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 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 (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.