YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Monday, Dec. 7, the 341st day of 2015. There are 24 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

43 B.C.: Roman statesman and scholar Marcus Tullius Cicero is slain at the order of the Second Triumvirate.

1787: Delaware becomes the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1842: The New York Philharmonic performs its first concert.

1909: Chemist Leo H. Baekeland receives a U.S. patent for Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic.

1941: The Imperial Japanese navy launches a surprise attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as part of a plan to pre-empt any American military response to Japan’s planned conquest of Southeast Asian territories; the raid, which claimed some 2,400 American lives, prompted the United States to declare war against Japan the next day.

1946: Fire breaks out at the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta; the blaze kills 119 people, including hotel founder W. Frank Winecoff.

1965: Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I simultaneously lift the mutual excommunications that had led to the split of their churches in 1054.

1975: Author-playwright Thornton Wilder, 78, dies in Hamden, Conn.

1985: Retired Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart dies in Hanover, N.H., at age 70.

1987: Forty-three people are killed after a gunman aboard a Pacific Southwest Airlines jetliner in California apparently opens fire on a fellow passenger, the pilots and himself, causing the plane to crash.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev set foot on American soil for the first time, arriving for a Washington summit with President Ronald Reagan.

1990: Actress Joan Bennett dies in Scarsdale, N.Y., at age 80.

1995: A 746-pound probe from the Galileo spacecraft hurtles into Jupiter’s atmosphere, sending back data to the mothership before it is presumably destroyed.

2004: Hamid Karzai is sworn in as Afghanistan’s first popularly elected president.

2005: Federal air marshals shoot and kill an airline passenger, Rigoberto Alpizar, at Miami International Airport after he claims to have a bomb. (It turned out that Alpizar, who suffered from bipolar disorder, had no bomb.)

2010: Elizabeth Edwards, the estranged wife of former U.S. Sen. John Edwards, dies at her home in Chapel Hill, N.C., at 61 after fighting breast cancer.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange surrendered to authorities in London, where he was jailed for nine days before being freed on bail as he fought extradition to Sweden for questioning in a rape investigation.

2010: Six prisoners held for 12 years at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, arrive in Uruguay amid a new push by President Barack Obama to close the U.S. prison.

Ken Weatherwax, who’d played Pugsley on “The Addams Family” television series in the 1960s, is found dead at his home in Box Canyon, Calif.; he was 59.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: Youngstown Catholic Bishop James W. Malone says the church opposes abortion and offers support to pregnant women, but is not sponsoring demonstrations at the Mahoning Women’s Clinic on Market Street and opposes violent confrontations there.

Trumbull Common Pleas Judge Mitchell Shaker calls for a one-year sales tax to finance renovation of the county’s 93-year-old courthouse rather than borrowing money.

Fourteen people are arrested in a drug sweep that Youngstown police say closed down one of the busiest crack houses in the city.

1975: Ten volunteer fire departments in Trumbull County have joined the trend in recent years toward adding emergency medical services to fire protection. A well-equipped vehicle costs about $15,000, and additional training for firefighters is 86 hours.

General Motors’ 25,000 Mahoning Valley employees will have a long Christmas-New Year’s vacation that will run almost two weeks.

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. and Dart Trucking co. of Canfield launch an experiment in hauling iron ore pellets from Ashtabula Harbor to the Youngstown furnaces via state Route 11.

1965: Nathaniel E. Lee, president of the Ohio and Youngstown chapters of the NAACP, is endorsed for membership on the national board.

The Youngstown Board of Education names Charles Besse, director of vocational and adult education at South-Western city school district in suburban Columbus, to head vocational education in the city.

Mahoning County Common Pleas Judge Forrest Cavalier overrules a motion to suppress evidence in the illegal abortion trial of Dr. Abraham Armstead.

1940: Edward P. Dailey, city engineering department employee, is elected president of the newly organized Local 222 of the American Federation of County and Municipal Employees, an AFL affiliate.

A record number of entries from Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia have been received for the Butler Art Institute’s New Year’s Art show. Hobson Pittman of Philadelphia and Grant Woods of Iowa will select works for exhibition and award prizes.

Nick Lucas, radio, screen and stage star, is one of many stars appearing at the sold-out 10th annual Alias Santa Claus show put on by the Vindicator’s Esther Hamilton at Stambaugh Auditorium.