Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is May 12, the 132nd day of 2014 and there are 233 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 !!!
Concerning the situation with Russia and Ukraine – I’m Just Sayin –
Aggressors often attack their weaker neighbors to restore a sense of pride. They calibrate self-interest not so much in getting more stuff as winning greater honor, feeling safer and instilling more fear. … We should stop trying to psychoanalyze [Vladimir] Putin, arguing that he is really weak or is an adolescent showing off his machismo — much less that he has legitimate grievances. Instead, Putin believes that the more he grabs from others, the prouder his otherwise downtrodden citizens will become, the more respect they will earn abroad, and the less likely others will fool with him. Until that is no longer true, Putin will continue.
Don’t forget, it’s Monday, so tune in to KDAZ AM730 at 12:05 p.m. today to hear our Pastor’s give us today’s ‘Message from GOD’ during ‘The World We Live In’ radio show. If you can’t get it on your radio or if you’re out of the area, there is a link on our homepage at fggam.org to listen in. More than worth your time; tune in for a GREAT listen!!!
So, What Happened Today In 1949?
Soviet Union ‘Cold War’ blockade of West Berlin is lifted
During the (first) Cold War, an early crises of the war comes to an end when the Soviet Union lifts its 11-month blockade against West Berlin. The blockade had been broken by a massive U.S.-British airlift of vital supplies to West Berlin’s two million citizens.
At the end of World War II, Germany was divided into four sectors administered by the four major Allied powers: the USSR, the United States, Britain, and France. Berlin, the German capital, was likewise divided into four sectors, even though it was located deep within the Soviet sector of eastern Germany. The future of Germany and Berlin was a major sticking point in postwar treaty talks, especially after the United States, Britain, and France sought to unite their occupation zones into a single economic zone. In March 1948, the Soviet Union quit the Allied Control Council governing occupied Germany over this issue. In May, the three Western powers agreed to the imminent formation of West Germany, a nation that would exist entirely independent of Soviet-occupied eastern Germany. The three western sectors of Berlin were united as West Berlin, which was to be under the administration of West Germany.
On June 20, as a major step toward the establishment of a West German government, the Western powers introduced a new Deutsche mark currency in West Germany and West Berlin. The Soviets condemned this move as an attack on the East German currency and on June 24 began a blockade of all rail, road, and water communications between Berlin and the West. The four-power administration of Berlin had ceased with the unification of West Berlin, the Soviets said, and the Western powers no longer had a right to be there. With West Berlin’s food, fuel, and other necessities cut off, the Soviets reasoned, it would soon have to submit to Communist control.
Britain and the United States responded by initiating the largest airlift in history, flying 278,288 relief missions to the city during the next 14 months, resulting in the delivery of 2,326,406 tons of supplies. As the Soviets had cut off power to West Berlin, coal accounted for over two-thirds of the material delivered. In the opposite direction, return flights transported West Berlin’s industrial exports to the West. Flights were made around the clock, and at the height of the Berlin airlift, in April 1949, planes were landing in the city every minute. Tensions were high during the airlift, and three groups of U.S. strategic bombers were sent as reinforcements to Britain while the Soviet army presence in eastern Germany increased dramatically. The Soviets made no major effort to disrupt the airlift. As a countermeasure against the Soviet blockade, the Western powers also launched a trade embargo against eastern Germany and other Soviet bloc countries.
On May 12, 1949, the Soviets abandoned the blockade, and the first British and American convoys drove though 110 miles of Soviet Germany to reach West Berlin. On May 23, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was formally established. On October 7, the German Democratic Republic, a Communist state, was proclaimed in East Germany. The Berlin airlift continued until September 30, in an effort to build up a year’s supply of essential goods for West Berlin in the event of another Soviet blockade. Another blockade did not occur, but Cold War tensions over Berlin remained high, culminating in the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
With the gradual waning of Soviet power in the late 1980s, the Communist Party in East Germany began to lose its grip on power. Tens of thousands of East Germans began to flee the nation, and by late 1989 the Berlin Wall started to come down. Shortly thereafter, talks between East and West German officials, joined by officials from the United States, Great Britain, France, and the USSR, began to explore the possibility of reunification, which was achieved on October 3, 1990. Two months following reunification, all-German elections took place and Helmut Kohl became the first chancellor of the reunified Germany. Although this action came more than a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, for many observers the reunification of Germany effectively marked the end of the Cold War.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On May 12 In History:
1641 – The chief advisor to Charles I, Thomas Wentworth, is beheaded in the Tower of London;
1780 – During the American Revolutionary War, after a siege that began on April 2, 1780, Americans suffer their worst defeat of the revolution with the unconditional surrender of Major General Benjamin Lincoln to British Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton and his army of 10,000 at Charleston, South Carolina. With the victory, the British captured more than 3,000 Patriots and a great quantity of munitions and equipment, losing only 250 killed and wounded in the process. Confident of British control in the South, Lieutenant General Clinton sailed north to New York after the victory, having learned of an impending French expedition to the British-occupied northern state. He left General Charles Cornwallis in command of 8,300 British forces in the South. The guerrilla warfare strategies employed by Patriots Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter and Nathanael Greene throughout the Carolina campaign of 1780-81 eventually chased the far more numerous British force into Virginia where they eventually surrendered at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. Having suffered the humiliation of surrendering to the British at Charleston, Major General Lincoln was able to turn the tables and accept Cornwallis’ ceremonial surrender to General George Washington at Yorktown on October 20;
1864 – In the American Civil War, close-range firing and hand-to-hand combat at Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia result in one of the most brutal battles of the war. After the Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-6), Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee raced respective Union and Confederate forces southward. Grant aimed his army a dozen miles southeast of the Wilderness, toward the critical crossroads of Spotsylvania Court House. Sensing Grant’s plan, Lee sent part of his army on a furious night march to secure the road junction before the Union soldiers got there. The Confederates soon constructed a five-mile long system of entrenchments in the shape of an inverted U. At dawn on May 12, Union General Winfield Scott Hancock’s troops emerged from the fog and overran the Rebel trenches, taking nearly 3,000 prisoners and more than a dozen cannons. While the Yankees erupted in celebration, the Confederates counterattacked and began to drive the Federals back. The battle raged for over 20 hours along the center of the Confederate line—the top of the inverted U—which became known as the “Bloody Angle.” Around the Bloody Angle, the dead lay five deep, and bodies had to be moved from the trenches to make room for the living. The action around Spotsylvania shocked even the grizzled veterans of the two great armies. Said one officer, “I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania”;
1870 – An act creating the Canadian province of Manitoba was given royal assent, to take effect in July;
1903 – President Theodore Roosevelt’s trip to San Francisco is captured on moving-picture film, making him the first president to have an official activity recorded in that medium. You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSZtV7SLoBc;
1918 – During World War I, the rulers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Emperor Karl I, meet to sign an agreement pledging their mutual allegiance and determining to share the economic benefits from their relationship with the newly independent state of Ukraine, one of the most fertile and prosperous regions of the former Russian Empire. One of pre-war Russia’s most prosperous areas, the vast, flat Ukraine (the name can be translated as at the border or borderland) was one of the major wheat-producing regions of Europe and was also rich with mineral resources, including vast deposits of iron and coal;
1922 – A 20-ton meteorite crashed near Blackstone, Virginia;
1932 – The body of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh’s baby is found, more than two months after he was kidnapped from his family’s Hopewell, New Jersey mansion. Lindbergh, who became the first worldwide celebrity five years earlier when he flew The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic, and his wife Anne discovered a ransom note in their 20-month-old child’s empty room on March 1. It wasn’t until April 2 that the kidnappers gave instructions for dropping off the money. When the money was finally delivered, the kidnappers indicated that little baby Charles was on a boat called Nelly off the coast of Massachusetts. However, after an exhaustive search of every port, there was no sign of either the boat or the child. On May 12, a renewed search of the area near the Lindbergh mansion turned up the baby’s body. The kidnapping looked like it would go unsolved until September 1934, when a marked bill from the ransom turned up. Suspicious of the driver who had given it to him, the gas station attendant who had accepted the bill wrote down his license plate number. It was tracked back to a German immigrant, Bruno Hauptmann. When his home was searched, detectives found $13,000 of Lindbergh ransom money. In April 1935 he was executed in the electric chair. Kidnapping was made a federal crime in the aftermath of this high-profile crime;
1935 – Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio by Bill Wilson, a stockbroker, and Doctor Bob Smith, a heart surgeon;
1937 – At London’s Westminster Abbey, George VI and his consort, Lady Elizabeth, are crowned king and queen of the United Kingdom as part of a coronation ceremony that dates back more than a millennium. George, who studied at Dartmouth Naval College and served in World War I, ascended to the throne after his elder brother, King Edward VIII, abdicated on December 11, 1936. In 1939, King George became the first British monarch to visit America and Canada. During World War II he worked to keep up British morale by visiting bombed areas and touring war zones. George and Elizabeth also remained in bomb-damaged Buckingham Palace during the war, shunning the relative safety of the countryside. After the war, the royal family visited South Africa, but a planned tour of Australia and New Zealand had to be postponed indefinitely when the king fell ill in 1949. Despite his illness, he continued to perform state duties until his death in 1952. He was succeeded by his first-born daughter, who was crowned Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953;
1957 – Race car driver A.J. Foyt (1935- ) scores his first professional victory, in a U.S. Automobile Club (USAC) midget car race in Kansas City, Missouri. A tough-as-nails Texan, Anthony Joseph Foyt, Jr. raced midget cars–smaller vehicles designed to be driven in races of shorter distances–and stock cars before moving up to bigger things in 1958, when he entered his first Indianapolis 500 race. Foyt won his first Indy 500 crown in 1961, when rival Eddie Sachs was forced to make a tire change in the final laps, giving Foyt the chance to overtake him and win with a then-record average speed of 139.13 mph. In 1989, Foyt became the first driver inducted into the brand-new Motor Sports Hall of Fame in Novi, Michigan;
1958 – The United States and Canada signed an agreement to create the North American Air Defense Command which later was renamed the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD;
1961 – During the Vietnam War, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon during his tour of Asian countries. Calling Diem the “Churchill of Asia,” he encouraged the South Vietnamese president to view himself as indispensable to the United States and promised additional military aid to assist his government in fighting the communists. On his return home, Johnson echoed domino theorists, saying that the loss of Vietnam would compel the United States to fight “on the beaches of Waikiki” and eventually on “our own shores.” With the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, Johnson became president and inherited a deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. Over time, he escalated the war, ultimately committing more than 500,000 U.S. troops to Vietnam;
1963 – Betty Miller became the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean as she landed her Piper Apache in Brisbane, Australia, having left Oakland, California, on April 30, making three stopovers along the way;
1971 – In the Vietnam War, the first major battle of Operation Lam Son 720 takes place as North Vietnamese forces hit the same South Vietnamese 500-man marine battalion twice in one day. Each time, the communists were pushed back after heavy fighting. Earlier, the South Vietnamese reportedly destroyed a North Vietnamese base camp and arms production facility in the A Shau Valley. On May 19, in a six-hour battle, South Vietnamese troops engaged the communists. Three Allied helicopters and a reconnaissance plane were downed by enemy ground fire. The fighting, air strikes, and artillery fire continued in the A Shau Valley through May 23; the South Vietnamese claimed the capture of more communist bunker networks and the destruction of large amounts of supplies and ammunition;
1975 – Following the end of the Vietnam War, the American freighter SS Mayaguez is captured by communist government forces in Cambodia, setting off an international incident. The United States response to the affair indicated that the wounds of the war still ran deep. The U.S. freighter and its 39-man crew was captured by gunboats of the Cambodian navy. Cambodia had fallen to communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge, in April 1973. The Cambodian authorities imprisoned the American crew, pending an investigation of the ship and why it had sailed into waters claimed by Cambodia. The response of the United States government was quick. On May 14, President Ford ordered the bombing of the Cambodian port where the gunboats had come from and aircraft from the Attack Aircraft Carrier USS Coral Sea (CVA-43) along with U.S. Marines were sent to attack the island of Koh Tang, where the prisoners were being held while the Fast Frigate USS Herold E. Holt (FF-1074) came alongside the SS Mayaguez and conducted the first hostile ship-to-ship boarding by the U.S. Navy since 1826;
1982 – In Fatima, Portugal, security guards overpowered a Spanish priest armed with a bayonet who attacked Pope John Paul II. (In 2008, the pope’s longtime private secretary revealed that the pontiff was slightly wounded in the assault;
2000 – 19-year-old Adam Petty, son of Winston Cup driver Kyle Petty and grandson of National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) icon Richard Petty, is killed after crashing into a wall during practice for a Grand National race at Loudon, New Hampshire. The young Petty was the first fourth-generation driver in NASCAR history;
2002 – Former US President Jimmy Carter arrives in Cuba for a five-day visit with Fidel Castro becoming first President of the United States, in or out of office, to visit the island since Castro’s 1959 revolution;
2004 – Suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk was deported from the United States to Germany;
2004 – On the second day of his Holy Land tour, Pope Benedict XVI took his message of peace to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem;
2011 – Queen Elizabeth II becomes the second-longest-reigning monarch in Britain;
2012 – A missing piece of the Mayan calendar is discovered, proving the Maya didn’t believe 2012 would be the end of the world;
2013 – Pope Francis gave the Catholic church new saints, including hundreds of 15th-century martyrs who were beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam, as he led his first canonization ceremony before tens of thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square;
2013 – It was one year ago TODAY!!!
Number 7 of 50 beautiful pictures from 50 beautiful states:
Young’s Pond, Branford, Connecticut
As I close this morning, I
And a thought
“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” Becoming a Christian means we have been liberated from law keeping. We now have God living in us through the Holy Spirit. The Spirit helps us to know God’s will and then live it. Through the Spirit’s power, we can do what no law could make us do: live up to God’s standards of righteousness. We are set free to be like God and to be with God, free from the crippling power of law, sin, and death.
Leads to a verse
There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life in Christ has set me free from the law of sin and death.
– Romans 8:1-2
That brings a prayer
My Gracious Father GOD, thank you for all of your gifts to me. Today, I want to especially thank you for liberating me from law and empowering me with your Spirit. Fill me and empower me today with your Spirit as I commit to live my life for you. In the name and by the authority of Jesus my Lord I pray. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!