September 12
1848 - Switzerland adopts new constitution as a federal union with strong central government.
1890 -Salisbury, Rhodesia, is founded.
1933 -Alejandro Lerroux forms new Spanish government.
1942 -A German U-boat sinks the British troop ship Laconia, killing more than 1,400 men during the Second World War.
1943 - German paratroopers take Benito Mussolini from the hotel where he is being held by the Italian government.
1953 - Nikita Khrushchev becomes first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
1959 - Soviet Union launches Luna 2, the first spacecraft to reach the moon.
1966 - Nasa launches its Gemini 11 manned spacecraft with astronauts Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon on board.
1974 - Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is deposed by a military junta.
1977 - South African black student leader Steven Biko dies while in police custody, triggering an international outcry.
1980 - Turkish military seizes power and keeps it until 1983.
1987 - Ethiopia adopts constitution.
1988 - Hurricane Gilbert slams into Jamaica with torrential rains, killing 45 people.
1992 - Abimael Guzman, founder of bloody Maoist guerrilla movement the Shining Path, is captured in Lima, Peru.
1995 - The Belarusian military shoots down a helium balloon during an international race, killing its two American pilots.
1997 - Scotland votes in favour of setting up its own parliament for the first time in 300 years.
2000 - A suspected car bomb rips through an underground garage in the Jakarta Stock Exchange building killing 15 people.
2003 - UN Security Council votes to lift sanctions against Libya that had been in place for 11 years.
2005 - Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe quietly adopts constitutional changes.
2007 - A Philippines anti-graft court sentences former President Joseph Estrada to life imprisonment.
2011 61 Kenyan are died after a petrol pipeline exploded in a slum area in Nairobi.
2012 At least 280 people die at a garment factory blaze in Karachi, Pakistan.
2013 37 people died in a fire that swept through an aged psychiatric hospital in Russia
2014 - Former Northern Ireland leader Ian Paisley dies at the age of 88.
2015 A cooking gas cylinder explodes in a restaurant in Petlawad in Madhya Pradesh, India, killing at least 85 people
2016 - Former British prime minister David Cameron resigns his seat in the House of Commons.
HIGHLIGHT
1992
Actor Perkins dies of Aids
Actor Anthony Perkins, best known for playing a murderous motel keeper in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho, died of complications related to Aids. He was 60. Perkins died peacefully in his Hollywood Hills home with his wife and two sons at his side. Perkins prepared a statement about his condition earlier this week which said: “ I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of Aids than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life,” Perkins wrote. Perkins, the son of stage and screen actor Osgood Perkins, began acting at the age of 15 and made his film debut in the 1953 movie The Actress at 21. He later appeared on Broadway and in television dramas before returning to the screen in 1956 in Friendly Persuasion, a role that won him an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor.
