YEARS AGO FOR MAY 12

Today is Sunday, May 12, the 132nd day of 2019. There are 233 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1780: During the Revolutionary War, the besieged city of Charleston, S.C., surrenders to British forces.

1932: The body of Charles Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old kidnapped son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, is found in a wooded area near Hopewell, N.J.

1939: The crowning of Britain’s King George VI takes place in Westminster Abbey; his wife, Elizabeth is crowned as queen consort.

1943: During World War II, Axis forces in North Africa surrender. The two-week Trident Conference, headed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, opens in Washington.

1949: The Soviet Union lifts the Berlin Blockade, which the Western powers had succeeded in circumventing with their Berlin Airlift.

1955: Manhattan’s last elevated rail line, the Third Avenue El, ceases operation.

1958: The United States and Canada sign an agreement to create the North American Air Defense Command (later the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD).

1978: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that hurricanes would no longer be given only female names.

1982: In Fatima, Portugal, security guards overpower a Spanish priest armed with a bayonet who attacks Pope John Paul II. (In 2008, the pope’s long-time private secretary revealed that the pontiff was slightly wounded in the assault.)

2002: Jimmy Carter arrives in Cuba, becoming the first U.S. president in or out of office to visit since the 1959 revolution that put Fidel Castro in power.

2003: The Texas House grinds to a standstill after 51 Democratic lawmakers leave the state in a dispute over a Republican congressional redistricting plan. (The Democrats returned four days later from Oklahoma, having succeeded in killing the bill.)

2008: A devastating 7.9- magnitude earthquake in China’s Sichuan province leaves more than 87,000 people dead or missing.

2009: Five Miami men are convicted in a plot to blow up FBI buildings and Chicago’s Sears Tower; one man is acquitted.

Suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk of Cleveland is deported from the United States to Germany.

2014: Scientists express concern during a NASA news conference over a pair of studies that say the huge West Antarctic ice sheet is starting a glacially slow collapse in an unstoppable way, a melt that could eventually add 4 to 12 feet to current sea levels.

2017: Dozens of countries are hit with a huge cyberextortion attack that locks up computers and holds users’ files for ransom at a multitude of hospitals, companies and government agencies.

2018: North Korea says it will dismantle its nuclear test site later in the month, in what analysts describe as a mostly symbolic event that won’t represent a material step toward denuclearization.

VINDICATOR FILES

1994: The Mahoning County Child Support Enforcement Agency reports a $700,000 increase in child-support collections in the first quarter of the year.

David S. Houck, founder and president of McDonald Steel Corp., a company that rose from the ruins of a closed steel mill in 1980, is retiring.

Former Youngstown Police Officer Joseph Bonacci, 46, receives a donor liver in a transplant at the Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City, Okla.

1979: Tuition for Ursuline and Cardinal Mooney high schools is increased by the Youngstown Diocesan Board of Education from $600 to $675 a year. Ursuline anticipates 1,225 students in the coming academic year; Cardinal Mooney, 1,100.

Allen Kinkade, 24, is electrocuted outside his Gladstone Road home in North Jackson while trying to restore power that had been cut off for nonpayment of a utility bill.

David Hassan, 15, is in fair condition in Tod Babies & Children’s Hospital after being rescued from Mill Creek by John Statler, 16. The boys were at the park for a Christian Schools’ Baseball Tournament.

1969: Marine Pfc. Darryl T. Dombroski, 20, a 1966 graduate of Austintown Fitch High School, is reported killed by enemy rifle fire near Hoa in Quang Nam Province, Vietnam.

Dave Leeper, a veteran track and field athlete from Lakeview High School in Cortland, gets off his best toss of the year, 52 feet, 83/4 inches, to win the shot put in the NEO Class A District Meet in Struthers.

James “Jack” Jurey, 45, former Vindicator newsman, dies at his Washington, D.C., home of cancer and complications. He left The Vindicator in 1958 and pioneered TV broadcast editorials at WTOP-TV.

1944: Recovery of the last of the bodies of three West Mecca boys from the waters of Mosquito Creek Lake is reported. Alfred Johnston had been found first, followed by Donald Hudson and Jack Tarr.

The New Castle, Pa., plant of United Engineering & Foundry Co. receives an order from the U.S. Army Ordnance to make casings for large caliber shells.

Unfounded rumors that crooner Frank Sinatra died results in numerous phone calls to The Vindicator. Sinatra, the callers were assured, was hospitalized for a throat infection but is very much alive.