YEARS AGO

Today is Thursday, Dec. 11, the 345th day of 2014. There are 20 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1792: France’s King Louis XVI goes before the Convention to face charges of treason. (Louis is convicted and executed the following month.)

1816: Indiana becomes the 19th state.

1928: Police in Buenos Aires announce they have thwarted an attempt on the life of President-elect Herbert Hoover.

1936: Britain’s King Edward VIII abdicates the throne so he could marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson; his brother, Prince Albert, becomes King George VI.

1937: Italy announces it is withdrawing from the League of Nations.

1941: Germany and Italy declare war on the United States; the U.S. responds in kind.

1946: The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is established.

1964: Che Guevara addresses the United Nations; in his speech, the Argentine revolutionary declares that “the final hour of colonialism has struck.”

Singer-songwriter Sam Cooke is shot to death by a motel manager in Los Angeles; he was 33.

1972: Apollo 17’s lunar module lands on the moon with astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt aboard; during three extravehicular activities (EVAs), they become the last two men to date to step onto the lunar surface.

1980: President Jimmy Carter signs legislation creating a $1.6 billion environmental “superfund” to pay for cleaning up chemical spills and toxic waste dumps.

“Magnum P.I.,” starring Tom Selleck, premieres on CBS.

1994: Leaders of 34 Western Hemisphere nations sign a free-trade declaration in Miami.

1997: More than 150 countries agree at a global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, to control the Earth’s greenhouse gases.

2004: Doctors in Austria say that Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko had been poisoned with dioxin, which caused the severe disfigurement and partial paralysis of his face.

2008: Bernie Madoff is arrested, accused of running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. (Madoff is serving a 150-year federal prison sentence.)

VINDICATOR FILES

1989:Former Major League pitcher Dave Dravecky of Boardman is honorary chairman of the Light-Up-a-Life campaign at Tod Children’s Hospital.

Fred DeLuca, former manager of the Youngstown Municipal Airport and an unsuccessful mayoral candidate in the Nov. 7 election, dies of cancer in Southside Medical Center.

Jeff Melody, 15, a sophomore at Austintown Fitch High School, will receive the Boy Scout Eagle Award at a court of honor at Boardman United Methodist Church.

1974: The Girard Board of Education votes 3-2 to not renew the contract of Superintendent Wendell Lauth, who has led the district for three years.

More than 100 people attend the opening of the Mahoning-Youngstown Bicentennial headquarters at 7 Federal Plaza West. Events are planned from late December 1975 through July 5, 1976.

1964: John S. Roberts, former Youngstowner, is elected executive vice president of the F.W. Woolworth Co. He was a Youngstown store manager in 1940.

Mrs. William H. Kilcawley lifts the first shovelful of earth as work begins on the $1.5 million student union building at Youngstown State University to be named in honor of her late husband.

Bishop Emmett M. Walsh confers youth wards on 177 Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls at St. Columba Cathedral.

1939: The Warren Library’s Bookmobile begins its second year of service, delivering books to rural Trumbull County.

A municipal stadium in Youngstown would help draw state softball and hardball tournaments to the city, says John H. Chase, director of the Youngstown Playground Association.

Catholics at every Mass on Sunday in the Youngstown Deanery renew pledges to support the Legion of Decency and the National Organization for Decent Literature and to oppose “indecent forms of public amusements.”