Today is the 40th day of 2012. There are 326 days left in the year.

Today's highlight:

1962: British empire announces that Jamaica will be granted Independence effective August 6.

Other highlights

1667: Peace of Andrusovo ends the Thirteen Years' War between Russia and Poland, giving Russia the eastern Ukraine, including Kiev.

1718: French colonists arrive in Louisiana.

1788: Austria's Joseph II declares war on Turkey.

1801: Peace of Luneville between Austria and France marks virtual destruction of Holy Roman Empire.

1825: US House of Representatives elects John Quincy Adams president after no candidate received a majority of electoral votes.

1849: Rome is proclaimed republic under Giuseppe Mazzini.

1870: The US Weather Bureau is established.

1891: Menelek, emperor of Ethiopia, denounces Italian claims to a protectorate.

1909: Germany recognises France's special interests in Morocco.

1934: Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Turkey sign the Balkan Pact.

1941: German troops under Gen Erwin Rommel cross from Italy to North Africa in World War II.

1943: The World War II battle of Guadalcanal in the southwest Pacific ends with an American victory over Japanese forces.

1964: The Beatles make their first live American television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

1971: Earthquake near Los Angeles kills at least 64 people.

1989: One woman is shot and killed and six people are injured in violence during Jamaica's election.

1990: Kenyan Foreign Minister Robert Ouko is found slain at his family farm before he was to have presented a report on corruption. Two of president Daniel Arap Moi's closest confidants are later named as suspects but never convicted.

1991: About 90 per cent of those casting ballots in Lithuania's referendum on independence vote in favour of secession from the Soviet Union.

1992: Army-backed ruling council of Algeria declares state of emergency to quell spreading violence.

1994: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres, Israel's foreign minister, reach agreement on security issues that have stalled the Israeli PLO peace accord.

1995: Russian President Boris Yeltsin says that Russian troops have pacified Chechnya. In reality, fighting continues and the Russians are later forced to withdraw from the separatist region.

1996: A bomb explodes in a London business district, killing two, injuring 37 and causing an estimated $125 million in damage. The IRA claims responsibility.

1997: Heavy rains pound much of Bolivia, destroying homes and crops of tens of thousands of farmers, drowning livestock and causing rivers to flood key roads.

1998: The United States announces it will send 2,500 to 3,000 Marines to Kuwait, bolstering forces in the latest stand-off with Iraq over weapons inspections.

2000: A Massachusetts court rules that a woman can't have frozen embryos she made with her former husband at a fertility clinic. The custody battle was a first in the state -- and one of a few in the United States.

2001: US Navy submarine collides with a Japanese fishing vessel about 16 kilometres (10 miles) south of Honolulu, Hawaii, sinking the ship and leaving nine of its passengers missing at sea.

2002: Princess Margaret, 71, younger sister of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, dies; Hundreds of singing Ethiopians line Addis Ababa's streets to welcome the return of a replica of the Ark of the Covenant looted from Ethiopia by British soldiers along with gold and silver artifacts more than 130 years ago.

2003: Iranian President Mohammed Khatami announces Iran has mined uranium for use in its power plants. He says Iran would retain control of the entire cycle of use of the uranium it mined, from processing the uranium ore to reprocessing the spent reactor fuel.

2005: A car bomb blamed on Basque separatists explodes in Madrid, injuring dozens of people a week after Spain's parliament overwhelmingly rejected a plan to give the region broad autonomy bordering on independence.

2006: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called US President George W Bush a "madman" and accuses the United States and Britain of planning to invade Iran, Venezuela's closest ally in the Middle East.

2007: The UN atomic monitor suspends nearly half the technical aid it provides to Iran, a symbolically significant punishment for nuclear defiance that only North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq had faced in the past.

2008: Turkey's parliament votes to amend the constitution to lift a decades-old ban on Islamic head scarves at Turkey's universities, despite fierce opposition from the secular establishment.

2009: A woman who ignited a fierce right-to-die debate that convulsed Italy and involved the Vatican dies just as lawmakers in Parliament rush to pass a bill designed to keep her alive.

2010: Russia's top military officer says US missile defence plans are a threat to Russian national security and have slowed down progress on a new arms control treaty with Washington.

2011: British police disclose they will contact thousands of people whose cellphones may have been targeted by the News of The World tabloid, an indication of the scale of the scandal at the heart of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

Today's Birthdays:

Leander Starr Jameson, South African statesman (1853-1917); Mrs Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Tanner), English actress (1865-1940); Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, Australian aviation pioneer (1897-1935); Carole King, US singer/songwriter (1942-); Alice Walker, US author (1944-); Mia Farrow, US actress (1945-); Ziyi Zhang, Chinese actress (1979-).

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