YEARS AGO

Today is Wednesday, Dec. 16, the 350th day of 2015. There are 15 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1773: The Boston Tea Party takes place as American colonists board a British ship and dump more than 300 chests of tea into Boston Harbor to protest tea taxes.

1944: The World War II Battle of the Bulge begins as German forces launch a surprise attack against Allied forces through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg (the Allies were eventually able to turn the Germans back).

1950: President Harry S. Truman proclaims a national state of emergency in order to fight “world conquest by Communist imperialism.”

1960: One hundred thirty-four people are killed when a United Air Lines DC-8 and a TWA Super Constellation collide over New York City.

Organized-crime chief Paul Castellano and his bodyguard are shot to death outside a New York City restaurant on orders from John Gotti.

2005: In a stinging defeat for President George W. Bush, Senate Democrats block passage of a new Patriot Act to combat terrorism at home. (The result was a revised Patriot Act signed by Bush in March 2006.)

2010: The House joins the Senate in passing a massive bipartisan tax package preventing a big New Year’s Day tax hike for millions of Americans.

2014: Taliban gunmen storm a military-run school in the northwestern Pakistan city of Peshawar, killing at least 148 people, mostly children.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: A Vindicator study of employment records shows that more than 10 percent of the Mahoning Valley Sanitary District’s 58 employees are tied to one another by blood, marriage or friendship, some directly to board members Frank DeJute and Edward A. Flask.

Pianist Joe Augustine, who has been playing at the Avalon Inn since graduating from Youngstown State University in 1971, releases a new album.

James R. Dull, a senior at Youngstown State University, is sworn in as a nonvoting student member of the board of trustees, joining another student trustee, Ralph Crum.

1975: A Penn Central Railroad train cuts a car in half at an unprotected crossing in Smith Township, killing two young Alliance women, Carolyn A. Hall and Cynthia Bileze, both 18.

The Mahoning County grand jury indicts a second deputy sheriff on a charge of aggravated assault of a prisoner in the Mahoning County Jail.

Elbessmar Dawson, 62, of 519 Jones St., is found dead in the living room of his home with a gunshot wound apparently inflicted by a robber.

1965: John Welker, assistant manager of the Youngstown office of the Social Security Administration, tells the Youngstown Association of Insurance Agents that people over 65 should establish their rights to Medicare benefits before the end of the first enrollment period on March 31, 1966, even if they are still working.

Dina Aron Schulman of Youngstown, first president of Century Food Markets, dies in North Side Hospital. She and her husband, Samuel, built Century from a small grocery opened in 1917 on Chicago Avenue.

Due to the rapidly expanding titanium market, Reactive Metals Co. plants in Niles and Ashtabula announce a major, three-year expansion program.

1940: The Rev. Leonard Stryker, pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church, presents his resignation effective Feb. 1, 1941, the 23rd anniversary of his coming to St. John’s.

Youngstown City Council agrees to lease 230 one-hour, five-cent parking meters for certain downtown streets and to ban parking on unwidened sections of East Federal.

More than 1,000 Youngstown district employees of Republic Steel Corp. receive checks amounting to several hundred thousand dollars to represent vacation pay for the years 1938, 1939 and 1940, as ordered by the Supreme Court of the United States.