Years Ago

Today is Sunday, Dec. 11, the 345th day of 2011. There are 20 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1816: Indiana becomes the 19th state.

1928: Police in Buenos Aires announce they have thwarted an attempt on the life of President-elect Herbert Hoover.

1936: Britain’s King Edward VIII abdicates the throne so he can marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson; his brother, Prince Albert, becomes King George VI.

1941: Germany and Italy declare war on the United States; the U.S. responds in kind.

1946: The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is established.

1961: A U.S. aircraft carrier carrying Army helicopters arrives in Saigon — the first direct American military support for South Vietnam’s battle against Communist guerrillas.

1972: Apollo 17’s lunar module lands on the moon with astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt aboard (to date, the last two men to step onto the lunar surface).

1981: Muhammad Ali, 39, fights his final fight, losing by unanimous decision to Trevor Berbick in Nassau, Bahamas.

2008: Bernie Madoff is arrested, accused of running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. (Madoff is serving a 150-year federal prison sentence.)

VINDICATOR FILES

1986: Mount Calvary Pentecostal Church will conclude financial agreements with the federal government for construction of an elderly housing complex after city council approves $125,000 in aid for the Market St. project.

Warren Councilman John Brown criticizes the proposed budget for 1987, claiming it contains $1.25 million for pay raises for city employees.

A Swiss company has agreed to buy the financially troubled Union Carbides Corp. in Youngstown if a labor dispute at the Southern Boulevard firm can be resolved.

1971: Steve Horanski, 54, of McGuffey Road, scheduled to appear in Municipal Court as a witness to an armed robbery, is found shot to death in a driveway alongside his Highlander Tavern.

The Rev. John J. Pallante, assistant pastor of St. Edward Church, is found dead of a heart ailment in his room at the Sheraton-Cleveland Hotel, where he had been staying on his annual Christmas shopping trip. He was 42.

1961: Two Mahoning County deputies, Andy Profanchik and John T. Raines, thwart an escape from the Mahoning County Jail by six inmates. A woman is being quizzed over a saw blade smuggled into the jail.

A 27-year-old expectant mother is shot and killed by her husband as her two small children look on. Dead is Maggie McMullen of Regent Street.

City engineer J. Phillip Richley says bridges on the Mahoning-W. Federal Street expressway will be constructed at a height to provide clearance for the proposed Lake Erie-Ohio River Canal.

1936: Thousands of Christmas shoppers, augmenting the usual rush hour crowds of the homeward bound, bring Youngstown one of its worst downtown traffic jams of the year.

Reflecting increased employment and recovery in the Youngstown district, the Mahoning County Relief Administration enters December with 2,550 single and family cases on its rolls, a drop of 115 from November.

Advertisement for The Central Store Co.: 2,000 men’s ties, valued to $1, just 59 cents; 2,400 pairs of full-fashioned all-silk hose, regular $1.15, special sale price, 88 cents.