Years Ago

Today is Sunday, Aug. 25, the 237th day of 2013. There are 128 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1537: King Henry VII grants a royal charter incorporating the Honourable Artillery Company, the oldest regiment in the British Army.

1718: Hundreds of French colonists arrive in Louisiana, with some settling in present-day New Orleans.

1825: Uruguay declares independence from Brazil.

1921: The United States signs a peace treaty with Germany.

1943: U.S.-led Allied troops liberate New Georgia in the Solomon Islands from Japanese forces during World War II.

1944: Paris is liberated by Allied forces after four years of Nazi occupation.

1958: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a measure providing pensions for former U.S. presidents and their widows.

1960: Opening ceremonies are held for the Summer Olympics in Rome.

1981: The U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 comes within 63,000 miles of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back pictures of and data about the ringed planet.

1985: Samantha Smith, 13, the schoolgirl whose letter to Yuri V. Andropov resulted in her famous peace tour of the Soviet Union, dies with her father in an airliner crash in Auburn, Maine.

1993: Amy Biehl, a 26- year-old Fulbright scholar from Newport Beach, Calif., is slain by a mob near Cape Town, South Africa. (The four men convicted in Biehl’s death claimed the attack was part of the war on apartheid; they were granted amnesty after confessing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.)

2003: A pair of car bombs kills 53 people in Mumbai, India.

2008: Israel frees nearly 200 jailed Palestinians in a goodwill gesture hours before U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice begins her peace mission to the region.

2009: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy dies at age 77 in Hyannis Port, Mass.

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is investigating a pipe bombing that damaged the Olympic Inn, 1129 Parkman Road, Warren.

The mother of Marcell Byers, 19, who has not been seen since July 11 when he was kidnapped from a North Side street corner, says the alleged disappearance of two men accused in the kidnapping is a scam meant to detract police.

The infant mortality rate in Mahoning County is 11.2 for every 1,000 newborns, higher than Ohio’s rate of 9.3 and the national rate of 10. In Trumbull County the rate is 10.2.

1973: A Youngstown school teacher, Richard Testa of Boardman, seeks an injunction barring the Youngstown Board of Education from enforcing a Youngstown residency requirement for school employees.

The Ohio State Medical Board grants the right to practice medicine to 462 people, including 29 from the Youngstown area.

Dr. Frank Bellino of Youngstown defeats defending champion Dr. Bill Welles of Newark to win the Ohio Seniors Golf Championship at Westbrook Country Club in Mansfield.

1963: The packaging plant of Riverview Orchids, Inc. in East Liverpool, one of the largest orchid suppliers in the eastern part of the United States, is destroyed by fire with damage estimated at $150,000 to $200,000.

Youngstown University hopes to acquire land by spring for the first of three expansion projects under the federally aided urban redevelopment program.

Meeting in Columbus, the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union adopts a program for intensive alcohol education that will be made available to the nation’s school teachers.

1938: A Vindicator reporter finds bugmen standing in doorways on East Federal Street waving their yellow receipt books and calling out “good numbers here” to passersby.

Steel production in the Youngstown district is at 44 percent of capacity, the highest in a year, with 10 of 23 blast furnaces and 20 of 43 open-hearths in production.

Warren’s Veterans of Foreign Wars Boys Band wins the national championship for the seventh time during the 39th annual national encampment of the VFW at Columbus.