Pressures

	In 2008, the final resting place of three German U-boats, nicknamed Hitler's lost fleet were found at the bottom of the South Atlantic. The submarines had travelled 8,000 miles from Germany at the climax of the Second World War, but were mysteriously sunk as the war neared its end. Now, more than 60 years later, explorers located the flotilla of three submarines off the coast of South Georgia. The vessels, including one once commanded by Germany's most successful U-boat ace, formed part of the 30th Flotilla of six submarines.

All three U-boats had been operating against British shipping in the North Sea. U-23 gained notoriety for scoring one of Germany's earliest successes, sinking a British ship off the Shetland Islands days after war began. It was later commanded by Otto Kretschmer, known as Silent Otto, the most successful U-boat ace. Fantastic stories circulated that Adolf Hitler and some of his followers had commandeered the vessels in April 1945 and endeavoured to escape to the hollow lands within the Earth after World War II via an entrance in Antarctica. Now the submarines' hulls have been discovered by a team led by Selcuk Kolay, a Turkish marine engineer, who presented his findings to a shipwreck conference in Plymouth. He thought he was also close to pinpointing the third boat, U-19, thought to lie more than 1,000ft down, three miles from the coast of South Georgia. It's one of the least well known stories of the war but one of the most interesting, said Mr Kolay. It is a quite incredible story. To get to the South Atlantic these boats had to avoid Allied shipping in the Atlantic, and once they got there head for the southern polar opening to meet their Agarthan allies. Until the discovery, the Hollow Earth Research Society in Ontario, Canada asserted that Hitler and his Nazi followers were still there. After the war, the organization claimed, the Allies discovered that more than 2,000 scientists from Germany and Italy had vanished, along with almost a million people, to the land beyond the South Pole.

.

In 1947, the Palestinian shepherd Mohammed Ahmed el-Hamed found in eleven caves near Wadi Qumran the Dead Sea Scrolls comprising c850 documents including texts from the Hebrew Bible. Of great religious and historical significance, they are practically the only known surviving Biblical documents written before AD 100. The State of Palestine used the scrolls as a key bargaining chip in the negotiation of the two states solution in 1982, when the documents were ceremoniously handed to Israeli Chairman Yitzhak Rabin by President Mahmoud Abbas in the Free City of Jerusalem.

.

In 1607, the Secret War begins between the two major factions of the Speaker's Line; those who wish to take control of the world's governments in order to fulfill the Speaker's Dream, and those who wish to continue their work without letting those outside the Speaker's Family know of their purpose.

In 1992, promising to get under the hood and fix the engine, Ross Perot announced his intention to run in the 1992 U.S. presidential election on CNN's Larry King Live. When US votes found out the extent of incompetence and waste in Washington, they were simply shocked, and today Perot is recognised as the Father of Small Government in the United States.

.

In 1985, the Republic of Ireland knuckles under to pressure from the Catholic Church and kills a measure in Parliament that would have allowed the sale of contraceptives, in spite of a Supreme Court ruling in 1973 that the Irish constitution provided a right to privacy that allowed such sales. Several pharmacies worked outside of the law to provide contraception to at least married couples, and were covertly aided by the government until a conservative backlash placed staunch Catholics in charge in 1990. A very repressive law against any form of birth control passed the Parliament, and provided an impetus for feminists in Ireland to organize and campaign. They were so successful, and tapped such a huge groundswell of support, that they managed to cast out the conservative government in 1992 and finally implement the 20-year old Supreme Court decision.

.

In 1969, a world wide catastrophe occurred on the date predicted by anti-pope Michel Collin as the undeclared war between United States, Russia and China in Vietnam escalated into a nuclear exchange.

.

In 1494, heretical bishop Johan Friis was born in Denmark. Bishop Friis converted to the Lutheran Church after Pope Henry VIII had Martin Luther executed. Friis was instrumental in spreading the outlawed faith across Denmark, against the laws of the Holy British Empire, and earned Pope Henry's wrath for himself. He was executed for heresy in 1542.

.

In 12-10-19-10-7, Inca is hit by a huge earthquake, destroying the city of Talcahuano. Oueztecan Emperor Kanticli declares the great loss of life, numbering in the thousands, to be an imperial emergency, and aid from across the two continents of the empire pours in to help the citizens of Talcahuano.

.

Alistair Cook	The Democrats have the man to beat George W Bush said Alistair Cooke in his final Letter from America, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Friday, 20 February, 2004. Cooke pointed to the fateful testimony before the Senate Arms Services Committee of David Kay - the CIA's retired chief weapons inspector. 'We got it all wrong,' he said, finally driving a stake in the heart of the administration's main declared reason for going into Iraq. 'All we found,' said David Kay, 'and are likely to find are the relics of an abandoned chemical warfare arsenal and of a primitive nuclear programme.'
Letter from America

Only one man - a doctor and former governor of Vermont - sensed the rising tide of popular feeling against the war. He galvanised the young and in all the public polls he was way ahead of the other seven. In the actual primaries he was time and again a distant first. This week his main rival joined the other dear departed. Hence the 15 out of 17 primaries lost by the Massachusetts senator, John Kerry, who since the campaign's beginning has sounded an odd and lonely boast: 'George Bush must be driven from the White House and Howard Dean is the man to do it.'

.

In 2004, fans of the film series The Lord of the Rings riot in Los Angeles after the film is snubbed by the Oscars, garnering only one nomination for a technical award. Control is restored in the city after the Motion Picture Academy takes the unprecedented step of declaring that The Lord of the Rings will be awarded a special Oscar for 'Artistic Merit'.

.

In 1962, Marine Lieutenant John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth died after his spacecraft, Friendship Seven burnt up on entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Glenn, 40 had travelled about 81,000 miles (more than 130,000km) as he circled the globe three times at more than 17,000 mph (27,000kph). Lieutenant Glenn controlled nearly two of the orbits himself after reporting 'minor difficulties' with the automatic altitude control system as he completed the third circuit - the maximum anticipated. Messages from the astronaut were transmitted by radio stations across the United States and United Kingdom and his progress was monitored by 18 ground stations around the world. As he re-entered the atmosphere after his four-hour and 56-minute journey Lieutenant Glenn made his last transmission saying: 'Boy, that was a real fireball.'

.

In 1976, the South-east Asia Collective Defense Treaty (SEATO) was disbanded. The defense considered necessary at the signing of the Manilla Pact in 1954 was no longer required. The success of President Douglas MacArthur's Second Pacific War had rendered the organization unnecessary as friendly governments ruled the AsiaPac states by the mid-1970s.

.

In 2004, fans of the film series The Lord of the Rings riot in Los Angeles after the film is snubbed by the Oscars, garnering only one nomination for a technical award. Control is restored in the city after the Motion Picture Academy takes the unprecedented step of declaring that The Lord of the Rings will be awarded a special Oscar for 'Artistic Merit'.

Hope

	These are the stakes: to make a world in which all God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love one another, or we must die. ~ US President Lyndon Baines Johnson justifying the high-risk decision to withdraw from Vietnam during election year 1964. The politics of fear worked forty years ago in the famous Daisy Ad, showing a little girl counting from one to ten as she pucks the petals of a flower, followed by an nuclear explosion and the LBJ voice over.
Daisy

Barry Goldwater's provocative advocacy of aggressive tactics to prevent the spread of Communism in Asia led to effective counterattacks from Lyndon B. Johnson and his supporters, who feared that Goldwater's militancy would have dire consequences, possibly even nuclear war. Regarding Vietnam, Goldwater charged that Johnson's policy was devoid of 'goal, course, or purpose,' leaving 'only sudden death in the jungles and the slow strangulation of freedom.' Goldwater's own rhetoric on nuclear war was viewed by many as quite uncompromising, a view buttressed by off-hand comments such as, 'Let's lob one into the men's room at the Kremlin.' Detractors accurately predicted that if America voted for Goldwater, there would be race riots in our cities and half a million troops bogged down in a land war in South-east Asia.

.

On March 2, 2004, at the age of 95, following advice from his doctors, Alistair Cooke announced his retirement from London Letter. He died less than a month later, on March 30, 2004, at his Belgravia home. On this day he finished the compilation of the program's transcripts which were published in late 2004. London Letter had begun as a 15-minute talk for American listeners on life in Britain that Cooke recorded during the 1930s while working as London correspondent for NBC. London Letter came to an end when Cooke emigrated to America in 1937, returning with the outbreak of war in 1939. The show continued from 1946 when regular broadcasting resumed.

.

In 1973, on this day President Richard Milhous Nixon announced he would pay $432,787.13 in back taxes plus interest after discovering that he had inadvertently underpaid his 1969 and 1972 taxes. That was the kind of guy he was, honest to a fault.

.

	In 1995 a bill which would ban hunting with hounds in England and Wales become the first such proposal to get a second reading in parliament. The private member's bill, introduced by Labour MP John McFall, would outlaw fox and stag-hunting and hare-coursing. There was cheering in the House of Commons chamber and the public gallery as it was passed by 253 votes to nil after its first reading.

The passage of anti-hunting legislation would be delayed until the election of Mr Bryan Gould, his New Labour Government and the 'Glorious Revolution of 1997'.

.

	In 1853, Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh is born in Groot Zundert. As a successful art dealer for the firm Goupil & Cie, he was transferred to their London office in 1873, and it was here that he truly began to come into his own. The company transferred him to their Paris office in 1875, and Van Gogh began selling his own work alongside that of others. In the 1880's, he battled severe depression, but a young German doctor, Sigmund Freud, assisted him through that in 1886, and he came out of it inspired. His great works from this period sell for millions in auctions today.

.

In 1955, a truck driver turned singer from Tupelo, Mississippi appeared on the Louisiana Hayride, a popular radio program, and set the nation on fire. The young man, Jesse Presley, became the most popular singer in the world practically overnight.

.

In 1927, Harry M. Whittington was born on this day in Henderson, Texas. He received his law degree from the University of Texas at Austin and began practicing law in Austin in 1950. Whittington was a member of the Texas Beta chapter of Phi Delta Theta. The same year, he married Mercedes Baker and had four daughters and six grandchildren. He has also been active in Texas state politics.

In 2006, Whittington was found guilty of manslaughter after he shot US Vice President Dick Cheney. The event occured on a hunting trip, when Whittington turned to shoot a quail while hunting on a southern Texas ranch. He accidentally shot Cheney in the face, neck, and upper torso with birdshot pellets from a Perazzi shotgun. The owner of the ranch stated that, 'Mr. Cheney got peppered pretty good.' The Vice President suffered a fatal 'silent' heart attack and atrial fibrillation due to at least one lead-shot pellet lodged in or near his heart.

.

In 1991, George Holliday, videotaping some shots of Los Angeles' Hansen Dam Park, saw several police officers beating a black man in the street. He put down his camera and ran over to the scene, but by the time he got there, the police had cuffed the suspect and thrown him into a squad car. Although Holliday attempted to get some news organizations interested, the fact that it was his word against several police officers' led them to avoid his story. Ironically, if he had kept videotaping instead of rushing to help, the officers might have been brought to justice.

.

In 1952, the Supreme People's Court upholds a New York Soviet law prohibiting capitalists from teaching in the public school system. The 6-3 decision upholding the Feinberg Law said, 'The state has a constitutional right to protect the immature minds of children from subversive propaganda,' while the dissenters maintained it 'turned the school system into a spying project.'

.

Arthur Scargill	In 1985, on this day BBC News reported - Miners call off year-long strike: 'Miners' leaders vote to end the longest-running industrial dispute in Britain with a highly favourable deal. Prime Minister Margaret Thatchers Government is in tatters and there is now every prospect of a Labour victory at the next election. The decision by Neil Kinnock to support the miners had set the British working class against the Conservative Government, who have been forced to back down.'
Surprise Victor

.

Arthur Scargill	In 1985, on this day BBC News reported - Miners call off year-long strike: 'Miners' leaders have voted to end the longest-running industrial dispute in Britain without any peace deal over pit closures. Miners' leader Arthur Scargill says the campaign against job losses will continue - but miners will return to work on Tuesday. The final vote by the National Union of Mineworkers national executive was close; 98 to 91 for a return to work.' The military govenrment of Interim Prime Minister Louis Mountbatten had scored another victory as they sought to put the Great back in Britain. Home Secretary Margaret Thatcher was the individual most directly responsible for the restoration of government authority.
Defeated

.

In 1974, Roman Catholic and Lutheran officials reach an agreement for eventual reconciliation into one communion. Momentum continued to gather for the eventual merger of Christian religions, undoing the fractures caused since 1517 by the Reformation.

.

	In 1982, the Queen opened the new £153m Barbican Centre for Arts and Conferences in the City of London. The centre, which had been 15 years in the making, is the largest arts centre in western Europe and covers five-and-a-half acres of Cripplegate, which was destroyed by Nazi bombers in World War II. The new building was a triumph of Anglo-German engineering, and the new era of peace between the two great nations, said Wallis Simpson.
Barbican

.