T O D AY I N H I S T O R Y
Today is Thursday, Dec. 3, the 338th day of 2020. There are 28 days left in the year.
Today’s highlight in history
On Dec. 3, 1984, thousands of people died after a cloud of methyl isocyanate gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.
On this date
In 1818, Illinois was admitted as the 21st state.
In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States by the Electoral College.
In 1833, Oberlin College in Ohio — the first truly coeducational school of higher learning in the United States — began holding classes.
In 1960, the Lerner and Loewe musical “Camelot,” starring Julie Andrews as Guenevere, Richard Burton as King Arthur and Robert Goulet as Lancelot, opened on Broadway.
In 1964, police arrested some 800 students at UC Berkeley, one day after students stormed the administration building and staged a sit-in.
In 1965, the Beatles’ sixth studio album, “Rubber Soul,” was released in the United Kingdom by Parlophone. (It was released in the U.S. by Capitol Records three days later.)
In 1967, a surgical team in Cape Town, South Africa, led by Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky, who lived 18 days with the donor organ, which came from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old bank clerk who had died in a traffic crash.
In 1979, 11 people were killed in a crush of fans at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum, where the British rock group The Who was performing.
In 1992, the Greek tanker Aegean Sea spilled more than 21 million gallons of crude oil when it ran aground off northwestern Spain.
In 1994, AIDS activist Elizabeth Glaser, who along with her two children were infected with HIV because of a blood transfusion, died in Santa Monica at age 47.
In 2014, a Staten Island, N.Y., grand jury declined to indict police Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the July 2014 chokehold death of Eric Garner, a Black man who’d been stopped on suspicion of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes. (Pantaleo would be fired from the police force in August 2019.) Herman Badillo, a Bronx politician who was the first person born in Puerto Rico to become a U.S. congressman, died at age 85.
Ten years ago: During a surprise holiday-season visit to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama told cheering U.S. troops at Bagram Air Field they were succeeding in their mission to fight terrorism; however, foul weather prevented Obama from meeting with President Hamid Karzai in Kabul to address frayed relations. The Labor Dept. reported the U.S. unemployment rate had risen in November 2010 to 9.8 percent after three straight months at 9.6 percent.
Today’s birthdays
Director Jean-Luc Godard is 90. Singer Jaye P. Morgan is
89. Actor Nicolas Coster is 87. Actor Mary Alice is 79. Rock singer Ozzy Osbourne is 72. Rock singer Mickey Thomas is
71. Country musician Paul Gregg (Restless Heart) is 66. Actor Steven Culp is 65. Actor Daryl Hannah is 60. Actor Julianne Moore is 60. Olympic gold medal figure skater Katarina Witt is 55. Actor Brendan Fraser is 52. Actor Bruno Campos is 47. Actor Holly Marie Combs is 47. Actor Liza Lapira is 45. Actor-comedian Tiffany Haddish is 41. Actor Anna Chlumsky is 40. Poprock singer-songwriter Andy Grammer is 37.