Today is final day of 2012.

Today’s Highlight

1879: US inventor Thomas A Edison gives first demonstration of his electric incandescent light at Menlo Park, New Jersey.

Other Events

1799: The Dutch East India Company’s territories in Indonesia are taken over by the Dutch Administration in Batavia, now Jakarta.

1851: Austrian Constitution is abolished.

1857: Britain’s Queen Victoria decides to make Ottawa the capital of Canada.

1919: Britain, Japan and United States sign an agreement on East Siberia.

1961: Lebanon’s army prevents coup attempt in Beirut by Syrian Popular Party; the US Marshall Plan expires after distributing more than $12 billion in foreign aid.

1963: Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dissolved.

1964: Indonesia’s President Sukarno threatens to quit the United Nations if Malaysia is given a seat on the UN Security Council.

1974: Private US citizens are allowed to buy and own gold for the first time in more than 40 years.

1978: Taiwanese diplomats strike their colours for the final time from the embassy flagpole in Washington, marking the end of diplomatic relations with the US.

1986: A fire at the Dupont Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, kills 97 and injures 140 people.

1987: Violent protests erupt in Jerusalem’s West Bank as Palestinians prepare to observe the January 1 anniversary of the PLO’s main guerrilla group.

1988: India and Pakistan agree not to attack each others’ nuclear facilities.

1990: Israeli air force attacks a PLO base near Sidon, Lebanon killing 12 guerrillas belonging to Yasser Arafat’s Al Fatah faction.

1991: Representatives of North Korea and South Korea agree not to use nuclear weapons.

1993: The teenage granddaughter of Cuban leader Fidel Castro arrives in the United States for a reunion with her mother, who defected from Cuba the previous week.

1994: A New Year’s Eve assault by Russian forces on Grozny, Chechnya, produces one of the bloodiest days of the war. Both sides claim success.

1997: Hong Kong authorities finish up the slaughter of 1.3 million chickens and other fowl to prevent an outbreak of a deadly strain of bird flu in humans.

1998: Eleven European nations usher in the New Year and the euro.

1999: Russian President Boris Yeltsin announces his resignation.

2000: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak draws the bottom line in any peace deal with the Palestinians: no transfer of sovereignty over Jerusalem’s revered Temple Mount to the Palestinians, and no right of return for Palestinian refugees.

2003: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that an outbreak of influenza reached epidemic levels in 45 states and has already killed at least 42 children.

2004: Locked doors at a nightclub in Buenos Aires, Brazil, block or slow the exit of many concertgoers fighting to escape a fire that kills 186 people and injures hundreds.

2005: British subway workers walk out in a 24-hour strike, disrupting the London Underground as tens of thousands of revellers throng in the capital to celebrate the new year.

2007: Parliamentary elections in Pakistan are set to be postponed by several weeks a day after Benazir Bhutto’s 19-year-old son, Bilawal Zardari, is chosen to succeed her as chairman of her opposition party and despite opposition demands elections go ahead as planned on January 8.

2008: The alleged ringleaders of a Chinese counterfeiting gang that sold at least $2 billion worth of bogus Microsoft Corp software are sentenced to prison terms of up to 6 1/2 years, in what is believed to be the harshest penalties yet under China’s tightened piracy laws.

2009: A US judge dismisses all charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security guards accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in a crowded Baghdad intersection in 2007.

2010: A top ally of Ivory Coast’s internationally recognised leader says that the country is already in a “civil war situation”, while the incumbent leader who refuses to step down after the disputed election accuses world leaders of launching a coup to oust him.

2011: Yemen’s outgoing president decides to stay in the country, reversing plans to leave in an apparent attempt to salvage his control over the regime, which has appeared to unravel in the face of internal revolts and relentless street protests.

Today’s Birthdays

Jacques Cartier, French explorer (1491-1557); Henri Matisse, French artist-sculptor (1869-1954); Nathan Milstein, Russian-born violinist (1903-1992); Gottfried August Burger, German poet (1748-1794); Anthony Hopkins, English actor (1937-); Sarah Miles, British actress (1941-); Donna Summer, US singer (1948-2012); Ben Kingsley, British actor (1943-).

— AP