YEARS AGO

April 4, 2016 at 12:00a.m.

Today is Monday, April 4, the 95th day of 2016. There are 271 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1818: Congress decides the U.S. flag would consist of 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars, with a new star to be added for every new state of the Union.

1841: President William Henry Harrison succumbs to pneumonia one month after his inaugural, becoming the first U.S. chief executive to die in office.

1850: The city of Los Angeles is incorporated.

1865: President Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by his son Tad, visits the vanquished Confederate capital of Richmond, Va., where he is greeted by a crowd that included former slaves.

1933: The Navy airship USS Akron crashes in severe weather off the New Jersey coast with the loss of 73 lives.

1958: Johnny Stompanato, an enforcer for crime boss Mickey Cohen and the boyfriend of actress Lana Turner, is stabbed to death by Turner’s teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, who says Stompanato had attacked her mother.

1968: Civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., 39, is shot and killed while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.

1975: More than 130 people, most of them children, are killed when a U.S. Air Force transport plane evacuating Vietnamese orphans crash-lands after takeoff from Saigon.

Microsoft is founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, N.M.

1983: The space shuttle Challenger roars into orbit on its maiden voyage. (It was destroyed in the disaster of January 1986.)

1991: Sen. John Heinz, R-Pa., and six other people, including two children, are killed when a helicopter collides with Heinz’s plane over a schoolyard in Merion, Pa.

2006: The Iraq tribunal announces new criminal charges against Saddam Hussein and six others, accusing them of genocide and crimes against humanity stemming from a 1980s crackdown against Kurds.

2011: Yielding to political opposition, the Obama administration gives up on trying avowed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four purported co-conspirators in civilian federal courts and says it will prosecute them instead before military commissions.

President Barack Obama’s campaign announces in a web video that he will run for re-election in 2012.

2015: In North Charleston, S.C., Walter Scott, a 50-year-old black motorist, is shot to death while running away from a traffic stop; Officer Michael Thomas Slager, seen in a cellphone video opening fire at Scott, has been charged with murder.

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: Two out of three jobless Ohioans are receiving no unemployment benefits as the state has made it more difficult to be eligible.

Trumbull County commissioners deny the annexation of .57 of an acre of Howland Township to the city of Warren. Warren Police Sgt. Thomas Skoczylas and his wife requested annexation of their home at 510 Quarry Lane to the city.

About 20 classes are cut from the Youngstown State University spring-quarter schedule of classes in anticipation of cuts in state money.

1976: Five Democratic presidential hopefuls will be campaigning in Ohio: former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, Rep. Morris Udall of Arizona, Sen Henry Jackson of Washington, Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Sen. Frank Church of Idaho.

Mushrooming warfare in southern Africa is causing uneasiness in the Youngstown steel district because it threatens the supply of vital raw materials, especially chromium and manganese.

Receiving awards during the annual dinner meeting of the Youngstown Chapter of the National Negro Business and Professional Women’s Club were Dr. Bertie Burrowes, Humanitarian Award; and Mrs. Sondra Dingey, Distinguished Community Service Award.

1966: Dr. C.W. Ricksecker, retired principal of Chaney High School, dies of a heart attack at his Volney Road home.

Library Director David Griffiths says in his annual report to trustees that increased demand for books in new branch libraries during 1965 lead to a record circulation of 1,473,085.

Dr. Thomas B. Wagner is elected president of the Eastern Academy of Podiatrists at the annual meeting at Barnett’s Motel in Salem, succeeding Dr. Irvin Knight.

1941: Dr. and Mrs. George Crile of the Crile Clinic in Cleveland were among 13 passengers on a Miami-New York Eastern Air Lines plane that was forced down in a Florida marsh.

Dr. Harry K. Eversull, president of Marietta College, will speak at the noon series for Holy Week at the Palace Theater.

Approximately 50 Youngstown firemen will attend conference sessions at Kent State University.