Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is April 19, the 109th day of 2014 and there are 256 days left this year where it is another Blessed Day in the pleasure of our service for our Lord here at:
For God’s Glory Alone Ministries !!!
I’d like to make note this morning that while there are many reasons for, and many reasons against, the United States and Europe getting involved in the Ukraine/Russian conflict, I am pushing neither view-point nor raising an argument for either. HOWEVER, I do ask you to read the Today In History note below concerning ‘1943’ below and take into consideration the notes discovered in Eastern Ukraine concerning ‘Jewish’ registration which is being distributed there by Pro-Russian forces. VERY CONCERNING!!!
So, What Happened Today In 1995?
Truck bomb explodes in Oklahoma City
Just after 9 a.m., a massive truck bomb explodes outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The blast collapsed the north face of the nine-story building, instantly killing more than 100 people and trapping dozens more in the rubble. Emergency crews raced to Oklahoma City from across the country, and when the rescue effort finally ended two weeks later the death toll stood at 168 people killed, including 19 young children who were in the building’s day-care center at the time of the blast.
On April 21, the massive manhunt for suspects in the worst terrorist attack ever committed on U.S. soil by an American resulted in the capture of Timothy McVeigh, a 27-year-old former U.S. Army soldier who matched an eyewitness description of a man seen at the scene of the crime. On the same day, Terry Nichols, an associate of McVeigh’s, surrendered at Herington, Kansas, after learning that the police were looking for him. Both men were found to be members of a radical right-wing survivalist group based in Michigan, and on August 8 John Fortier, who knew of McVeigh’s plan to bomb the federal building, agreed to testify against McVeigh and Nichols in exchange for a reduced sentence. Two days later, a grand jury indicted McVeigh and Nichols on murder and conspiracy charges.
While still in his teens, Timothy McVeigh acquired a penchant for guns and began honing survivalist skills he believed would be necessary in the event of a Cold War showdown with the Soviet Union. Lacking direction after high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and proved a disciplined and meticulous soldier. It was during this time that he befriended Terry Nichols, a fellow 13 years his senior, who shared his survivalist interests.
In early 1991, McVeigh served in the Persian Gulf War and was decorated with several medals for a brief combat mission. Despite these honors, he was discharged from the U.S. Army at the end of the year, one of many casualties of the U.S. military downsizing that came after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Another result of the Cold War’s end was that McVeigh shifted his ideology from a hatred of foreign communist governments to a suspicion of the U.S. federal government, especially as its new elected leader, Democrat Bill Clinton, had successfully campaigned for the presidency on a platform of gun control.
The August 1992 shoot-out between federal agents and survivalist Randy Weaver at his cabin in Idaho, in which Weaver’s wife and son were killed, followed by the April 19, 1993, inferno near Waco, Texas, that killed some 80 Branch Davidians, deeply radicalized McVeigh, Nichols, and their associates. In early 1995, Nichols and McVeigh planned an attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City, which housed, among other federal agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF)–the agency that had launched the initial raid on the Branch Davidian compound in 1993.
On April 19, 1995, the two-year anniversary of the disastrous end to the Waco standoff, McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck loaded with a diesel-fuel-fertilizer bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and fled. Minutes later, the massive bomb exploded, killing 168 people.
On June 2, 1997, McVeigh was convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy, and on August 14, under the unanimous recommendation of the jury, was sentenced to die by lethal injection. Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $200,000 for failing to warn authorities about McVeigh’s bombing plans. Terry Nichols was found guilty on one count of conspiracy and eight counts of involuntary manslaughter, and was sentenced to life in prison.
In December 2000, McVeigh asked a federal judge to stop all appeals of his convictions and to set a date for his execution. Federal Judge Richard Matsch granted the request. On June 11, 2001, McVeigh, 33, died of lethal injection at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was the first federal prisoner to be put to death since 1963.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On April 19 In History:
1539 – Emperor Charles V reaches a truce with German Protestants at Frankfurt, Germany;
1764 – The English Parliament bans the American colonies from printing their own paper money;
1775 – At about 5 a.m., 700 British troops, on a mission to capture Patriot leaders and seize a Patriot arsenal, march into Lexington to find 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waiting for them on the town’s common green. British Major John Pitcairn ordered the outnumbered Patriots to disperse, and after a moment’s hesitation the Americans began to drift off the green. Suddenly, the “shot heard around the world” was fired from an undetermined gun, and a cloud of musket smoke soon covered the green. When the brief Battle of Lexington ended, eight Americans lay dead or dying and 10 others were wounded. Only one British soldier was injured, but the American Revolutionary War had begun. The battles of Lexington and Concord were the first battles of the American Revolution, a conflict that would escalate from a colonial uprising into a world war that, seven years later, would give birth to the independent United States of America;
1782 – The Netherlands officially recognizes the United States;
1802 – The Spanish reopen New Orleans port to American merchants;
1809 – Former President Thomas Jefferson writes up a contract for the sale of an indentured servant named John Freeman to newly sworn-in President James Madison. Slavery and indentured servitude were major components of the early American economy. Slaves performed most of the manual and domestic labor on the large plantations owned by several presidents and their colonial ancestors, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Andrew Jackson. While slaves were primarily African and Native Americans, indentured servants in the late 1600s to early 1700s were frequently impoverished white men of English descent who resorted to selling themselves into servitude in exchange for room and board, and sometimes wages. The original hand-written contract for John Freeman’s sale is now housed at the Library of Congress. In the exhibit, it is noted with irony that America’s preeminent revolutionary, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the agreement on the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington, the event that launched the war to end America’s servitude to England;
1861 – The first blood of the American Civil War is shed when a secessionist mob in Baltimore attacks Massachusetts troops bound for Washington, D.C. Four soldiers and 12 rioters were killed. One week earlier, on April 12, the Civil War began when Confederate shore batteries opened fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay. During a 34-hour period, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. The fort’s garrison returned fire, but lacking men, ammunition, and food, it was forced to surrender on April 13. There were no casualties in the fighting, but one federal soldier was killed the next day when a store of gunpowder was accidentally ignited during the firing of the final surrender salute. Two other federal soldiers were wounded, one mortally;
1861 – In the American Civil War, President Lincoln orders a blockade of Confederate ports;
1876 – In the ‘Old West’, a Wichita, Kansas, commission votes not to rehire policeman Wyatt Earp after he beats up a candidate for county sheriff. Born in 1848, Wyatt was one of the five Earp brothers, some of whom became famous for their participation in the shootout at the O.K. Corral in 1881. Before moving to Tombstone in 1879, however, Wyatt had already become a controversial figure. For much of his life, he worked in law enforcement, but his own allegiance to the rule of law was conditional at best. Wyatt Earp seemed unable to control his passions or play the political game, though his propensity for solving problems with bloodshed waned as he grew older. He spent the next five decades of a long and interesting life wandering around the West, dabbling in mostly unsuccessful business ventures in gold, silver, and oil. He eventually settled in Los Angeles where he died in 1929 at the age of 80;
1897 – John J. McDermott of New York won the first Boston Marathon with a time of 2:55:10. The Boston Marathon was the brainchild of Boston Athletic Association member and inaugural U.S. Olympic team manager John Graham, who was inspired by the marathon at the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896;
1902 – The last and most powerful in a series of earthquakes rocks Western Guatemala. More than 2,000 people were killed and 50,000 left homeless by the destruction. 1902 was a record year for seismic activity and the April 18-19 quakes were not the end of it. The southern Mexican Colima volcano became active soon after, ending years of dormancy. And on October 24, the Santa Maria volcano, where the Guatemala quakes originated, erupted. The towns of the Quezaltenago region were covered with ash, which in some places reached a height of three feet;
1939 – After a slight delay of a couple hundred years and a decade or two, the State of Connecticut finally approves the Bill of Rights;
1943 – (See above);
1949 – During the (first) Cold War, at the opening night of the spring edition of the famous Moscow Circus, clowns and magicians fire salvos of jokes aimed at the United States. Although a relatively minor aspect of the total Cold War, the night was evidence that even humor played a role in the battle between the United States and the Soviet Union. On the other side of the Atlantic, American comics and entertainers were just as busily poking fun at the Soviets and communism, indicated that laughter was universally welcomed in a period when the threats of massive new world wars and nuclear holocaust hung heavy in the air;
1960 – Baseball uniforms begin displaying player’s names on their backs;
1965 – At a cost of $20,000, the outer Astrodome ceiling is painted because of sun’s glare. Unfortunately, the grass died;
1967 – In the Vietnam War, Air Force Maj. Leo K. Thorsness, from the 357th Tactical Fighter Squadron, and his electronic warfare officer, Capt. Harold E. Johnson, destroy two enemy surface-to-air missile sites, and then shoot down a MiG-17 before escorting search-and-rescue helicopters to a downed aircrew. Although his F-105 fighter-bomber was very low on fuel, Major Thorsness attacked four more MiG-17s in an effort to draw the enemy aircraft away from the downed aircrew. Awarded the Medal of Honor for his courageous action this day, Major Thorsness did not receive his medal until 1973–on April 30, 1967, he was shot down over North Vietnam and spent the next six years as a prisoner of war;
1971 – Russia launches its first Salyut space station;
1989 – Aboard the Battleship, USS Iowa (BB-61), 330 miles northeast of Puerto Rico on a training cruise, at 9:55 A.M. during the loading cycle, the center 16-inch gun in the number 2 turret exploded with an open breach, sending a blast wave into the turret that killed 47 sailors;
1993 – At Mount Carmel in Waco, Texas, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launches a tear-gas assault on the Branch Davidian compound, ending a tense 51-day standoff between the federal government and an armed religious cult. By the end of the day, the compound was burned to the ground, and some 80 Branch Davidians, including 22 children, had perished in the inferno. The FBI and the Justice Department maintained there was conclusive evidence that the Branch Davidian members ignited the fire, citing an eyewitness account and various forensic data. Of the gunfire reported during the fire, the government argued that the Davidians were either killing each other as part of a suicide pact or were killing dissenters who attempted to escape the Koresh-ordered suicide by fire. Most of the surviving Branch Davidians contested this official position, as do some critics in the press and elsewhere, whose charges against the ATF and FBI’s handling of the Waco standoff ranged from incompetence to premeditated murder. In 1999, the FBI admitted they used tear-gas grenades in the assault, which have been known to cause fires because of their incendiary properties;
1994 – The United States Supreme Court outlaws excluding people from juries because of gender;
2005 – Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, becomes the 265th pope;
2012 – At the London Book Fair, Ma Jian, Chinese author of the banned novel ‘Beijing Coma,’ puts red paint over his face and calls Chinese publishers, ‘the mouthpiece of the Chinese communist party’;
2013 – It was one year ago Today!!!
From a Lady who knows of what she speaks
Today, as I
Christ has indeed been raised, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
– 1 Corinthians 15:20-22
So, let us pray
Dear Almighty, Most Powerful God. Because of your grace and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, I know I will see you face to face. Help me now, however, to live that resurrected life being more like Jesus today than any day ever before. In the name of my risen Lord I pray. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!