Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is May 11, the 131st day of 2014 and there are 234 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 !!!
A Mothers Love can only be matched by the Lord Himself !!! I pray all the wonderful mothers around the world a wonderful day today as we celebrate you! A Mother’s tasks are never-ending and so it should be Mother’s Day Every Day!!! God Bless You ALL!!!
I’m a lucky fella as I have three very precious Mom’s to celebrate on this wonderful day. My precious wife Sandy. Another in Heaven, walking side by side with Jesus as she watches over me. The other, who took on the daunting task of stepping into the role with a ‘ready-made family’ with three very rowdy boys to deal with. Looking back, I personally can’t think of stepping into a more demanding role and to do it with the care, devotion and love she has given us all is far above remarkable!!! I myself, stepped into a ready made family with my precious wife Sandy and her, (our), three beautiful children. A daunting task and I only wish I could do it as well as my mother, Harriet Stambaugh, has done!!! HAPPY MOTHERS DAY MOM; and to all the very wonderful Mom’s out there today!!! You are loved and appreciated!!! I pray you all have a wonderful day – Thank You!!!
So, What Happened Today In 1987?
Klaus Barbie, ‘The Butcher of Lyon’, goes on trial
Klaus Barbie, the former Nazi Gestapo chief of German-occupied Lyon, France, goes on trial in Lyon more than four decades after the end of World War II. He was charged with 177 crimes against humanity.
As chief of Nazi Germany’s secret police in Lyon, Barbie sent 7,500 French Jews and French Resistance partisans to concentration camps, and executed some 4,000 others. Among other atrocities, Barbie personally tortured and executed many of his prisoners. In 1943, he captured Jean Moulin, the leader of the French Resistance, and had him slowly beaten to death. In 1944, Barbie rounded up 44 young Jewish children and their seven teachers hiding in a boarding house in Izieu and deported them to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Of the 51, only one teacher survived. In August 1944, as the Germans prepared to retreat from Lyon, he organized one last deportation train that took hundreds of people to the death camps.
Barbie returned to Germany, and at the end of the war burned off his SS identification tattoo and assumed a new identity. With former SS officers, he engaged in underground anti-communist activity and in June 1947 surrendered himself to the U.S. Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) after the Americans offered him money and protection in exchange for his intelligence services. Barbie worked as a U.S. agent in Germany for two years, and the Americans shielded him from French prosecutors trying to track him down. In 1949, Barbie and his family were smuggled by the Americans to South America.
Assuming the name of Klaus Altmann, Barbie settled in Bolivia and continued his work as a U.S. agent. He became a successful businessman and advised the military regimes of Bolivia. In 1971, the oppressive dictator Hugo Banzer Suarez came to power, and Barbie helped him set up brutal internment camps for his many political opponents. During his 32 years in Bolivia, Barbie also served as an officer in the Bolivian secret police, participated in drug-running schemes, and founded a rightist death squad. He regularly traveled to Europe, and even visited France, where he had been tried in absentia in 1952 and 1954 for his war crimes and sentenced to death.
In 1972, the Nazi hunters Serge Klarsfeld and Beatte Kunzel discovered Barbie’s whereabouts in Bolivia, but Banzer Suarez refused to extradite him to France. In the early 1980s, a liberal Bolivian regime came to power and agreed to extradite Barbie in exchange for French aid. On January 19, 1983, Barbie was arrested, and on February 7 he arrived in France. The statute of limitations had expired on his in-absentia convictions from the 1950s; he would have to be tried again. The U.S. government formally apologized to France for its conduct in the Barbie case later that year.
Legal wrangling, especially between the groups representing his victims, delayed his trial for four years. Finally, on May 11, 1987, the “Butcher of Lyon,” as he was known in France, went on trial for his crimes against humanity. In a courtroom twist unimaginable four decades earlier, Barbie was defended by three minority lawyers–an Asian, an African, and an Arab–who made the dramatic case that the French and the Jews were as guilty of crimes against humanity as Barbie or any other Nazi. Barbie’s lawyers seemed more intent on putting France and Israel on trial than in proving their client’s innocence, and on July 4, 1987, he was found guilty. For his crimes, the 73-year-old Barbie was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, France’s highest punishment. He died of cancer in a prison hospital in 1991.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On May 11 In History:
1310 – Fifty-four members of the Knights Templar are burned at the stake in France for being heretics;
1330 – Constantinople (Istanbul) becomes new capital by Roman Emperor Constantine for Eastern Roman Empire;
1573 – Henry of Anjou becomes the first elected king of Poland;
1647 – Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam to become governor of New Netherland. New Netherland was a 17th-century colonial province of the Seven United Netherlands that was located on the East Coast of North America which claimed territories extended from the Delmarva Peninsula to extreme southwestern Cape Cod. The provincial capital of New Amsterdam was located at the southern tip of the island of Manhattan on New York Harbor;
1690 – In the first major engagement of King William’s War, British troops from Massachusetts seize Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) from the French;
1776 – During the American Revolutionary War, in a letter addressed to the president of Congress, American General George Washington recommends raising companies of German-Americans to use against the German mercenaries anticipated to fight for Britain. Washington hoped this would engender a spirit of disaffection and desertion among Britain’s paid soldiers. Washington surmised that If a few trusty, sensible fellows could get with them, I should think they would have great weight and influence with the common Soldiery, who certainly have no enmity towards us, having received no Injury, nor cause of Quartell [sic] from us.” Though Washington was correct in realizing that many so-called English colonists were actually German immigrants, he was apparently unaware that most Germans living in the American colonies spoke southern German dialects, and they might well be derided by the British mercenaries—Hessians from the central German territory of Hesse—if they could understand one another at all;
1812 – In London, Spencer Perceval, prime minister of Britain since 1809, is shot to death by demented businessman John Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons. Bellingham, who was inflamed by his failure to obtain government compensation for war debts incurred in Russia, gave himself up immediately;
1812 – The ‘Waltz’ is introduced into English ballrooms. Most observers consider it disgusting & immoral. (No wonder it caught on!);
1816 – The ‘American Bible Society’ forms in New York;
1858 – Minnesota enters the Union as the 32nd state on May 11, 1858. Known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” Minnesota is the northern terminus of the Mississippi River’s traffic and the westernmost point of the inland waterway that extends through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean;
1862 – During the American Civil War, Confederates scuttle the damaged CSS Virginia off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia to prevent it from falling into Union hands;
1864 – During the American Civil War, a dismounted Union trooper fatally wounds J.E.B. Stuart, one of the most colorful generals of the South, at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, just six miles north of Richmond, Virginia. The 31-year-old Stuart died the next day. The death of Stuart was a serious blow to Lee. He was a great cavalry leader, and his leadership was part of the reason the Confederates had a superior cavalry force in Virginia during most of the war. Yet Stuart was not without his faults: He had been surprised by a Union attack at the Battle of Brandy Station in 1863, and failed to provide Lee with crucial information at Gettysburg. Stuart’s death, like Stonewall Jackson’s the year before, seriously affected Lee’s operations;
1919 – Following the end of World War I, during the second week of May 1919, the recently arrived German delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference, convened in Paris after the end of the First World War, pore over their copies of the Treaty of Versailles, drawn up in the months preceding by representatives of their victorious enemies, and prepare to lodge their objections to what they considered to be unfairly harsh treatment. The Versailles Treaty was signed on June 28, 1919. Meanwhile, opposition to the treaty and its Article 231, seen as a symbol of the injustice and harshness of the whole document, festered within Germany. As the years passed, full-blown hatred slowly settled into a smoldering resentment of the treaty and its authors, a resentment that would, two decades later, be counted—to an arguable extent—among the causes of the Second World War;
1934 – A massive storm sends millions of tons of topsoil flying from across the parched Great Plains region of the United States as far east as New York, Boston and Atlanta. At the time the Great Plains were settled in the mid-1800s, the land was covered by prairie grass, which held moisture in the earth and kept most of the soil from blowing away even during dry spells. By the early 20th century, however, farmers had plowed under much of the grass to create fields. The U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 caused a great need for wheat, and farms began to push their fields to the limit, plowing under more and more grassland with the newly invented tractor. During the 1920s, wheat production increased by 300 percent, causing a glut in the market by 1931. That year, a severe drought spread across the region. As crops died, wind began to carry dust from the over-plowed and over-grazed lands. Over a period of two days, high-level winds caught and carried some 350 million tons of silt all the way from the northern Great Plains to the eastern seaboard. The dust storms forced thousands of families from Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico to uproot and migrate to California, where they were derisively known as “Okies”–no matter which state they were from. Another massive storm on April 15, 1935–known as “Black Sunday”–brought even more attention to the desperate situation in the Great Plains region, which reporter Robert Geiger called the “Dust Bowl”;
1944 – In World War II, Allied forces begin a major assault on the Gustav Line, a German defensive line drawn across central Italy just south of Rome. The Gustav Line represented a stubborn German defense, built by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, that had to be broken before the Italian capital could be taken; the attack on the line was also part of a larger plan to force the Germans to commit as many troops to Italy as possible in order to make way for an Allied cross-Channel assault—what would become D-Day. Despite the fact that the Allies outnumbered the Germans by a ratio of 3 to 1, it took seven days before the Gustav Line could be broken, with the Polish Corps occupying the famed Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino. The Germans withdrew, to the Hitler Line, but that too was penetrated. The Allies would be in Rome by June 4;
1947 – The B.F. Goodrich Company of Akron, Ohio announces it has developed a tubeless tire, a technological innovation that would make automobiles safer and more efficient;
1949 – The body of Leon Besnard is exhumed in Loudun, France, by authorities searching for evidence of poison. For years, local residents had been suspicious of his wife Marie, as they watched nearly her entire family die untimely and mysterious deaths. Law enforcement officials finally began investigating Marie after the death of her mother earlier in the year. When Marie fell in love with another man in 1947, Leon fell victim to her poisoning as well. Traces of arsenic were found in his exhumed body, as well as in the rest of her family’s corpses. But Marie didn’t let a little bit of pesky evidence get in her way. She managed to get a mistrial twice after trace evidence was lost while conducting the tests for poison each time. By her third trial, there wasn’t much physical evidence left. On December 12, 1961, Marie Besnard was acquitted. The “Queen of Poisoners,” as the French called her, ended up getting away with 13 murders;
1949 – Siam renames itself Thailand;
1960 – Israeli soldiers capture accused World War II criminal Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires;
1961 – During the Vietnam War, President Kennedy approves sending 400 Special Forces troops and 100 other U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam. On the same day, he orders the start of clandestine warfare against North Vietnam to be conducted by South Vietnamese agents under the direction and training of the CIA and U.S. Special Forces troops. Kennedy’s orders also called for South Vietnamese forces to infiltrate Laos to locate and disrupt communist bases and supply lines there;
1963 – “Puff (The Magic Dragon)” by Peter, Paul & Mary hits #2 in the charts. You can listen by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu_rItLPTXc;
1967 – The 100,000,000th land-line phone is connected in the United States. (It would still be a couple of decades before everyone walked around with a phone in your pocket!);
1969 – In the Vietnam War, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces continue to battle North Vietnamese troops for Ap Bia Mountain (Hill 937 or ‘Hamburger Hill’), one mile east of the Laotian border. The battle was part of Operation Apache Snow, a 2,800-man Allied sweep of the A Shau Valley. The purpose of the operation was to cut off North Vietnamese infiltration from Laos and enemy threats to Hue and Da Nang. U.S. paratroopers pushing northeast found the communist forces entrenched on Ap Bia Mountain. In fierce fighting directed by Maj. Gen. Melvin Zais, the mountain came under heavy Allied air strikes, artillery barrages, and 10 infantry assaults. The communist stronghold was captured on May 20 in the 11th attack;
1974 – “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield hits #7 in the charts. You can listen by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbnSsTtctTY;
1985 – Fifty people die in a fire in the grandstand at a soccer stadium in Bradford, England, on this day in 1985. The wooden roof that burned was scheduled to be replaced by a steel roof later that same week. The official inquiry into the cause of the fire blamed an accumulation of garbage beneath the stands. Most likely, the fire was sparked by a cigarette. It quickly lit the old and dilapidated structure that the formerly struggling team had just found the money to replace;
1988 – Kim Philby, a former British Secret Intelligence Service officer and double agent for the Soviet Union, dies in Moscow at the age of 76. Philby was perhaps the most famous of a group of British government officials who served as Russian spies from the 1930s to the 1950s;
1997 – IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue makes chess history by defeating Gary Kasparov, the chess champion widely regarded as the greatest who has ever lived. The Russian master conceded defeat after 19 moves in the sixth game of the tournament, losing the match 2.5 to 3.5. It was the first defeat of a reigning world champion by a machine in tournament play. Big Blue, which can analyze 200 million chess moves a second, had met Kasparov once before, but the human had been able to hold his own against the computer. Before their second meeting, Kasparov had never lost a professional chess match;
2004 – A grisly video is released on an al-Qaida-linked website showed the beheading of businessman Nick Berg, an American who’d been kidnapped in Iraq;
2009 – American journalist Roxana Saberi, imprisoned on espionage charges in Iran for four months, was freed;
2009 – President Barack Obama met at the White House with representatives of the health care industry who promised to cut $2 trillion in costs over 10 years. (I wonder how that’s workin out so far?!?);
2011 – The Tokyo Electric Power Company together with the Government of Japan agree not to cap compensation payments resulting from the Fukushima I nuclear accidents;
2013 – It was one year ago TODAY!!!
Number 6 of 50 beautiful pictures from 50 beautiful states
Maroon Bells, Elk Mountains, Colorado
To close today, as I
A thought
Be kind and compassionate — two qualities that seem to be in short supply. Maybe it’s because we hold up the wrong heroes. Unfortunately these two qualities are often seen as signs of weakness rather than strength. To forgive as God forgave us requires great courage and great strength. So let’s be strong!
Leads to a verse
Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
– Ephesians 4:32
That brings a prayer
Holy Father God, there is no way I can adequately thank you for sacrificing so much to forgive me. So this day, I pledge to be more like you: to share more of your kindness and grace with those who have wronged me. Today, I ask you to help me release all my bitterness and I ask you to bless everyone with your kindness and grace. By the power of Jesus’ example I ask this. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!
