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, 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president of the United States by the Electoral College.
On this date:
- In 1818, Illinois was admitted as the 21st state.
- 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-year-old 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, 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.
Today’s Birthdays:
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. Singer Montell Jordan is 52. Actor Royale Watkins is 51. Actor Bruno Campos is 47. Actor Holly Marie Combs is 47. Actor Liza Lapira is 45. Actor Lauren Roman is 45. Pop-rock singer Daniel Bedingfield is 41. Actor/comedian Tiffany Haddish is 41. Actor Anna Chlumsky is 40. Actor Jenna Dewan is 40. Actor Brian Bonsall is 39. Actor Dascha Polanco is 38. Pop/rock singer-songwriter Andy Grammer is 37. Americana musician Michael Calabrese (Lake Street Dive) is 36. Actor Amanda Seyfried is 35. Actor Michael Angarano is 33. Actor Jake T. Austin is 26.