Following are some of the major events to have occurred on June 12:
1917 – King Constantine of Greece stepped down in favour of his son, Prince Alexander.
1935 – Bolivia and Paraguay signed a truce ending the Chaco War, a three-year dispute over the Chaco area.
1991 – Boris Yeltsin defeated Communist rivals in the first direct election to the presidency of the Russian republic.
2003 – Gregory Peck, one of the last great stars from Hollywood’s golden era and a man who embodied on-screen heroism and dignity, died. He was 87 and best known for his appearances in the films “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “Moby Dick” and “Cape Fear”.
2005 – Kuwait appointed its first woman cabinet member, naming veteran women’s rights activist Massouma al-Mubarak as planning minister.
2006 – Canadian newspaper tycoon Ken Thomson, who helped transform his father’s print empire into one of the world’s biggest electronic publishers, Thomson Corporation, died aged 82.
2007 – The U.N. war crimes tribunal sentenced the former leader of rebel Serbs in Croatia, Milan Martic, to 35 years in jail for ordering atrocities committed in the early 1990s.
2008 – Long-time political rivals Taiwan and China, in their first formal talks in almost a decade, agreed to launch direct weekend passenger flights starting from July 4, the first in nearly 60 years.
2014 – Actress Angeline Jolie and Actor Brad Pitt join Britain’s Foreign Secretary at the world’s first summit to end sexual violence in conflict.
2017 – U.S. Student Otto Frederick Warmbier is released from detention in North Korea in a coma.
