Today is Thursday, Jan. 17, the 17th day of 2008. There are 349 days left in the year. On this date

Today is Thursday, Jan. 17, the 17th day of 2008. There are 349 days left in the year. On this date in 1945, Soviet and Polish forces liberate Warsaw during World War II.

In 1893, the 19th president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, dies in Fremont, Ohio, at age 70. In 1893, Hawaii’s monarchy is overthrown as a group of businessmen and sugar planters force Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate. In 1917, the United States pays Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands. In 1945, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews, disappears in Hungary while in Soviet custody. In 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warns against the rise of “the military-industrial complex.” In 1977, convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, 36, is shot by a firing squad at Utah State Prison in the first U.S. execution in a decade. In 1994, a 6.7 magnitude earthquake strikes Southern California, killing at least 72 people. In 1995, more than 6,000 people are killed when an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 devastates the city of Kobe, Japan. In 1997, a court in Ireland grants the first divorce in the Roman Catholic country’s history.

January 17, 1983: Some 500 Northeast Ohio truckers meet at the Austintown Truck Plaza and overwhelmingly vote to join a Jan. 31 truckers strike to protest the 5-cent per gallon gasoline tax that will go into effect in April as part of the Highway Improvement Act of 1982.

Richard A. Tyo of Canfield, a senior engineering student at the University of Cincinnati, creates a computer system that will be on a NASA spacecraft that will be placed in orbit Jan. 25.

Five people are killed and four others are injured when a bridge on a rural road collapses near Antwerp in northwestern Ohio.

January 17, 1968: Retired Common Pleas Judge John W. Ford, 79, of 840 Old Furnace Road, dies of pneumonia in North Side Hospital after a one-week illness.

The Mahoning County Medical Society’s efforts to establish a medical school at Youngstown State University are reviewed at the annual meeting of the society at the Mural Building.

There are waiting lists at all four extended nursing home facilities certified for Medicare patients, including the Mahoning County Nursing Home, says James E. O’Brien county welfare director. The state is reimbursing nursing homes only $180 a month per patient, says O’Brien.

Spec. 4 Eugene M. Williams, 21, of Youngstown is reported killed in Vietnam, the 47th Mahoning County serviceman to die in the war.

January 17, 1958: Mayor Frank X. Kryzan officially removes Airport Manager Donald Scheetz from the city payroll and says the post will remain vacant until the city determines how to fully comply with a common pleas court order that had found Scheetz’s original appointment violated the city’s civil service law.

Several thousand people get an advanced tour of the new $500,000 Home Savings & Loan Co. branch at Hillman Way and Market Street.

St. Vincent College gives Youngstown University’s Penguins a 99-67 drubbing before some 1,000 fans at Latrobe, Pa.

January 17, 1933: Three Trumbull County lawyers are disbarred, another is suspended and a fifth is reprimanded by three judges who heard charges of “unprofessional conduct involving moral turpitude.”

Invitations to 100 Mahoning County citizens to join a citizens committee to fight vice and lawlessness are sent out by a committee appointed by the Federated Churches to organize a decency drive.

Youngstown teachers and other school employees receive paychecks that were due Jan. 6 after the district takes a $150,000 loan in anticipation of tax collection.