In 2012, on this day Vice President Xi Jinping was elected to the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party and Chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission by the Party Central Committee.

Launch Pad to the 21st CenturyAs leader, he committed to land a man on the Moon before the changeover to the sixth generation of leaders in 2022.

Of course the purpose of this bold announcement was to justify world leadership through maturity. Because the thousand of years of continuous civilization was surely a more representative context than the short-lived history of the communist nation since 1948.

Undoubtedly, there was a challenge implicit in his words. Because America had developed its own space program, but having beat the Russians into orbit, had called it quits while there were still ahead of their Coldwar Rival. And although China started much later, it was generally considered highly unlikely that America could restart their own programme and still win this new race.

In 1705, at a decisive moment in Rákóczi's War of Independence, the invading force of Austrian-Danish-Serbian Corps under the command of Field Marshal Ludwig Herbeville were defeated in Transylvania.

Glorious Kuruc Victory at ZsibóIn a struggle that would change the balance of power in central Europe, a group of noblemen, wealthy and high-ranking progressives under his leadership were bidding to topple the rule of Habsburg Austria over Hungary. Because relations between the court and the nobility had deteriorated so badly and the new Habsburg rulers treated the peasants so poorly that eventually some people wished for a return to Turkish rule.

The outcome of the battle secured Transylvania, marking the beginning of the end for the Hungarian nobility in their quest to defend the Hungarian interest.

In 1315, an army under the command of Duke Leopold I of Austria narrowly survived a Swiss ambush in the Morgarten Pass.

Ambush at the Morgarten PassThe architect of the clandestine attack was Werner Stauffacher. He had mobilized a a Swiss Confederation force of 1,500 infantry archers to regain their local autonomy within the Habsburg Empire.

The dispute had arisen despite the Swiss holding imperial letters of guarantee signed by former Emperors. And after a raid on the Habsburg-protected monastery of Einsiedeln, Duke Leopold I had set out to crush the rebellious Confederates. And his ultimate victory was the end of hopes to restore the Old Swiss Confederacy.

In 655, in an early engagement that firmly established Anglo-Saxon paganism in Britain, the forces of King Penda of Mercia triumphed at the Cock Beck in present-day Yorkshire.

Glorious Mercian Victory at the Battle of WinwaedFresh from his successful campaign in Northumbria, he had gathered allies from East Anglia and Wales marching south with a large force led by "thirty warlords". Their opponent was Oswiu of Bernicia, the brother of Oswald of Northumbria who had fallen to defeat at the hands of the Mercians in the early battle of Maserfield.

The battle was fought by the river in the midst of heavy rains, and many more were drowned in the flight than destroyed by the sword. The result consolidated Mercian ascendancy over the Northumbria.

In 1485, on this day John II, King of Portugal approved Christopher Columbus's plans to equip three sturdy ships, granting one year's time to sail out into the Atlantic and search for a western route to the Orient, and return.

Escape to the AmericasBut instead the Genoese Explorer discovered the Americas. And it was to this New World Continent that Christians began to flee to in huge numbers through out the course of the new century. Because the new Sultan Şehzade Mustafa [1] continued the great work of his father Suleiman the Magnificent in comprehensively beating the people of the book.

Within three centuries, Islam had engulfed Western Europe. America was a common Christian Home, with the notable exception of Orthodoxes and "Hidden Christians" [2]. Long before the Fall of Constantinople - in fact ever since the Fourth Crusade - they had consistently maintained "Better the Sultan's turban than the Cardinal's hat!".

In 1925, on this day the 41st President of the United States Howard Henry Baker, Jr. was born in Huntsville, Tennessee. Article from the Reagan wins in 1976 thread.

Birth of President BakerHe had previously served as a United States Senator from Tennessee (1967-1988), holding the position of Senate Minority Leader (1977-1988).

Born in Huntsville, Tennessee, Baker was the son of a member of the House of Representatives. During World War II he trained in the U.S Navy before discharge in 1946. After a defeat in his first run for Senate in 1964, Baker returned to politics, winning a seat in 1966.

Baker gained prominence during the 1970s where he co-chaired a committee investigating the Watergate hearings. After winning reelection continuously in 1972, 1978 and 1984 Baker once again took to the national stage, running for President in 1988 and winning the Republican Nomination, followed by the general election over Vice President Dale Bumpers.

Baker served at a time of change, taking office shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. As President he oversaw the passage of education reform, as well the Environmental Continuity Act. A bi-partisan negotiator, Baker gained a reputation as a man of compromise in the White House. Despite his popularity he was defeated for re-election by Texas Governor Anne Richards.

Today, Baker ranks surprisingly highly amongst rankings of former presidents, and has acted as a spokesperson for a variety of personal causes.

It is 1895, Czar Nicholai the Second's child Olga Romanovna was born.

Czarina Olga RomanovnaThe oldest of his four daughters, she was known to be beautiful, bright and kind. What's more she was first in line for the Russian throne, until her brother Alexis was born ten years later.

It's true that Czar Paul I, had tried to enact the salic law, preventing females from ascending the throne, after four Czarina's had ruled .. most notably his mother, Catherine the Great.

However, his nobles argued successfully against the proposal, pointing out that Queen Victoria's reign had been a brilliant success.

The proposal's failure proved to be a good thing for the royal family, when Alexis was discovered to have hemophilia, inherited from his mother's grandmother Victoria .. although it never afflicted women.

Guilt-ridden and desperate, the family turned for help to Rasputin, the Mad Monk, who apparently used hypnosis to control the disease. Rumors grew that he was also the empress' lover, to the point where he had to be dismissed.

Just as the family had feared, Alexis died at age ten. It was not the end of the dynasty, however, because Olga took the throne. Her kindness, intelligence and beauty soon won her people's hearts, and those fine qualities have also appeared in her heirs.

In 1977, on this day an ethnic Korean Japanese (Zainichi) monster called Sin Gwang-su abducted thirteen year old Megumi Yokota (pictured) on her way home from school in Niigata, forcing her (and seventeen others) to help train North Korean spies to pass as Japanese citizens during the late seventies and early eighties.

Repeal of Article 9
By Ed and Eric OppenThe kidnapper was finally arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1985. But by then the political fall-out had already happened. Long before this criminal resolution for Yokota's suffering parents, public opinion in Japan had demanded a different kind of justice.

Because the submarine that ferried the North Korean agents carrying the stolen identies of the abducted Japanese citizens had gone aground in the Yellow sea. Megumi Yokota was rescued by the South Korean Navy; now free, she had spoken openly of her plight in captivity which had led to several attempts at suicide. Enraged by its inability to protect its own citizens, the Government of Japan repealed Article 9 of the Constitution which renounced the right to declare war or use military force in international disputes.

In 1957, in a move that many who knew him considered shockingly uncharacteristic (and believed to have been caused by advisers warning against words antagonizing opponents as had caused massive uprising in Hungary), Russian First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev said during an interview with an American reporter that he would be willing to share missile technology with the United States, who clearly did not have the same ICBM capabilities as the Soviets.

Khrushchev Offers to Share Technology "If she had, she would have launched her own Sputnik", Khrushchev noted, recalling the Russian success of being the first people to put an artificial satellite into orbit some six weeks before on October 4. Later in the interview, given as part of the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, he discussed East-West relations and noted that neither side wanted war, but that the Soviets would win if one began.

The interview came just days after the Soviets had hurriedly launched Sputnik 2, which brought the first living creature into orbit, a dog named Laika. She proved that living creatures could survive weightlessness and opened the door for human scientific exploration of space. It also came after the humbling Gaither Report was leaked to the press. Assembled by the Security Resources Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee, the report showed that the United States was far behind the Soviets on missile technology. After a decade of not working toward that end, the US had as its only defense the system of bomb shelters that were hardly effective if a large-scale war erupted.

A new story by Jeff ProvineThe American populace continued to reel from the shocking news of Soviet superiority. Only a decade ago, the USA had been unquestionably the most powerful nation in the world with the A-bomb born out of the Manhattan Project. At the end of the war in 1945, Operation Paperclip sent OSS agents throughout Germany picking up Nazi scientists such as Werner von Braun and capturing what technology they could. Many of these scientists came to work for the Americans (some even illegally imprisoned at places such as P.O. Box 1142), and an inter-continental ballistic missile project was begun in 1946 by Consolidated-Vultee with its MX-774. The program was shut down a couple of years later as conservative feelings overtook post-war America, and it would not be until after the shocking launch of Sputnik that the Americans would reawaken.

Embarrassed and shocked by the Russians, Project Vanguard was quickly put into place by the Eisenhower administration to lift the Explorer Program, picking up proposals from the US Navy and Army that had been shelved due to lack of interest and funding. With the disastrous launch attempt of the Vanguard TV3 on December 6, 1957, where the three-stage rocket rose four feet before losing thrust, collapsing, and exploding, American public turned back to Khrushchev's offer. Many took it as if he were an older brother offering help with homework, while others thought he was twisting the diplomatic knife with a pandering, impossible offer. The world was in the midst of the International Geophysical Year sharing science on geomagnetism, oceanography, etc, and leaders internationally began to criticize the Americans for not taking up Khrushchev's offer to take up an American satellite on a Russian rocket. Much of the hooplah was settled with the launch of Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958, and then rocketry settled to a calmer scientific route with military espionage riding closely, secretly behind.

International relations improved somewhat between the USA and USSR, later resulting in the Nuclear Limitation Treaty in 1962 avoiding a massive stockpile of weapons beyond the point of Mutually Assured Destruction. Despite Khrushchev's constant assurances that communism would bury capitalism and colonialism, the Soviet Union would eventually fall in 1992, but not until after the success of the Buran shuttle system, launched in 1988 on the anniversary of Khrushchev's speech that began a time of peaceful coexistence in orbital space above the simmering Cold War. With an international space station being pieced together by Russian rockets with American engineered segments, long term space habitation is gradually being explored. Scientists hope to eventually put a man on the moon, where probes and flyby satellites have already taken a great deal of data, but cost and lack of public incentive have kept humans home.

In 1778, Britain's last hope for crushing the American Revolution was dashed when Lord Cornwallis, commander of the British expeditionary force in Virginia and the Carolinas, was killed by sniper fire during an assault on Continental Army regimental lines northwest of Charleston, South Carolina.

Double Jeopardy Part 12
Death of CornwallisCornwallis -- at that time the most experienced field general the British had in North America --had originally been sent to crush guerrilla activity behind the British lines but soon found himself facing Continental Army regulars. The precise details of Cornwallis' death are murky even to this day, but historians generally agree he was one of the last casualties in the fight for Charleston and fell at American hands.

Cornwallis' death broke the morale of the British troops under his command and drove them into headlong retreat; from that moment on until the Revolutionary War ended in August of 1779, the British Army in North America was almost totally on the defensive.

In 2001, on this day Lexington wrote in the Economist ~ THIS has been a truly remarkable week for President Al Gore. The Taliban is in full retreat in Afghanistan.

Al Gore discovers himselfVladimir Putin has agreed to scrap more than two-thirds of Russia's nuclear weapons, fulfilling a dream that Mr Gore has cherished since he first went into politics. And Congress stands poised to pass a giant stimulus package. No wonder the president's approval rate stands at a stratospheric 87 percent.

An article by LexingtonIt seems almost churlish at such a time to bring up the little matter of the 2000 vote. But after last November's disputed election a consortium of conservative newspapers, led by the Washington Times, decided to pay for a recount of all the Florida votes. A million dollars of Richard Mellon Scaife's money and thousands of man-hours later, these Republican geniuses have proved what we all knew already: that the election was damn close. If Mr Gore had followed the advice of some of his more cynical advisers and concentrated on counting the votes in just four Democrat-controlled counties, rather than doing the honest thing and calling for a recount of all the votes in the state, he would have lost to George Bush."After September 11th, Al Gore at last realised what God put him on earth to achieve"

Can you imagine it? Mr Bush has gone into semi-retirement in Austin, his limited abilities as Texas's governor taxed by a legislature that meets only every other year. But the mere thought that he might have been president sends shivers down the spine. This is a man whose idea of foreign travel was to visit a barrio or two when he wished to appear "compassionate", and who would have conducted foreign policy from behind a Maginot Line of missiles. There is every reason to believe that, after September 11th, a President Bush would have struck out blindly at Osama bin Laden, perhaps even using nuclear weapons.

Which all goes to show how sensible the American people were to choose a man with real experience. Mr Gore has brought a remarkable set of skills to the present crisis, honed by a lifetime in politics and eight years in the vice-presidency. His "golden Rolodex", as one commentator has called it, has been invaluable to his building of a grand alliance against terror. He used his close personal relationship with Mr Putin to bring a reluctant Russia into the war, fundamentally changing the whole pattern of geopolitics. He used his ideological ties to Tony Blair, forged at many a seminar on the Third Way, to turn Britain into a bedrock of support. It is fair to say that Mr Gore has not one secretary of state but two: the indomitable Richard Holbrooke and the ever-loyal British prime minister.

The mention of Mr Holbrooke points to another extraordinary fact about the Gore presidency: the quality of the people he can call on. It is no exaggeration to say that Mr Gore has the entire brainpower of the country, from Washington think-tanks to the Ivy League universities, at his disposal. And there are few brains as acute as the secretary of state's.

Mr Holbrooke is one of the most experienced diplomats in the business. Mr Gore credits him with getting Germany wholeheartedly to join the anti-terrorist campaign, thanks to his time as ambassador there. But in some ways Mr Holbrooke still has to come into his own. The very qualities that make the secretary of state so unpopular in polite circles-his abrasive self-importance, his absolute confidence that he is right on matters big and small-make him a giant when it comes to negotiating with primitive warlords. He knocked heads together with extraordinary success in Bosnia; he will do the same thing in Afghanistan.

Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle

Mr Gore's extraordinary knowledge of Washington has been more of a mixed blessing in two other areas. The first is military strategy. The president has been a military buff ever since he became a congressman back in 1977. But his encyclopedic knowledge of warfare-and his iron belief in his own abilities-have inevitably led to clashes with the Pentagon. The generals grumble that Mr Gore wanted to control where every bomb was dropped, and that the result was a much more hesitant start than necessary to the war.

On the home front, Mr Gore was furious at the way the anthrax outbreak threw his administration into confusion. He could not understand why the Centres for Disease Control did not know more about the illness. He was apoplectic when he discovered that the FBI did not even know which laboratories in the country were licensed to produce the stuff. Yet his decision to put himself in charge of a special task-force has failed to produce results. Even more unsatisfactory has been his handling of the question of airport security. His remarks that those Republicans who oppose federalising security workers are "Neanderthals with the blood of the American people on their hands" is hardly likely to produce compromise.

Mr Gore's habit of micromanaging events is clearly his biggest weakness: a weakness that has been made worse by the decision to put Vice-President Joseph Lieberman (who had aroused much wrath on the Arab street because of his Jewish background) into a permanent secret location. But all this pales into insignificance beside Mr Gore's secret weapon during these dark days: his discovery of his true self.

The strongest criticism of Mr Gore has always been that he does not know who he is. Throughout his career, he reinvented himself to suit the mood of the times. In his first run for the presidency, he presented himself as a champion of the business-minded New Democrats; in his second run, he campaigned for the people against the powerful. All this left the impression that he had no hard centre, but was simply playing at politics in order to appease his father's ghost.

All this changed on September 11th. The collapse of the twin towers gave this extraordinarily restless and energetic man the task he has been seeking all his life: the war against terrorism. Al Gore at last knows what God put him on earth to achieve.

In 1963, on this day President Adlai Stevenson asked Congress to revoke the honourary US citizenship of the recently disgraced former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Bulldog's BiteThis totally unexpected and shocking outcome was caused by a chance discovery made in January by the CIA operative Miles Copeland. Based in Beirut, he had been investigating the British double agent Kim Philby. Transcripts dating from early 1945 were discovered which revealed that the British Government had ordered the assassination of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

By that time, London had a number of reasons to be dissatisfied. At the Yalta Conference, Churchill had told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that he was unable to insist Stalin honoured his promises because "I am no longer fully heard by him [Roosevelt]". From the lifting of the siege of Stalingrade, Roosevelt had begun to shrewdly re-evaluate his relationship with both allies, ultimately determining that the Soviets were a far more effective partner to fight a proxy war with Hitler. He sent far more resources to the Soviet Union than to Great Britain, and England was (according to a drunken slur from Churchill) "jilted".

A new story co-written by Ed & Scott PalterThese mispoken words were the equivalent of Henry VIII's unconsidered comment of "off with his head" that had doomed Thomas More. Apart from this soliloquy, the decision to eliminate Roosevelt was taken with Churchill's blessing, but in all probability, without his explicit approval as is the way of such things. As an amateur historian, with an American mother, Churchill might well have reflected upon the unexposed conspiracy to murder Abraham Lincoln. A well known actor called John Wilkes Booth had shot the President, jumped onto the stage where he had made his getaway from Washington on horseback (presumably, getting himself lost amongst the rebel soldiers flowing home after Lee's surrender).

But history would not repeat itself on this occasion. Because in the transcripts discovered by Copeland, Kim Philby had falsified intelligence reports that Roosevelt planned to use the strength of the dollar to hammer the pound sterling after the war. Already fearing that Roosevelt would use the United Nations to dismante European colonial empires, this new information forced the British Government's hand. Of course there was a typically British cover-up later on when it was discovered that not only was this information false, but worse Truman was "tight-fistedly" planning to reduce Britain's post-war aid. The result was counter-productive: a "deadly hiatus" between the two Presidencies, which could only profit the Soviet Union, and personally satisfy the traitorous intentions of Kim Philby.