YEARS AGO FOR APRIL 8

Today is Sunday, April 8, the 98th day of 2018. There are 267 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1820: The Venus de Milo statue is discovered by a farmer on the Greek island of Milos.

1864: The United States Senate passes, 38-6, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing slavery. (The House of Representatives would pass it in January 1865; the amendment would be ratified and adopted in December 1865.)

1913: The 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for popular election of U.S. senators (as opposed to appointment by state legislatures), is ratified.

President Woodrow Wilson becomes the first chief executive since John Adams to address Congress in person as he asks lawmakers to enact tariff reform.

1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, which provides money for programs such as the Works Progress Administration.

1946: The League of Nations assembles in Geneva for its final session.

1952: President Harry S. Truman seizes the American steel industry to avert a nationwide strike. (The Supreme Court later ruled that Truman had overstepped his authority, opening the way for a seven-week strike by steelworkers.)

1973: Artist Pablo Picasso dies in Mougins, France, at age 91.

1974: Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hits his 715th career home run in a game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, breaking Babe Ruth’s record.

1988: TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart resigns from the Assemblies of God after he is defrocked for rejecting an order from the church’s national leaders to stop preaching for a year amid reports he had consorted with a prostitute.

1993: Singer Marian Anderson dies in Portland, Ore., at age 96.

1994: Kurt Cobain, singer and guitarist for the grunge band Nirvana, is found dead in Seattle from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound; he was 27.

2008: The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David Petraeus, tells Congress that hard-won gains in the war zone are too fragile to promise any troop pullouts beyond the summer as he holds his ground against impatient Democrats and refuses to commit to more withdrawals before President George W. Bush leaves office in January 2009.

American Airlines grounds all 300 of its MD-80 jetliners amid safety concerns about wiring bundles; the carrier ends up canceling more than 3,000 flights over the next four days.

Tennessee captures its eighth women’s NCAA championship with a 64-48 victory over Stanford.

2013: Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 87, of Britain dies in London.

Actress and former Disney “Mouseketeer” Annette Funicello, 70, dies in Bakersfield, Calif.

VINDICATOR FILES

1993: A family of four dies in a mobile home fire in Little Beaver Township, Pennsylvania State Police identify the deceased as Seliena B. Bebout, 21; her boyfriend, Charles L. Chamberlain Jr., 24, and their two children, Raymond D. Bebout, 3; and Brandon J. Bebout, 10 months old.

A Mahoning County jury deliberates for eight hours before acquitting a Youngstown man in a shooting that wounded an 8-year-old girl and her grandfather with stray gunfire. The defendant’s attorney, Samuel Amendolara, said the two witnesses who tied his client to the crime lacked credibility.

Two Catholic school girls suffer minor injuries when an asphalt chunk was thrown at their Howland school bus as it passed Warren G. Harding High School.

1978: More than 350 Sharon city taxpayers jammed into the IUE Hall on Connelly Boulevard to complain about the size of their 1978 city property-tax increase.

Mahoning County Budget Commission unanimously approves a resolution to accept a proposal by trustees of the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad to pay 44 percent of the $1 million in taxes due to the county.

Margaret Woodruff, 19, an attendant at the Gas Town service station on Youngstown’s South Side, suffers serious burns when a man threw three lighted matches at her after she spilled gasoline on her clothes while pumping gas into a car.

1968: Clifton Kibble, a seventh-grader at Hillman Junior High School, wins a “best of show” award for a water color painting in the student art show at the Home and Garden Show.

An overflow crowd of more than 3,000 gather in Stambaugh Auditorium for a memorial service to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Rev. Lonnie Simon challenges everyone to continue Dr. King’s mission of brotherhood.

1943: Frank Bolog, Youngstown food inspector, says some wholesalers are unloading hamburger on local retailers that is as much as 80 or 90 percent suet and as little as 10 percent red meat. An ordinance setting acceptable percentages of fat in hamburger is suggested.

Four people are injured when a Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train strikes a truck in North Jackson.

Herbert E. Humphries, a telegrapher for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, has both legs amputated below the knees after beings struck by a train in the Haselton Yards.