Today is Saturday, Dec. 12, the 346th day of 2009. There are 19 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

On Dec. 12, 1917, Father Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town outside Omaha, Neb.

ON THIS DATE

In 1787, Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

In 1870, Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina became the first black lawmaker sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 1897, “The Katzenjammer Kids,” the pioneering comic strip created by Rudolph Dirks, made its debut in the New York Journal.

In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt nominated Oscar Straus to be Secretary of Commerce and Labor; Straus became the first Jewish Cabinet member.

In 1925, the first motel — the Motel Inn — opened in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

In 1937, Japanese aircraft sank the U.S. gunboat Panay on China’s Yangtze River. (Japan apologized, and paid $2.2 million in reparations.)

In 1939, swashbuckling actor Douglas Fairbanks died in Santa Monica, Calif., at age 56.

In 1963, Kenya gained its independence from Britain.

In 1985, 248 American soldiers and eight crew members were killed when an Arrow Air charter crashed after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland.

In 1989, in New York, hotel queen Leona Helmsley, 69, was sentenced to four years in prison and fined $7.1 million for tax evasion. (Helmsley served 18 months behind bars, plus a month at a halfway house and two months of house arrest.)

In 1999, author Joseph Heller, whose darkly comic first novel “Catch-22” defined the paradox of the no-win dilemma and added a phrase to the American language, died in East Hampton, N.Y., at age 76.

In 2004, a bomb exploded in a market in southern Philippines, killing at least 14 people. Militants blew up an Israeli base at the Gaza-Egypt crossing, killing five soldiers. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas apologized to Kuwaitis for Palestinian support for Saddam Hussein after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Associated Press