1. Absolutely no idea - unit events are very tricky!
2. A couple of things, although it helps to know exactly what is going wrong with the event (eg. not firing, game not loading, etc....):
* Not sure if this is valid:
date = { day = 0 month = january year = 1936 }
Try changing them all to 'day = 1'.
* Also, I'm not 100% sure if you can have event choices with absolutely no effects - try adding some minor effect (eg. dissent increase or decrease....) to 'action_a' to see if it works them.