YEARS AGO

Today is Sunday, Dec. 27, the 361st day of 2015. There are four days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1831: Naturalist Charles Darwin sets out on a round-the-world voyage aboard the HMS Beagle.

1904: James Barrie’s play “Peter Pan: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up” opens at the Duke of York’s Theater in London.

1927: The musical play “Show Boat,” with music by Jerome Kern and libretto by Oscar Hammerstein II, opens at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York.

1932: New York City’s Radio City Music Hall first opens.

1945: The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are formally established.

1947: The original version of the puppet character Howdy Doody makes its TV debut on NBC’s “Puppet Playhouse.”

1949:Queen Juliana of the Netherlands signs an act recognizing Indonesia’s sovereignty after more than three centuries of Dutch rule.

1964: The Cleveland Browns defeat the Baltimore Colts 27-0 to win the NFL Championship Game played at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

1968: Apollo 8 and its three astronauts make a safe, nighttime splashdown in the Pacific.

1979: Soviet forces seize control of Afghanistan. President Hafizullah Amin, who was overthrown and executed, is replaced by Babrak Karmal.

1985: Palestinian guerrillas open fire inside the Rome and Vienna airports; 19 victims are killed, plus four attackers are slain by police and security personnel.

American naturalist Dian Fossey, 53, who had studied gorillas in the wild in Rwanda, is found hacked to death.

1995: Israeli jeeps speed out of the West Bank town of Ramallah, capping a seven-week pullout giving Yasser Arafat control over 90 percent of the West Bank’s 1 million Palestinian residents and one-third of its land.

2001: President George W. Bush grants China permanent normal trade status with the U.S.

2007: Opposition leader Benazir Bhutto is assassinated during a suicide bomb attack in Pakistan following a campaign rally.

2005: Grass fires burn in drought-stricken Texas and Oklahoma (over the course of three days, nearly 200 homes were lost and the fires blamed for at least four deaths).

Indonesia’s Aceh rebels formally abolish their 30-year armed struggle for independence under a peace deal born out of the 2004 tsunami.

2010: A Russian court finds imprisoned oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty of stealing nearly $30 billion in oil from his company, Yukos.

Economist and former government official Alfred E. Kahn, known as “the father of airline deregulation,” dies in Ithaca, N.Y., at age 93.

2014: North Korea blames its recent Internet outage on the United States and hurls racially charged insults at President Barack Obama over the hacking row involving the movie “The Interview.”

Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who shot and wounded John Paul II in 1981, lays white flowers on the saint’s tomb in St. Peter’s Basilica.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: Poland Mayor Ruth Wilkes is supervising the village police department after the assistant chief, William Morvay, who has been acting chief while Chief William Klase is on sick leave, relinquishes his supervisory job and returns to being a patrolman.

Ohio will lose two members of the U.S. House, dropping to 19, based on 1990 Census figures.

Mylios Kraja of Youngstown, who has been chief lobbyist and executive director of the 3-million member American Legion since 1974, is retiring. Kraja has worked with five presidents and was honored by President Bush.

1975: Two robbers hold a 30-year-old woman hostage for almost six hours after holding up the staff and customers at the Imperial Caf on Larchmont Avenue in Warren.

The Rev. Robert E. Ralston, is ordained and installed as pastor of Tabernacle United Presbyterian Church in Austintown.

Ballet Western Reserve and the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra and Chorus perform “The Nutcracker” at Powers Auditorium for the eighth year. Cast members include Rochelle Rosian, Edward Patuto, Michael Tipton, Dina Byer, Michael Falotico, Georgann Falotico, Roderick B. MacDonald, Robert Tupper, Leigh Ann Hudacek, Edward Henkle and Rachel List.

1965: Over the holiday weekend, 704 Americans died in traffic accidents, a record. The toll nearly equaled the 706 who died during a 4-day Christmas weekend in 1964.

Herman J. Spoerer, vice president of industrial relations at Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., will be honored by the Mahoning Valley Industrial Management Association.

Carl W. Flitcraft Jr., winner in the nonpartisan mayoral election in New Middletown, will be sworn into office by Atty. Jack D. Kuhlman, village solicitor.

1940: Some 100 Mahoning County livestock men will attend the livestock program during Farmers Week at Ohio State University. Mrs. John Heberding is president of the Ohio Jersey Cattle Club, and Robert Montgomery is director of the Ohio Holstein Association.

Gatty Sellars, world-famed organist and composer, will present a concert at Martin Luther Church. His first Youngstown concert was 20 years earlier at First Presbyterian Church.

Returning home from a Christmas reunion with relatives, Mrs. Frank Shuster of Craig Beach finds her 17-year-old daughter, Virginia, hacked to death in one bedroom, a 19-year-old son near death in another bedroom and the body of her husband dead in the cellar from self-inflicted gunshots.