Years Ago

Today is Wednesday, Feb. 29, the 60th day of 2012. There are 306 days left in the year. This is Leap Day.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1504: Christopher Columbus, stranded in Jamaica during his fourth voyage to the West, uses a correctly predicted lunar eclipse to frighten hostile natives into providing food for his crew.

1892: The United States and Britain agree to submit to arbitration their dispute over seal-hunting rights in the Bering Sea. (A commission later rules in favor of Britain.)

1904: President Theodore Roosevelt appoints a seven-member commission to facilitate completion of the Panama Canal.

1936: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a second Neutrality Act as he appeals to American businesses not to increase exports to belligerents.

1940: “Gone with the Wind” wins eight Academy Awards, including best picture of 1939; Hattie McDaniel wins for best supporting actress, the first black performer so honored.

1960: The first Playboy Club, featuring waitresses clad in “bunny” outfits, opens in Chicago.

1968: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (also known as the Kerner Commission) warns that racism is causing America to move “toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”

1996: Daniel Green is convicted in Lumberton, N.C., of murdering James R. Jordan, the father of basketball star Michael Jordan, during a 1993 roadside holdup. (Green and an accomplice, Larry Martin Demery, are sentenced to life in prison.)

VINDICATOR FILES

1972: The 11th District Court of Appeals upholds Common Pleas Judge Sidney Rigelhaupt’s ruling that more than $200,000 in Youngstown street improvement assessments are illegal because of the city’s failure to follow proper procedure

Austintown Township trustees say township businesses and residents who plow snow into the street will be prosecuted.

Dr. Myron S. Malkin, a Youngstown native, is named first deputy assistant secretary of defense for technical evaluation by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird.