YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Friday, April 15, the 106th day of 2016. There are 260 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1850: The city of San Francisco is incorporated.

1865: President Abraham Lincoln dies nine hours after being shot the night before by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater in Washington; Andrew Johnson becomes the nation’s 17th president.

1912: The British luxury liner RMS Titanic founders in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland more than 21/2 hours after hitting an iceberg; 1,514 people died, while less than half as many survived.

1920: A paymaster and a guard are shot and killed during a robbery at a shoe company in South Braintree, Mass.; Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are accused of the crime, convicted and executed amid worldwide protests that they hadn’t received a fair trial.

1945: During World War II, British and Canadian troops liberate the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died April 12, is buried at the Roosevelt family home in Hyde Park, N.Y.

1959: Cuban leader Fidel Castro arrives in Washington to begin a goodwill tour of the United States.

1974: Members of the Symbionese Liberation Army hold up a branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco; a member of the group was SLA kidnap victim Patricia Hearst, who by this time was going by the name “Tania” (Hearst later said she’d been forced to participate).

1986: The United States launches an air raid against Libya in response to the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin on April 5; Libya said 37 people, mostly civilians, were killed.

1998: Pol Pot, the notorious leader of the Khmer Rouge, dies at age 73, evading prosecution for the deaths of 2 million Cambodians.

2006: U.S.-led coalition forces using warplanes and artillery clash with a small band of militants holed up in a house and a cave complex in eastern Afghanistan in fighting that kills at least seven Afghan civilians.

2011: The first of three days of tornadoes to strike the central and southern U.S. begins; according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there were an estimated 177 twisters and at least 38 fatalities.

2013: Two bombs packed with nails and other metal shards explode at the Boston Marathon finish line, killing two women and an 8-year-old boy and injuring more than 260. (Suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev dies in a shootout with police; his brother and alleged accomplice, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.)

2014: Boko Haram terrorists kidnap some 276 girls from a school in northeastern Nigeria.

2015: Douglas Hughes, a postal carrier from Florida, flies a one-person gyrocopter onto the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol as a protest against money in politics; he later pleaded guilty to operating a gyrocopter without a license, a felony.

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: Youngstown’s police union is prepared to challenge Chief Randall Wellington’s plan to require some ranking officers to go on patrol duties when there are more than two officers on a shift.

Under Gov. George Voinovich’s proposed budget, Youngstown State University would lose 4.8 percent of its state funding, more than any other university.

“Is the African-American Male Endangered” is the topic of a panel discussion presented by Youngstown State University’s African-American Student Union in the Kilcawley Center’s Art Gallery.

1976: Youngstown City Council overrides Mayor Jack C. Hunter’s veto and reaffirms the city’s intention of transferring sponsorship of the Areawide Agency on Aging from the city to EDATA.

Dr. James A. Houck, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Library Levy, says the library is the “bulwark of civilization” and passage of a library levy is vital.

William Shaw, 43, a prominent Volant, Pa., dairy farmer is gored to death by a bull. Shaw was a member of the Wilmington Area School Board and each summer had a fundraising drive for mentally disabled children at his farm.

1966: Youngstown University’s application to become Youngstown State University is welcomed by Gov. James A. Rhodes as “fitting in well in the pattern of higher education we are seeking for young people.”

Mrs. Helen Roseman had just paid her income tax at the Internal Revenue Service on Wick Avenue and drove over an 8-foot wall at the rear of the building and struck the Lombard Building.

The Youngstown Board of Control approves a joint acquisition with the Ohio Department of Highways of 60 parcels needed to make way for the Division Street Bridge connecting Salt Springs Road with West Federal Street.

Gerald L. “Jerry” Renkenberger, 52, of Salem is killed when his twin-engine Beechcraft based at Youngstown Municipal Airport crashes into a mountain near Taylorsville, N.C.

1941: Peter Harris, deputy game warden of Mercer, Pa., misses the first day of fishing after he found a pair of handcuffs, put them on and then couldn’t get them off. He had to abandon fishing to return to the jail, where the handcuffs were removed.

Seventy-six young men from the Mahoning County draft board have to wait two hours for buses to take them to Columbus, where they will be given final examinations and inducted into the armed services.