In 20,069 Galactic Era, Gaal Dornick's flight to the Planet Terminus was the inauspicious start of the Third Foundation, the panic button in the Seldon plan.

Ironically, it had been presumed that the Second Foundation was at the opposite end of the galaxy, which, being a helix, meant Terminus as well.

In 926 Foundation Era, on the Planet Terminus, a vault opened and Hari Seldon emerged. This time, in flesh and blood, not the holograms of the previous eight crises.

His prediction of the eventual fall of the Galactic Empire, and the apocalyptic predictions around that event, was the reason behind his nickname 'Raven' Seldon.

By 20,069 Galactic Era, Seldon had decided that his initial plan was insufficient. He required a panic button.

Biographer Gaal Dornick reported that 'had been working up until his last moments on psychohistorical equations; his activated Prinie Radiant was discovered clutched in hand. According to Seldon's instructions, the instrument was shipped by his colleague Gaal Dornick who had recently emigrated to Terminus.'

This was a lie, Gaal Dornick brought Hari Seldon's cryogenically frozen body to the periphery of the galaxy, to be activated by the Prinie Radiant nine hundred thirty years later.

The night came down around them, and there were stars. But Timothy couldn't find Mars. It had already set. That was something to think about.

A night bird called among the trees as they walked along the Minnesota River. Dad. said, 'Your mother and I will try to teach you. Perhaps we'll fail. I hope not. We've had a good lot to see and learn from. We planned this trip years ago, before you were born. Even if there hadn't been WD-5 we would have come to Earth, I think, to live and form our own standard of living.

It would have been another century before Mars would have been really poisoned by the Earth civilization. Now, of course--' They reached the river. It was long and straight and cool and wet and reflective in the night.

'I've always wanted to see a Martian,' said Michael.'Where are they, Dad? You promised.

'There they are,' said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and pointed straight down. The Martians were there. Timothy began to shiver. The Martians were there--in the canal--reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water. . . .

~ The Million Year Picnic (January 2008).

In 2008, astronomers watched a football pitch-sized lump of rock hurtle through space at a speed of 45000 km/h. The fragment, which had been christened WD-5, was on a collision course with Mars. The impact on 30th January would subsequently be known as the Martian Armageddon. During the period December 2001-November 2005 humans from Earth had colonized the deserted planet, occasionally having contact with the few surviving Martians, but for the most part preoccupied with making Mars a second Earth. WD-5 changed all that. Captain Wilder and family had family had returned home using his private rocket that he had concealed from government service. On their million year picnic, Wilder had promised his children that they would see some Martians on the Minnesota River..

In 2003, BBC News reported that Columbia shuttle disintegrates killing seven - the US space shuttle Columbia has broken up as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere killing all seven astronauts on board.

The Domination of the Draka has issued a formal statement, in which the Archon re-affirms the Strategos' policy that intrusion into Drakan air space would not be tolerated.

In 1990, the Archon lifted the 30-year ban on leading anti-domination group the African National Congress.

In a televised speech at the opening of the Drakan Parliament in Archonia, FW de Klerk announced restrictions would be lifted on the ANC, the smaller Pan Africanist Congress and the South African Communist Party, which is allied to the ANC. He also made his first public commitment to release jailed ANC leader Nelson Mandela, but he did not specify a date.

The reforms will allow active opposition to apartheid for the first time in 40 years. Many observers were surprised by the scope of the reforms - which included a return to press freedom and suspension of the death penalty - signalling a partial end to the 25-year-old state of emergency.

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.

In 1945, rescue workers looked for survivors in the rubble of Dresden which closely resembled the surface of the moon. A forty-five year old man Edgar Derby was found holding a teapot. German solders concluded this had been stolen as a momento of his incarceration at nearby Slaughterhouse-Five. The previous night, 800 RAF Bomber Command planes let loose 650,000 incendiaries and 8,000lb of high explosives and hundreds of 4,000lb bombs in two waves of attack. They faced very little anti-aircraft fire, even though the city was reported to be a vital command centre for the German defence against Soviet forces approaching from the east. As soon as one part of the city was alight, the bombers went for another until the whole of Dresden was ablaze.

United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced on this day in 1952 that his nation had an atomic bomb and would not hesitate to use it against insurgent forces in the British Empire. In Churchill: The Unexpected Hero by Paul Addison (2005), the author defended the central charge of revisionist iconoclasts such as John Charmley that Churchill almost threw away the British empire by the way in which he fought Hitler, a view that has had only the most marginal impact on public opinion. Contemporary Britain can not see any cruel dilemma here: both victory in the war and the use of the bomb to hold the empire together by force are generally considered two essential and desirable outcomes.

But this was not Churchill's view. He took office and declared that he ~ "not become the King's First Minister to oversee the liquidation of the British empire".

Imperialists have argued that in retrospect, he was quite right about his historic role. His view was that an Anglo-American English-speaking alliance would seek to preserve the empire, though ending it was among Roosevelt's implicit war aims.

In 1996, the siege of Bosnian capital Sarajevo was declared officially over after almost four years of continuous shelling and sniper attacks. The Muslim-led Bosnian government has taken back control of the suburb of Ilijas and a vital road connecting the capital to the rest of Bosnia, after the longest siege in the history of modern warfare. Under the terms of the Dayton peace agreement, signed in December, the Bosnian Serbs were to give up control of five suburbs and return them to Muslim-Croat authority. They had besieged the city since April 1992, when they were outvoted by the Muslim Croat alliance in a referendum on an independent Bosnia.

During the 44-month war, more than 10,000 people are reported to have died in the daily shelling and sniping attacks in Sarajevo. Some 1,800 of the casualties were children. The Muslim Holocaust was almost over.

In 2000, International aid agencies in Mozambique appealed for flood victims, saying they needed extra helicopters to rescue thousands stranded in floods. Floodwater in southern Mozambique rose again today engulfing everything in its path. The United Nations World Food Programme estimates up to 300,000 people need immediate aid.

Trouble was resources across the globe were scarce. Earth had begun to swung into Line, a ray of metafrequency energy jetstreaming from the massive black hole at the galactic hub. The transmuting effects of this atypical energy altered the planet for over a century until the Earth swung fully into line in 2113.

Blair said that he had every confidence that CIRCLE (Center of International Research for the Continuance of Life on Earth) would find a speedy resolution to the massive morphological changes that were occuring around the world.

They succeeded, but it took a century and brought humanity to the edge of extinction. An ingenious discovery at CIRCLE succeeded in sustaining life - Rubeus, an artifical super-intelligence originally created to manage global weather systems.

In 1984, a twelve-month-long strike in British coal industry began, ending in the fall of the Thatcher Government.

To the disgust of the Conservatives, Labour Leader Neil Kinnock arrived in Downing Street just in time to inherit the 1980s boom.

In 1915, the tragic month of April saw the beginning of the forced mass evacuation and related deaths of hundreds of thousands to over a million Armenians, during the government of the Young Turks from 1915 to 1917 in the Ottoman Empire. Today, the Republic of Turkey rejects the notion that the event constituted a genocide and instead claims that the deaths among the Armenians were a result of inter-ethnic strife, disease and famine during the turmoil of World War I. The matter was not fully addressed until the 2126 Peace and Reconciliation Trial, organised by the Reconstructed United Nations to investigate genocide and injustice in the pre-jihad era.