10 years ago

From the Journal Tribune: “The Five Points reconstruction project is drawing to a close, with paving planned for early next week. The major intersection will be closed to traffic starting Monday, Aug. 22 to 24 for paving. Traffic traveling Route 111 outbound, from the city center will be detoured from the intersection. The paving project is weather dependent and may extend into the last week of August if it rains.”

50 years ago

From the Biddeford-Saco Journal: “A rear end collision on U.S. 1 at the Ocean Park Road intersection caused considerable damage to the vehicles involved last night, police said. A vehicle operated by Leslie A. Hamel Jr., 31, of South Portland told police he was stopped for a traffic light when his vehicle was struck from the rear…”

100 years ago

From the Biddeford Daily Journal: “The stockholders of the Biddeford National bank have voted to reduce the amount of the capital stock of the bank, having taken the proper action at a meeting held last February. In pursuance of the vote taken, further action is provided for, by individual stock holders … The action taken by the stockholders is considered good business policy.” — Amanda Melanson

Today in History

Today is Friday, August 21, the 233th day of 2015. There are 132 days left in the year.

On this date: In 1831, Nat Turner led a violent slave rebellion in Virginia resulting in the deaths of at least 55 white people. (He was later executed.) In 1858, the first of seven debates between Illinois senatorial contenders Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas took place. In 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris. (The painting was recovered two years later in Italy.) In 1940, exiled Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky died in a Mexican hospital from wounds inflicted by an assassin the day before. In 1944, the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China opened talks at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington that helped pave the way for establishment of the United Nations. (The talks concluded on October 7.)

Today’s Highlight in History:

On August 21, 1945, President Harry S. Truman ended the Lend-Lease program that had shipped some $50 billion in aid supplies to America’s allies during World War II.

Ten years ago Pope Benedict XVI triumphantly ended his four-day trip to his native Germany, celebrating an open-air Mass for a million people in Cologne. Robert A. Moog, whose self-named electronic synthesizers revolutionized music in the 1960s, died in Asheville, North Carolina, at age 71.

Five years ago Iranian and Russian engineers began loading fuel into Iran’s first nuclear power plant, which Moscow promised to safeguard to prevent material at the site from being used in any potential weapons production. A Vincent van Gogh painting, “Poppy Flowers,” was stolen in broad daylight from Cairo’s Mahmoud Khalil Museum. (Although Egyptian authorities initially said they’d recovered the painting the same day at the Cairo airport, that report turned out to be erroneous; the painting remains missing.)

One year ago Calling it a “miraculous day,” an American doctor infected with Ebola left his isolation unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta; Dr. Kent Brantly warmly hugged his physicians and nurses, showing the world that he posed no public health threat one month after getting sick with the virus. Gov. Jay Nixon ordered the Missouri National Guard to begin withdrawing from Ferguson, where nightly scenes of unrest had erupted since a white police officer fatally shot an unarmed black 18-year-old nearly two weeks earlier.