YEARS AGO

Today is Friday, April 24, the 114th day of 2015. There are 251 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1898: Spain declares war on the United States. (The United States responded in kind the next day.)

1915: What’s regarded as the start of the Armenian genocide begins as the Ottoman Empire rounds up Armenian political and cultural leaders in Constantinople.

1916: Some 1,600 Irish nationalists launch the Easter Rising by seizing several key sites in Dublin. (The rising was put down by British forces almost a week later.)

1932: In the Free State of Prussia, the Nazi Party gains a plurality of seats in parliamentary elections.

1953: British statesman Winston Churchill is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

1962: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology achieves the first satellite relay of a television signal, using NASA’s Echo 1 balloon satellite to bounce a video image from Camp Parks, Calif., to Westford, Mass.

1970: The People’s Republic of China launches its first satellite, which keeps transmitting a song, “The East Is Red.”

1980: The United States launches an unsuccessful attempt to free the American hostages in Iran, a mission that results in the deaths of eight U.S. servicemen.

1990: The space shuttle Discovery blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., carrying the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope.

1995: The final bomb linked to the Unabomber explodes inside the Sacramento, Calif., offices of a lobbying group for the wood products industry, killing chief lobbyist Gilbert B. Murray. (Theodore Kaczynski was later sentenced to four lifetimes in prison for a series of bombings that killed three men and injured 29 others.)

2005: Pope Benedict XVI formally begins his stewardship of the Roman Catholic Church; the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger says in his installation homily that as pontiff he will listen to the will of God in governing the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics.

South Korean scientists succeed in cloning a dog as an Afghan hound puppy named “Snuppy” is born.

Former Israeli President Ezer Weizman dies in Caesarea, Israel, at age 80.

2010: The policy-setting panel of the International Monetary Fund, with a nervous eye on Greece, pledges during a meeting in Washington to address the risks posed to the global recovery from high government debt.

A dozen people are killed by a tornado system that bumps down in Louisiana before plowing into Mississippi and then Alabama.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: Boardman township trustees demote William Walter from police chief to detective-lieutenant and name Capt. Glenn Bowers the acting chief. Bower has been outspoken at recent meetings, criticizing, among other things, the use of Police Department money to purchase a car for the township administrator.

The Salem Board of Education will receive a gift of 65 acres of farm land near Southeast Elementary School from the Salem Community Foundation.

A proposal for universal health insurance for Ohioans has little chance for passage in 1990, its supporters in the Legislature concede.

1975: Charles B. Cushwa Jr., 65, of 250 Tod Lane, chairman of the board of Commercial Shearing Inc., dies at his home. He had been in declining health since resigning as president.

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. will spend $40 million for new Youngstown district air-pollution control facilities as a result of an agreement announced by the company and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

The city of Youngstown notifies Mahoning County commissioners that the surcharge on water sold to suburban areas will be increased from 25 percent to 33 or 35 percent.

1965: A violent explosion at a Republic Steel Corp.’s blast furnace near Center Street rocks the downtown area, sending a huge cloud of reddish brown dust into the air.

Some 250 students conduct a sit-in outside the office of Ohio State University President Novice G. Fawcett to protest a rule limiting appearances by controversial speakers on campus.

Youngstown Bishop Emmet M. Walsh grants permission for 13 newly baptized adults to receive communion in both bread and wine during a mass at St. Columba Cathedral, a first for a Roman Catholic Church of the Latin Rite in Youngstown.

1940: Mahoning County Common Pleas Judge J.H.C. Lyon discusses the Beaver-Mahoning canal from a military standpoint and argues that its construction would aid America in any future conflict.

More than 3,000 people attend opening day of the Youngstown Home Show at the Rayen-Wood Auditorium.

Fletcher Hodges Jr., curator of the Foster Memorial Hall at the University of Pittsburgh, tells the Trumbull Historical Society that Stephen Collins Foster wrote his famous “Old Folks at Home” while staying at the Gaskill House at Main Avenue and South Street in Warren in 1860.