YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Friday, Feb. 5, the 36th day of 2016. There are 330 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1631: The co-founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, and his wife, Mary, arrive in Boston from England.

1783: Sweden recognizes the independence of the United States.

1811: George, the Prince of Wales, is named Prince Regent due to the mental illness of his father, Britain’s King George III.

1887: Verdi’s opera “Otello” premieres at La Scala.

1911: Missouri’s second Capitol building in Jefferson City burns down after being struck by lightning.

1917: Congress passes, over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, an immigration act severely curtailing the influx of Asians.

Mexico’s constitution is adopted.

1937: President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes increasing the number of Supreme Court justices; critics accuse Roosevelt of attempting to “pack” the court. (The proposal failed in Congress.)

1940: Glenn Miller and his orchestra record “Tuxedo Junction” for RCA Victor’s Bluebird label.

1958: Gamal Abdel Nasser is formally nominated to become the first president of the new United Arab Republic (a union of Syria and Egypt).

1971: Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell step onto the surface of the moon in the first of two lunar excursions.

1989: The Soviet Union announces that all but a small rear-guard contingent of its troops have left Afghanistan.

2006: Jacob Robida, suspected of an attack at a Massachusetts gay bar, the killing of an Arkansas officer and the slaying of a mother of three, is mortally wounded in a shootout with authorities.

The Pittsburgh Steelers win a record-tying fifth Super Bowl with a 21-10 win over the Seattle Seahawks.

Actor Franklin Cover (“The Jeffersons”) dies in Englewood, N.J., at age 77.

2011: The leadership of Egypt’s ruling party steps down as the military figures spearheading the transition try to placate protesters without giving them the one resignation they were demanding, that of President Hosni Mubarak.

2015: Jordan steps up its air attacks on Islamic State facilities in Syria and expands its airstrikes into Iraq for the first time after a captured Jordanian pilot was burned to death by the militant group. At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama calls the Islamic State group a “death cult” and condemned those who seek to use religion as a rationale for violence.

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: Customers line up at area post offices to buy new 29-cent first-class stamps or to buy 4-cent stamps to supplement the old 25-cent stamps. It is the first postal rate increase since 1988.

The Mahoning Valley Sanitary District files suit in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court to block creation of a water district by Hubbard and Girard cities and Hubbard and Liberty townships, terming the project an “unnecessary duplication of effort.”

Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time hits leader, becomes an outsider as the Baseball Hall of Fame’s board of directors approves a motion that makes “permanently ineligible players” ineligible for the Hall of Fame ballot.

1976: Mayor Jack C. Hunter names two investigators to the Youngstown Fire Department arson bureau: Thomas Krispinsky, 23, of Lucius Avenue, and Alan A. Charity, 21, of Stocker Avenue. The salary is $9,999 per year.

Although the worldwide business of Commercial Shearing Inc. is vital to its success, Chairman Thomas J. Travers tells the Youngstown Board of Trade that Commercial is essentially a Youngstown and Ohio company, and he prefers to see it stay that way.

Lykes Youngstown Corp. reports that 1975 was the second-best earnings year since the conglomerate was formed six years earlier, with consolidated net earnings of $56.9 million and earnings of $5.73 per common share.

1966: Joseph Bucheit & Son Co. submits the low bid of $2.1 million for construction of a new engineering building at Youngstown State University.

A bed of quicksand slows construction of sewer lines to the General Motors Corp. plant in Lordstown.

Two Lake Milton boys, 12 and 10 years old, are held by police in connection with 10 house burglaries.

1941: Emmett Conway, park forester, and Linde Reed, planting foreman, report that 30,000 trees, shrubs and vines were planted in Mill Creek Park in 1940.

Atty. Joseph Leta Jr. is president of the newly organized South Side Civic Organization of New Castle.

Lansdowne Field, the second-oldest municipally owned airport in Ohio, is now officially off the books of the Federal Aviation Administration, after being closed by Youngstown.