Years Ago

Today is Sunday, May 13, the 134th day of 2012. There are 232 days left in the year. This is Mother’s Day.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1607: English colonists arrive by ship at the site of what becomes the Jamestown settlement in Virginia.

1846: The United States declares that a state of war already exists with Mexico.

1861: Britain’s Queen Victoria declares her country’s neutrality in the American Civil War, but also acknowledges that the Confederacy had belligerent rights.

1917: Three shepherd children near Fatima, Portugal, report seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary.

1940: Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, tells Parliament: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

1958: Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, are spat upon and their limousine battered by rocks thrown by anti-U.S. demonstrators in Caracas, Venezuela.

1961: Actor Gary Cooper dies in Los Angeles six days after turning 60.

1981: Pope John Paul II is shot and seriously wounded in St. Peter’s Square by Turkish assailant Mehmet Ali Agca.

1985: A confrontation between Philadelphia authorities and the radical group MOVE ends as police drop a bomb onto the group’s row house; 11 people die in the resulting fire that destroys 61 homes.

1994: President Bill Clinton nominates federal appeals Judge Stephen G. Breyer to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Harry A. Blackmun.

VINDICATOR FILES

1987: Weathersfield Township trustees go to Trumbull County Common Pleas Court in an attempt to block Dundy Massacci from reopening his landfill on Austintown-Warren Road.

A three-judge panel takes only a half hour before delivering a guilty verdict in the two-day trial of John J. Eley, charged with aggravated murder in the robbery-slaying of Brier Hill grocer Ihsan Aydah.

Don Tucker, chief administrative officer of Commercial Shearing Inc., is elected president of the board of trustees of the Butler Institute of American Art.

1972: Atty. Jack H. Cohen, 52, former solicitor of East Palestine, and his wife, Kathleen, 41, are killed when struck from behind by a pick up truck as they were riding a tandem bicycle in Route 14 east of Liverpool.

Youngstown detectives launch a concerted effort to track down a suspect in the rape of a 25-year-old woman on the campus of Youngstown State University.

1962: A 37-year-old Poland man is shot and killed by his 16-year-old son in the climax to a family fight.

Joan DePiore is crowned May Queen during the 35th annual May Day festivities, that included songs by fraternity and sorority choruses and the traditional Maypole dance.

Mrs. Margaret Traylor, 73, of 453 Rice St., mother of 11 children, is honored as Mother of the Year by the Mother’s Council of W. Federal St. YMCA.

1937: The Steel Workers Organizing Committee calls a strike by 27,000 workers against Jones & Laughlin in Pittsburgh and Aliquippa, but SWOC is delaying action in Youngstown against Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. and Republic Steel Corp.

Mayor Lionel Evans is awaiting word on county tax disbursements before deciding whether he can approve pay increases of 4.2 percent for Youngstown police and firemen, which would restore the last part of the 10 percent pay cuts Evans instituted when he took office in 1935.

Youngstown traffic officers are spreading out over the city with arrest warrants for 250 motorists who have failed to pay $1 fines since Jan 1.