Today is Monday, Feb. 29, the 60th day of 2016. There are 306 days left in the year. This is Leap

Today is Monday, Feb. 29, the 60th day of 2016. There are 306 days left in the year. This is Leap Day.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1504: Christopher Columbus, stranded in Jamaica during his fourth voyage to the West, uses a correctly predicted lunar eclipse to frighten hostile natives into providing food for his crew.

1796: President George Washington proclaims Jay’s Treaty, which settles some outstanding differences with Britain, in effect.

1904: President Theodore Roosevelt appoints a seven-member commission to facilitate completion of the Panama Canal.

1916: Singer, actress and TV personality Dinah Shore is born Frances Rose Shore in Winchester, Tenn. (Shore, who claimed March 1, 1917, as her birthday, died in 1994 just days before she would have turned 78.)

1940: “Gone with the Wind” wins eight Academy Awards, including best picture of 1939; Hattie McDaniel wins for best supporting actress, the first black performer so honored.

1960: The first Playboy Club, featuring waitresses clad in “bunny” outfits, opens in Chicago.

1968: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (also known as the Kerner Commission) warns that racism was causing America to move “toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”

The discovery of a “pulsar,” a star which emits regular radio waves, was announced by Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell in Cambridge, England.

1980: Former Israeli foreign minister Yigal Allon, who had played an important role in the Jewish state’s fight for independence, dies at age 61.

1984: Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau announces he will step down after more than 15 combined years in power.

1996: Daniel Green is convicted in Lumberton, N.C., of murdering James R. Jordan, the father of basketball star Michael Jordan, during a 1993 roadside holdup. (Green and an accomplice, Larry Martin Demery, were sentenced to life in prison.)

A Peruvian Boeing 737 crashes on approach to Arequipa, killing all 123 people on board.

2004: “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” wins a record-tying 11 Academy Awards, including best picture; Sean Penn takes the best-actor prize for “Mystic River” and Charlize Theron wins best actress for portraying Aileen Wuornos in “Monster.”

2008: Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama accuses rival Hillary Rodham Clinton of trying to “play on people’s fears to scare up votes” with a TV ad showing sleeping children and asking who would be more qualified to answer a national security emergency call at 3 a.m.

2012: Violent weather-packing tornadoes continue to ravage the Midwest and South, resulting in some 15 deaths.

Davy Jones, 66, the heartthrob singer who helped propel the made-for-TV pop band The Monkees to the top of the pop charts, dies in Stuart, Fla.

VINDICATOR FILES

Editor’s note: Today’s Local Years ago entries are short because it is Leap Day. Of the years we monitor in 2016, only 1976 was a leap year.

1976: The North East Ohio Special Education Regional Resource Center launches an effort to identify an estimated 7,000 children and young adults in Trumbull, Mahoning and Ashtabula counties who need special education or training.

The Western Reserve Transit Authority should be the only agency running all pubic transportation in Mahoning and Trumbull counties, say WRTA trustees Edmund Salata and George Vukovich.

Twin brothers Bob and Rich Donadee capture championships in early competition of the Class AAA Sectional Wrestling Tournament to help Austintown clinch its third straight championship for Coach Phil Resch.