DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Friday, Dec. 3, the 337th day of 2021. There are 28 days left in the year. On this date in:
1818: Illinois was admitted as the 21st state.
1828: Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States by the Electoral College.
1947: The Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened on Broadway.
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.
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 25year-old bank clerk who had died in a traffic accident.
1979: 11 people were killed in a crush of fans at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum, where the British rock group The Who was performing.
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.
1992: The Greek tanker Aegean Sea spilled more than 21 million gallons of crude oil when it ran aground off northwestern Spain.
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.
2000: Poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-american to win a Pulitzer
Prize, died in Chicago at age 83.
2010: 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.
2015: 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.
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.
Singer Ozzy Osbourne is 73. Singer
Mickey Thomas of Jefferson Starship is 72. Bassist Paul Gregg of Restless Heart is 67. Actor Steven Culp (“Desperate Housewives”) is 66. Actor Daryl Hannah is 61. Actor Julianne Moore is 61. Actor Brendan Fraser is 53. Singer
Montell Jordan is 53. Actor-comedian Royale Watkins is 52. Actor Bruno Campos (“Nip/tuck,” “Jesse”) is 48. Actor Holly Marie Combs (“Charmed”) is 48. Actor Lauren Roman (“Bold and the Beautiful”) is 46. Musician Daniel Bedingfield is 42. Actor Tiffany Haddish (“Girls Trip”) is 42. Actor Anna Chlumsky is 41. Actor Jenna Dewan (“The Resident,” “Supergirl”) is 41. Singer-songwriter Andy Grammer is 38.