Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is June 12, the 163rd day of 2014 and there are 202 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 !!!
It’s
A good day to thank the Lord for His Love!
Quite A Thought:
“A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive.”
– Pearl Bailey, American entertainer (1918-1990)
So, What Happened Today In 1987?
United States President Ronald Reagan challenges Gorbachev
During the (first) Cold War, in one of his most famous speeches, President Ronald Reagan challenges Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down” the Berlin Wall, a symbol of the repressive Communist era in a divided Germany.
In 1945, following Germany’s defeat in World War II, the nation’s capital, Berlin, was divided into four sections, with the Americans, British and French controlling the western region and the Soviets gaining power in the eastern region. In May 1949, the three western sections came together as the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), with the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) being established in October of that same year. In 1952, the border between the two countries was closed and by the following year East Germans were prosecuted if they left their country without permission. In August 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected by the East German government to prevent its citizens from escaping to the West. Between 1949 and the wall’s inception, it’s estimated that over 2.5 million East Germans fled to the West in search of a less repressive life.
Reagan’s challenge came during a visit to West Berlin. With the Berlin Wall as a backdrop, Reagan declared, “There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.” He then called upon his Soviet counterpart: “Secretary General Gorbachev, if you seek peace–if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe–if you seek liberalization: come here, to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Addressing the West Berlin crowd, Reagan observed, “Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.” Reagan then went on to ask Gorbachev to undertake serious arms reduction talks with the United States.
Most listeners at the time viewed Reagan’s speech as a dramatic appeal to Gorbachev to renew negotiations on nuclear arms reductions. It was also a reminder that despite the Soviet leader’s public statements about a new relationship with the West, the U.S. wanted to see action taken to lessen Cold War tensions. Happily for Berliners, though, the speech also foreshadowed events to come: Two years later, on November 9, 1989, joyful East and West Germans did break down the infamous barrier between East and West Berlin. Germany was officially reunited on October 3, 1990.
Gorbachev, who had been in office since 1985, stepped down from his post as Soviet leader in 1991. Reagan, who served two terms as president, from 1981 to 1989, died on June 5, 2004, at age 93.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On June 12 In History:
1442 – Alfonso V of Aragon is crowned the King of Naples;
1665 – England installs a municipal government in New York City;
1776 – During the American Revolution, the Virginia Convention, assembled in Williamsburg, unanimously adopts George Mason’s declaration of rights. The assembled slaveholders of Virginia promised to “the good people of VIRGINIA and their posterity” the equal right to life, liberty and property, with the critical condition that the “people” were white men. These same white men were guaranteed that “all power” would be “vested in, and consequently derived from” them. Should a government fail to represent their common interest, a majority of the same held the right to “reform, alter or abolish” the government. Virginia’s Declaration of Rights later became the basis for the Bill of Rights amended to the federal Constitution;
1849 – Much needed during the first World War, the gas mask is patented by L. P. Haslett in Louisville Kentucky;
1862 – During the American Civil War, Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart begins his ride around the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsular campaign in Virginia, after being sent on a reconnaissance of Union positions by Robert E. Lee. General George McClellan spent the spring of 1862 preparing the Union army for a campaign against Richmond up the James Peninsula. By late May, McClellan had inched up the James with relatively light fighting. But after Joseph Johnston was wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines on May 31, Robert E. Lee assumed command of the Army of Northern Virginia. In the next month, Lee began to show the gambling spirit that eventually earned him a reputation as one of history’s greatest generals. Lee dispatched Stuart, his dashing cavalry leader, and 1,200 troopers to investigate the position of McClellan’s right flank. Stuart soon discovered that McClellan’s right flank did not have any natural topographic features to protect it, so he continued to ride around the rest of the army in a bold display that exceeded Lee’s orders. His troopers took prisoners and harassed Federal supply lines. They rode 100 miles, pursued by Union cavalry that was commanded, coincidentally, by Stuart’s father-in-law, Philip St. George Cooke. The Confederate cavalry was far superior to their Yankee counterparts, and the expedition became legendary when Stuart arrived back to Richmond on June 15. The information provided to Lee helped the Confederates begin an attack that eventually drove McClellan from Richmond’s doorstep;
1864 – In the American Civil War, after suffering a devastating defeat on June 3 at Cold Harbor, Virginia, Union General Ulysses S. Grant pulls his troops from their positions and begins moving them south;
1897 – A powerful earthquake in Assam, India, triggers deadly landslides and waves, killing more than 1,500 people. The quake, with a devastating 8.8 magnitude, struck at 5 p.m. near the town of Shillong in northern India. This area is close to the Himalayan mountain range, which was formed by the Indian tectonic plate driving into the Asian plate. This interaction of the earth’s plates creates a huge fault line in the area that was prone to strong tremors. The June 12 quake was so strong that it was felt by people thousands of miles away. The area of devastation was approximately 160,000 square miles, larger than the entire state of California. The final death toll is thought to be 1,542 people;
1898 – During the Spanish-American War, Filipino rebels led by Emilio Aguinaldo proclaim the independence of the Philippines after 300 years of Spanish rule. By mid-August, Filipino rebels and U.S. troops had ousted the Spanish, but Aguinaldo’s hopes for independence were dashed when the United States formally annexed the Philippines as part of its peace treaty with Spain. In April 1898, the Spanish-American War broke out over Spain’s brutal suppression of a rebellion in Cuba. The first in a series of decisive U.S. victories occurred on May 1, 1898, when the U.S. Asiatic Squadron under Commodore George Dewey annihilated the Spanish Pacific fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay in the Philippines. From his exile, Aguinaldo made arrangements with U.S. authorities to return to the Philippines and assist the United States in the war against Spain. He landed on May 19, rallied his revolutionaries, and began liberating towns south of Manila. On June 12, he proclaimed Philippine independence and established a provincial government, of which he subsequently became head. In 1935, the Commonwealth of the Philippines was established with U.S. approval, and Manuel Quezon was elected the country’s first president. On July 4, 1946, full independence was granted to the Republic of the Philippines by the United States;
1917 – In World War I, King Constantine I of Greece, the foremost champion of Greek neutrality during the war, abdicates his throne in the face of pressure from Britain and France and internal opponents—most notably Prime Minister Eleutherios Venizelos—who favored Greece’s entrance into the war on the side of the Allies. Constantine abdicated in favor of his second son, Alexander, who reinstated Venizelos as prime minister. On July 2, 1916, Greece declared war on the Central Powers. Over the next 18 months, some 5,000 Greek soldiers would die on the battlefields of the first World War;
1924 – President Calvin Coolidge was nominated for a term of office in his own right at the Republican national convention in Cleveland. Serving as Vice President, Coolidge had become president in 1923 upon the sudden death of Warren G. Harding;
1924 – Future President of the United States, the first Bush president, George Herbert Walker Bush, is born in Milton, Massachusetts. Bush served in the Navy during World War II and survived a harrowing ordeal when his torpedo bomber was shot down over the Pacific. Bush drifted in the water for several hours until a U.S. submarine picked him up. He was later awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery in combat. After serving two terms as a U.S. representative from Texas, he served in several diplomatic and intelligence capacities, including U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (1971), chairman of the Republican National Committee (1973), chief envoy to the People’s Republic of China (1974), and briefly as director of the Central Intelligence Agency from January 1976 to January 1977. In 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan chose Bush to be his running mate; Bush went on to serve two terms as vice president. In 1988, Bush won the presidency and presided over the end of the Cold War between Russia and the U.S. and led America in the 1991 defeat of Saddam Hussein during Operation Desert Storm. In 2004, Bush celebrated his 80th birthday by skydiving and he just did it again this morning for his 90th. Bush is the father of another president, George Walker Bush, and of Jeb Bush, the two-term governor of Florida;
1931 – Gangster Al Capone and 68 of his henchmen are indicted for violating Prohibition laws. Al himself is indicted on 5,000 counts;
1939 – The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, New York;
1940 – During World War II, 54,000 British and French troops surrender to German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at St. Valery-en-Caux, on the northern Channel border, as the Germans continue their gains in France. Even after the evacuation of Dunkirk by the British Expeditionary Force, tens of thousands of British and Allied troops remained in France. Overwhelmed by the German invaders, over 3,000 Allied troops attempted to escape by sea but were stopped by German artillery fire. Surrender was the order of the day; among those taken prisoner were 12 Allied generals. Despite the British reinforcements and encouragement (Churchill flew to France himself to encourage the French leaders), General Maxime Weygand ordered the French military governor of Paris to ensure that the French capital remained an open city-that is, there was to be no armed resistance to the Germans. In short, he was pushing for an armistice, in effect, capitulation. The enemy would be allowed to pass through unchallenged. Weygand addressed his cabinet with his assessment of the situation: “A cessation of hostilities is compulsory.” He bitterly blamed Britain for France’s defeat, unwilling to take responsibility for his own inept strategies and failed offensives. Paris was poised for German occupation;
1940 – During World War II, Edsel Ford telephones William Knudsen of the U.S. Office of Production Management (OPM) to confirm Ford Motor Company’s acceptance of Knudsen’s proposal to manufacture 9,000 Rolls-Royce-designed engines to be used in British and U.S. airplanes. By the spring of 1940, Nazi Germany had conquered Poland, Norway and Denmark and pushed France to the brink of defeat. An increasingly nervous General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the United States needed to rearm in order to prepare for the possibility of a German attack on American shores. That May, Roosevelt called on Knudsen, a former Ford executive who became president of General Motors in 1937, to serve as director general of the OPM, the agency responsible for coordinating government purchases and wartime production. Knudsen had barely settled in Washington when he received an urgent appeal from the British government: The Royal Air Force (RAF) was in desperate need of new airplanes to defend Britain against an expected German offensive. Unlike other automakers, Ford had already built a successful airplane, the Tri-Motor, in the 1020s. In two meetings in late May and early June 1940, Knudsen and Edsel Ford agreed that Ford would manufacture a new fleet of aircraft for the RAF on an expedited basis. In May of 1941 the company opened a large new government-sponsored facility at Willow Run, Michigan for the purposes of manufacturing B-24E Liberator bombers for the Allied war effort. In addition to aircraft, Ford Motor plants produced a great deal of other war materiel during World War II, including a variety of engines, trucks, jeeps, tanks and tank destroyers;
1942 – During World War II, Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, receives a diary for her 13th birthday. A month later, she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis in rooms behind her father’s office. For two years, the Franks and four other families hid, fed and cared for by Gentile friends. The families were discovered by the Gestapo, which had been tipped off, in 1944. The Franks were taken to Auschwitz, where Anne’s mother died. Friends in Amsterdam searched the rooms and found Anne’s diary hidden away. Anne and her sister were transferred to another camp, Bergen-Belsen, where Anne died of typhus a month before the war ended. Anne’s father survived Auschwitz and published Anne’s diary in 1947 as The Diary of a Young Girl. The book has been translated into more than 60 languages;
1944 – Future President of the United States, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy receives the Navy’s highest honor for gallantry for his heroic actions as a gunboat pilot during World War II. The future president also received a Purple Heart for wounds received during battle. In July 1943, Kennedy and the crew of PT 109 were ordered into combat near the Solomon Islands. In the middle of the night on August 2, their boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer and caught fire. Several of Kennedy’s shipmates were blown overboard into a sea of burning oil. Kennedy dove in to rescue three of the crew and in the process swallowed some of the toxic mixture. For 12 hours, Kennedy and his crew clung to the wrecked hull, before he ordered them to abandon ship. Kennedy and the other good swimmers placed the injured on a makeshift raft, and then took turns pushing and towing the raft four miles to safety on a nearby island. For six days, Kennedy and his crew waited on the island for rescue. They survived by drinking coconut milk and rainwater until native islanders discovered the sailors and offered food and shelter. On August 8, a Navy patrol boat picked up the haggard survivors. On June 12, 1944, while he was in the hospital recuperating from back surgery, Kennedy received the Navy and Marine Corps medal for courage, endurance and excellent leadership that contributed to the saving of several lives and was in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service”;
1963 – Civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001;
1965 – In the Vietnam War, mounting Roman Catholic opposition to South Vietnamese Premier Phan Huy Quat’s government leads him to resign. The next day a military triumvirate headed by Army General Nguyen Van Thieu took over and expanded to a 10-man National Leadership Committee on June 14. The Committee decreed the death penalty for Viet Cong terrorists, corrupt officials, speculators, and black marketeers. The Catholics approved of Quat’s resignation and warned the military against favoring the Buddhists, who asked for an appointment of civilians to the new cabinet;
1967 – The Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages;
1972 – During the Vietnam War, General John D. Lavelle, former four-star general and U.S. Air Force commander in Southeast Asia, testifies before the House Armed Services Committee. He had been relieved of his post in March and later demoted after it was determined that he had repeatedly ordered unauthorized bombings of military targets in North Vietnam. Lavelle became the first four-star general in modern U.S. history to be demoted on retirement, although he continued to receive full general’s retirement pay of $27,000 per year;
1994 – Nicole Brown Simpson, famous football player O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife, and her friend Ron Goldman are brutally stabbed to death outside Nicole’s home in Brentwood, California, in what quickly becomes one of the most highly publicized trials of the century. With overwhelming evidence against him, including a prior record of domestic violence towards Brown, O.J. Simpson became the chief suspect. Although he had agreed to turn himself in, Simpson escaped with friend A.C. Cowlings in his white Ford Bronco on June 17. He was carrying his passport, a disguise, and $8,750 in cash. Simpson’s car was spotted that afternoon, but he refused to surrender immediately. Threatening to kill himself, he led police in a low-speed chase through the freeways of Los Angeles as the entire nation watched on television. Eventually, Simpson gave himself up at his home in Brentwood. Simpson’s so-called “Dream Team” of defense lawyers, including Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey, claimed before a national television audience that Simpson had been framed by racist police officers such as Detective Mark Fuhrman. After deliberating for three hours, the jury acquitted Simpson. He vowed to find the “real killers,” but has yet to turn up any new leads. In a civil trial, Simpson was found responsible for causing Goldman’s death and committing battery against Brown in February 1997, and was ordered to pay a total of $33.5 million, little of which he has paid. In 2007, Simpson ran into legal problems once again when he was arrested for breaking into a Las Vegas hotel room and taking sports memorabilia at gunpoint. On October 3, 2008, he was found guilty of 12 charges related to the incident, including armed robbery and kidnapping, and sentenced to 33 years in prison;
2004 – Gunmen firing from a car killed Iraq’s deputy foreign minister, Bassam Salih Kubba;
2004 – Former President Ronald Reagan’s body was sealed inside a tomb at his presidential library in Simi Valley, California, following a week of mourning and remembrance by world leaders and regular Americans;
2009 – U.S. television stations ended analog broadcasts in favor of digital transmission;
2009 – The United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on North Korea for its second nuclear test;
2012 – The World Health Organization concludes that diesel fuel exhaust fumes causes cancer;
2013 – The director of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, vigorously defended once-secret surveillance programs before the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying that collecting Americans’ phone records and tapping into their Internet activity had disrupted dozens of terrorist attacks;
2013 – Ariel Castro, accused of holding three women captive in his Cleveland home for about a decade, pleaded not guilty to hundreds of rape and kidnapping charges. Castro was later sentenced to life plus 1,000 years and soon after committed suicide in prison;
2013 – It was one year ago TODAY!!!
Another reason I still enjoy reading the news!
Number 37 of 50 beautiful pictures from 50 beautiful states:
Lower Kentucky Falls, Oregon
As I
A thought
God’s voice is always speaking. His witnesses give testimony to his glory, majesty, and creative grace. The universe shouts with joy that behind its intricate beauty and paralyzing powers is the One who gave it life, purpose, and intention.
Leads to a verse
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.
– Psalm 19:1-2
That brings a prayer
My God, Creator of the countless heavens and our own small blue planet, thank you for noticing the heart cries of one so small in a universe so large. I love you, admire you, trust you, and worship you with wonder. Be exalted in my life, my words, and my deeds this day. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!
