UPI Almanac for Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016

Today is Saturday, Dec. 3, the 338th day of 2016 with 28 to follow.

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

Those born on this date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include presidential portrait painter Gilbert Stuart in 1755; Civil War-era Gen. George B. McClellan in 1826; U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologist Cleveland Abbe, who initiated daily weather bulletins, in 1838; English novelist Joseph Conrad in 1857; Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, in 1925; pioneer country singer Ferlin Husky, also in 1925; singer Andy Williams in 1927; French film director Jean-Luc Godard in 1930 (age 86); former race car driver Bobby Allison in 1937 (age 79); Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Ozzy Osbourne in 1948 (age 68); former race car driver Rick Mears in 1951 (age 65); Olympic gold medal skier Franz Klammer in 1953 (age 63); actors Mel Smith in 1952 and Daryl Hannah and Julianne Moore, both in 1960 (age 56); Olympic figure skater Katarina Witt in 1965 (age 51); and actors Brendan Fraser in 1968 (age 48), Brian Bonsall in 1981 (age 35) and Amanda Seyfried in 1985 (age 31).

On this date in history:

In 1818, Illinois was admitted as the 21st state in the United States.

In 1833, Oberlin College in Ohio, the first truly coeducational college in the United States, opened with an enrollment of 29 men and 15 women.

In 1929, the Ford Motor Co. raised the pay of its employees from $5 to $7 a day despite the collapse of the U.S. stock market.

In 1967, Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful heart transplant at Cape Town, South Africa.

In 1984, poison gas leaked at a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, in the world's worst chemical disaster. Death toll estimates varied widely. Government officials said about 3,000 people died shortly after the leak and many thousands more in the months and years ahead.

In 1992, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to authorize sending a U.S.-led multinational force to Somalia.

In 1997, delegates from 131 countries met in Canada to sign the Convention on the Prohibition, Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines.

In 2006, Hugo Chavez, an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush and U.S. foreign policy, was re-elected for a third term as president of Venezuela.

In 2009, Comcast, the largest cable operator in the United States, bought 51 percent of NBC Universal from General Electric for $13.75 billion.

In 2012, White House spokesman Jay Carney, commenting on a U.S. warning that Syria must not cross a "red line" and use chemical weapons, said: "The [Bashar] Assad regime must know that the world is watching and that they will be held accountable by the United States and the international community if they use chemical weapons or fail to meet their obligations to secure them."

In 2013, a federal judge ruled that Detroit was eligible for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

A thought for the day: Robert F. Kennedy said, "The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better."