Today is the 327h day of 2012 There are 39 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight

2005: Conservative Angela Merkel takes power as Germany’s first female chancellor and the country’s first leader to grow up under communism in the Soviet-occupied East. It is the same day, 15 years earlier, that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigns, after 11 1/2 years in office.

Other Events

1906: The “SOS” distress signal is adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin.

1935: The flying boat, The China Clipper, leaves San Francisco on the first trans-Pacific airmail flight.

1943: Lebanon is granted independence after two decades of French mandate rule; Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Franklin D Roosevelt, and China’s Chiang Kai-shek agree in Cairo, Egypt, on measures to defeat Japan in World War II.

1963: US President John F Kennedy is assassinated as he rides in motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Vice President Lyndon B Johnson becomes the 36th president.

1972: US President Richard Nixon lifts 22-year-old ban on American travel to China.

1974: UN General Assembly gives the Palestine Liberation Organisation observer status.

1977: The British and French supersonic airliner Concorde begins service out of New York’s Kennedy International Airport after lengthy dispute over noise levels.

1989: Lebanese President Rene Mouawad is assassinated.

1990: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, after being defeated by John Major in a ballot for Conservative Party leader, resigns after 11 1/2 years in office.

1991: Ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide meets with a group of legislators to negotiate an end to Haiti’s constitutional crisis. It is the first meeting between the two sides since Aristide’s overthrow in a military-led coup.

1993: Mexican Senate approves North American Free Trade Agreement.

1998: Albanians ratify their country’s first post-Communist constitution in a referendum.

2001: The Turkish Parliament approves revisions to the country’s 75-year-old civil code to recognise men and women as equal before the law.

2002: Officials cancel the Miss World pageant in Nigeria and move it instead to London after news that the African nation will host the event sparks deadly riots.

2004: Opposition supporters gather to protest alleged fraud in Ukraine’s presidential runoff, which European monitors say was marred by official interference and suspiciously high turnout figures.

2006: Nepal celebrates the end of a bloody 10-year communist insurgency by declaring a public holiday, and the international community hails the deal under which communist rebels will join an interim government.

2007: A transport strike that has crippled France for nine days in open defiance of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s reform agenda collapses as rail workers around the country vote “yes” to return to work.

2008: China denounces a US congressional panel that issued a report accusing it of stepping up computer espionage attacks on the American government, its defense contractors and businesses.

2009: Iran begins large-scale air defence war games aimed at protecting its nuclear facilities from attack as an air force commander boasts the country could deter any military strike by Israel.

2010: Thousands of people stampede during a festival in the Cambodian capital, leaving more than 330 dead and hundreds injured in what the prime minister calls the country’s biggest tragedy since the 1970s reign of terror by the Khmer Rouge.

2011: South Korea’s ruling party forces a long-stalled free trade deal with the US through parliament, enraging opposition lawmakers who blast their political rivals with tear gas.

Today’s Birthdays

Charles de Gaulle, French general-statesman (1890-1970); Benjamin Britten, English composer (1913-1976); Lew Hoad, Australian tennis champion (1934-1994); Jamie Lee Curtis, US actress (1958-); Mariel Hemingway, US actress (1961-); Boris Becker, German tennis professional and Wimbledon champion (1967-); Scarlett Johansson, US actress (1984-).