The almanac

Today is Monday Nov. 19, the 323rd day of 2007 with 42 to follow.

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

Those born on this date are under the sign of Scorpio. They include English King Charles I in 1600; U.S. frontier military leader George Rogers Clark in 1752; James Abram Garfield, 20th president of the United States, in 1831; religious revivalist Billy Sunday in 1862; explorer Hiram Bingham, discoverer of the Inca city of Machu Picchu, in 1875; bandleader Tommy Dorsey in 1905; Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1917; former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick in 1926; talk show host Larry King in 1933 (age 74); entertainer Dick Cavett in 1936 (age 71); entrepreneur Ted Turner in 1938 (age 69); fashion designer Calvin Klein in 1942 (age 65); actress Kathleen Quinlan in 1954 (age 53); Eileen Collins, first female space shuttle commander, in 1956 (age 51); actress Meg Ryan in 1961 (age 46); actress/director Jodie Foster in 1962 (age 45); actress Terry Farrell ("Star Trek: Deep Space Nine") in 1963 (age 44); and Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug in 1977 (age 30).

On this date in history:

In 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on a Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania.

In 1919, the U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles drawn up by the Paris peace conference at the end of World War I.

In 1939, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid the cornerstone for his presidential library at Hyde Park, N.Y.

In 1954, the first automatic toll collection machine went into service at the Union Toll Plaza on New Jersey's Garden State Parkway.

In 1985, a Houston jury ruled Texaco must pay $10.5 billion, the largest damage award in United States history, to Pennzoil Co. for Texaco's 1984 acquisition of Getty Oil Co.

In 1986, at the beginning of what became the Iran-Contra scandal, U.S. President Ronald Reagan said the United States would send no more arms to Iran.

In 1990, NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations signed a massive conventional arms treaty in Paris to end the 40-year Cold War.

In 1991, a cargo train derailment in central Mexico killed 70 people and injured 40 more when the boxcars crushed automobiles on a highway below the tracks.

In 1994, Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano and his party claimed victory in the country's first multiparty presidential and parliamentary elections.

In 1995, in a close presidential runoff election in Poland, former communist party leader Aleksander Kwasniewski defeated incumbent Lech Walesa.

In 1997, Bobbi McCaughey gave birth to septuplets in Des Moines, Iowa, the first time seven babies had been born and survived.

In 2001, the U.S. government offered a $25 million award for information leading to the location or capture of Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

In 2002, 13 months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to create a Cabinet-level Homeland Security Department in the largest government reorganization in more than 50 years.

Also in 2002, The World Wildlife Fund warned that an oil tanker that broke in half and was sinking off the coast of Spain could trigger an ecological disaster far worse than the one Exxon Valdez caused in Alaska 13 years earlier.

In 2004, the chief of U.S. forces in South Korea said he is concerned that North Korea may sell its weapons-grade plutonium to international terrorists.

In 2005, Ford Motor Co. said it would eliminate 4,000 white-collar jobs next year as part of a major cost-cutting plan.

Also in 2005, health experts in the United States and Japan investigated the deaths of 12 Japanese children who took Roche's anti-viral Tamiflu medication.

And, in 2005, Prince Albert II formally became ruler of Monaco when he assumed the throne of his late father Prince Rainier.

In 2006, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said current circumstances in Iraq made it impossible for the United States to win a full military victory.

A thought for the day: Milan Kundera said, "The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past."