YEARS AGO FOR FEB. 16

Today is Friday, Feb. 16, the 47th day of 2018. There are 318 days left in the year. This is the Chinese New Year of the Dog.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1804: Lt. Stephen Decatur leads a successful raid into Tripoli Harbor to burn the U.S. Navy frigate Philadelphia, which had fallen into the hands of pirates during the First Barbary War.

1923: The burial chamber of King Tutankhamen’s recently unearthed tomb is unsealed in Egypt by English archaeologist Howard Carter.

1937: Du Pont research chemist Dr. Wallace H. Carothers, inventor of nylon, receives a patent for the synthetic fiber.

1968: The nation’s first 911 emergency telephone system is inaugurated in Haleyville, Ala.

1988: Seven people are shot to death during an office rampage in Sunnyvale, Calif., by a man obsessed with a co-worker who was wounded in the attack. (The gunman is on death row.)

2008: A car plows into a group of street-racing fans obscured by a cloud of tire smoke on an isolated Maryland highway, killing eight people.

2017:. In the first full-length news conference of his presidency, Donald Trump denounced what he called the “criminal” leaks that took down his top national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

VINDICATOR FILES

1993: Calling a ban on prayer at graduation ceremonies “unreasonable,” officials of Maplewood Local School District in Trumbull County call on other school districts and federal legislators to restore the graduation tradition.

U.S. Rep. Tom Ridge, R-Erie, tells Sharon Steel Corp. workers that U.S. Bankruptcy Court, not Congress, is the proper forum for them to pursue their accusation of financial misdealings by the company.

Mahoning County Coroner Dr. Nathan Belinky rules the death of Gilbert Price, 71, of New Middletown, a homicide, the seventh in the county this year. A 47-year-old Beaver Township woman is arrested on a homicide charge.

1978: The Mahoning Valley Economic Development Agency votes to oppose any merger of Lykes Corp. and LTV Corp. until the government first judges the efforts of outside interests to acquire the Campbell Works of the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co.

Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins opens the trial of John Tidwell with a grisly description of the night Tidwell shot and killed Warren industrialist C. Walter Holmquist and his wife, Dorothy, in their Cortland home.

Youngstown Councilman John Murphy calls for legislation that would make loitering on bridges a crime after a 3-year-old boy was killed by a rock thrown from a Madison Avenue Expressway overpass. There’s also a discussion of fencing in all overpasses.

1968: Sgt. Frank Ramos of Youngstown is reported killed in action in Vietnam, about four weeks after he’d been scheduled to return to the U.S.

Youngstown schools Superintendent Woodrow Zinser, speaking at the 10th annual B’Nai B’rith men and women’s brotherhood program, says, “the home environment is the most important factor in determining a child’s success in school and in later life.”

General Motors Packard Electric plants in Warren will furlough 1,777 workers to adjust production.

1943: The United Labor Congress unanimously adopts a resolution asking the federal government to build a Mosquito Creek reservoir north of Warren for flood control and an adequate water supply.

A natural-gas shortage continues to curtail industrial production in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys as sub-zero temperatures continue.

At least two Youngstown men are known to have been on the U.S.S. Chicago that was reported sunk Jan. 30, and both are reported safe: Lt. Cmdr. Joseph Yavorsky and Ralph G. Callahan, a fireman first class.