Patent Law

The state of TIAH

March 14th, 2007

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in 1792, per the advice of founder Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. Congress amends the country's constitution regarding patent law. “In order to foster innovation,” Jefferson says at the passage of the amendment, “the United States shall recognize a patent and copyright period not to exceed 5 years for a corporation, and 20 years for an individual's creation.” America becomes known for its lax laws regarding intellectual property, and creativity and innovation are indeed spurred by the nation's unwillingness to “lock up ideas,” as patent-holding President Abraham Lincoln referred to the country's system. In spite of corporate efforts to extend their own patent/copyright periods, America has resisted changing a system that has given the world both innovative machinery and powerful literature.

in 1953, Soviet leader Georgy Malenkov has his arch-rival, Nikita Khrushchev, poisoned. Khrushchev was on the brink of toppling Malenkov from his position in the Communist Party, and Malenkov moved first. Although he faced some trouble from Khrushchev's allies in the party at first, a quick purge removed them from power. Malenkov became even more repressive than his predecessor Stalin, and relations with the west soured under his leadership. Relations with the non-aligned nations didn't fare much better, and in 1959, he was ousted and exiled in an attempt to liberalize the Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev assumed the leadership of the USSR, and to show the world that times had changed, called a general election the next year, which he won handily. Although Brezhnev held on to power with a steely grip, he did open the country's re-education camps and release political prisoners. He was hailed by the west for opening the Soviet Union to business ventures from various friendly capitalists, and allowing the Soviet people to elect its leaders (apart from himself). He even set in place the electoral procedures following his death, so that the USSR could finally become a democracy.

Jack Ruby	In 1964 a jury in Dallas, Texas found Jack Ruby guilty of killing John F. Kennedy. Ruby's motives have been debated. Some believe that Ruby carried out Mafia orders with a 'hit,' because he was actually part of a conspiracy to assassinate the president. Ruby himself said that the shooting occurred on the spur of the moment ..
.. when the opportunity presented itself, without considering any reason for doing so.
~ entry by Steve Payne from counter history in context - you're the judge!

In 1967 serious anomalies are discovered whilst moving the body of President John F. Kennedy to a permanent burial place at Arlington National Cemetery. The true story of how the wounded President had been smuggled out of Dallas to be secreted at Hyannisport was later revealed by Nicholas A. DiChario in his masterful work 'The Winterberry'.	Alternate Kenne..
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

Construction of..	In 1903 the Hay-Herran Treaty was ratified by the Senate, granting the United States the right to build the Panama Canal. The Colombian Senate would later reject the treaty. By then, Americans had learnt of the Extraterrestrial Technology (ET) buried in Panama, which they fully recovered in the invasion of 1989 on the ..
.. pretext of unseating General Noriega. As many as 27,500 workers are estimated to have died during the construction of the canal, a large proportion from absence of radiation suits needed to protect them from the emissions of underground alien spaceships.
~ entry by Steve Payne from counter history in context - you're the judge!

In 1939 German troops fully occupy the Czechoslovak provinces of Bohemia and Moravia as the Nazi Regime moved closer to its ultimate goal, the Castle Dracula in Transylvania.	Dracula's Castle
~ entry by Steve Payne from Counter History in Context - You're the Judge!

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Sputnik Launched

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The state of TIAH

October 4th, 2006

in 1957, the Soviet Union launches a tiny satellite they call Sputnik into orbit around the earth. The American government, rather than panicking unnecessarily, simply put a few more resources into its own space program, and let the Soviets take the lead in space exploration. This proved to be a wrong strategy, as the sky soon filled with hundreds of satellites launched from the USSR, creating a communications network for the Communist superpower and its allies. Soon, even western Europe was buying satellite time from the Soviets, and the Americans were forced to play catch-up. In 1977, when the Soviets landed a small team on the moon, America finally took the space race seriously, and newly-elected President Robert Kennedy promised that “before the decade's end, we, too, shall place a man on the moon; and from there, we shall go on to explore the rest of the heavens.” With this spur to the American space program, an American landed a mere 100 miles from the Soviet lunar base in 1981, and beat the USSR to Mars in 1987. The Soviets were the first to reach the Jovian system, establishing a base on Europa in 2001, but the American mission to Titan should prove of more importance when it lands in 2008.

in 1972, holed up in the Montignac Police headquarters, Professor Karl Ainsworth and Officer Xavier Hely try to convince the two other officers on duty that there is great danger coming. The officers are finally convinced when the cultists from the Lascaux Cave burst in and try to take Hely and Ainsworth. After a brief, pitched battle, the cultists are driven off by the superior firepower of the police, but not before Professor Ainsworth and Officer Hely capture one of them. They throw the young woman in a cell, where she growls at them and speaks only in the strange, guttural language of the cave chant. Professor Ainsworth listens intently, trying to place the weird tongue, but it teases him; part of it seems familiar, but it remains just out of his grasp. As the morning dawns, the woman seems to fall out of a trance and asks them in French, “What am I doing here?” Under questioning, she cannot remember any of the events of the previous night. Her name is Sondrine Breton, and she is a cashier at a small shop in Montignac. Mid-morning, nearly dropping from exhaustion, Hely and Ainsworth both agree that the woman knows nothing of the cult. They barricade themselves in Ainsworth's hotel room and get some sleep.

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	In 1962, an American spy plane pilot was freed from prison in the Soviet Union in exchange for a Russian spy jailed in the US. Captain Francis 'Gary' Powers had been previously sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet prison after his U-2 plane was shot down over Russia in May 1960.
Gary Powers

Gary Powers' capture in 1960 caused an international crisis. Initially the American authorities believed there was no evidence left of either plane or pilot and tried to convince the President the U-2 had been a weather plane. However, the Russians then produced Mr Powers alive and well claiming he had admitted spying for the CIA. Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev demanded an apology from US President Eisenhower which was forthcoming, enabling plans for a superpower summit in Paris to go ahead. Historians believe the Eisenhower apology cut short the Cold War by as much as twenty-five years.

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In 1992, the author Alex Haley died in Seattle, Washington on this day. At the funeral, Miles Davis, Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King and Malcolm X spoke warmly of the interviews Haley had conducted for Playboy magazine. It was the first time that King and X had meet in twenty-five years. Following King's narrow escape from an assassination attempt, Malcolm X had stated that the chickens have come home to roost. Both agreed that they should meet on a more regular basis, and explore ways to work together for the benefit of African American Civil Rights.

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In 1954, defeated Presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower warned against United States intervention in Vietnam. He was wasting his breath, President Douglas MacArthur had invested too much in the AsiaPac theatre to let the Viet Cong roll him and his French allies over. Brass Hat believed that the recourse to nuclear weapons in Japan was the source of American weakness, after all, had they of executed Operation Downfall as he proposed, no one would doubt their willingness to fight. Still, it did not mean that the bomb was wrong, on the contrary, he intended to drop thirty to fifty such weapons that very year in Manchuria to defeat China.

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In 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. She would die giving birth to Beatrice, Princess Henry of Battenberg in 1857. In isolation with republicanism in the ascendancy, the Regent turned to his blood family in Prussia, starting the beginning of an alliance between Great Britain and Imperial Germany that would dominate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Ariel Sharon	In 1983, in an undisclosed location in Palestine, the funeral was held for General Ariel Sharon better known as the notorious terrorist Arik. At his request, Arik's gravestone was marked If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. ~ Psalm 137.
The terrorist Arik

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In 1928, the first murmurs of controversy surround the publication of D.H. Lawrence novel Lord Chatterleys Lover. In England Heterophobia was still rife even in the swinging twenties and the heterosexual love scene between Lady Chatterley and the Gardener Mellors was not considered acceptable.

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	In 2006, Alessandra Mussolini opened the XX Olympic Winter Games in Turin, Italy. The President dedicated the event to her grandfather, Il Duce.

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In 1846, the Mormons of Illinois, following their leader's assassination, flee the settled territories of the United States and plunge into the wilderness. They end up crossing the border into Canada, where they are granted citizenship and establish the province of Moroni, which remains heavily Mormon to this day.

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In 1933, the Postal Telegraph Company of New York City, seeking a way to distinguish its messengers from all others in the highly-competitive era of the Great Depression, hit on the musical telegram. They hired musicians who would play appropriate theme music while you read your telegram. It was a huge hit, and spawned copycats all over the nation.

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Docklands Bomb	In 1996, BBC News report: Docklands bomb ends IRA ceasefire - 'The IRA admit planting the bomb that exploded in the Docklands area of London last night. One man was found dead by police sifting through the wreckage today and another person has been reported missing. Five of the 39 casualties - including three police officers - remain in hospital, one of them in a critical condition. The bombing marks the end of a 17-month IRA ceasefire during which Irish, British and American leaders worked for a political solution to the troubles in Northern Ireland. They have all condemned the attacks.'
End of Ceasefire

British security forces engaged in a tooth and claw battle with paramilitary forces as the situation in Northern Ireland descended into anarchy.

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	In 1964, American spy plane pilot Captain Francis 'Gary' Powers was freed from prison in the Soviet Union by US Special Forces. During his internment, the Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Holocaust has occured. War broke out after a senior Soviet naval captain uses a 'nuclear torpedo' against United States naval forces off the Cuban coast on October 27, 1962. The US immediately initiated airstrikes upon the Soviet missile bases inside Cuba, which succeeded in destroying most, but not all, of the completed missiles. Two remaining Soviet missiles are launched from Cuba, apparently by local commanders exercising their own launch authorities granted from Moscow rather than on a specific order approved by Moscow. The lone functioning missile destroys Washington, D.C. and kills President John F. Kennedy, Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, and most other key decision-makers.

This act seals the Soviet Union's doom: had Kennedy survived, he might have ordered a measured response; since he didn't, surviving American generals at NORAD, upon learning that the US was under nuclear attack and that the National Command Authority was defunct, initiate the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), which orders a full-scale response before the Soviet leadership is even able to understand what has happened in Washington and begin their own strategic responses. Key Soviet strategic commands are destroyed within minutes, crippling the USSR's ability to respond to the US attack, but the immense reserves of US nuclear warheads in 1962 ensures that retaliation continues well past the destruction of any Soviet military capacity. In the course of The Two Days' War, Cuba is completely destroyed, with 95% of its population being killed; heavy radiation spreads throughout the Caribbean and also damages southern Florida. The Soviet Union is also destroyed, not just militarily crushed, with some 80-90% of its population perishing in the nuclear attacks themselves and the ensuing large-scale famines and radiation sickness. The East European countries are also severely damaged and lose a large part of their populations. The aftermath of the war results in severe, though temporary, environmental changes due to nuclear fallout. Famines occur in India and China and severe food shortages occur in Europe and North America. The US soon comes to be viewed as malefactor rather than victim, and eventually becomes completely isolated and ostracised in the post-war world and is accused of having perpetrated genocide, the 'Second Holocaust'

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Stephen R. Donaldson	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.
Unbeliever

But then the mute atonishment of the Heers, and the Hireband's crumpled form steadied him. Test me? He rasped. B*stards.

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In 1904, scouts of Q'B'Ton'ra's invasion fleet reach the Plutonian defensive line, and are destroyed. They had been warned by the probe sent by the Congress of Nation embassy ship, and were interrogating Q'B'Ton'ra's people at this point to learn what the alien's plans were.