Today is Saturday, June 8, the 159th day of 2019. There are 206 days left in the year.

June 8, 2019 at 12:00a.m.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1845: Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States, dies in Nashville, Tenn.

1920: The Republican National Convention opens in Chicago; its delegates nominate Ohioan Warren G. Harding for president.

1948: “Texaco Star Theater” debuts on NBC-TV with Milton Berle guest-hosting the first program.

1967: During the six-day Middle East war, 34 American servicemen are killed when Israel attacks the USS Liberty, a Navy intelligence-gathering ship in the Mediterranean Sea.

1968: Authorities announce the capture in London of James Earl Ray, the suspected assassin of civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

1998: The National Rifle Association elects actor Charlton Heston to be its president.

2003: Frustrated and angry over delays, a coalition of the nation’s mayors asks federal officials to give them the money they needed to beef up homeland security.

2017: Former FBI Director James Comey, testifying before Congress, asserts that President Donald Trump fired him to interfere with his investigation of Russia’s ties to the Trump campaign.

VINDICATOR FILES

1994: Automobile Specialty Corp., which has been installing sunroofs and convertible tops on Chevrolet Cavaliers and Pontiac Sunbirds at its North Jackson plant since 1984, is closing its Youngstown Commerce Park plant.

Vicki Van Meter, 12, a Meadville, Pa., sixth-grader, lands at Glasgow International Airport after a three-hop flight from Maine, and could be the youngest pilot to cross the Atlantic.

Canfield police and school officials say the traditional shaving-cream battles on the Village Green must stop because there have been too many close shaves with Canfield Middle School students darting into traffic.

1979: Austintown police capture a 25-year-old Niles man who abducted a 19-year-old Niles woman from the Eastwood Mall parking lot, drove her to an unpaved road off Four Mile Run Road where he assaulted her. She escaped and called police from a nearby house while his car became stuck in the mud. Police captured him after he fled on foot.

James W. Blevins, 30, of Warren is killed after his motorcycle was forced from Route 45 in Bristol Township by a passing car. In a separate Trumbull County motorcycle crash, Tammy Hidasey, 18, of Newton Falls, was killed when the motorcycle on which she was a passenger rammed into a car on Mahoning Avenue.

Members of the Youngstown Men’s Garden Club plant petunias and marigolds in large planters on Federal Plaza.

1969: Three Austintown Fitch High School graduates – Alan Copp, Malvern Culp and Wayne Summers – receive scholarships to the General Motors Institute.

Fred W. Green, vice president of Home Savings and Loan Co., is elected president of the Downtown Kiwanis Club.

The Rt. Rev. John Burt, Episcopal bishop of Ohio and former rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Youngstown, will visit St. James Church, Boardman, where he will commission four men as lay readers: Fred D. Butler, Howard Burlingame, Ivor Jenkins and Harry Lawson.

1944: Ohio’s U.S. senators, Harold H. Burton and Robert A. Taft, make a personal appeal to 89 senators for their support for the Beaver-Mahoning waterway.

Cole Brothers Circus rolls into Youngstown from Meadville, Pa., via the Erie Railroad and then onto the West Avenue yards of the Pennsylvania Railroad, where real circus fans got up at dawn to see the show within the show – the unloading of the double-length cars.

A downtown “bingo emporium,” a new “soldiers lounge” and a national headquarters for a new World War II veterans organization to be known as the Legion Association of America will be opened soon in the Cahn Building on West Commerce Street.