YEARS AGO

YEARS AGO

Today is Friday, May 13, the 134th day of 2016. There are 232 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1607: English colonists arrive by ship at the site of what became the James-town settlement in Virginia (the colonists went ashore the next day).

1846: The United States declares that a state of war exists with Mexico.

1916: One of Yiddish literature’s most-famous authors, Sholem Aleichem, dies in New York at age 57.

1918: The first U.S. airmail stamps, featuring a picture of a Curtiss JN-4 biplane, are issued to the public. (On a few of the stamps, the biplane inadvertently was printed upside-down, making them collector’s items.)

1935: T.E. Lawrence is critically injured in a motorcycle accident in Dorset, England; he died six days later.

1940: In his first speech as British prime minister, Winston Churchill tells Parliament, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

1954: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Act.

1958: Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, are spat upon and their limousine battered by rocks thrown by anti-U.S. demonstrators in Caracas, Venezuela.

1968: A one-day general strike takes place in France in support of student protesters.

1973: In tennis’s first so-called “Battle of the Sexes,” Bobby Riggs defeats Margaret Court 6-2, 6-1 in Ramona, Calif. (Billie Jean King soundly defeated Riggs at the Houston Astrodome in September.)

1981: Pope John Paul II is shot and seriously wounded in St. Peter’s Square by Turkish assailant Mehmet Ali Agca.

1985: A confrontation between Philadelphia authorities and the radical group MOVE ends as police drop a bomb onto the group’s row house; 11 people died in the resulting fire that destroyed 61 homes.

1996: The U.S. Supreme Court, in 44 Liquormart v. Rhode Island, unanimously strikes down Rhode Island’s ban on ads that listed or referred to liquor prices, saying the law violated free-speech rights.

2006: Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton help Tulane University in New Orleans celebrate its “miracle” commencement, nine months after Hurricane Katrina put two-thirds of the campus under water and scattered students to more than 600 schools nationwide.

2011: Two suicide bombers attack paramilitary police recruits heading home after months of training in northwest Pakistan, killing 87 people in what the Pakistan Taliban called revenge for the U.S. slaying of Osama bin Laden.

2015: The House votes 338-88 to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records and replace it with a system to search the data held by telephone companies on a case-by-case basis. (The measure was passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Barack Obama.)

vindicator files

1991: Ohio legislators are considering a bill introduced by Sen. Charles Horn, R-Kettering, to restrict where cigarette machines can be installed with a goal of reducing the use of the machines by underage buyers.

Maintenance workers at the Youngstown Metropolitan Housing Authority say they are increasingly wary while going about their jobs. In the first four months of 1991, 38 workers have reported being threatened, attacked or verbally abused on the job.

Yellow Creek Park in Struthers is recovering from years of neglect thanks to its becoming part of the Mill Creek Metropolitan Park District. Crews have removed truckloads of litter and have been sprucing up the 79-acre park.

1976: A large delegation of Smoky Hollow residents attends a Youngstown City Council meeting to protest the effort by Youngstown State University to take property by eminent domain to build a parking deck.

Marcy Zambelli, 20, of New Castle, Pa., is in Niagara Falls, N.Y., rehearsing for the nationally televised Miss USA pageant. She is Miss Pennsylvania.

One car of an eastbound ConRail freight train derails near downtown East Palestine, ramming through a wall of the Amoco gas station and striking the Shafer House Restaurant.

1966: As Ohio Gov. James A. Rhodes is protesting the New York Central Railroad’s moving of its regional headquarters from Cleveland, top NYC executives say that the merger of their company with the Pennsylvania Railroad would bring an expansion of facilities in Youngstown and other Ohio cities.

Gov. Rhodes, speaking at Canfield High School, predicts that GM’s new Lordstown plan will become the world’s greatest auto-assembly facility and that the Youngstown area will get 10 to 15 new industries as GM suppliers move in.

1941: Youngstown City Council President Arthur Gundry calls a special meeting to consider Mahoning County’s request for $71,000 toward financing direct relief for the rest of the year. The money would be used to inaugurate the food- stamp program.

The Youngstown Safety Committee commits to a program of obtaining about $30,0000 from earmarked parking-meter funds for the traffic division’s operations. Mayor William Spagnola backs the plan.

Installation of white-way lighting standards on Market Street is approved by Youngstown City Council.