YEARS AGO FOR FEB. 27

Today is Tuesday, Feb. 27, the 58th day of 2018. There are 307 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1700: English explorer William Dampier becomes the first known European visitor to the island of New Britain in the Southwest Pacific.

1801: The District of Columbia is placed under the jurisdiction of Congress.

1911: Inventor Charles F. Kettering demonstrates his electric automobile starter in Detroit by starting a Cadillac’s motor with just the press of a switch, instead of hand-cranking.

1943: The U.S. government, responding to a copper shortage, begins circulating one-cent coins made of steel plated with zinc (the steel pennies proved unpopular, since they were easily mistaken for dimes).

1968: At the end of a CBS News special report on the Vietnam War, Walter Cronkite delivers a commentary in which he says the conflict appeared “mired in stalemate.”

1973: Members of the American Indian Movement occupy the hamlet of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children. (The occupation lasted until the following May.)

In 1991, Operation Desert Storm ends as President George H.W. Bush declares that “Kuwait is liberated.”

2017: The Senate confirms billionaire investor Wilbur Ross as commerce secretary by a vote of 72-27.

VINDICATOR FILES

1993: More than 300 employees at the General Motors plant at Lordstown agree to take early retirement and 60 others will be laid off as the plant’s job-bank fund is exhausted.

The fate of Mahoning County’s bid for a Pentagon finance center that would employ as many as 7,000 people is in the hands of President Clinton’s defense secretary, Les Aspin.

Four Mahoning Valley high-school students will go to the National Young Leaders Conference in Washington, D.C.: Charese Cross of Youngstown East, Robby Piriak of Salem, Ross Clark of Boardman and Scott Will of Canfield.

1978: Speaking at the installation of officers of the Fraternal Order Of Police Lodge 28, James Traficant, executive director of the Mahoning County Drug Program, decries the “watering down of laws and overly solicitous attitude toward criminals.” Youngstown Patrolman Paul Gains is installed as FOP president.

Frank Jordan, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 41, said Struthers police have unanimously rejected a 5-percent wage increase offered by the city.

The 1978 Vindicator All-City Series basketball squad includes two repeat members, Joe James of Rayen and Eric Posey, North. Filling out the squad are Richard Jones, East; Duke Ellington, South, and Tom Fenisey, Chaney.

1968: The steel producers of Ohio issue a statement declaring that 11.5 million tons of foreign steel coming into the United States in 1967 could have affected 12,000 jobs in Ohio alone.

Negotiations between Youngstown and the combined police and firefighters will resume with the safety forces demanding pay increases of $148 a month.

Some 2,100 members of United Auto Workers Local 1112 at GM Fisher Body-Chevrolet assembly plant at Lordstown strike after negotiations fail to produce an agreement.

1943: Coadjutor Bishop Edward F. Hoban of the Cleveland Diocese gives Youngstown Catholics a dispensation from most of the Lenten fasting and abstinence requirements because of food rationing. Fasting and abstinence will be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

Draft Board 11, comprising most of Mahoning County’s rural areas, expects to run out of 3-A childless married men engaged in nonessential work by mid-March.

Liquor “pirates” who travel from liquor store to store cornering the market have been busy in Youngstown since the liquor shortage began.