Years Ago

Today is Sunday, Sept. 29, the 272nd day of 2013. There are 93 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1789: The U.S. War Department establishes a regular army with a strength of several hundred men.

1829: London’s reorganized police force, which becomes known as Scotland Yard, goes on duty.

1862: Prussia’s newly appointed minister-president, Otto von Bismarck, delivers a speech to the country’s parliament in which he declares the issue of German unification would be decided “not through speeches and majority decisions” but by “iron and blood.”

1907: The foundation stone is laid for the Washington National Cathedral, which would not be fully completed until this date in 1990.

1912: Movie director Michelangelo Antonioni is born in Ferrara, Italy.

1938: British, French, German and Italian leaders conclude the Munich Agreement, which is aimed at appeasing Adolf Hitler by allowing Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.

1957: The New York Giants play their last game at the Polo Grounds, losing to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 9-1. (The Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958.)

1978: Pope John Paul I is found dead in his Vatican apartment just over a month after becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.

1982: Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide claim the first of seven victims in the Chicago area. (To date, the case remains unsolved.)

1986: The Soviet Union releases Nicholas Daniloff, an American journalist confined on spying charges.

1987: Henry Ford II, longtime chairman of Ford Motor Co., dies in Detroit at age 70.

2001: President George W. Bush condemns Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers for harboring Osama bin Laden and his followers as the United States presses its military and diplomatic campaign against terror.

2005: John G. Roberts Jr. is sworn in as the nation’s 17th chief justice after winning Senate confirmation.

2003:: The White House denies that President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, had leaked CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity to retaliate against her husband, an opponent of the administration’s Iraq policy.

2008: On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunges 777 points after the House defeats, 228-205, a $700 billion emergency rescue for the nation’s financial system, leaving both parties and the Bush administration scrambling to pick up the pieces.

VINDICATOR FILES

1988: The city of Sharon and Westinghouse Electric Corp. want the federal government to speed up a decision on whether the company’s former transformer plant should be added to the Superfund list of hazardous waste sites.

Environmental agents and crime investigators are searching a wooded site in Lordstown for clues behind the dumping of 26 55-gallon drums of gray sludge that were illegally dumped at a well site.

The Trumbull Convention and Visitors Bureau wants county commissioner to increase the county’s 2.5 percent motel tax.

1973: The new North High School coach Paul D’Eramo makes his debut in City Series competition when his Bulldogs square off against Pat Ungaro’s Rayen Tigers. North wins, 12-2.

Mrs. Grace H. Butler, widow of Henry Butler who died July 21, leaves an estate appraised at $1,456,453, the bulk of which was left to her son and four grandchildren.

The Youngstown Park and Recreation Commission is told that the state will not repair the causeway fishing facility on Mahoning Avenue until it is certain that the lake level will be restored.

1963: Roy Bratton, 54, is shot and killed at the curb in front of his Wick Avenue apartment. His estranged wife walked into the police station a few minutes later, still carrying a shotgun, and gave herself up.

Metropolitan Brick Inc. announces it will shut down its brick plant in Bessemer, Pa., and will try to relocate 120 employees to the company’s Darlington operation.

Jon Koning, a junior at Youngstown University, is the new president of the university Debate Society.

1938: Freshman Week is underway in Youngstown College and the rules include wearing small caps and nametags, among other regulations.

John Penny, 40, of Youngstown was picked up as a hitchhiker near Newton Falls and minutes later was killed, along with the Cleveland driver of the car, when it went out of control and overturned on a curve west of Newton Falls.