1978

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• On 18 April, the United States promises to return the Panama Canal to Panama by 2000.

• On 27 April, a Communist/Islamic coup overthrows and kills Afghan president Muhammad Daoud.

• On 17 September, the Camp David accords between US president Jimmy Carter, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat provide the basis for the Middle East peace process.

• On 16 October, Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland is elected pope as John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope since 1522.

• On 25 December, Vietnamese troops invade Cambodia with the aim of overthrowing Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

• In a mass suicide on 19 November, 911 men, women and children (many from the San Francisco area) die at the People's Temple of cult leader Jim Jones at Jonestown, Guyana.

• Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, is born in Britain on 25 July.

• On 26 October, the World Health Organization announces that smallpox has been eradicated except for small laboratory stocks of the virus.

• Edward Said, a Palestinian academic living in the United States, publishes Orientalism, an influential criticism of Western ideas about Middle Eastern culture.

• A committee of the US House of Representatives concludes that a second gunman was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

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