Today is Tuesday, Dec. 19, the 353rd day of 2017 with 12 to go.
The moon is waxing. The morning stars are Jupiter, Mars and Venus. The evening stars are Mercury and Uranus.
Those born on this date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include women’s suffrage leader Mary Livermore in 1820; novelist Eleanor Porter (Pollyanna) in 1868; baseball Hall of Fame member Ford Frick in 1894; Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev in 1906; French singer Edith Piaf in 1915; country singer Little Jimmy Dickens in 1920; actor Cicely Tyson in 1924 (age 93); baseball Hall of Fame member Al Kaline in 1934 (age 83); folk singer Phil Ochs in 1940; former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in 1941 (age 76); British rock musician Alvin Lee in 1944; bluegrass musician John McEuen in 1945 (age 72); actor Tim Reid in 1944 (age 73); actor Robert Urich in 1946; actor Jennifer Beals in 1963 (age 54); actor Robert MacNaughton in 1966 (age 51); magician Criss Angel in 1967 (age 50); actor Alyssa Milano in 1972 (age 45); actor Jake Gyllenhaal in 1980 (age 37); actor Keiynan Lonsdale in 1991 (age 26).
On this date in history:
In 1777, Gen. George Washington and the Continental Army began a winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pa.
In 1946 the First Indochina War began with Vietnamese troops under Ho Chi Minh clashing with the French at Hanoi.
In 1958, the U.S. satellite SCORE (Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment), launched aboard an Atlas rocket, transmitted the first radio voice broadcast from space, a 58-word recorded Christmas greeting from President Dwight Eisenhower.
In 1972, the splashdown of Apollo 17 ended the United States’ manned moon exploration program. “It’s a beautiful day,” astronaut Eugene Cernan said upon exiting the command module.
In 1974, Nelson Rockefeller is sworn in as Vice President of the United States under President Gerald Ford.
In 1984, the prime ministers of Britain and China signed an agreement to return Hong Kong to China in 1997.
In 1998, Bill Clinton became the second U.S. president to be impeached (Andrew Johnson was the first) by the House of Representatives, which approved articles charging him with perjury and obstruction of justice. Like Johnson, he was acquitted by the Senate.
In 2006, a Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a doctor to death for deliberately infecting 426 children with HIV.
In 2008, Mark Felt, an FBI official who became known as The Washington Post journalists’ shadowy source “Deep Throat” in the Watergate scandal, died at the age of 95.
In 2012, Britain announced it would begin a gradual withdrawal of its forces in Afghanistan in April 2013.
In 2012, South Koreans head to the polls to elect Park Geun-hye as the nation’s first female president.
In 2013, Target, confirming a security breach, said criminals stole credit and debit card information millions of people who shopped in its stores in the post-Thanksgiving period.
In 2016, the Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov was shot dead at an art gallery in Ankara.
In 2016, a failed Tunisian asylum seeker drove a truck into a group of people at a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring dozens more. The driver, Anis Amri, was killed days later in Milan when confronted by police.
A thought for the day: “When you judge another you do not define them, you define yourself.” — Wayne Dyer