YEARS AGO

Today is Saturday, July 2, the 184th day of 2016. There are 182 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1566: French astrologer, physician and professed prophesier Nostradamus dies in Salon.

1776: The Continental Congress passes a resolution saying that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

1881: President James A. Garfield is shot by Charles J. Guiteau at the Washington railroad station; Garfield died the following September. (Guiteau was hanged in June 1882.)

1926: The United States Army Air Corps is created.

1937: Aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappear over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first round-the-world flight along the equator.

1961: Author Ernest Hemingway shoots himself to death at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.

1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law a sweeping civil-rights bill passed by Congress.

1976: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Gregg v. Georgia, rules 7-2 that the death penalty is not inherently cruel or unusual.

1986: In a ruling in a pair of cases, the Supreme Court upholds affirmative action as a remedy for past job discrimination.

2001: Robert Tools receives the world’s first self-contained artificial heart in Louisville, Ky. (He lived 151 days with the device.)

2015: Trying to close the books on the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, BP agrees to provide billions of dollars in new money to five Gulf Coast states in a deal the company said would bring its full obligations to an estimated $53.8 billion.

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: One of two winning tickets in Ohio’s $24 million Super Lottery drawing was purchased at the Wickliffe Amoco Food Mart in Austintown, but the woman who bought it demanded that the $77 worth of tickets she bought be voided and new tickets issued. The clerk complied and threw what would have been a $12 million ticket in the trash.

Ohio Sen. Howard Metzenbaum says he will grill President Bush’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, on his views on abortion because he does not want to see a further erosion of a woman’s right to choose.

East Palestine city officials provide the only opposition to a proposed 911 emergency telephone system for Columbiana County during a public hearing.

1976: Mahoning County deputy sheriffs arrest two young Maryland hitchhikers who are accused of abducting a sailor in Norfolk, Va., and forcing him to drive to Lake Milton.

Contempo Vans of Los Angeles acquires Century Plastics Co. of Lordstown, taking over 50,000 square feet of space in the Warren Space Center. The company plans to convert vans built at the Lordstown General Motors plant into recreational vehicles.

The Youngstown law department is reviewing an interim entry by U.S. District Judge Thomas Lambros in Cleveland that requires the city to hire at least two blacks in filling six police vacancies.

1941: A new obstacle to Youngstown’s getting federal funds for the Berlin Reservoir appears when the allocation of a $150 million appropriation for public works was transferred from Washington to a priority board in Detroit.

A plan to cut Ohio Edison Co. and Penn Power Co. loose from Commonwealth and Southern Corp. of Delaware is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

With temperatures in the 90s for the sixth day, Youngstown registers its first death from heat exhaustion, Nick Radu, 73, who died at South Side hospital.