YEARS AGO FOR JULY 18

Today is Wednesday, July 18, the 199th day of 2018. There are 166 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

A.D. 64: The Great Fire of Rome begins, consuming most of the city for about a week.

1536: The English Parliament passes an act declaring the authority of the pope void in England.

1817: English novelist Jane Austen dies in Winchester at age 41.

1918: South African anti-apartheid leader and president Nelson Mandela is born in the village of Mvezo.

1932: The United States and Canada sign a treaty to develop the St. Lawrence Seaway.

1940: The Democratic National Convention at Chicago Stadium nominates President Franklin D. Roosevelt for an unprecedented third term in office.

1947: President Harry S. Truman signs a Presidential Succession Act which placed the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore next in the line of succession after the vice president.

1969: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., leaves a party on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard with Mary Jo Kopechne, 28; some time later, Kennedy’s car goes off a bridge into the water. Kennedy escapes, but Kopechne drowns.

1984: Gunman James Huberty opens fire at a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif., killing 21 people.

2017: President Donald Trump declares that it is time to “let Obamacare fail” after the latest Republican effort to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law was blocked in the Senate.

VINDICATOR FILES

1993: Nearly $40 million will be invested in downtown Youngstown by 1994 for construction of two jails, a business incubator, a state office building and a federal courthouse – the biggest investment in the central business district since urban renewal in the 1960s.

State Rep. Frank LaGrotta, D-Ellwood City, introduces a bill that would outlaw smoking by anyone in Pennsylvania public and private school buildings.

Aulisio’s Restaurant in Niles advertises itself as a “Smokers Restaurant. Nonsmokers welcome.” Manager Georgiann Fenton says smokers deserve to be treated with the same respect as nonsmokers.

1978: The state Controlling Board clears the way for nearly $700,000 to promote economic development in Struthers, Campbell and Lowellville. The money will be allocated to CASTLO.

New Castle, Pa., detectives have nothing to report in their investigation into the murders of Kathy Kadunce, 25; and her daughter, Dawn, 4. They plan to administer lie-detector tests to people who may have information.

Taking top honors in the seventh annual Boardman News Invitational golf tournament are Chuck Burt, Calloway champion; Tim Turk, scratch champion; and Philip Thomas, handicap champion.

1968: Fire of a suspicious nature breaks out at a vacant Fruit Street home in Youngstown where the body of Larry Gallagher, 62, of Sharon Pa., had been found beaten to death a week earlier.

Henry Williams, director of East Side Citizens Center since 1966, resigns to join Bristol-Myers.

1943: The Rev. E. Pinkney Wroth of Warren, Ohio, is elected bishop of the Erie Diocese of the Episcopal Church and will be consecrated at St. John’s at Sharon, Pa., one of the largest congregations in the diocese.

Joyce Schall, Como Street, Struthers, is seriously injured when a car in which she was a passenger skidded off a rain-soaked road new New Bedford, Pa.

Second Lt. Donald Balch, Arlington Street, Youngstown, and Lt. Howard Winfield, East Prospect Street, Girard, members of a Marine aviation squadron on Guadalcanal, are among American fliers who shot down 24 Japan Zero planes.