UPI Almanac for Monday, Oct. 26, 2015

Today is Monday, Oct. 26, the 299th day of 2015 with 66 to follow.

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

Those born on this date are under the sign of Scorpio. They include cereal foods entrepreneur C. W. Post in 1854; baseball Hall of Fame member Judy Johnson in 1900; boxing champion Primo Carnera in 1906; singer Mahalia Jackson and football Hall of Fame member Sid Gillman, both in 1911; bandleader Charlie Barnet in 1913; actor Jackie Coogan in 1914; French President Francois Mitterrand and U.S. aviator Boyd Wagner, both in 1916; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah of Iran, in 1919; actor Bob Hoskins in 1942; author Pat Conroy in 1945 (age 70); TV personality Pat Sajak in 1946 (age 69); former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 1947 (age 68); and actors Jaclyn Smith in 1947 (age 68), Dylan McDermott in 1961 (age 54), Cary Elwes in 1962 (age 53) and Tom Cavanagh in 1963 (age 52); rock musician Keith Strickland in 1953 (age 62); Bolivian President Evo Morales in 1959 (age 56); singers Natalie Merchant in 1963 (age 52) and Keith Urban in 1967 (age 48); and actors Seth McFarlane in 1973 (age 42) and Jon Heder in 1977 (age 38).

On this date in history:

In 1825, the Erie Canal, America's first man-made waterway, was opened, linking the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River.

In 1881, the storied gunfight at the O.K. Corral occurred in Tombstone, Ariz.

In 1920, the lord mayor of Cork, Ireland, Terence McSwiney, demanding independence for Ireland, died after a 2 1/2-month hunger strike in a British prison cell.

In 1944, after four days of furious fighting, the World War II battle of Leyte Gulf, largest air-naval clash in history, ended with a decisive U.S. victory over the Japanese.

In 1951, British voters placed Winston Churchill's Conservative Party at the helm of government today after six years of socialism.

In 1979, South Korean President Park Chung-hee was assassinated by the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1990, District of Columbia Mayor Marion Barry was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $5,000 for his conviction on misdemeanor drug charges. (Barry became mayor again in 1995.)

In 1994, Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty at a desert site along the Israeli-Jordanian border.

In 1995, Islamic Jihad leader co-founder, Fathi Shaqaqi (Fathi ash-Shiqaqi), was assassinated by Mossad agents at his hotel in Malta.

In 1998, the presidents of Ecuador and Peru signed a peace treaty, ending a decades-long border dispute.

In 2001, the United States passes the USA PATRIOT Act into law. ***

In 2002, a four-day Moscow hostage crisis came to a bloody end after Russian soldiers stormed a theater where Chechen rebels had held 700 people for ransom. Ninety hostages and 50 rebels were killed.

In 2010, GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug manufacturer, agreed to settle criminal and civil complaints for $750 million, stemming from accusations of knowingly selling drugs with questionable safety standards.

In 2013 police in Phoenix said Michael Guzzo, 56, angered by barking dogs in his townhouse complex, shot and killed four members of a family and two of their dogs, fired shots at the home of another family, then killed himself.

A thought for the day: President Theodore Roosevelt said, "Far better... to dare mighty things... even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."