Today in history

Today is Thursday, Feb. 14, the 45th day of 2013. There are 320 days left in the year. This is Valentine’s Day.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1895: Oscar Wilde’s final play, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” opens at the St. James’s Theatre in London.

1903: The Department of Commerce and Labor is established. (It is divided into separate departments of Commerce and Labor in 1913.)

1913: Labor leader Jimmy Hoffa is born in Brazil, Ind., and college football coach Woody Hayes is born in Clifton, Ohio.

1920: The League of Women Voters is founded in Chicago; its first president is Maud Wood Park.

1929: Seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang are gunned down in the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” in a Chicago garage.

1949: Israel’s Knesset convenes for the first time.

1979: Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, is kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police.

1989: Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini calls on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” a novel condemned as blasphemous.

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: A dramatic increase in Ohio’s requirements for police office training has some Youngstown area departments turning to private police academies that are offering classes.

Youngstown Artist Bill Dotson’s work, including drawings of Bernie Kosar, “Boom Boom” Mancini and Joe Montana, will be on view in the Donnell sports gallery at the Butler Institute of American Art.

Trumbull County schools are forming a consortium for the purpose of reducing the cost of dealing with asbestos in school buildings.

1973: The Mahoning County Board of Revision turns down 38 tax appeals filed by a Cleveland firm to reduce assessed values on various commercial properties in Youngstown.

U.S. District Court Judge Joseph P. Kinneary declares Ohio’s 132-year-old law prohibiting abortion unconstitutional, saying it violates a woman’s right to privacy.

1963: The Youngstown district’s so-called “unfavorable labor climate, which has caused some firms to move away and others to avoid coming here, is not such an overwhelming problem,” says John A. Logan, president of Ajax Magnethermic Corp.

Two bandits rob the Cross Drug Store at 114 E. Boardman St. downtown, escaping with the day’s receipts of about $400.

A bill creating the Department of Industrial Development envisions a vast organization to attract industry to Ohio and create 200,000 new jobs.

1938: Trumbull County will be the first Ohio county to have complete voting by machines in the August primary after Judge Lynn B. Griffith rules that the lease contract by which the board of elections acquired voting machines is legal.

Five Youngstown district men, including the son of a Campbell policeman and the brother of a Struthers patrolman, are held in Portage county jail, charged with armed robbery in a $12 store holdup at Paris, 12 miles northeast of Ravenna.