May 14, 1948 : STATE OF ISRAEL PROCLAIMED:

On May 14, 1948, in Tel Aviv, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion
proclaims the State of Israel, establishing the first Jewish state in
2,000 years. In an afternoon ceremony at the Tel Aviv Art Museum,
Ben-Gurion pronounced the words "We hereby proclaim the establishment
of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel," prompting
applause and tears from the crowd gathered at the museum. Ben-Gurion
became Israel's first premier.

In the distance, the rumble of guns could be heard from fighting that
broke out between Jews and Arabs immediately following the British
army withdrawal earlier that day. Egypt launched an air assault
against Israel that evening. Despite a blackout in Tel Aviv--and the
expected Arab invasion--Jews joyously celebrated the birth of their
new nation, especially after word was received that the United States
had recognized the Jewish state. At midnight, the State of Israel
officially came into being upon termination of the British mandate in
Palestine.

Modern Israel has its origins in the Zionism movement, established in
the late 19th century by Jews in the Russian Empire who called for the
establishment of a territorial Jewish state after enduring
persecution. In 1896, Jewish-Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl
published an influential political pamphlet called The Jewish State,
which argued that the establishment of a Jewish state was the only way
of protecting Jews from anti-Semitism. Herzl became the leader of
Zionism, convening the first Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897.
Ottoman-controlled Palestine, the original home of the Jews, was
chosen as the most desirable location for a Jewish state, and Herzl
unsuccessfully petitioned the Ottoman government for a charter.

After the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, growing numbers of
Eastern European and Russian Jews began to immigrate to Palestine,
joining the few thousand Jews who had arrived earlier. The Jewish
settlers insisted on the use of Hebrew as their spoken language. With
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, Britain took
over Palestine. In 1917, Britain issued the "Balfour Declaration,"
which declared its intent to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Although protested by the Arab states, the Balfour Declaration was
included in the British mandate over Palestine, which was authorized
by the League of Nations in 1922. Because of Arab opposition to the
establishment of any Jewish state in Palestine, British rule continued
throughout the 1920s and '30s.

Beginning in 1929, Arabs and Jews openly fought in Palestine, and
Britain attempted to limit Jewish immigration as a means of appeasing
the Arabs. As a result of the Holocaust in Europe, many Jews illegally
entered Palestine during World War II. Radical Jewish groups employed
terrorism against British forces in Palestine, which they thought had
betrayed the Zionist cause. At the end of World War II, in 1945, the
United States took up the Zionist cause. Britain, unable to find a
practical solution, referred the problem to the United Nations, which
in November 1947 voted to partition Palestine.

The Jews were to possess more than half of Palestine, although they
made up less than half of Palestine's population. The Palestinian
Arabs, aided by volunteers from other countries, fought the Zionist
forces, but by May 14, 1948, the Jews had secured full control of
their U.N.-allocated share of Palestine and also some Arab territory.
On May 14, Britain withdrew with the expiration of its mandate, and
the State of Israel was proclaimed. The next day, forces from Egypt,
Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.

The Israelis, though less well equipped, managed to fight off the
Arabs and then seize key territory, such as Galilee, the Palestinian
coast, and a strip of territory connecting the coastal region to the
western section of Jerusalem. In 1949, U.N.-brokered cease-fires left
the State of Israel in permanent control of this conquered territory.
The departure of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from
Israel during the war left the country with a substantial Jewish
majority.

During the third Arab-Israeli conflict--the Six-Day War of
1967--Israel again greatly increased its borders, capturing from
Jordan, Egypt, and Syria the Old City of Jerusalem, the Sinai
Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. In
1979, Israel and Egypt signed an historic peace agreement in which
Israel returned the Sinai in exchange for Egyptian recognition and
peace. Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) signed a
major peace accord in 1993, which envisioned the gradual
implementation of Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process moved slowly,
however, and in 2000 major fighting between Israelis and Palestinians
resumed in Israel and the occupied territories.

May 12, 1949 : BERLIN BLOCKADE LIFTED:

On May 12, 1949, an early crisis of the Cold 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.

May 17 1885:

For the second time in two years,
the Apache chief Geronimo breaks out of an Arizona reservation, sparking panic among Arizona settlers.

A famous medicine man and the leader of the Chiricahua Apache,
Geronimo achieved national fame by being the last American Indian to surrender formally to the United States.
For nearly 30 years, Geronimo and his followers resisted the attempts of Americans to take away their southwestern homeland and confine them to a reservation.
He was a fearless warrior and a master of desert survival.
The best officers of the U.S. Army found it nearly impossible to find Geronimo, much less decisively defeat him.

May 18 1980:

Mount St. Helens in Washington erupts, causing a massive avalanche and killing 57 people on this day in 1980.
Ash from the volcanic eruption fell as far away as Minnesota.

May 18, 1980 : Mount St. Helens erupts

At 8:32 a.m. PDT, Mount St. Helens, a volcanic peak in southwestern
Washington, suffers a massive eruption, killing 57 people and
devastating some 210 square miles of wilderness.

Called Louwala-Clough, or "the Smoking Mountain," by Native Americans,
Mount St. Helens is located in the Cascade Range and stood 9,680 feet
before its eruption. The volcano has erupted periodically during the
last 4,500 years, and the last active period was between 1831 and
1857. On March 20, 1980, noticeable volcanic activity began again with
a series of earth tremors centered on the ground just beneath the
north flank of the mountain. These earthquakes escalated, and on March
27 a minor eruption occurred, and Mount St. Helens began emitting
steam and ash through its crater and vents.

Small eruptions continued daily, and in April people familiar with the
mountain noticed changes to the structure of its north face. A
scientific study confirmed that a bulge more than a mile in diameter
was moving upward and outward over the high north slope by as much as
six feet per day. The bulge was caused by an intrusion of magma below
the surface, and authorities began evacuating hundreds of people from
the sparsely settled area near the mountain. A few people refused to
leave.

On the morning of May 18, Mount St. Helens was shaken by an earthquake
of about 5.0 magnitude, and the entire north side of the summit began
to slide down the mountain. The giant landslide of rock and ice, one
of the largest recorded in history, was followed and overtaken by an
enormous explosion of steam and volcanic gases, which surged northward
along the ground at high speed. The lateral blast stripped trees from
most hill slopes within six miles of the volcano and leveled nearly
all vegetation for as far as 12 miles away. Approximately 10 million
trees were felled by the blast.

The landslide debris, liquefied by the violent explosion, surged down
the mountain at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour. The avalanche
flooded Spirit Lake and roared down the valley of the Toutle River for
a distance of 13 miles, burying the river to an average depth of 150
feet. Mudflows, pyroclastic flows, and floods added to the
destruction, destroying roads, bridges, parks, and thousands more
acres of forest. Simultaneous with the avalanche, a vertical eruption
of gas and ash formed a mushrooming column over the volcano more than
12 miles high. Ash from the eruption fell on Northwest cities and
towns like snow and drifted around the globe within two weeks.
Fifty-seven people, thousands of animals, and millions of fish were
killed by the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

By late in the afternoon of May 18, the eruption subsided, and by
early the next day it had essentially ceased. Mount St. Helens'
volcanic cone was completely blasted away and replaced by a
horseshoe-shaped crater--the mountain lost 1,700 feet from the
eruption. The volcano produced five smaller explosive eruptions during
the summer and fall of 1980 and remains active today. In 1982,
Congress made Mount St. Helens a protected research area.

Mount St. Helens became active again in 2004. On March 8, 2005, a
36,000-foot plume of steam and ash was expelled from the mountain,
accompanied by a minor earthquake. Though a new dome has been growing
steadily near the top of the peak and small earthquakes are frequent,
scientists do not expect a repeat of the 1980 catastrophe anytime
soon.