YEARS AGO

Today is Friday, Aug. 26, the 239th day of 2016. There are 127 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1789: France’s National Assembly adopts its Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

1883: The island volcano Krakatoa begins cataclysmic eruptions, leading to a massive explosion the next day.

1920: The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing American women’s right to vote, is certified in effect by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby.

1939: The first televised major league baseball games are shown on experimental station W2XBS: a double-header between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field. (The Reds won the first game, 5-2, the Dodgers the second, 6-1.)

1958: Alaskans go to the polls to overwhelmingly vote in favor of statehood.

1968: The Democratic National Convention opens in Chicago; the four-day event is marked by a bloody police crackdown on war protesters in the streets and a tumultuous nominating process that resulted in the choice of Hubert H. Humphrey for president.

1978: Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice is elected pope after the death of Paul VI; the new pontiff takes the name Pope John Paul I. (However, he died a little more a month later.)

2006: Iran’s hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, inaugurates a heavy-water production plant, a facility the West fears will be used to develop a nuclear bomb.

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: The U.S. Navy’s parachute team, the Leap Frogs, will perform at the Canfield Fair for the first time.

Inspired by gardens she saw while traveling in Canada, Jane Brozyna of Brookfield has plants with more than 10,000 flowers in beds on Yankee Run Gulf Course and 300 at the township community center.

Twenty candidates, a record number, file to run for four seats on the Youngstown Board of Education, including three incumbents, Anthony Julian, Billy Tanner and Edna Pincham.

1976: The Niles wife of a prisoner in the Mahoning County Jail is arrested on charges of smuggling marijuana into the jail.

On the 57th day of their strike, 1,200 workers at GF Business Equipment Inc. reject the company’s latest offer.

Dr. Raymond J. Catoline, Mahoning County Jail physician, says the Mahoning County grand jury is unqualified to evaluate medical care given to inmates and is irresponsible in issuing a report critical of the jail’s administration.

1966: Youngstown bail bondsman Mario Guerrieri is charged with possession of tools used in a purported abortion performed on a 24-year-old Erie, Pa., woman in a Liberty Township motel.

Reactive Metals Inc. announces a $70 million expansion plan for its facilities in Niles and Ashtabula.

NBC airs a three-hour “white paper” on organized crime that includes a 17-minute segment on slayings and gambling in Youngstown.

1941: Using a Geiger-Muller counter, crews locate a capsule of radium worth $5,000 in the crook of a sewer pipe 4 feet beneath the lawn at South Side Hospital. The capsule had accidentally been thrown down a sewer.

The Heller-Murray Co. of Youngstown is awarded a $502,000 contract to build a 150-unit addition to the Westlawn Housing Project in Warren. The addition will provide living quarters for Ravenna Arsenal workers.

Muriel Roberts of Warren is the soloist for the Youngstown Symphony Orchestra’s final pops concert of the season being given at the Mansion.