The Almanac

Today is Friday, Sept. 2, the 245th day of 2005 with 120 to follow.

The moon is waning. The morning stars are Mercury, Mars and Saturn. The evening stars are Neptune, Jupiter, Uranus, Venus and Pluto.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Virgo. They include poet Eugene Field in 1850; Hiram Maxim, inventor of the automobile muffler and firearm silencer, in 1869; authors Cleveland Amory in 1917 and Allen Drury in 1918; dancer Marge Champion in 1923 (82); former baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth in 1937 (age 68); Christa McAuliffe, born on this date in 1948, was the school teacher who became an astronaut but was killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986; also born in 1948, pro football star/sportscaster Terry Bradshaw, (age 57); actor Mark Harmon in 1951 (age 54); tennis champion Jimmy Connors in 1952 (age 53); singer k.d. lang in 1961 (age 44), and actors Keanu Reeves in 1964 (age 41) and Selma Hayek in 1966 (age 39).

On this date in history:

In 1666, the Great Fire of London began. It destroyed 13,000 houses in four days.

In 1935, one of the worst hurricanes to hit the U.S. mainland ripped through the Florida Keys, killing more than 350 people.

In 1945, Japan signed an unconditional surrender aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, formally ending World War II.

In 1983, Moscow admitted to the Sept. 1 shooting down of a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747, killing all 269 people aboard, but said the jumbo jet intentionally invaded Soviet air space.

In 1991, the European Community-approved plan to end the civil war in Yugoslavia was accepted by the Yugoslav federal presidency. But federal forces renewed their offensive against Croatia.

In 1992, more than 100 people were killed when earthquake-spawned tidal waves swept Pacific coast villages in Nicaragua.

In 1997, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 257.36 points for its largest one-day point gain, closing at 7,879.

In 1998, a Swissair jetliner en route from New York City to Geneva, Switzerland, crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. All 229 people aboard were killed.

In 1999, the Clintons bought a home in the New York suburb of Chappaqua for $1.7 million, establishing residency for first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, planning a run for the U.S. Senate.

In 2003, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts formally announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In 2004, President George W. Bush accepted the GOP nomination for re-election, promising to build a "safer world and a more hopeful America."

Also in 2004, South Korea acknowledged it conducted secret experiments to enrich uranium to weapons-grade status but said it was solely for the domestic production of nuclear fuel.

A thought for the day: Logan Pearsall Smith said, "There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail."