YEARS AGO

Today is Monday, April 25, the 116th day of 2016. There are 250 days left in the year.

Associated Press

On this date in:

1507: A world map produced by German cartographer Martin Waldseemueller contains the first recorded use of the term “America,” in honor of Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci.

1792: Highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier becomes the first person under French law to be executed by the guillotine.

1862: During the Civil War, a Union fleet commanded by Flag Officer David G. Farragut captures the city of New Orleans.

1901: New York Gov. Benjamin Barker Odell Jr. signs an automobile registration bill which imposes a 15 mph speed limit on highways.

1915: During World War I, Allied soldiers invade the Gallipoli Peninsula in an unsuccessful attempt to take the Ottoman Empire out of the war.

1944: The United Negro College Fund is founded.

1945: During World War II, U.S. and Soviet forces link up on the Elbe River, a meeting that dramatized the collapse of Nazi Germany’s defenses.

1959: The St. Lawrence Seaway opens to shipping.

1964: Vandals saw off the head of the “Little Mermaid” statue in Copenhagen, Denmark.

1983: Ten-year-old Samantha Smith of Manchester, Maine, receives a reply from Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov to a letter she’d written expressing concern about possible nuclear war; Andropov reassures Samantha that the Soviet Union does not want war.

1990: The Hubble Space Telescope is deployed in orbit from the space shuttle Discovery.

2006: In a video posted on the Internet, al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi swears allegiance to Osama bin Laden and says any government formed in Iraq would be merely a “stooge.”

2011: President Bashar Assad of Syria sends the military into the southern city of Daraa, where an anti-government uprising had begun the previous month.

2015: A magnitude-7.8 earthquake in Nepal kills more than 8,200 people.

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: The Youngstown Area Chamber of Commerce says it will support a proposed increase in the Mahoning County sales tax but with a caveat: None of the money should be spent to recall furloughed employees except those who work for criminal justice.

Warren Law Director William McLain says city council should consider repealing the city’s residency law and replace it with a new law that would be more flexible and less likely to result in litigation.

1976: A portrait of William F. Maag Jr., the late editor and publisher of The Vindicator, is unveiled at the dedication of the $6 million library that will bear his name at Youngstown State University.

Youngstown State University trustees approve a budget of $29.3 million submitted by President John J. Coffelt, an increase of $3.3 million over the 1976-77 budget.

Mario Grilli, 46, a ninth- and 10th-grade teacher at Hubbard High School, receives a heart transplant at Stanford University Medical Center. The heart came from a 15-year-old boy who died in a traffic accident. Dr. Norman Shumway oversaw the operation, his 100th transplant.

1966: Ben Wilson of Lisbon wins the East Central Ohio School Bus Road-e-o in Canton.

Violent winds splintered three garages, tore down apple trees and tore off car hoods in a wrecking yard in a quarter-mile swath along Center Road in Poland Township.

Hundreds of parishioners and clergy of Niles Protestant and Catholic churches attend the dedication of the new $300,000 First Christian Church.

Pvt. William Dolecki, 17, of 3310 S. Wendover Circle, is identified by the Pentagon as one of 82 killed in the crash of a chartered airliner in southern Oklahoma.

1941: H.K. Rayen, principal of Princeton Junior High School, is given a citation for “outstanding humanitarian service to the community” by American Legion Post 15 at the annual Americanism dinner in the legion home.

The Rayen School golf squad, defending champions, open the season at Sebring. Ken Pickering cut the team to five players: Jimmy Alcroft, Bob Carson, Heyward Dick, Marvin Kurjan and Mike Frasco.

Sobbing jurors find Youngstown Councilman John DelBene guilty of accepting a $7,500 bribe from a Youngstown Metropolitan Housing Authority architect, but Judge Erskine Maiden says that when he pronounces a sentence, it will not include penitentiary time.