Local history

50 years ago: 1976

The Blair County Tuberculosis and Respiratory Disease Association and Eliza Leader, executive secretary, said it would obey the state DER mandate to cease mobile chest X-rays but still believed they were beneficial.

25 years ago: 2001

Logan Township, Frank Meloy supervisor, was to work with Altoona, the Post Office and 911 Center to rename some streets and roads in Logan Township, especially Lakemont, to benefit the 911 Center.

10 years ago: 2016

Bryce Saylor & Sons used two cranes to lift a 1927 steam locomotive from the Everett Railroad on to a flatbed truck in Hollidaysburg so it could be repaired, Zach Hall, Everett Railroad steam shop foreman reported.

— Compiled by Tim Doyle

World history

Today is Thursday, Feb. 26, the 57th day of 2026. There are 308 days left in the year.

Today’s highlight in history:

On Feb. 26, 1993, a truck bomb built by Islamic extremists exploded in the parking garage of the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others, mainly due to smoke inhalation. (The bomb failed to topple the north tower into the south tower, as the terrorists had hoped; both towers were destroyed in the 9/11 attack eight years later.)

On this date:

ö In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from exile on the island of Elba, sailing back to France in a bid to regain power.

ö In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson signed an act making the Grand Canyon a national park.

ö In 1952, Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that Britain had developed its own atomic bomb.

ö In 1987, the Tower Commission, which had probed the Iran-Contra affair, issued its report, which rebuked President Ronald Reagan for failing to control his national security staff.

ö In 1998, a jury in Amarillo, Texas, rejected an $11 million lawsuit brought by Texas cattlemen who blamed Oprah Winfrey’s talk show for a price fall after a segment on food safety that included a discussion about mad cow disease.

— The Associated Press