YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Wednesday, Jan. 20, the 20th day of 2016. There are 346 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1265: England’s first representative Parliament meets for the first time; the gathering at Westminster is composed of bishops, abbots, peers, Knights of the Shire and town burgesses.

1649: King Charles I of England goes on trial, accused of high treason (he was found guilty and executed by month’s end).

1887: The U.S. Senate approves an agreement to lease Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as a naval base.

1936: Britain’s King George V dies after his physician, Lord Dawson of Penn, injects the mortally ill monarch with morphine and cocaine to hasten his death; the king is succeeded by his eldest son, Edward VIII, who abdicates the throne 11 months later to marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson.

1942: Nazi officials hold the notorious Wannsee conference, during which they arrive at their “final solution” that calls for exterminating Jews.

1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt is sworn into office for an unprecedented fourth term.

1961: John F. Kennedy is inaugurated as the 35th president of the United States.

1981: Iran releases 52 Americans it had held hostage for 444 days, minutes after the presidency had passed from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan.

1986: The United States observes the first federal holiday in honor of slain civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

2001: George Walker Bush becomes America’s 43rd president after one of the most turbulent elections in U.S. history.

2006: Michael Fortier, the government’s star witness in the Oklahoma City bombing trials, is released from federal prison after serving more than 10 years for failing to warn authorities about the plot.

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: A $3.5 million drag-line that scoops out 24 tons of dirt at a time is working around the clock at the East Fairfield Coal Co. strip mine near Petersburg mining a 26-inch-thick seam of coal from 90 feet beneath the surface.

Boardman police are continuing to look for the driver who struck and killed Justin Sosnos, 13, while he was riding his bicycle near the family’s Glenwood Avenue home Jan. 13.

The readiness of Trumbull County’s Emergency Management Agency to respond to the threat of terrorism in the wake of the Iraq war is being questioned by local officials.

The Coast Guard uses a helicopter and boats to rescue 10 fishermen who were set adrift on Lake Erie on an ice floe that started drifting from shore near Port Clinton, Ohio.

Paul Luce, retired teacher and principal of Chaney High School, is elected president of the board of trustees of Planned Parenthood of the Mahoning Valley.

1966: Struthers Mayor Stanley Davis tells City Council and citizens that the city “is on relief [and] unable to meet its payroll.” Some 150 city employees will not be receiving pay checks until a loan can be negotiated.

Tabernacle United Presbyterian Church, which was founded in 1859, will begin construction of a new church on four acres in the Greenbriar development on Raccoon Road.

Twenty-nine Beaver Valley industries have pledged $406,700 to Geneva College’s development program.

1941: A total of $69,927 was paid in 1940 in Old Age and Survivors Insurance and for funeral expenses in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties by the Youngstown field office of the Social Security Board.

Sixty Vindicator carriers win a trip to a Cleveland hockey game as a reward for sales efforts.

“Choose the Clues,” an audience-participation show, will originate from the WFMJ studios in Youngstown.