Years Ago

Today is Thursday, Aug. 23, the 236th day of 2012. There are 130 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1305: Scottish rebel leader Sir William Wallace is executed by the English for treason.

1775: Britain’s King George III proclaims the American colonies to be in a state of “open and avowed rebellion.”

1858: “Ten Nights in a Bar-room,” a play by Timothy Shay Arthur about the perils of alcohol, opens in New York.

1912: Actor, dancer, director and choreographer Gene Kelly is born Eugene Curran Kelly in Pittsburgh.

1914: Japan declares war against Germany in World War I.

1926: Silent film star Rudolph Valentino dies in New York at age 31.

1927: Amid protests, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed in Boston for the murders of two men during a 1920 robbery.

1939: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agree to a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in Moscow.

1944: Romanian prime minister Ion Antonescu is dismissed by King Michael, paving the way for Romania to abandon the Axis in favor of the Allies.

1962: John Lennon marries his first wife, Cynthia Powell, in Liverpool, England. (The marriage lasts until 1968.)

1973: A bank robbery-turned-hostage-taking begins in Stockholm, Sweden; the four hostages end up empathizing with their captors, a psychological condition now referred to as “Stockholm Syndrome.”

1982: Lebanon’s parliament elects Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel president. (However, Gemayel is assassinated some three weeks later.)

2002: North Korean leader Kim Jong Il makes his second visit to Russia in a year, meeting with President Vladimir Putin outside Vladivostok.

New York publicist Lizzie Grubman pleads guilty in a hit-and-run crash that injures 16 people outside a Hamptons nightclub. (Grubman ends up serving 37 days of a 60-day sentence at the Suffolk County, N.Y., jail, with time off for good behavior.)

VINDICATOR FILES

1987: Fire of undetermined origin destroys the Stambaugh-Thompson store in the Boardman Plaza and damages two adjacent stores.

Henry Guzman, a former Youngstown Hispanic leader, is named deputy director of the Ohio Department of Liquor Control.

Harold “Nick” Nichols, shop chairman of IUE Local 717 at the Packard Electric division of General Motors, says the union opposes a GM contract proposal that would eliminate employee cost-of-living adjustments.

1972: Some $8 million in cancelled checks that fell from an airplane en route from New York to Detroit are recovered on the East Side of Salem. Residents are asked to watch for more checks.

Among the pages serving at the Republican National Convention in Miami are Audrey Welty of Lockwood Blvd. and Charles Hunter of Creed Street, Struthers.

Labor for McGovern Committee is formed by 12 unions leaders from Mahoning and Trumbull counties to support the Democratic ticket of McGovern-Shriver in the November presidential election.

1962: At a cost of about $1,800 per inch, a section of the Market Street Bridge over the new arterial highway is jacked up 13 inches over seven hours so that it meets the approach road and corrects a construction error.

The bigger government gets, the more inefficient, expensive and oppressive it becomes, Ohio Chief Justice Weygandt tells the Youngstown Rotary Club at the Hotel Pick Ohio.

Warren rackets figure Tony Delsanter is charged by police with being a suspicious person and questioned about a barbut game in Campbell and the bombing death of Billy Naples. He is released after his lawyer, Eugene Fox, files a writ in Youngstown Municipal Court to show why he is being held or released.