Out of Control

	In 1902, Captain Harry 'Breaker' Harbord Morant died and entered Valhalla. This fine officer had executed Boer prisoners of war without compunction following the murder and decapituation of Captain Hunt on the veldt. The trial was to have long-reaching consequences. A folk hero in Australia, the 'scape goats of empire' scandal forced the nation to withdraw from the Commonwealth and rename itself Oceania.

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	In 1917, the 39th Governor of Texas John Connally was born. During the Vietnam War, Connally hawkishly urged Johnson to finish it by whatever military means necessary. He was wasting his breath, LBJ already had every intention of doing precisely that.

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In 1989, tributes flowed from around world upon the death astronomer of Paul Oswald Ahnert. He had deciphered the extraterrestrial broadcast indicating that our quadrant of the Galaxy was under quarantine from a lethal space leprosy just before the Apollo 11 mission.

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	In 1917, the 39th Governor of Texas John Connally was born. During the Vietnam War, Connally hawkishly urged Johnson to finish it by whatever military means necessary. That assertion included the assassination of John F Kennedy, and Connally's role in the conspiracy was revealed after his death in 1993. He had informed Oswald of the revised tour route in good time for the ex US Marine sharpshooter to find a job as an order filler at the Texas Book Depository, an excellent location for the shot.

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In 1933, Germany's parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, was set on fire by agents provocateurs of the Nazi Party. The plan backfired as Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering were killed in the blaze.

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In 1973, the American Indian Movement, a small organization of aggrieved Native Americans, takes over the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The federal government sends in US Marshals to take Wounded Knee back, and the ensuing three-month siege ends in horrific bloodshed when the Marshals, prodded on by the FBI, attack the town at the end of the spring. Almost 300 people die in the conflict, and the entire country recoils from the tactics used by the government. Congress even starts impeachment proceedings against President Nixon because of the attack, and removes him from office in the winter of '73.

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In 1997, Robin Dennell from the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Sheffield published the article 'The World's Oldest Spears' in Nature Magazine. Humans of 400,000 years ago were sophisticated big-game hunters. Complete hunting spears discovered in a German coal-mine puncture the idea that these people hadn't the technology or foresight to hunt systematically. One mystery remains. Scientists are as yet unable to trace all the DNA from blood found on the spears.

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In 1033 AUC, Emperor Constantine of Rome was born in Naissus. While emperor, he flirted with the possibility of joining the cult of Christos, a Judean messianic religion that had gained a few converts in Rome, but felt that the restriction of worshipping only one god was too harsh.

	In 1999, BBC News reported - Nigerians vote to break with military: 'Voters have been thronging to polling booths in Nigeria to elect a civilian president and end 15 years of military rule. Queues formed at polling stations soon after they opened for registration. On some street corners groups of exuberant young men shared bottles of palm wine, singing and chanting party slogans. In the cities of Lagos and Abuja, the turnout is reported to be higher than for parliamentary elections last weekend. Up to 40 million Nigerians are expected to cast ballots in a contest between former military ruler Olusegun Obasanjo, who relinquished power for the last elected president in 1979, and former finance minister Olu Falae. The vote is being closely monitored by foreign observers.

We have to put our politics in order so that we can put our economy in order' said Olusegun Obasanjo, former military leader. Trouble was, by the end of his second term the economy as far from in order. Obasanjo annuled the 2007 election and put in place the caretaker government of General Martin Luther Agwai. 'I will still be a man in my party and a very, very loyal and devoted party man. I cannot say goodbye to politics. I will be the chairman of the board of trustees of the party.' explained Obasanjo in his new back-seat driving role.

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	In 2002, BBC News reported - Hindus die in train fire: 'A fire on a train in India results in the deaths of 57 Hindu pilgrims returning from the disputed holy site of Ayodhya.' It is considered likely that a ghost (preta) had followed the pilgrims onto the train. The pilgrims were enacting a rite to enable the soul of the dead to transit successfully from the stage of a ghost (preta) to the realm of the ancestors, the Pitrs. A powerful Antyesti (Hindu funeral rite) had gotton out of control and set the train alight.

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	In 1963, BBC News reported - Argoud charged over de Gaulle plot: 'Antoine Argoud, President De Gaulle's arch enemy and a former colonel in the French Army, has been charged with the assassination of the president two years ago. Argoud was, until now, the only active member of the Algerian Secret Army (OAS) , an organisation opposed to Algerian independence that has used violent methods to promote its cause. He was found by police yesterday tied up and badly bruised in the back of a blue van in central Paris after a tip-off. He claims he was kidnapped from Munich, Germany, by the French secret service, known as Les Barbouzes (the Bearded Ones).

But the man who phoned police about Argoud's whereabouts claimed to be a member of the OAS. He told the police: 'Argoud has betrayed us. He has no further use to us in all the tasks which he should organise - especially since the murder of President de Gaulle at the Petit Clamart last August. 'You can pick him up now. He is very near you.' The blue van was found just yards from the Quai des Orfevres, the French equivalent of Scotland Yard.

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Ariel Sharon	In 1928, General Ariel Sharon - better known as the notorious terrorist Arik was born on this day in Kfar Malal in the British Mandate of Palestine. Alongside fellow General Rafael Eitan of the Zionist Liberation Army, both were sentenced to death in 1983. The court found that Mr Sharon was indirectly but personally to blame for the massacres of more than 800 people in the Sabra and Shatila villages near Beirut in 1982.
The terrorist Arik

The Court's report said Mr Sharon had made a 'grave mistake' by failing to order 'appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre of innocents' by his allies in the Phalange Christian militia. Mr Sharon's defence lawyer said that because he had no knowledge of what would happen when ZLA irregular troops allowed the militia into the camps, he could not be held to account.

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Love and Hatred

Bombing	In 1945, BBC News reported: Thousands of bombs destroy Dresden: 'British and US bombers have dropped hundreds of thousands of explosives on the German city of Dresden. The city is reported to be a vital command centre for the German defence against Soviet forces approaching from the east. Last 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. As soon as one part of the city was alight, the bombers went for another until the whole of Dresden was ablaze.'
Dresden

Amongst the dead was a twenty-two year old American GI, Kurt Vonnegut. A man of German descent, he had been transferred to Slaughterhouse-Five, a nearby prisoner of war camp. Vonnegut and his colleagues had been hiding below ground, but were killed when the ceiling collapsed from the shock waves of the bombing. And so it goes.

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In 1968, astronomer Paul Oswald Ahnert deciphered an extraterrestrial broadcast indicating that our quadrant of the Galaxy was under quarantine from a lethal space leprosy. At first his warnings were ignored, however reconsideration was duly given when returning Lunar Module Pilot Colonel Buzz Eugene Aldrin lifted his visor at the splashdown point, east of Wake Island on July 24 1969.

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In 1779, during his third exploratory voyage in the Pacific Captain James Cook narrowly escaped death at the hand of natives of the Sandwich Islands. He had mistakenly returned to Hawaii in the season dedicated to Ku, god of war, inadvertently upset the equilibrium and fostered an atmosphere of resentment and aggression from the local population.

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In 1956, Malcolm Little received parole and was released from Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown. A dangerous criminal, Little had avoided the draft by telling the examining officer that he could not wait to organize with other black soldiers so he could 'kill some crackers.' Incarcerated for a decade, there was a lot of catch-up to be done.

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In 1956, at the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow, Premier Nikita Khruschev revealed than Lenin was a shape-shifting Vampire. A number of strokes in the 1920s forced the undead nosferatu to possess the body of Comrade Stalin to permit him to continue his misrule. He had even maintained his corpse in a Kremlin mausoleum just in case a Dracula style exit was necessary.

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In 269, Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage for young men, in order to make them a better pool to draft soldiers from. The Christian cleric Valentius was known for his defiance of Rome, and many young couples came to him in order to wed. Valentius performed the ceremonies gladly until the local centurion told him that he would be executed after the next one. Valentius relented, but the decree was rescinded in 271 after Claudius' death, anyway, so nothing ever really came of it.

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In, 47421 BCE, Telka the Speaker is wooed by and mated with the father of her first children, the man she names Komar. She learns to count the days in a year by the anniversary of this day each year that she was with him. His love for her led him to throw himself in front of a boar that was charging her; although he saved her and killed the boar, he died from injuries he received. Telka made sure that each of her descendants celebrated this day out of her love for him.

In 498, Pope Gelasius names this day the Feast of Saint Valentine. In his honor, prisoners across the land were given a meal of ox-hearts and red wine, to signify the blood that the saint had shed while a prisoner of the pagan Romans. The traditional feast of hearts and wine continues to this day across Christendom, although the practice has spread from the jailhouse to all those who might need a prayer for more freedom.

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In 2021, a rare form of cosmic radiation enters Earth's atmosphere, concentrated in and around Chicago. 99.9% of the city only feels a slight tingling, but one man, Eddie Valens, finds his reflexes and running speed amplified tenfold - plus, he is now able to evoke feelings of love and peace in nearly anyone with but a word. Putting these two together, and donning a pink costume, Eddie takes the name Saint Valentine and proceeds to fight crime in Chicago for nearly a decade as one of the only real superheroes in the 21st century.

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On February 14, 2003, a group of high ranking Iraqi generals, fearing the disastrous effects of U:S. invasion stage a coup. They know that Sadam as a sentimental guy would be distracted at big party for his family. The succeed in killing their President and his sons. The new junta is composed of Sunni Baathists, but they extend the hand of friendship to the world community and invite weapons inspectors. What would the last half of a decade have brought to Iraq ?

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In 1965, the Soviet States of America bans the unofficial Valentines Day holiday. Comrade Representative O'Hare of Chicago, in her statement calling for the ban, said, 'No other holiday so cheapens the idea of romantic love, or saps the will to fight of our comrades in the street, as this so-called Valentines Day.'

In 1167 AUC, the Lupercalia Festival is finally made a separate holiday from the festival celebrating the founding of Rome. This festival of ritual matchmaking, popular for hundreds of years, was certainly the highlight of the 2-day celebration at the ides of February, and most Romans felt that it deserved separation from the more staid founding ceremony.

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Alexander	In 1974, Soviet authorities executed Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Two days before, Mr Solzhenitsyn was arrested in his wife's Moscow flat and taken away for questioning by the Soviet secret police, the KGB. His charge, under Article 64 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code, was punishable with death by firing squad or a minimum of ten years in prison along with confiscation of property.
Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn had been under investigation for six weeks after his novel Gulag Archipelago depicting life in the labour camps was published in the West. He had already spent a total of ten years in prison under Stalin for his dissident writings.

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