Today 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.
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 the University of California at Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive 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 (BAHR’nard) performed the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky, who lived 18 days with the donor organ, which came from Denise Darvall, a 25-yearold bank clerk who had died in a traffic accident.
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, California, at age 47.
In 2014, a Staten Island, New York, 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 (bah-DEE’-yoh), a Bronx politician who was the first person born in Puerto Rico to become a U.S. congressman, died at age 85.
In 2017, the second- largest U.S. drugstore chain, CVS, announced that it was buying Aetna, the third-largest health insurer, in order to push much deeper into customer care.
Five years ago: Congress approved a 5-year, $305 billion bill to address the nation’s aging and congested transportation systems (the bill was approved on a 359-65 vote in the House, and an 83-16 vote in the Senate). Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered the armed services to open all military jobs to women, removing the final barriers that had kept women from serving in combat, including the most dangerous and grueling commando posts. Former Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland was found dead in his tour bus in Bloomington, Minnesota; he was 48.
One year ago: A 300-page report prepared by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee found “serious misconduct” by President Donald Trump in his dealings with Ukraine; the report would serve as a foundation for debate over whether Trump should be impeached and removed from office. At the NATO summit in London, Trump branded Democrats as “unpatriotic” for moving ahead with the impeachment effort while he was overseas. After initially seeking to hold the 2020 G7 summit at a resort he owns in Florida, Trump announced that the annual gathering would be held at the Camp David retreat in Maryland. (It ended up being postponed by the coronavirus outbreak.)