This day in history
Today is Wednesday, Aug. 2, the 214th day of 2023. There are 151 days left in the year.
► Birthdays: Rock musician Garth Hudson of the Band is 86. Singer Kathy Lennon (the Lennon Sisters) is 80. Actor Joanna Cassidy is 78. Actor Butch Patrick (TV: “The Munsters”) is 70. Senator Jacky Rosen, Democrat of Nevada, is 66. Singer Mojo Nixon is 66. Actor Victoria Jackson is 64. Actor Cynthia Stevenson is 61. Actor Mary-Louise Parker is 59. Actor-director Kevin Smith is 53. Actor Sam Worthington is 47. Actor Edward Furlong is 46. TV meteorologist Dylan Dreyer is 42. Singer Charli XCX is 31.
► In 1776, members of the Second Continental Congress began attaching their signatures to the Declaration of Independence.
► In 1873, inventor Andrew S. Hallidie successfully tested a cable car he had designed for the city of San Francisco.
► In 1876, frontiersman “Wild Bill” Hickok was shot and killed while playing poker at a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, by Jack McCall, who was later hanged.
► In 1921, a jury in Chicago acquitted several former members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team and two others of conspiring to defraud the public in the notorious “Black Sox” scandal.
► In 1922, Alexander Graham Bell, generally regarded as the inventor of the telephone, died in Nova Scotia, Canada, at age 75.
► In 1923, the 29th president, Warren G. Harding, died in San Francisco; Vice President Calvin Coolidge became president.
► In 1934, German President Paul von Hindenburg died, paving the way for Adolf Hitler’s complete takeover.
► In 1939, Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging creation of an atomic weapons research program.
► In 1945, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and Britain’s new prime minister, Clement Attlee, concluded the Potsdam conference.
► In 1974, former White House counsel John W. Dean III was sentenced to one to four years in prison for obstruction of justice in the Watergate cover-up. (Dean ended up serving four months.)
► In 1980, 85 people were killed when a bomb exploded at the train station in Bologna, Italy. º In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, seizing control of the oil-rich emirate. (The Iraqis were later driven out by the United States and allies in Operation Desert Storm.)
► In 2018, Pope Francis decreed that the death penalty is “inadmissible” under all circumstances and the Catholic Church should campaign to abolish it. The Vatican said that Francis had amended the Catechism of the Catholic Church — the compilation of official Catholic teaching — to say that capital punishment can never be sanctioned because it constitutes an “attack” on the dignity of human beings. Apple became the world’s first publicly-traded company to be valued at $1 trillion.
► Last year, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan, becoming the highestranking American official in 25 years to visit the self-ruled island claimed by China, which quickly announced that would will conduct military maneuvers in retaliation for her presence.