Today is the 286th day of 2012.There are 80 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight

2007: Jamaican university professor Dr Anthony Chen is part of the team that is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for work on climate change. Former US Vice-President Al Gore is a team member.

Other Events

1492: Christopher Columbus makes his first landfall in the New World, in present-day Bahamas.

1822: Brazil becomes independent of Portugal.

1960: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev upsets the decorum of UN General Assembly by pounding the desk with his shoe during a dispute.

1964: US forces take control in South Vietnam, ousting government of Maj Gen Nguyen Khanh.

1969: Soviet Union launches Soyuz VII spacecraft with three men aboard to join two men in orbit in Soyuz VI.

1977: Sweden agrees to cancel over US$200 million in debts owed by eight Third World nations.

1984: An Irish Republican Army bomb explodes at a hotel in Brighton, England, where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is attending a conference, killing five people.

1989: Rejecting democratic reforms, a high-ranking East German official says socialism will continue to dominate society.

1993: German Chancellor Helmut Kohl pledges to move most of the nation's government to Berlin from Bonn, the current capital, by the end of the year 2000.

1995: Panama grants asylum to Haiti's Raoul Cedras, who had taken power in a 1991 coup.

1996: Commander Ramona of the Zapatista rebel movement marches into Mexico City at the head of a demonstration by indigenous people on the 504th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in America.

1997: Cuban President Fidel Castro appoints his brother Raoul as successor and urges the party to be unified in maintaining communism.

1998: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agrees to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, initiate peace negotiations with ethnic Albanians and allow international observers to ensure UN demands are met.

1999: A military coup throws Pakistan into political disarray as conflict with India continues over the disputed Kashmir territory. Army Chief Gen Pervez Musharraf becomes the new leader and promises to hold elections.

2001: The UN and its

Secretary-General Kofi Annan, win the Nobel Peace Prize.

2005: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatens to kick some Christian missionaries out of the country as he presents property titles to indigenous groups who he said had been robbed of their ancient homelands.

2009: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vows never to allow Israeli leaders or soldiers to stand trial on war crimes charges over their actions during last winter's military offensive in the Gaza Strip, furiously denouncing a UN report in a keynote address to parliament.

2011: BlackBerry users across the world are exasperated as an outage of email, messaging and Internet services on the phones spread to the US and Canada and stretch into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Today’s Birthdays

England's King Edward VI (1537-1553); Pedro I, first emperor of Brazil

(1798-1834); James Ramsey MacDonald, British prime minister (1865-1937);

Edith Stein, German Roman Catholic saint (Saint Teresa Benedicta Of The Cross)

(1891-1942); Ralph Vaughan Williams, English composer (1872-1958); Luciano

Pavarotti, Italian tenor (1935-2007), Kirk Cameron, US actor (1970-).

—AP and the Jamaica Observer