YEARS AGO FOR FEB. 15

Today is Thursday, Feb. 15, the 46th day of 2018. There are 319 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1564: Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa.

1798: A feud between two members of the U.S. House of Representatives (meeting in Philadelphia) boils over as Roger Griswold of Connecticut uses a cane to attack Vermont’s Matthew Lyon, who defends himself with a set of tongs.

1898: The U.S. battleship Maine mysteriously blows up in Havana Harbor, killing more than 260 crew members and bringing the United States closer to war with Spain.

1933: President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt escapes an assassination attempt in Miami that mortally wounds Chicago Mayor Anton J. Cermak; gunman Giuseppe Zangara would be executed about four weeks later.

1961: Seventy-three people, including an 18-member U.S. figure skating team en route to the World Championships in Czechoslovakia, are killed in the crash of a Sabena Airlines Boeing 707 in Belgium.

1989: The Soviet Union announces the last of its troops has left Afghanistan, after more than nine years of military intervention.

1992: A Milwaukee jury finds that Jeffrey Dahmer was sane when he killed and mutilated 15 men and boys. (Dahmer was beaten to death in prison in 1994.)

2017: President Donald Trump’s nominee for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, abruptly withdraws his nomination after Senate Republicans balk at supporting him, in part over taxes he had belatedly paid on a former housekeeper not authorized to work in the United States.

VINDICATOR FILES

1993: Passage rates for all four Ohio high-school proficiency tests range in Mahoning County from 19 percent in Youngstown to 67 percent in Canfield; in Trumbull County, from 27 percent in Joseph Badger to 72 percent in McDonald; and in Columbiana County, from 23 percent in Wellsville to 51 percent in Leetonia.

Wizard Graphics, a custom-painting and pinstriping shop owned by Steve Chaszeyka in New Middletown, hosts 35 pinstriping artists from throughout the United States and Canada at the first “Pinhead Summit.”

Ohio is becoming a battleground state over the cleanup of toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes with the U.S. EPA preparing to release its Great Lakes Water Quality Initiative and a group representing industry and municipal-waste districts organized as the Great Lakes Water Quality Coalition opposing the EPA’s initiatives.

1978: Delinquency charges of murder are filed against two 15-year-old East Side boys accused of throwing a rock from an overpass on the Madison Avenue Expressway that killed a 3-year-old Campbell boy.

As Ohio Edison warns of possibly crippling cutbacks in electricity generation because of a coal shortage, Mahoning Valley stores report a run on oil lamps, flashlights, batteries, candles and home generators.

The Warren Board of Education approves a $19 million budget, described as the “tightest ever.”

1968: The Air Force cancels plans to shut down its reserve base at Youngstown Municipal Airport. The Airlift Group may be re-equipped with newer and faster aircraft.

In South Side holdups, robbers take 12,000 trading stamps from a South Avenue service station and money from Hillman Street Market.

A new 17,000-square-foot ice-skating rink at the James L. Wick Jr. Recreation Area in Mill Creek Park opens.

1943: An effort to lift an injunction restraining government engineers from closing dam gates and filling Berlin Reservoir will be made at a conference of a U.S. attorney, common pleas judge and Portage County commissioners.