In 1802, on this day 22nd President of the United States Solomon Foot (pictured) was born in Cornwall, Vermont.

Birth of President Solomon FootHe was a Vermont lawyer, state representative and later senator who spent more than 25 years in elected office. He graduated from Middlebury College in 1826 and was admitted to the bar in 1831. He served as a state representative briefly in 1833, and also from 1836 to 1838. After six years as a prosecuting attorney, he was elected as a Whig congressman in 1843 and as a senator in 1850. He was re-elected as a Republican senator in 1856, in which capacity he served until his death in 1866. He served as President pro tempore of the Senate from 1861 to 1863.

By an accident of history, he then occupied the White House for the remaining eighteen months of Chester A. Arthur's term. Because the President had been forced to resign when Arthur P. Hinman discovered evidence that he was was not a native-born citizen of the United States. Instead, he was born in Ireland and had arrived in the US at the end of fourteen.

By coincidence, he shared his birthday with the 20th President, James A. Garfield, and his predecessor died on November 18th.

In 1831, on this day the twentieth President of the United States James A. Garfield was born in Moreland Hills, Ohio.

Birth of President James A. GarfieldIn 1881 he was shot once in the arm and once in the back by Charles J. Guiteau at the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad on the National Mall in Washington.

Although the first bullet only caused a graze, the second was initially thought to have lodged near his liver. However the hopelessly incompetent Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss was completely wrong, and the bullet was actually located behind the pancreas, a discovery made by a metal detector devised by the brilliant Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell.

Aside from the creation of the mocking expression "Ignorance if Bliss", the event was quickly forgotten because Garfield, like many other veterans were unfazed by such an injury. In fact one of the detectives who took Guiteau to the district jail still had a Civil War bullet lodged in his head. However the consequence of his survival was huge; as soon as his recovered, he quickly resumed his radical programme of reform that would change Washington forever.

In 1600, Charles the Last, the final British monarch was born in Dunfermline Palace. He ascended to the throne of the United Kingdom of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales in 1625.

Charles the LastCharles was deposed by Oliver Cromwell's forces in 1646, and despite several attempts to restore the monarchy over the next couple of decades, the people of the UK were never to follow a king or queen again.

Although Cromwell was followed by his son as Lord Protector of the Kingdom, Parliament began electing the Lord Protector in 1660 and the office was filled at the pleasure of the people from then on.

Other monarchies in Europe were disturbed by the loss of their British cousin, and financed many of the pretenders who tried to raise armies to retake the crown, but none were successful. Indeed, the agitators were sometimes toppled by British counter-espionage tactics - the French king fell in 1684, the Russian tsar was ousted in 1692, and the Swedish monarchy was replaced by a democracy in 1704. The rest of Europe's non-democratic governments gave up after the brutal execution of Sweden's nobility, and pretenders to the British Crown disappeared in the 18th century.

In 1700, on this day victory in the Great Northern War established the Swedish Empire's supremacy in northern Central Europe and Eastern Europe after Tsar Peter I of Russia was killed at the climax of the Battle of Narva.

Death of Peter the GreatA Swedish relief army under Charles XII of Sweden defeated a siege force three times its size. And the seizure all of the defender's cannons, muskets and military supplies meant that Russia's remaining armed forces with essentially no equipment and thus powerless to prevent the subsequent Swedish advance into Poland and also Northern Germany.

Of course the loss of such a powerful monarch was a crushing blow to the Russian State. Tragically, Peter had not planned to be present at the siege, but events had forced him to hasten back to Narva just one day before the Battle.

Swedish military hegemony of Northern Europe would only be checked by the gigantic clash of empires that occured in the Great War of 1913.

In 1918, on this day Gefreiter (Private) Adolf Hitler of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment was discharged from the Paswalk Hospital, his administrative status of Kriegdverendungunfahig ("unfit for military service") made largely irrelevant by the recent and spectacular success of Ludendoff's autumn offensive.

KriegdverendungunfahigTransferred to the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment in Munich, he witnessed the beginnings of orderly demobilization of the Reichwehr.

The situation in the allied countries was chaotic. The process of internal collapse that had forced the allies to sue for terms had continued after the armistice. In Britain, Soviets were being established in northern and Scottish industrial towns, and in France, Paris was in the grip of a new commune. Former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who had first muttered "We are going to lose this war" accredited defeat less to a triumph of German arms, but rather to a "stab in the back" from anti-establishment forces stirring revolt in the working class.

As his eye-sight began to fully recover, Hitler was to observe more subtle changes in his own victorious nation. The prestige of the monarchy was shattered, and the war-time dominance of the military was set to continue long into peace-time.

Germany had attained its undeclared war-time aim of achieving world power status. But continued expansion would surely bring the country into conflict with the two world powers that had remained out of the Great War, the United States and Japan. Creating the possibility of a terrifying future war with the defeated nations in combination with those world powers. Hitler wondered if perhaps this current peace was little more than an interregnum. A prolonged armistice of two conflicts bridging a single war. It was the start of a thought process that would eventually lead to his own political awakening..

In 1938, Earth's first faster-than-sound aircraft, the Bell XF-1A, took its debut test flight.

Part Nine of Parley The XF-1A, designed by aviation mogul Howard Hughes and incorporating Martitan innovations in vehicle propulsion technology, broke the sound barrier within just a few minutes after taking off from an airfield in the California desert and would eventually reach speeds of up to 2200 miles per hour before landing at an Army Air Corps base in Nevada. The supersonic aircraft, whose existence would be revealed at a White House press conference three days later, was created in response to a War Department proposal for a tactical fighter that could fly faster than sound and intercept the long-range bombers the Germans were said to be working on with the aid of Martian militarists.

Among those who attended the press conference disclosing the XF-1A's existence was CBS Radio producer Orson Welles, who as a result of the startling turn of events which had unfolded since the landing at Grover's Mill was steadily shifting away from his former career as an entertainer to a new identity as a newsman. By the summer of 1940 he would be working almost exclusively for CBS Radio's news division.

In 1943, the mass Escape at Janowska occured on this day occured. In the outskirts of Lwów, in which had once been Poland but was then under the fascist rule of Nazi Germany, the Janowska concentration camp for labor and transit stood (pictured, Members of a Sonderkommando 1005 unit pose next to a bone crushing machine).

Mass Escape at Janowska In the early days of World War II, the corner of Poland had become Russian territory in Hitler's deal with Stalin in the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Knowing the coming persecution from the Nazis, Jews fled the western part of Poland and settled here as refugees, doubling the local Jewish population to 200,000. In 1941, Operation Barbarossa brought Germany east, and the Jews found themselves blamed under propaganda for massacres, then slaughtered and fenced like animals.

A new story by Jeff ProvineWith some 13,000 already killed by 1942, the Germans restricted the northern part of Lwów into a ghetto and began deporting thousands more for extermination at Belzec. Others were taken to Nazi SS factories established on Janowska Street, forced to work for the German war machine and live in a nearby concentration camp. Janowska evolved further into a transit and processing camp, sorting victims into usable fodder and those who would simply be exterminated.

Toward the end of 1943, the war began to turn against Germany, and the Russians moved their front westward. As the Germans fell back, they worked to evacuate prisoners to cover their war crimes of mass murder. Under Sonderaktion 1005, systematic clearing of mass graves and execution of witnesses rushed to hide what had been done. In November, evacuation began at Janowska, with prisoners forced to exhume the dead and burn the bodies in hidden fires in the woods. Meanwhile, increased numbers were sent westward to extermination at unprecedented rates.

On November 19, an uprising began among the prisoners. Uprisings had been planned before, such as those by Pilecki at Auschwitz, but none seemed to meet with any hope of success. Janowska may very well have ended as a last desperate strike until a group of men who could have escaped decided to give up their freedom to fight back. Storming the arsenal at high casualties, the prisoners were able to arm themselves and establish a fortress. In the resulting firefight would ultimately result in Nazi crackdown of the camp, but by then some 6,000 well armed prisoners had escaped. While many of them would be recaptured, a majority would fall among the Polish Underground and survive the war.

The stories of the thousands of escaped Jews, Poles, and Russians reached public ears. Minor escapes had happened earlier in the Holocaust, such as Jacob Grojanowski in 1942, which created the Grojanowski Report on the war crimes by German command. While the BBC and New York Times reported on the gassing of Jews, Allied propaganda had downplayed the plight. Jan Karski, who had given testimony repeatedly on the murderous situation, even to Franklin Roosevelt himself in 1943, worked for years to call action against the Germans without much success.

Now with the thousands of freedmen spreading word across Europe, the Holocaust became impossible to ignore. Karski used his connections to give the story greater precedence, and finally the West listened. Candlelight vigils were held in London, New York, and Hollywood, and speeches were presented before Congress and Parliament. Nazi propaganda worked to contain rumors within German borders, though increased insurrection among prisoners dragged thousands of troops from the front.

In 1944, Pope Pius XII announced the condemnation of the Holocaust by the Catholic Church. The religious implications struck many of Germany's loyal Catholics, causing a political uproar that spun Germany into civil war. With unclear battle-lines and the approach of Allied troops, many Germans simply retreated home and washed their hands of the Third Reich. The war in Europe would be proclaimed an Allied victory December 12, 1944.

In the chaos, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust would escape abroad, most eventually dragged back as the World Court sought justice. Hitler himself committed suicide while attempting to evade capture by Russian troops. Having gained political voice, the Jewish people would soon establish a new homeland in Israel in 1947 as well as cultural recognition, such as the works of journalist and novelist Anne Frank, who survived the Holocaust as a young girl.

In 1945, on this day Adolf Hitler and the Infamous Lava Man were both killed after a Schauberger "Repulsine" engine failure caused their sabotaged Haunebu-type Nazi saucer craft to crash land on approach to the secret base in New Swabia, Antarctica.
Click to watch the Nazi UFO Conspiracy on Youtube!

Farewell to the MagiciansCornered like a rat in Berlin, the Fuehrer had made a number of fantastically exaggerated claims for the secret technology with which he bought his escape from the Third Reich. And having issued upwards of a thousand emergency passports to German Scientists, the United States soon discovered that the UFO technology had been oversold, in fact like many American consumers they found the units exhibited many of the hallmarks of German products themselves, being over-featured, mostly safe but ultimately unsatisfying.

Despite his fast-talking, spittle-flying claims the Haunebu model had not transported Nazi Astronauts to the moon in 1942, rather the Repulsine engine lifted the craft just a few feet off the ground, permitting Hitler and Goering to engage in a somewhat childish if not futuristic game of bumper cars. Enraged by the double-cross, American agents had fixed the Fuehrer by sabotaging his lousy toy craft.

A new story by the EditorDespite well publicised failures at Roswell and Kecksberg, both the United States and Canada nevertheless persisted with the programme well into the 1970s, believing that the levational concept was fundamentally sound, just requiring the injection of a super fuel to accelerate flight to supersonic speeds. Finally, a suitable quantity of Element 115 was secured from aliens. Rushed to Area 51 for testing, the infinitely valuable fuel was then stolen by the pyrotechnic freak Bob Lazar who exploded the material at one of his annual Desert Storm Parties before becoming the victim of a mysterious hit and run shooting on a Las Vegas Highway.

In 2537 of Cyrus era, the "King of Kings", Shahanshah Reza Pahlavi (pictured) became the first indigenous Middle Eastern leader to officially visit the State of Israel.

State VisitPrime Minister Yitzhak Rabin greeted the Royal Party at Moshe Sharett International Airport in West Jerusalem.

Accompanied by his wife, the Empress Farah, the Shah was then driven by limousine to the Knesset where he set out his views on how to achieve a comprehensive peace to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

He said during his visit that he hoped "that we can keep the momentum in Geneva, and may God guide the steps of Premier Rabin and Knesset, because there is a great need for hard and drastic decision".

"that we can keep the momentum in Geneva, and may God guide the steps of Premier Rabin and Knesset, because there is a great need for hard and drastic decision".He made the visit after receiving an invitation from Rabin and once again sought a permanent peace settlement.

This diplomatic breakthrough had a decidedly mixed reception in the Middle East provoking the fury of nationalist Arabs. Inside of three months, Persia would be attacked by the great nation of Iraq. The new dictator in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majidida al-Tikriti had advanced plans to replace the Shah as the strongman in the Gulf. And the Soviet Union was very pleased to arm the Iraqis and create some fresh Cold War turbulence in the region.

In 1864, U.S. President Hannibal Hamlin dedicates a national cemetery on the site of the disastrous Battle of Gettysburg in July of the previous year. Dedication

The Union loss of that battle proved to be the turning point of the War of the States. News of the defeat ignited massive anti-draft riots in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and elsewhere, and was instrumental in persuading Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy. That recognition, in turn, provoked a further collapse of union morale. In December 1863, Kentucky had seceded from the Union.

At the 1864 Republican convention, with the Union war effort in tatters following the direct intervention of the British and French navies and Washington itself in Confederate hands, President Lincoln had been denied renomination in favor of his own vice-president, Hannibal Hamlin. Afterward, a dejected Lincoln had resigned and retired to his old home town of Springfield, Illinois.

President Hamlin had signed the treaty of Ontario in October, acknowledging Confederate independence. By then, Maryland, too, would have seceded from the Union. Hamlin?s overwhelming defeat at the polls on Nov. 8, 1864 by Democratic candidate Gen. George McClellan had rendered him a lame duck by the time of the dedication ceremony, but in accordance with the custom of the time, he would not leave office until the following March 4.

In 1886, on this day 21st President of the United States Chester Alan Arthur died in New York City of apoplexy, a cerebral haemorrhage and stroke. He was only fifty-six years old.

Death of President Chester A. ArthurAccording to his own account, he was born on October 5, 1829 in Fairfield, Vermont, he was the son of an abolitionist preacher. His father was an Irish immigrant and his mother came from Canada.

He was the running mate for James A. Garfield. Tragically, he wife Nell died of pneumonia on January 12, 1880 at the age of 42. And only two hundred days after inauguration, he was sworn in after the President was assassinated by Charles J. Guiteau at the Sixth Street Station of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad in Washington. Arthur never appointed a Vice President.

During his tenure, he created an impressive set of enemies that resisted his reform agenda. He was undone by the discovery [1] that he was born in Ireland and came to America aged fourteen. After his resignation, he was succeeded by the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Solomon Foot who, in act of supreme of irony, was the Senator for Vermont.

In 1965, on this day 33rd President of the United States Henry Agard Wallace died in Danbury, Connecticut.

Death of President Henry A. WallaceBorn on October 7, 1888, at a farm near the village of Orient, Iowa, in Adair County, he was the son of Henry Cantwell Wallace, a farmer, journalist, and political activist. Like his father, he was appointed US Secretary of Agriculture serving until 1940 when he resigned, having been nominated for Vice President as Roosevelt's running mate in the presidential election. Three years later FDR died, and he rose to the Presidency.

Due to the Democrat party rule of allowing a sitting President to run uncontested, he gained re-election in 1944. In his second term, he made the critical decision to use the atomic bomb .. but only for demonstration purposes. As he expected Japan surrendered anyway, and he defended the decision from a moral perspective saying that he refused to usher in a "century of fear" [1]. After the war, he immediately threw all of his energies into achieving great power disarmament.

In 1946, having eliminated the Fellowship of the Ring scene where Saruman proposes to Gandalf that the Wizards take the Ring for themselves and challenge Sauron for the mastery of Middle Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien set about introducing a dramatically modified version of the same outcome into The Two Towers.

Wizard! Part 4
LOTR, the Kick Ass EditionIn the original text, Gandalf had failed to meet Frodo en route to Rivendell because he had been imprisoned at Isengard for refusing to reveal the location of Durin's Bane. Disappointed by the slow pace of the trilogy his son Christopher had suggested that the meeting was brought forward to the earlier location in Bree as planned. Because of this fork in the plot, Gandalf is not summoned to Isengard and is thus unaware that his fellow Istari was creating his own army of Orcs and wolves, "in rivalry of Sauron, and not in his service yet" and that the green valley below Orthanc "was now filled with pits and forges".

Based on an idea from Steven FisherIn the modified final chapter of FOTR a dramatic aerial battle ensues between the Nazgûl and Great Eagles during which Frodo recovers the Ring from the Balrog but in so doing is mortally wounded with the Morgul blade by the Witch-king of Angmar. In the confusion, the Fellowship is broken, and Frodo is taken to Isengard where the Ring is seized by Saruman, Gandalf's superior as the head of the White Council.

The context of War of the Ring has now changed dramatically, with open conflict breaking out between The Two Towers of Barad-dÊr and Orthanc. The breath-taking prospect of Uruk-hai versus Mordor Orcs hugely excited Tolkien. And yet this dramatic change in the plot presented a huge challenge of the imagination. Should he persist in the course of events where Gandalf et al. travel to Edoras to try to convince the Riders of Rohan to attack Isengard - but in this case, to rescue Frodo and seize the Ring by force, if that is even possible. Or should they press on to Minas Tirith and reform a great alliance of men and Elves that combats whichever of the masters of the Two Towers that prevails?
This article is part of the Wizard thread.

In 1307, in a legendary act that seemed almost Biblical in magnitude, Albrecht Gessler, the Austrian bailiff of the Alpine town of Altdorf, set his hat atop a pole in the center of town.

William Tell Misses He ordered the townspeople to bow before it in recognition of the Austrian emperor (although, as it was his own hat and thus "crown", they may have been bowing to him). The Alps had been under the influence of various foreign ruling houses such as Savoy and Kyburg who maintained key passes for military supremacy. In 1264, Kyburg toppled, and the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph I claimed the Swiss territory as his own.

A new story by Jeff ProvineAfter decades of rule, local Swiss grumbled, and Gessler was dispatched to quell them. Many suspected that the emperor sent him there to provoke the Swiss so that an Austrian invasion would seem a peacekeeping force, but such secrets would remain behind closed doors. Gessler conducted government business with a heavy hand, staging rules to find naysayers and execute them before the rabble was roused.

While other townsfolk bowed to the hat, a hunter named William Tell walked through the square and refused to bow. Gessler had him arrested and gave him a choice: be executed outright or use his crossbow to knock an apple from his son Walter's head. Tell, an expert marksman, chose the apple. Surrounded by Austrian troops, Tell would trust his skills and play the overlord's game. If he missed, both he and his son would be executed. If he struck true, as he felt certain he would, they would be given freedom.

During the attempt, a man coughed behind Tell, breaking his concentration enough to have the arrow bury itself several inches below the apple. As Walter fell dead, Tell turned on Gessler and fired a second arrow, killing the Austrian instantly. Guards seized Tell and nearly beat him to death before their captain stopped them. Tell would be sent back to Austria and put on trial for murder.

The case at court would prove instrumental in establishing political jurisdiction over Switzerland for Austria. While the Swiss balked at their lack of freedom, the Austrian crown gradually began to assert control by giving sway in the competition for Holy Roman Emperor against the Luxembourgs. Rather than a crackdown militarily, the Austrians offered pacts to the various Alpine communities such as Uri and Berne, creating a confederation that would evolve into Austrian domination by the fifteenth century.

The uproar of the Reformation broke apart the Holy Roman Empire and spilled southward into the Alps, led before his death by Huldrych Zwingli. Seizing freedom of religion as an opportunity to seek political freedom as well, the confederation shattered and set about militarized valleys among the mountains. Guerrilla warfare pitted communities against one another and, especially, against Austrian influence. With such interruption in the south, the Swedish-backed northern Germans were able to free themselves from Roman authority early in the Twenty-five Years' War.

Switzerland would come under heavy sway in the Counter-Reformation following those violent years. Ideals of religious freedom were cast aside as heresy and disunity, and great significance was put into building up cathedrals and Catholic institutions, even to the cost of economic growth. Much of Europe would pass by Switzerland in this time, but the resilience would be recognized as the key to halting French invasion in 1798. Empowered by victories during the growth of Nationalism, Switzerland would seek independence in 1870 from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, gaining great military support from Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose unification of Italy also fought against Austrian imperialism. Finally standing as its own free republic, Switzerland would follow Italy and its neighbor Bavaria into Fascism in the early twentieth century. After the war defeated fascist thought, Switzerland would be occupied by French and American troops, eventually returned to its own elections. In 1997, Switzerland joined the European Union, hoping to gain much of the economic and technological improvement it had missed for so many years.

In 1183, on this day the Genpei War took an unexpected turn when a Minamoto force seized the Taira military base on Yashima, a small island off the coast of Shikoku.

Battle of MizushimaThe army that General Minamoto no Yoshinaka (pictured) had sent an army to cross the Inland Sea to Yashima engaged the Taira just offshore of Mizushima.

The Taira made a tactical error by tieing their ships together, and placed planks across them to form a flat fighting surface. The battle began with archers loosing a rain of arrows upon the Minamoto boats; when the boats were close enough, daggers and swords were drawn, and the two sides engaged in hand-to-hand combat. However the Taira were undone by the inflexibility of their static line of defence and the Minamoto warriors prevailed.

The victory almost certainly brought forward the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate under Minamoto Yoritomo.

In 1558, on this day Queen Mary I of England died and was succeeded by Elizabeth Tailboys, Henry VIII's illegitimate daughter born to his long-time lover Bessie Blount.

Elizabethan Era BeginsHer ascension triggered an immediate challenge from Mary's half-sister, who confusingly was also called Elizabeth (Tudor, pictured). And the resulting Civil War was therefore known as the Elizabethan Era, which of course drew to a sudden close when King Phillip of Spain's armada set sail.

The pretender's prospects of success were greatly enhanced by the clear landing zone [1] she organized. And when she finally seized the throne and threw Tailboys into the Tower of London, Elizabeth Tudor, that traitorous Spanish stool pidgeon was sarcastically labelled "Good Queen Bess".

In 1603, on this day Sir Walter Raleigh was acquitted. Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, many Catholics saw the time of transition when Scottish James I took the English throne as the chance to overthrow the Protestant government.

Sir Walter Raleigh Acquitted England had officially separated from Rome in 1534 under Henry VIII, who repeatedly fought to keep his position as head of the Church of England. The wars continued, primarily with Spain, through the reign of his daughter Elizabeth, though she would take a fairly neutral stance on Catholicism compared to Henry. The Virgin Queen had no issue, and the crown passed to her relative James VI of Scotland, who was not uniformly welcomed to the throne.

In the midst of the uneasiness, many Catholics thought that a single push would overthrow the Protestant rule of the country, and conspiracies were born. Most famous would be the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 with its close-call to the destruction of Parliament, but there would also be Bye Plot (in which Catholic priests hoped to kidnap James I to force the repeal of anti-Catholic laws) and the Main Plot both in 1603. Funded by Spain and led by men such as Henry Brooke, his brother Sir George (who would be executed after trial in the Bye Plot), and military man Thomas Grey, the plot involved raising up an army to storm London and place James's cousin Arabella on the throne. Henry Brooke, the Lord Cobham, was in contact with the court of Spain and would collect money for the plot by travelling circuitously from London to Brussels to Spain and then back to London via Jersey, where Sir Walter Raleigh was governor. As the conspiracy came to trial, Raleigh would be dragged into it.

A new story by Jeff ProvineRaleigh was familiar with scandal. He had secretly married one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton, without permission in 1591, and the couple was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Shortly thereafter, however, Raleigh was released as he was one of the leading Englishmen with knowledge of the New World and worked to divide the spoils of the captured Spanish Madre de Dios. His fortunes would bounce back, just as they had after his failed experiment with Roanoke Colony. In 1593, he was made a burgess and later elected to Parliament (sitting for three counties in 1603). The next year, he came upon the story of "El Dorado", a golden city at the headwaters of the Caroni River, a tributary of the Orinoco, and traveled to explore the northern coast of South America. Upon his return, Raleigh wrote The Discovery of Guiana and made exciting, if exaggerated, claims about his voyage. He returned to favor with exploits in battles with Spain and was named Governor of Jersey, from which he would be recalled in 1603 under suspicion of conspiracy and treason.

Cobham had given a sworn confession involving Raleigh, attempting to name names as his brother George Brooke had done turning Cobham in during the Bye trials. Raleigh denounced the evidence as "hearsay", which was outright inadmissible in common law, though it could be heard in this civil law case of treason. General Attorney Edward Coke, who was new to his position and gaining great fame as he prosecuted numerous treasonous conspirators, refused to allow Cobham to testify in person as Cobham was described by contemporaries to say "one thing at one time, and another thing in another, and could be relied upon in nothing". Coke used personal attacks such as "notorious traitor", "vile viper" and "damnable atheist" in lieu of actual evidence, and finally Raleigh was able to point out that Coke was acting simply out of desperation in his duty to prosecute by order of the king. James I recognized this, and the charges were dismissed.

Raleigh returned to his positions and completing his improvements of the Jersey defenses before pressing on with his aspirations of discovering El Dorado. He gathered investors and equipment for not just an expedition, but a colony at the delta of the Orinoco to supply further expeditions up river. Raleigh's bravado worked to his advantage in keeping the Spanish farther west and establishing an effective new Jamestown. The colony would later be governed by his son Wat after Raleigh disappeared into the jungle on one of his many expeditions and never returned. Orinoco proved a key military position between coastal Spanish Venezuela and the Dutch colonies forming to the east, many of which would be conquered in the later Anglo-Dutch wars.

Orinoco proved a fairly profitable, if non-noteworthy, plantation colony for the British Empire in the next several centuries. By the early 1900s, its vast oil fields became a valuable commodity, and since then Orinoco has been one of the richest corners of the Commonwealth, looked upon with envy by other former colonies and routinely doing well in sporting matches from its state-of-the-art national stadium, El Dorado.

In 1938, on this day suspicions that the attempt on Prof. Richard Pearson's life was part of a larger Nazi conspiracy against the American scientific community were heightened when U.S. Army intelligence cryptologists decoded a series of cable intercepts originating from the Berlin headquarters of Germany's Abwehr foreign espionage agency.

Part Eight of Parley These cables, initially transmitted to the German embassy in Washington and then forwarded to German undercover agents throughout the United States, contained detailed instructions for assassinating prominent American scientists and attacking facilities known or suspected to be associated with the overall Western research and development efforts to master Martian technology.

Interestingly enough, these cables made no mention of the Manhattan Project, suggesting the German government wasn't yet aware of its existence.

In 1973, President Spiro T. Agnew, under investigation both for his possible role in offenses relating to the June 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C.'s Watergate Hotel and for alleged bribery and kickbacks dating from his time as governor of Maryland, gave a rambling speech defending himself which was most memorable for his assurance that "I am not a crook. The President of the United States is not a crook".

Driven from Office by Eric LippsAgnew had succeeded to the presidency upon the unexpected death of President Richard M. Nixon from an aortic aneurysm on January 24, just days after Nixon had been sworn in for a second term after winning a landslide victory over Democrat George S. McGovern in the 1972 presidential election.

"I am not a crook. The President of the United States is not a crook".Later, some would argue Nixon had been the luckier one. The Watergate investigation would turn up extensive evidence of presidential misconduct, which would certainly have put him at risk of impeachment. His death in effect left Agnew holding the bag for those misdeeds. But it would be the revelations emerging from Maryland which would prove more damaging, ultimately not only forcing Agnew from office but making him the first U.S. President ever sentenced to prison. Although the prison sentence was suspended, ex-President Agnew would be fined $10,000 and would live out the remainder of his life as a political pariah, shunned even by Republican conservatives who had once looked to him to speak for them.

In 1972, speaking on Radio Kampala on this day the President of Uganda Idi Amin Dada (pictured) declared "economic warfare" by announcing a set of Africanisation policies that included the expropriation of properties owned by Asians, Jews and Europeans.

Idi Amin declares economic war on ethnic minoritiesNot only would Amin's repatriation plans for Africanization ravage the national economy, they would attempt to destroy the lives of two ethnic groups who had been born in the country, their ancestors having come to Uganda when the country was still a British colony. Yet the reactions of these persecuted minorities would be very different.

Uganda's 80,000 Asians were mostly from the Indian subcontinent, many owned businesses, including large-scale enterprises, that formed the backbone of the Ugandan economy. Amin issued a decree ordering the expulsion of the 60,000 Asians who were not Ugandan citizens and most of them held British passports. This was later amended to include all 80,000 Asians, with the exception of professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and teachers. A plurality of the Asians with British passports, around 30,000, emigrated to Britain. Others went to Australia, Canada, India, Pakistan, Sweden, and the U.S.

"In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order". ~ Idi AminSince 1903, 250,000 Zionists had settled the 5,000 square mile Mau Plateau after British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain gave a portion of British East Africa to the Jewish people as a homeland under the British Uganda Program. The offer was a response to pogroms against the Jews in Russia, and it was hoped the area could be a refuge from persecution for the Jewish people.

Recognising an unmistakeable threat to the future of the Jewish Homeland, and determined to prevent a repeat of the Russian pogroms, a special forces mission, "Operation Thunderball" was ordered by the Zionist leadership. Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan "Yoni" Netanyahu led a team of commandoes from the Israeli Defense Force who secretly landed in Entebbe Airport and drove an exact replica of Amin's Mercedes into the Presidential Compound where Yoni killed the Head of State with a burst from his Kalashnikov. Netanyahu was also shot in the raid, but survived due to the timely intervention of Dora Bloch, a 75-year-old hostage who had been seized at Mulago Hospital in Kampala with some of her doctors and nurses.

In 1989, what would later be known as the Velvet Rebellion began with the suppression if a peaceful demonstration in Prague, Czechoslovakia (pictured). Velvet Revolution Fails by Eric Lipps

That event would lead to an escalating cycle of protest and repression which would end in December with the direct intervention of Soviet military forces.

The Czech rebellion would prove to be the last straw for opponents of Mikhail Gorbachev within the Soviet military and government.

On January 2, 1990, Gorbachev would be forcibly deposed and a hard-line Stalinist government backed by the Red Army would take control in Moscow. Thereafter, the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe would be tightened once more, forestalling what might have been a peaceful end to the Cold War which could have averted the global holocaust of June 1999.

In 2008, on this day French police arrested Mikel Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina (pictured).Txeroki arrested by Chris Oakley & Todayinah Ed.

"Txeroki" is the suspected military leader of the Basque Unity Militia, a group sponsored by Spain's neo-fascist government which sought to forcibly reunite the Basque Republic with the rest of Spain, from which the Republic had seceded in 1940. The Basque news agency, Vasco Press, said that Mr Garikoitz Aspiazu, whose nickname means Cherokee, had been detained along with another suspected terrorist group member in the town of Cauterets, and the arrest was a "severe blow" to the terrorist group.

The arrest of Mr Garikoitz Aspiazu, 35, which took place overnight in the Hautes-Pyrenees region of France, follows the detention of the terrorist group's alleged political commander, Javier Lopez Pena alias 'Thierry', in the French city of Bordeaux in May. The French interior ministry did not provide any other details about the arrest, but said he was "suspected of being the perpetrator" of the murder of two civil guard officers in Capbreton on 1 December 2007, shot during a surveillance operation on suspected terrorist group members.

"This arrest shows again the resolute commitment of the French police and gendarmerie in the fight against all forms of terrorism and illustrates once again the excellent co-operation between France and the Basque Republic in the fight against state sponsored terrorism. Today Basque Unity Militia is weaker and Basque autonomy is stronger". The French statement added.