UPI Almanac for Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2019

Today is Tuesday, Dec. 10, the 344th day of 2019 with 21 to follow.

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

Those born on this date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include abolitionist/journalist William Lloyd Garrison in 1805; mathematician Ada Lovelace in 1815; poet Emily Dickinson in 1830; librarian Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey decimal book classification system, in 1851; poet Nelly Sachs in 1891; novelist Clarice Lispector in 1920; actor Tommy Kirk in 1941 (age 78); actor Susan Dey in 1952 (age 67); actor Michael Clarke Duncan in 1957; actor/director Kenneth Branagh in 1960 (age 59); singer/actor Nia Peeples in 1961 (age 58); celebrity chef Bobby Flay in 1964 (age 55); musician Meg White in 1974 (age 45); actor Emmanuelle Chriqui in 1975 (age 44); actor Xavier Samuel in 1983 (age 36); actor Raven-Symone Pearman in 1985 (age 34).

On this date in history:

In 1768, Encyclopedia Britannica was first published.

In 1817, Mississippi joined the United States as the 20th state.

In 1869, the Territory of Wyoming granted women the right to vote.

In 1898, Spain signed a treaty officially ending the Spanish-American War. It gave Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States.

In 1901, the Nobel Prizes were first awarded in Oslo, Norway, and Stockholm, Sweden.

In 1906, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1936, Britain's King Edward VIII abdicated to marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson. His brother succeeded to the throne as King George VI.

In 1941, Japanese troops landed on northern Luzon in the Philippines in the early days of World War II.

In 1950, U.S. diplomat Ralph Joseph Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize for his peace mediation during the first Arab-Israeli war. He was the first African American to win the award.

In 1984, the National Science Foundation reported the discovery of the first planet outside the solar system -- 21 million light-years from Earth.

In 1990, communists won a major victory in the first postwar multiparty elections in the Yugoslavian republics of Serbia and Montenegro.

In 2005, Richard Pryor, who pushed the envelope on racial themes and vulgarity in standup and movie comedy, died of cardiac arrest. He was 65.

In 2006, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former president of Chile who seized power in a bloody 1973 coup and ruled the nation for 17 years, died at the age of 91.

In 2009, President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, urging attendees to reach for the world "as it ought to be."

In 2010, Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, represented by a portrait and an empty chair, was honored during the Nobel presentations in Oslo, Norway. Liu was in a northeastern China prison serving an 11-year sentence for subversion and his family was forbidden from attending the ceremony.

In 2013, Mary Barra became CEO of General Motors, the first woman to head a major automotive company.

In 2018, British Prime Minister Theresa May postponed a key vote on her Brexit plan because it didn't have enough votes to pass the House of Commons.

A thought for the day: "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?" -- American poet Emily Dickinson