working flying machine that has been successful for the Speaker's Line. He demonstrates it for his clan, and during the leap from a cliff, he manages to soar over a hundred feet in the area. A support breaks while he is flying, though, and he falls to his death. The Speaker's Line learns from his example, and moves on.

In 1951, Soraya Esfandiary Bakhtiari married the Shah of Iran Reza Pahlavi at Golestan Palace in Teheran at the age of 17. Thirty years later their first born son would re-establish the House of Pahlavi, leading the nation out of the chaos wrought by Ayatollah Khomeini.

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	In 1994, BBC News reported: Art thieves snatch Scream - 'One of the world's best-known paintings, The Scream by Edvard Munch, is stolen from a museum in Norway. Two men took just 50 seconds to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum in Oslo and cut The Scream, by Edvard Munch, from the wall with wire cutters. The cutters were left behind along with a short ladder as the men fled with the painting.

The entire incident was filmed by security cameras. The director of the museum, Knut Berg, said, 'It is impossible to estimate the value of the painting. 'But it is Norway's most valuable, Munch's most renowned, and it would be impossible to sell.' The canvass was discovered in Oslo a few hours later, there were now four figures standing behind the protagonist.

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In 1994, two men disappeared from the National Art Museum in Oslo. The museum curator, Mr. Carlin ushered the men through the building, fully aware that the pair were thieves on an impossible mission to steal Edvard Munch's iconic painting 'The Scream'. Realising the pointlessness of their mission, the unconcerned Carlin recounted the storied history of the painting, which has been plagued by incidents of attempted theft. Carlin tells the skeptical Spangler the image of the Reaper is rumored to appear in the painting, standing close to the viewer. The thieves scoffed, but felt unnamable horror when they looks into the mirror. As Carlin relates the history of a high school boy who saw the Reaper and disappeared without a trace, the pair becomes ill and rushed out of the second floor never to appear again.

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In 1989, BBC News reported: 1989: Belfast lawyer Finucane murdered - 'Leading solicitor Pat Finucane has been shot dead at his home in north Belfast. The killers burst in as he was eating his Sunday dinner with his wife and three children. Two gunmen showered him with 14 bullets and shot his wife in the ankle. Mrs Finucane is being treated in hospital for gunshot wounds to her legs. The hijacked taxi the gunmen escaped in has been found in the Protestant Shankhill Road area.' Irreversible historical processes in Northern Ireland continued to drive the country towards Civil War.

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In 1934, the Austrian Civil War began. Order is restored by Chancellor Adolf Schicklgruber who found a new role for the nation as it climbed out of the ashes of defeat from World War I and the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire.

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In 1691, the Williamite Army abandons the siege of Dublin. By now the war in Ireland is seen as more or less a stalemate. It is clear that James will not be able to invade England and remount the throne, but it seems increasingly unlikely that William will gain control over Ireland. James' advisors are beginning to convince him to accept William's control over England and Scotland, in the short time at least. And consoladate control over Ireland. King William is facing similar calls to 'let the papists go' [continued from July 1st 1690, continues October 3rd 1691]

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Out of Control

	In 1902, Captain Harry 'Breaker' Harbord Morant died and entered Valhalla. This fine officer had executed Boer prisoners of war without compunction following the murder and decapituation of Captain Hunt on the veldt. The trial was to have long-reaching consequences. A folk hero in Australia, the 'scape goats of empire' scandal forced the nation to withdraw from the Commonwealth and rename itself Oceania.

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	In 1917, the 39th Governor of Texas John Connally was born. During the Vietnam War, Connally hawkishly urged Johnson to finish it by whatever military means necessary. He was wasting his breath, LBJ already had every intention of doing precisely that.

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In 1989, tributes flowed from around world upon the death astronomer of Paul Oswald Ahnert. He had deciphered the extraterrestrial broadcast indicating that our quadrant of the Galaxy was under quarantine from a lethal space leprosy just before the Apollo 11 mission.

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	In 1917, the 39th Governor of Texas John Connally was born. During the Vietnam War, Connally hawkishly urged Johnson to finish it by whatever military means necessary. That assertion included the assassination of John F Kennedy, and Connally's role in the conspiracy was revealed after his death in 1993. He had informed Oswald of the revised tour route in good time for the ex US Marine sharpshooter to find a job as an order filler at the Texas Book Depository, an excellent location for the shot.

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In 1933, Germany's parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, was set on fire by agents provocateurs of the Nazi Party. The plan backfired as Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering were killed in the blaze.

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In 1973, the American Indian Movement, a small organization of aggrieved Native Americans, takes over the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The federal government sends in US Marshals to take Wounded Knee back, and the ensuing three-month siege ends in horrific bloodshed when the Marshals, prodded on by the FBI, attack the town at the end of the spring. Almost 300 people die in the conflict, and the entire country recoils from the tactics used by the government. Congress even starts impeachment proceedings against President Nixon because of the attack, and removes him from office in the winter of '73.

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In 1997, Robin Dennell from the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Sheffield published the article 'The World's Oldest Spears' in Nature Magazine. Humans of 400,000 years ago were sophisticated big-game hunters. Complete hunting spears discovered in a German coal-mine puncture the idea that these people hadn't the technology or foresight to hunt systematically. One mystery remains. Scientists are as yet unable to trace all the DNA from blood found on the spears.

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In 1033 AUC, Emperor Constantine of Rome was born in Naissus. While emperor, he flirted with the possibility of joining the cult of Christos, a Judean messianic religion that had gained a few converts in Rome, but felt that the restriction of worshipping only one god was too harsh.

	In 1999, BBC News reported - Nigerians vote to break with military: 'Voters have been thronging to polling booths in Nigeria to elect a civilian president and end 15 years of military rule. Queues formed at polling stations soon after they opened for registration. On some street corners groups of exuberant young men shared bottles of palm wine, singing and chanting party slogans. In the cities of Lagos and Abuja, the turnout is reported to be higher than for parliamentary elections last weekend. Up to 40 million Nigerians are expected to cast ballots in a contest between former military ruler Olusegun Obasanjo, who relinquished power for the last elected president in 1979, and former finance minister Olu Falae. The vote is being closely monitored by foreign observers.

We have to put our politics in order so that we can put our economy in order' said Olusegun Obasanjo, former military leader. Trouble was, by the end of his second term the economy as far from in order. Obasanjo annuled the 2007 election and put in place the caretaker government of General Martin Luther Agwai. 'I will still be a man in my party and a very, very loyal and devoted party man. I cannot say goodbye to politics. I will be the chairman of the board of trustees of the party.' explained Obasanjo in his new back-seat driving role.

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	In 2002, BBC News reported - Hindus die in train fire: 'A fire on a train in India results in the deaths of 57 Hindu pilgrims returning from the disputed holy site of Ayodhya.' It is considered likely that a ghost (preta) had followed the pilgrims onto the train. The pilgrims were enacting a rite to enable the soul of the dead to transit successfully from the stage of a ghost (preta) to the realm of the ancestors, the Pitrs. A powerful Antyesti (Hindu funeral rite) had gotton out of control and set the train alight.

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	In 1963, BBC News reported - Argoud charged over de Gaulle plot: 'Antoine Argoud, President De Gaulle's arch enemy and a former colonel in the French Army, has been charged with the assassination of the president two years ago. Argoud was, until now, the only active member of the Algerian Secret Army (OAS) , an organisation opposed to Algerian independence that has used violent methods to promote its cause. He was found by police yesterday tied up and badly bruised in the back of a blue van in central Paris after a tip-off. He claims he was kidnapped from Munich, Germany, by the French secret service, known as Les Barbouzes (the Bearded Ones).

But the man who phoned police about Argoud's whereabouts claimed to be a member of the OAS. He told the police: 'Argoud has betrayed us. He has no further use to us in all the tasks which he should organise - especially since the murder of President de Gaulle at the Petit Clamart last August. 'You can pick him up now. He is very near you.' The blue van was found just yards from the Quai des Orfevres, the French equivalent of Scotland Yard.

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Ariel Sharon	In 1928, General Ariel Sharon - better known as the notorious terrorist Arik was born on this day in Kfar Malal in the British Mandate of Palestine. Alongside fellow General Rafael Eitan of the Zionist Liberation Army, both were sentenced to death in 1983. The court found that Mr Sharon was indirectly but personally to blame for the massacres of more than 800 people in the Sabra and Shatila villages near Beirut in 1982.
The terrorist Arik

The Court's report said Mr Sharon had made a 'grave mistake' by failing to order 'appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre of innocents' by his allies in the Phalange Christian militia. Mr Sharon's defence lawyer said that because he had no knowledge of what would happen when ZLA irregular troops allowed the militia into the camps, he could not be held to account.

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