Today in History: Air France plane crashes off runway at Toronto International Airport, all passengers and crew survived the crash

The following are some of the major events to have occurred on August 2:

1776 - Formal signing of the US Declaration of Independence by 56 people (date most accepted by modern historians).

1790 - 1st US census conducted, the population was 3,939,214 including 697,624 slaves.

1921 – The Italian operatic tenor Enrico Caruso died in Naples.

1923 – U.S. President Warren Harding died in San Francisco on his return from a trip to Alaska. Calvin Coolidge took over the presidency.

1939 – Albert Einstein, concerned that German scientists were working on powerful bombs using uranium, wrote to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging him to start an atomic project.

1996 – The American runner Michael Johnson became the first man to win both the 200 metres and 400 metres at the same Olympics.

1997 – The American counterculture writer William S. Burroughs, a member of the “beat generation” best known for the novel “Naked Lunch”, based on his experiences as a drug addict, died aged 83.

1999 – The Awadh-Assam Express train collided head-on with the Brahmaputra Mail in eastern India, killing 285 people and injuring nearly 300.

2001 – Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic was jailed for 46 years for the murder of thousands of Muslims in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two. His sentence was later cut to 35 years.

2004 – The Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, died aged 95.

2005 – Air France flight 358 crashes off runway at Toronto International Airport, with all passengers and crew walking away from the fiery remains.

2007 – Russian explorers dived deep below the North Pole in a submersible and planted their national flag on the seabed to stake a symbolic claim to the energy riches of the Arctic.

2014 – Factory explosion kills at least 68 in eastern China.

(Reuters)