Today is Thursday, Dec. 18, the 352nd day of 2014

Today is Thursday, Dec. 18, the 352nd day of 2014. There are 13 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1787: New Jersey becomes the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1865: The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, is declared in effect by Secretary of State William H. Seward.

1892: Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker” publicly premieres in St. Petersburg, Russia.

1912: Fossil collector Charles Dawson reports to the Geological Society of London his discovery of supposed early human remains at a gravel pit in Piltdown. (More than four decades later, Piltdown Man was exposed as a hoax.)

1915: President Woodrow Wilson, widowed the year before, marries Edith Bolling Galt at her Washington home.

1940: Adolf Hitler orders secret preparations for Nazi Germany to invade the Soviet Union. (Operation Barbarossa is launched in June 1941.)

1944: In a pair of related rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Korematsu v. United States, upholds, 6-3, the government’s wartime evacuation of people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, from the West Coast (the decision was limited to the exclusion policy, and did not take up the issue of internment), while in Ex parte Endo, the justices unanimously agree that “concededly loyal” Americans of Japanese ancestry could not continue to be detained. (Both rulings came a day after the U.S. Department of War said it was lifting the internment policy.)

1958: The world’s first communications satellite, SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment), nicknamed “Chatterbox,” is launched by the United States aboard an Atlas rocket.

VINDICATOR FILES

1989: Three women are killed on state Route 711 in Youngstown when their car is struck head-on by a vehicle driven by a purse-snatching suspect being pursued by police and Ohio Highway Patrol troopers. Dead are Anna Marzo, 43; her daughter, Rochelle Mayer, 17, and Nancy Thomas, 19. The driver of the other car is in critical condition.

Oren Liber of Lisbon, known during his high school football days as “Scorin’ Oren,” is recovering at University Hospital in Cleveland following a heart transplant.

Longtime Republican Party activist in Trumbull County, Nettie Ashelman, is named by state party Chairman Robert Bennett to succeed the late Ruth Lindesmith as committeewoman from the 17th Congressional district.

1974: Mahoning County sheriff’s detectives are chasing down dozens of leads from phone calls about the weekend murders of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Marsh and their 4-year-old daughter at their Canfield home.

Anne Baer, 56, is killed when struck by a car while walking her dog near her home, in the 1,400 block of South Avenue, near the entrance to South Side Park.

Mrs. Robert McConnell is re-elected to a second term as president of the Florence Crittenton Home.

1964: The Rt. Rev. Alfred J. Heinrich, pastor of St. Patrick Church, dies after a fall at the rectory.

John Ozanich, foreman at Diamond Steel Co., is elected to head the Youngstown Shrine Club.

A.N. Vogt, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. district sales manager, will retire Jan. 1 and be succeeded by John H. Krick.

1939: Five new councilmen and a city treasurer, all Republicans elected in November, will transform a predominantly Democratic city administration in Niles into a Republican one after the first of the year.

Sixty members of the National Youth Administration’s school patrol are assigned to downtown duty, directing pedestrian traffic at the height of the Christmas shopping season.

Gertrude Kay, 55, of Alliance, noted author, artist and illustrator, dies in South Side hospital of injuries suffered in an auto collision north of Canfield.