YEARS AGO

Today is Saturday, May 16, the 136th day of 2015. There are 229 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1763: The English lexicographer, author and wit Samuel Johnson first meets his future biographer, James Boswell.

1770: Marie Antoinette, age 14, marries the future King Louis XVI of France, who is 15.

1868: The U.S. Senate fails by one vote to convict President Andrew Johnson as it takes its first ballot on the eleven articles of impeachment against him.

1920: Joan of Arc is canonized by Pope Benedict XV.

1929: The first Academy Awards are presented. “Wings” wins “best production,” while Emil Jannings and Janet Gaynor are named best actor and best actress.

1939: The federal government begins its first food stamp program in Rochester, N.Y.

1943: The nearly month-long Warsaw Ghetto Uprising ends as German forces crush the Jewish resistance and blow up the Great Synagogue.

1948: CBS News correspondent George Polk, who’d covered the civil war between communist and nationalist forces, is found slain in Salonika Harbor.

1955: American author and critic James Agee dies in New York at age 45.

1965: The musical “The Roar of the Greasepaint — the Smell of the Crowd” opens on Broadway.

1975: Japanese climber Junko Tabei becomes the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

1988: The U.S. Supreme Court, in California v. Greenwood, rules that police can search discarded garbage without a search warrant.

Surgeon General C. Everett Koop releases a report declaring nicotine is addictive in ways similar to heroin and cocaine.

1990: Death claims entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. in Los Angeles at age 64 and “Muppets” creator Jim Henson in New York at age 53.

2005: Newsweek magazine retracts its Quran abuse story that sparked deadly protests in Afghanistan.

Army Spc. Sabrina Harman is convicted at Fort Hood, Texas, of six of the seven charges she’d faced for her role in the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

2010: BP crews finally succeed in keeping some of the oil rushing from a blown well out of the Gulf of Mexico by hooking up a mile-long tube to funnel the crude into a tanker ship.

Space shuttle Atlantis arrives at the International Space Station.

Rafael Nadal wins a record 18th Masters title by beating Roger Federer 6-4, 7-6 (5) in the Madrid final.

Lebanese-born Miss Michigan Rima Fakih wins the 2010 Miss USA title.

2014: Federal safety regulators slap General Motors Co. with a record $35 million fine for taking more than a decade to disclose an ignition-switch defect in millions of cars linked at that point to at least 13 deaths (the figure later rose to 90).

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel pledges to Israeli leaders that the U.S. would “do what we must” to prevent the Jewish state’s greatest fear of a nuclear-armed Iran from being realized.

Cornell William Brooks is chosen to be the next national president and CEO of the NAACP.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: The Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office is seeking to try a 15-year-old Warren youth as an adult in the shooting death of Andre Evans, 24, outside the Hampshire House apartments on Fifth Street SW.

Trumbull Democratic Party Chairman Dr. William Timmins makes peace with Ohio Democratic Party Chairman James Ruvulo and wins back some of the summer jobs that were taken away from him. But for the second year in a row, Mahoning County Chairman Don L. Hanni Jr. is excluded from the annual patronage shuffle.

After nine months of debate, Canfield Council approves an ordinance prohibiting skateboarding on posted areas of the Village Green.

1975: Some 200 members of the Youngstown Diocesan Confederation of Secondary Teachers agree to accept a one-year contract offer from the Youngstown Diocese Board of Education calling for a $7,450 starting salary and other benefits.

The Rhodes administration mails letters to 53 striking employees at two Ohio correctional facilities informing of their immediate termination.

Pete Prokop, Youngstown resident manager for the Universal Guaranty Life Insurance Co., wins one of the top honors, the “Agency Cup,” at the annual sales awards convention. He also qualified for Universal’s “Millionaires Club.”

1965: Steve Brincko is chairman of the committee that will use volunteers from 50 veterans organizations to decorate 5,000 graves of military men and women in Mahoning County for Memorial Day.

W. J. Hamilton, manager of the Niles branch of the Ohio State Employment Service, says he has 400 job openings that are not filled and the acute labor shortage is expected to grow worse when the Lordstown GM plant opens.

Trumbull County Commissioner Robert E. Hagan suggests that the new Trumbull County office and jail building have an eternal flame installed on top. The flame would be lighted from John F. Kennedy’s grave and passed along by relays.

1940: Mahoning County Red Cross directors approve a local command to raise $40,000 as the local share of a national drive for $10 million for European war relief.

A report on the 1939 season of the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra shows receipts of more than $16,000 and a profit of $5,400.

Charles Brunswick, 15, of 2247 Kimmel Ave., is in fair condition in South Side Hospital with a gunshot wound of the stomach he received while playing with a 22-caliber revolver that he thought was loaded with blanks.