YEARS AGO

Today is Sunday, Feb. 5, the 36th day of 2017. There are 329 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1783: Sweden recognizes the independence of the United States.

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

1897: The Indiana House of Representatives passes, 67-0, a measure offering a new (as well as fundamentally flawed) method for determining the area of a circle, which would have effectively redefined the value of pi as 3.2. (The bill died in the Indiana Senate.)

1917: Mexico’s present-day constitution is adopted by the Constitutional Convention in Santiago de Queretaro.

The U.S. Congress passes, over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, an act severely curtailing Asian immigration.

1922: The first edition of Reader’s Digest is published.

1937: President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes increasing the number of U.S. Supreme Court justices; the proposal, which failed in Congress, drew accusations that Roosevelt was attempting to “pack” the nation’s highest court.

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

1953: Walt Disney’s animated feature “Peter Pan” is first released.

1967: “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” premieres on CBS-TV.

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

1973: Services are held at Arlington National Cemetery for U.S. Army Col. William B. Nolde, the last official American combat casualty before the Vietnam cease-fire took effect.

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

1994: White separatist Byron De La Beckwith is convicted in Jackson, Miss., of murdering civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963, and is immediately sentenced to life in prison. (Beckwith died Jan. 21, 2001 at age 80.)

Sixty-eight people are killed when a mortar shell exploded in a marketplace in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

2007: President George W. Bush unveils a $2.9 trillion budget, which proposes a big spending increase for the Pentagon while pinching domestic programs.

2012: Josh Powell, long identified as a person of interest in the 2009 disappearance of his wife, Susan, sets fire to his home in Graham, Wash., killing himself and his two sons, 7-year-old Charles and 5-year-old Braden, who had been brought there by a social worker for a supervised visit.

Eli Manning and the Giants one-up Tom Brady and the Patriots again, coming back with a last-minute score to beat New England 21-17 for New York’s fourth NFL title in Super Bowl XLVI (46).

2016: President Barack Obama uses a new jobs report to continue his victory lap on the economy, declaring the U.S. has “the strongest, most durable economy in the world.”

A huge construction crane plummets into a Lower Manhattan street, killing one person and leaving three other people injured.

VINDICATOR FILES

1992: Some 225 companies are participating in the Jump Start America campaign that was launched by Warren physician William Lippy to encourage the purchase of American-made cars.

Two boys, Thomas Bowell, 8, and Brian Clarke, 11, are rescued by Mill Creek Park Police Officer Fred Russo after they fell through the ice at the Lake Glacier Dam.

Christopher Grusha, 4-year-old son of Mr. and Mrs. Gary Grusha of Mineral Ridge, is named Mahoning County’s 1992 Heart Child.

1977: Youngstown Municipal Airport is closed to airline night flights because of heavy snow and the breakdown of a snowblower, Airport Manager Fred DeLuca says.

David R.E. Baker, a trooper at the Canfield Post of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, is promoted to sergeant.

A snow-covered porch roof at the Fisher Funeral Home in Hadley, Pa., collapses, killing Newton E. Fisher, 62, funeral director and owner of the Church Street home. Mercer County Deputy Coroner Dr. Frank McElree Jr. rules the death accidental.

1967: Pfc. John J. Bentfeld, 23, of Youngstown is reported killed in action in Vietnam after being hit by fragments from friendly mortar rounds.

Congressman Michael Kirwan announces appointments to the U.S. Military, Air Force and Naval academies. They are John Cronin Jr., William J. Reiley Jr., Jerome Hammar, Lawrence Bartolin and John H. Davis.

Two members of Youngs-town University’s debate team, James La Lumia and Michael Polansky, compete at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., winning first prizes in individual categories.

1942: The Standard Steel Springs Corp. of Coraopolis, Pa., is acquiring the buildings of the former New Castle tin plant of the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Co.

James Quinn, a native of Youngstown who last visited the city as a Marine recruiting officer, returns to take charge of Steel Makers’ Organization Committee in the Mahoning Valley.

Ruling on an action brought by three Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Ohio Supreme Court upholds a Struthers ordinance that prohibits hand-bill distributors from ringing door bells.