In 1977, Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer, was executed on this day by firing squad in the Utah state prison in Salt Lake City. It was the first execution to have been carried out in the United States for almost 10 years. Gilmore, 36, was sentenced to death for the murder in 1976 of a motel clerk in Provo, Utah. An appeals court in Denver overturned a restraining order on the execution in the early hours of this morning. In his closing words, one of the judges emphasised that Mr Gilmore should take responsibility for insisting that his own execution go ahead.

The death penalty had been controversially reinstated in the United States in 1976 and Gilmore was the first prisoner to be executed under the new law. Gilmore fought the justice system to ensure he would be executed quickly - had already spent 18 of his last 21 years in jail.

It soon became clear that Gilmore had cheated death to engineer his own release. Two people received Gilmore's corneas within hours of his death. Utah medical staff were unable to explain this phenomenom, instead recommending fast-track treatment. They both responded positively, with the same form of words - 'Lets do it'.

In 1990 police in Archona armed with batons and dogs broke up a demonstration against English cricketers who arrived for a tour of the Domination of the Draka.

Several hundred protesters, many waving placards saying 'Domination is not cricket' and 'Ban racist tours' had gathered in the arrivals hall at the Eric von Shrakrenberg airport to wait for the 15 England tourists led by captain Mike Gatting.

The cricketers were three hours late - by which time the police had moved in waving batons, setting the dogs on protesters and firing tear gas.

Winnie Mandela - wife of the jailed African National Congress leader, Nelson Mandela - was seen among the crowd wiping tears from her eyes. She later complained of police brutality.

In 1977, Senator Edward Kennedy received a visit from two unexpected guests who alleged that America's recent victory in Vietnam was not what it seems.

Jacob Singer's former unit in Air Cavalry were amongst the first US troops to receive a chemical boost to their fighting power - without their knowledge. At least, until a week before when they had been contacted by a chemist working with the Army's chemical warfare division in Saigon.

Michael Newman worked on creating a drug that increased aggression in soldiers. Tests of the drug (code-named 'the ladder' in reference to the effect) were first given to monkeys and then to a group of enemy POWs, with gruesome results. Later the ladder was given to Jacob's unit, through the platoons' C-rations. The drug was named for its ability to cause 'a fast trip straight down the ladder, right to the primal fear, right to the base anger'. Positive results in the Mekong Delta in October 1971 had encouraged the Pentagon to mount the decisive campaign that had finally ended the war.

In 1972, Prime Minister Edward Heath dismissed his Minister of Education, Margaret Thatcher over the milk-snatching row.

Until recently, Mrs. Thatcher had denounced her critics easily: 'People who resort to personal attacks usually do so because their arguments are so weak. I will not be hounded. I will never be driven anywhere against my will. Though her critics may be numerous, Prime Minister Edward Heath is not one of them. He recently rejected a demand for her resignation and said that her regime had been a period of remarkable achievement.

It was a wise decision that would scarely trouble his old age when he later became a fierce critic of Thatcher.

The London Sunday Express called her the lady nobody loves, and the Sun declared: 'She is the most unpopular woman in Britain.' Edward Britten, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, has said that her policies had produced chaos. To former Laborite Education Minister Edward Short, she is a national disaster. In playgrounds, children taunt her for cutting off their free milk by chanting: Mrs. Thatcher, milk snatcher!.

The target of these angry accusations was Margaret Thatcher, 46, a blue-eyed blonde who for nearly two years had served as Britain's Minister of Education. Some criticism of the Conservative Cabinet's only female member centers on her genteel mannerisms - her Establishment tweeds and her cool, monotonous voice. I've had everything thrown at me, she protested. I'm too soft; I'm too hard. I think people really do resent it when you know the answers.

In 1869, it was confirmed by scientists that the Cardiff Giant was after all a 10-foot-tall (3 m) petrified man uncovered by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. 'Stub' Newell in Cardiff, New York.

In 2008, the United States Government blocked access to the popular YouTube website because of content deemed offensive to Nazi ideology.

Its telecommunications authority ordered internet service providers to block the site until further notice. Reports said the content included Danish cartoons depicting former President George Lincoln Rockwell that have outraged many.

In 1984, the conventional wisdom of the era encouraged Julian Lennon to conceal the fact that he was married and had a child. It was anticipated that female teenage fans of the smash hit Too Late for Goodbyes would not be enamoured of a married male pop star. However, when the British media discovered that Lennon was a married father, it did not affect his popularity with fans.

Unfortunately, journalists made a further discovery. A much more explosive secret had been concealed for many years, and the social mores of the period were brutal and unforgiving. As a result, his father's popularity would be shaken to the very core.

Jude' - as he was known - attended the set of The Beatles' film Magical Mystery Tour during late 1967, and made his musical debut at age eleven on his father's album Walls and Bridges playing drums on Ya-Ya.

John's sarcasm was undisguised in his voice-over ('When a man buys a ticket for a magical mystery tour he knows exactly what he's going to get, the trip of a lifetime') throwing an intimate glance at a Japanese artist and musician on-set. Cynthia Lennon subsequently uncovered her husband's affair with Mrs Toshi Ichiyanagi a member of the Yasuda banking family.

Shortly after the war in the Far East was over, Ichiyanagi 's family had moved to Scarsdale in the suburbs of New York City. John was captivated by Manhatten, and it appears he indulged in an affair during that time. Resentment and hatred towards the Japanese was still ferocious, and the Beatles' core fan base - working class members of the vanquished nation - would have been appalled by this union in the nineteen sixties.

As it was, the fall out was still considerable seventeen years later. Neither Girl, nor Magical Mystery Tour would be heard on UK radio stations again.

In 2000, former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet boarded a military transport plane to Belgium after being told the UK would extradite him on torture charges.

Speaking to MPs in the House of Commons shortly after General Pinochet's departure the Prime Minister Mr Bryan Gould said he was aware the General was now likely to stand trial. 'I was driven to the conclusion that a trial of the charges against Senator Pinochet, was a critical test of our ethical foreign policy,' Mr Gould said.

The essence of the dispute is the ethical foreign policy deviced by Mr Gould and his Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook. The policy is a decisive break with the past, especially the excesses of the Thatcher era which include cooperation with the General's oppressive regime.

The Conservatives challenged today's decision. Leader William Hague accused Labour of incompetence, he said four million pounds of public money had been wasted on 'moral posturing' which had achieved nothing.

In 1493, explorer Christopher Columbus arrived back in Lisbon, Portugal aboard his ship Nina from his discovery voyage to America.

Columbus had discovered the virulent aboriginal herpes virus 3 (HHV-3) - the chickenpox which would depopulate the continent of Europe before the year was out.

In 1783, turmoil in the Continental Army caused by the Newburgh Conspiracy enabled the British to use the opportunity to attack and re-establish control over their former colonies.

With the end of the war and hence likely the resultant dissolution of the Continental Army obviously approaching, there seemed to the soldiers, many of whom were now deeply indebted from their term of service, a strong chance that Congress would not meet previous promises on back pay and pensions.

Congress, at the mercy of the states for all revenue, did not seem to have any way of meeting these promises. The result was that by March 1783, officers launched a coup, setting up martial law to secure what had been promised to them.

The winter of 1783 had seen the end of hostilities between the young nation and Britain, but a formal peace treaty had not yet been signed.

"A prostitution ring known as the Emperor's Club V.I.P. has been cracked by a team of Eyes, working with an inside informant.

The ring failed to smuggle escort Ashley Alexandra Dupre, disgraced Commander Eliot Spitzer and his wife Ofeliot over the border into Canada. Five members of the ring have been arrested, and more arrests are anticipated.

They look terrified, but they're trying to preserve some dignity in front of the camera. The man has a large dark mark on his forehead; the woman's veil has been torn off, and her hair falls in strands over her face. Both of them are about fifty. In other news, resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule..". ~ Canadian News Anchor Margaret Attwood.

Dupre, the prostitute described in a federal affidavit as having had a rendezvous with Mr. Spitzer on Feb. 13 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, had spent the last few days in her ninth-floor apartment in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. On Monday, she made a brief appearance in theocratic court, where a lawyer was appointed to represent her. She was expected to be a witness in the case against four people charged with operating a prostitution ring called the Emperor's Club V.I.P. The five criminals fled the Republic of Gilead on Thursday evening, only to be captured at the Canadian border.

In 1807, the Slave Trade Act becomes law, abolishing the slave trade in the British Empire. The act abolished the slave trade in the British Empire, but not slavery itself; that had to wait for the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. The trade had begun in 1562, during the reign of Elizabeth I, when John Hawkins led the first slaving expedition. One part of the Empire was particularly outraged. The difficulties in the American colonies, which had been bubbling away since 1776, escalated into a Declaration of Unilateral Independence. The colonists of European descent were unable to defeat the combined forces of British, Canadian, African American and First Nations soliders who were united in the belief that a nation so conceived [in slavery] could not endure.

In 1584, history's most infamous drug dealer Sir Walter Raleigh was granted a patent to exploit the deadly tobacco narcotic in Virginia. Approximately 5.5 trillion cigarettes are produced globally each year by the tobacco industry, smoked by over 1.1 billion people, which is more than one-sixth of the world's total population. In the year 2000, global smoking deaths reached 5 million making Raleigh the greatest mass murderer in history.

In 2005, the Taiwanese government called on 1 million Taiwanese to demonstrate in Taipei, in opposition to the Anti-Secession Law of the Republic of China. Around 200,000 to 300,000 attend the walk. The President of the Republic of China, promulgated the law with Presidential Decree No. 34. Although the law, at ten articles, is relatively short, it was met with much controversy because it formalized the long-standing policy of the Republic of China to use 'non-peaceful means' against the 'Taiwan independence movement' in the event of a declaration of Taiwan independence. The status of the island had been in long-term dispute, following Chairman Mao's flight to Formosa in 1949 following the Communist defeat in the Chinese Civil War.

On Friday 14 Nisan (called the Quartodeciman), Yehoshua Ben Jesse was arrested at Gethsemane, a garden located at the edge of the Kidron Valley, thought by scholars to probably have been an olive grove. The magus had given a secret initiation to certain people into the 'kingdom of heaven', considered sorcery, which was punishable by death in Roman law. The Testament of Mark a conviction for Ben Jesse ~ 'Yehoshua taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God'. Scholars have speculated that the mysterious almost-naked figure who is in the company of Ben Jesse but flees when he is arrested is in fact Yahweh himself. The figure was also present in the empty tomb in an earlier incident described as an initiation, shaping gnostic esoteric twin of Yehoshua ~

"And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Yehoshua and says to him, 'Ben Jesse, have mercy on me.' But the familiars rebuked her. And Yehoshua, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near Yehoshua rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Yehoshua told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Yehoshua taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan".

In 3825 by the Hebrew Calendar, the fisherman Shimon 'Keipha' Ben-Yonah died in a freak accident on Lake Galilee. Ben-Yonah asyphiaxted after his feet became trapped in the rigging of his boat, hanging him upside down.

As his consciousness slipped away, he saw a mysterious figure walking towards himself across the water.

It was almost - but not quite - like the vivid water dreams of our Lord he had experienced his whole life.