THE 1980s: WORLD EVENTS: SELECTED OCCURRENCES OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES

1980

Italian semiotics professor Umberto Eco publishes his medieval detective novel, The Name of the Rose.
Anthony Burgess publishes Earthly Powers.
Nuns and Soldiers, by Iris Murdoch, is published.
German motion-picture director Rainer Werner Fassbinder completes his fifteen-and-a-half-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa releases Kagemusha.
Man of Iron, by Polish director Andrzej Wajda, is released.
Alain Resnais's Mon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle), starring Gérard Depardieu, is released.
The British rock group Joy Division disbands following the May suicide of their lead singer, Ian Curtis.
British unemployment reaches 2.5 million by year's end, the highest number since 1935. Inflation climbs above 20 percent, double its rate when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took office in 1979.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raises the price of a barrel of crude oil to $32. Gasoline prices rise accordingly.
The Church of England replaces the Book of Common Prayer, used in services since 1569, with the Alternative Service Book.

6 Jan.: Former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi is reelected to the office.
27 Feb.: French officials announce the sale of weapons-grade uranium and a nuclear reactor to Iraq.
24 Mar.: Human rights activist Archbishop Oscar A. Romero is murdered in El Salvador.
12 Apr.: In Liberia a military coup led by Samuel K. Doe deposes President William R. Tolbert.
18 Apr.: Zimbabwe, formerly known as Rhodesia, gains independence after years of civil war. The first autonomous government is headed by Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, 56, a Marxist.
21 Apr.: Cubans begin an exodus from the port of Mariel to the United States, resulting in a migration of 125,262 citizens before the Castro government halts the emigration on 26 September.
24 Apr.: An attempt by U.S. forces to rescue the fifty-two diplomatic hostages held by Islamic revolutionaries in Iran fails.
30 Apr.: Dutch queen Juliana abdicates and is succeeded by her daughter, Beatrix.
4 May: Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito dies after thirty-five years in power. The power vacuum precipitated by his death raises fears that Yugoslavia will be racked by long-standing but suppressed ethnic violence.
20 May: Quebec voters defeat an independence initiative.
12 June: Japanese prime minister Masayoshi Ohira dies. He is succeeded by Zenko Suzuki, 66.
23 June: The son of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, dies in a plane crash.
26 June: France announces the successful test of a prototype neutron bomb.
27 June: Canada's House of Commons officially adopts "O, Canada" as the national anthem.
14 July: The American Defense Intelligence Agency (ADIA) announces that its members believe that South Africa exploded an atomic bomb in September 1979.
18 July: India launches its first successful staged rocket.
27 July: Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, in exile following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, dies of cancer.
14 Aug.: Polish shipyard workers in Gdansk strike in protest of a new rise in meat prices. By 1 September, Communist Party leader Edward Gierek agrees to the demands set by a dissident labor union, Solidarity. Led by electrician Lech Walesa, Solidarity becomes the first independent labor union in the Soviet bloc.
19 Aug.: Willy Russell's play Educating Rita debuts at London's Piccadilly Theatre, following an opening at the Warehouse Theatre.
20 Aug.: In response to continuing unrest in the East Bloc, the Soviet Union jams western radio broadcasts, thus violating the 1975 Helsinki accords.
4-22 Sept.: Iraqi planes and a ten-thousand-man strike force attack Iranian airfields in the Shatt al Arab estuary, escalating border conflicts and beginning an eight-year war between Iran and Iraq.
17 Sept.: In Asunción, Paraguay, former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle is assassinated by gunmen who destroy his Mercedes with a bazooka and machine guns.
1 Oct.: The European Economic Community (EEC) bans the use of growth hormones in cattle feed.
4 Oct.: A bomb explosion outside a Paris synagogue kills four, injures ten, and raises fear of neo-Nazi activities in France.

1981

German author Heinrich Böll's Fürsorgliche Belagerung: Roman (1979) is translated into English by Leila Vennowitz and published as The Safety Net
University of Geneva literature professor George Steiner publishes The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.
British novelist Salman Rushdie completes Midnight's Children.
West German writer Peter O. Chotjewitz publishes The Thirty Years Peace.
Wolfgang Peterson's antiwar study, Das Boot (The Boat), starring Jurgen Prochnow, is released.
Australian filmmaker Peter Weir completes Gallipoli starring Mark Lee and Mel Gibson.
The world population reaches 4.5 billion, up from 2.5 billion in 1950.
Divorce is legalized in Spain.
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, 80, dies.
Britain completes the building of the 4,626-foot Humber Bridge at Hull, the longest suspension bridge in the world.
The new U.S. presidential administration of Ronald Reagan resumes grain exports to the Soviet Union and agrees that the United States will not suspend any future grain shipments. The grain embargo had been imposed by previous U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, in response to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

17 Jan.: Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos ends eight years of martial law and calls for free elections. He wins a second six-year term on 16 June.
20 Jan.: On the day of U.S. president Ronald Reagan's inauguration, the United States releases almost $8 billion in Iranian assets, and Iran releases the fifty-two American diplomats held hostage for 444 days.
23 Jan.: The Reagan administration suspends U.S. financial aid to the revolutionary Sandinista government of Nicaragua, charging that Nicaragua, with the aid of Cuba and the Soviet Union, is supplying arms to rebels in El Salvador. Later in the year the U.S. government begins to support the Contras, a counterrevolutionary guerrilla force opposing the Sandinistas.
5 May: Following a sixty-five-day hunger strike, Irish nationalist Bobby Sands dies.
6 May: Accusing Libya of supporting international terrorism, the Reagan administration closes the Libyan embassy in Washington.
10 May: Socialist leader François Mitterrand is elected president of France.
13 May: In Rome, Pope John Paul II survives an assassination attempt by a Bulgariantrained Turk.
7 June: In an effort to prevent Iraqi production of plutonium, Israeli jets destroy Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor.
22 June: Iranian president Abolhassan Bani-Sadr is removed from office and flees to France.
28 June: Islamic Republican Party chief Ayatollah Mohammed Beheshti, along with four aides, is killed in Teheran.
1 July: Nell Dunn's Steaming opens at London's Theatre Royal, Stratford East.
24 July: U.S. envoy Philip C. Habib negotiates a cease-fire following continuing clashes between Israeli and Palestinian forces in Lebanon.
28 July: Simon Gray's Quartermaine's Terms, starring Edward Fox, debuts at the Queen's Theatre in London.
29 July: Prince Charles of Great Britain, 32, marries Lady Diana Spencer, 20, at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, beginning a relationship that would keep tabloid writers occupied throughout the decade.
31 July: Brig-Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera, dictator of Panama, is killed in a plane crash. By 1983 Col. Manuel Antonio Noriega, a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) informant, will be the strong-arm de facto leader of Panama.
19 Aug.: After they are attacked in air space above the Gulf of Sidra, two U.S. Navy planes shoot down two Soviet-made Libyan air-force planes.
30 Aug.: Several top Iranian officials, including President Muhammad Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammad Javar Bahonar, are killed by a bomb in the prime minister's office.
11 Sept.: A grenade attack kills Ayatollah Assadolah Madani, an aide to Iranian cleric and Islamic revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.
21 Sept.: British Honduras, renamed Belize, becomes an independent state and member of the British Commonwealth of Nations.
22 Sept.: The 236 MPH high-speed train, the TGV, begins service from Paris to Lyon, France.
6 Oct.: In Cairo, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is assassinated by Islamic extremists angered by his 1979 peace accord with Israel and recent crackdowns on political dissidents. Sadat will be succeeded by Hosni Mubarak, 53.
1 Nov.: The Caribbean islands of Antigua and Barbuda gain independence and together are recognized as one state in the British Commonwealth of Nations.
13 Dec.: Polish general Wojciech Jaruzelski, having assumed the office of prime minister in February, declares martial law, outlaws the independent labor union Solidarity, and imprisons opposition leaders.
14 Dec.: Israel annexes the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory taken in the 1967 Six-Day War.

1982

Soviet poet Yevgeny A. Yevtushenko publishes his first novel, Berry Patches.
Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez publishes Crónica de una muerte anunciada (translated as Chronicle of a Death Foretold) and wins the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature.
La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977), by Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, is translated into English by Helen R. Lane and published as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.
Andrzej Wajda's film about the French Revolution, Danton, starring Gérard Depardieu, is released.
Klaus Kinski stars in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.
Ben Kingsley plays the lead in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi.
Beatrice Romand stars in Eric Rohmer's Le Beau Mariage.
Placido Domingo stars in Franco Zeffirelli's movie version of La Traviata.
Italy defeats West Germany, 3-1, to win the World Cup in international soccer competition.
A national census reveals that the Chinese population is more than one billion.
Many U.S. oil companies and thousands of U.S. citizens leave Libya.

23 Mar.: In Guatemala a military coup overthrows the dictatorship of Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia, who has been charged by Amnesty International with responsibility for thousands of political murders. Gen. José Efraín Ríos Montt becomes the new dictator in June.
1 Apr.: Under the terms of the 1977 treaty with the United States, Panama formally takes over the policing of the Panama Canal Area.
2 Apr.: A long-standing territorial dispute between Argentina and Great Britain over the disposition of the British-held Falkland Islands in the southern Atlantic leads to an Argentinean military invasion of the islands.
3 Apr.: In Paris, terrorists assassinate an Israeli diplomat.
12 Apr.: Great Britain imposes a blockade of the Falkland Islands.
17 Apr.: In Ottawa, Queen Elizabeth II of Britain signs the Constitution Act, replacing the North American Act of 1867 with a new, fully autonomous Canadian constitution.
21 Apr.: Israeli forces destroy Palestinian strongholds in southern Lebanon from which members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) have been staging guerrilla attacks.
25 Apr.: Under the terms of the 1978 Camp David Accords and 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Israel completes withdrawal of its troops from the Sinai.
4 May: South African playwright Athol Fugard debuts Master Harold…and the Boys at New York's Lyceum Theater.
14 May: British forces storm the Falkland Islands.
24 May: Iranian forces retake the port city of Khurramshahr, seizing thirty thousand Iraqi prisoners.
3 June: In London, terrorists critically wound the Israeli ambassador to Great Britain.
6 June: Seeking to quell PLO guerrilla attacks, Israel invades Lebanon. Israeli forces reach the outskirts of Beirut on 10 June.
14 June: Argentinean troops in the Falkland Islands surrender to the British. The Falkland Islands war has cost the British 243 lives and the Argentineans more than 1,000.
27 July: Israeli jets bomb West Beirut, killing 120 and injuring 232.
20 Aug.: Mexico defaults on a $60 billion foreign debt, the first of several Third World nations to do so. In response, First World bankers begin to grant delays in interest payments.
29 Aug.: Two British explorers complete a three-year expedition to circumnavigate the globe by way of both the North and South poles.
14 Sept.: Christian Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel, the president-elect of Lebanon, is killed in a bomb explosion.
16 Sept.: In West Beirut, Christian Phalangist militiamen massacre Palestinian civilians in refugee camps. Suspicions of Israeli complicity lead to demands for the resignation of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.
1 Oct.: In West German elections the Christian Democrats defeat the Socialists. Christian Democratic leader Helmut Kohl replaces Helmut Schmidt as prime minister.
29 Oct.: Spanish voters elect Socialist leader Felipe González as prime minister.
5 Nov.: Brazil and Paraguay complete construction of the sluice gates on the Itaipu Dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project.
10 Nov.: Soviet party secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev dies after seventeen years in power in the Soviet Union. He is succeeded by former KGB head Yuri V. Andropov.
16 Nov.: Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing debuts at London's Strand Theatre.

1983

The German magazine Stern reveals the existence of what are purported to be Adolf Hitler's diaries. The diaries are later exposed as a hoax.
South African novelist J. M. Coetzee publishes The Life and Times of Michael K.
Stanley and the Women, by British novelist Kingsley Amis, is published.
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman releases Fanny and Alexander.
Robert Bresson's L'Argent is released.
The "New Romantic" style of British pop music, exemplified by artists such as A Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran, and Culture Club, enjoys popularity.
In a stunning upset, Australia strips the United States of the America's Cup for the first time since 1851 when the Australia II defeats Liberty four races to three in international sailboat racing.
In a portent of a coming ecological disaster, Soviet haulers quit fishing the Aral Sea, once the source of 10 to 15 percent of the nation's freshwater catch. By the 1990s the sea will have shrunk massively, becoming primarily a desert.
Gen. Oscar Mejía Víctores organizes a coup and overthrows Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt.

9 Mar.: Caryl Churchill's Fen opens at London's Almeida Theatre.
30 Mar.: Run for Your Wives, by Ray Cooney, opens at London's Shaftesbury Theatre.
18 Apr.: In Beirut terrorists bomb the U.S. Embassy, killing sixty-three people.
6 Aug.: Off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, the oil tanker Castillo de Bellver catches fire, spilling 250,000 tons of crude oil.
21 Aug.: After two years in exile, Philippine senator Benigno S. Aquino returns to Manila to organize political opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos. Aquino is murdered upon arrival by an assassin who is himself killed.
29 Aug.: Mortar shells landing in the U.S. Marine compound at the Beirut airport kill two and wound thirteen.
1 Sept.: Near Sakhalin Island in the north Pacific, a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 strays into Soviet airspace and is shot down, killing all 269 passengers. The government of the Soviet Union issues no apology, insisting the airliner was part of a reconnaissance mission. The U.S. government condemns the attack but acknowledges that it has been conducting surveillance activities in the area. Despite the strain the incident causes to U.S.-Soviet relations, arms control negotiations resume soon after.
15 Sept.: Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin resigns. He is succeeded by Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
21 Sept.: David Mamet's study of greed, Glengarry Glen Ross, opens at London's Cottlesloe Theatre.
8 Oct.: In Tokyo the Metropolitan Teien Art Museum opens.
9 Oct.: In an attempt to assassinate South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan, North Korean terrorists destroy a ceremonial mausoleum in Rangoon, Burma, killing nineteen and wounding forty-nine. President Hwan, visiting Burma, had changed his scheduled visit to the mausoleum at the last minute and thus avoided the attack.
12 Oct.: In Tokyo former Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka is convicted of accepting a $2.2 million bribe from Lockheed Corporation. Tanaka is fined the amount of the bribe and sentenced to four years in prison.
In the tiny Caribbean-island nation of Grenada, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop is overthrown in a coup engineered by Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, a Marxist. One week later, Bishop is killed as his supporters engineer a prison break.
23 Oct.: Terrorists on suicide missions detonate trucks filled with explosives in the U.S. and French barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French paratroopers.
25 Oct.: Three thousand U.S. Marines invade Grenada. U.S. officials justify the intervention on the grounds that the new Marxist government is endangering the lives of American citizens on the island and that the Grenadan government is constructing an airstrip for use by Central American communists.
26 Oct.: London's Lyric Theatre debuts Hugh Williams's Pack of Lies.
4 Nov.: A suicide bomber attacks an Israeli military installation in Lebanon, killing sixty people.
26 Nov.: Masked gunmen steal $39 million in gold from Heathrow Airport in London.

31 Dec. Nigeria's five-year-old democracy is overthrown in a military coup led by Maj. Gen. Mohammed Buhari.

1984

Exiled Czech novelist Milan Kundera publishes The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
L'Amant, by French novelist Marguerite Duras, is published.
Mario Vargas Llosa publishes Historia de Mayta (translated as The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta).
French sculptor Jean Dubuffet unveils his Monument with Standing Beast before the new State of Illinois building in Chicago.
Louis Ducreux stars in Bertrand Tavernier's A Sunday in the Country.
Famine and drought in sub-Saharan Africa kill three hundred thousand.
British pop star Bob Geldof organizes Band Aid, a high-profile pop-music charity for African famine victims.
Japan endures a scare as extortionists claim to have poisoned candy.
Western experts estimate that casualties from the ongoing Iran-Iraq War have killed one hundred thousand Iranians and fifty thousand Iraqis.
U.S., French, and Italian peacekeeping forces leave Lebanon.
The World Court denounces the mining of Nicaraguan export harbors by the United States as a violation of international law.
In the fall Great Britain is wracked by a debilitating national coal strike.
Great Britain's Thatcher government privatizes its telephone service.

1 Jan.: With construction of the European-Soviet pipeline complete, France receives its first delivery of Soviet natural gas.
18 Jan.: In Beirut terrorists kill American University president Malcolm H. Kerr.
9 Feb.: Soviet general secretary Yuri V. Andropov dies. He is succeeded by Politburo member Konstantin U. Chernenko.
10 Feb.: The Soviet Union and China sign a __BODY__.2 billion trade agreement.
16 Mar.: South Africa and Mozambique sign a peace accord, the first between South Africa's white government and a black nation.
27 Mar.: Starlight Express, a musical featuring roller skating, debuts at London's Apollo Theatre.
4 Apr.: Michael Frayn's Benefactors debuts at London's Vaudeville Theatre.
May: Junta leader and political moderate José Napoleón Duarte is elected president in El Salvador, defeating the ultra-right-wing candidate Roberto D'Aubuisson, a graduate of the United States School of the Americas and a leading figure linked to El Salvador's death squads.
5-6 June: Indian government efforts to expel Sikh separatists from the Golden Temple at Amritsar result in the deaths of six hundred to twelve hundred people.
30 June: Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau resigns from office and calls for national elections.
3 Aug.: The African nation of Upper Volta changes its name to Burkina Faso.
4 Sept.: In Canadian national elections, the Progressive Conservative Party enjoys a sweep of the House of Commons, winning 211 of 282 seats. Corporate lawyer Brian Mulroney becomes prime minister.
14 Sept.: Because no political party has earned a majority of votes in recent elections, the Israeli Knesset agrees to a coalition government headed first by Labor leader Shimon Peres, followed by a government headed by Likud head Yitzhak Shamir.
1 Oct.: Sikh extremists among her own bodyguards assassinate Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, 66. She is succeeded by her son Rajiv, who wins the ministry in his own right by year's end.
19 Oct.: Members of the Polish security police murder pro-Solidarity priest Jerzy Popieluszko. Public outcry results in the arrest and trial of the murderers, who are convicted in February 1985.
20 Oct.: Beijing announces economic reforms leading to increased capitalism in Red China.
15 Nov.: Following demonstrations against dictator Augusto Pinochet, Chilean police arrest thirty-two thousand suspects in the Santiago slum district of La Victoria and hold them in a soccer stadium for questioning.
19 Nov.: A natural gas explosion in Mexico City kills five hundred people.
3 Dec.: The Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, leaks poison gas, killing two thousand and injuring two hundred thousand.
19 Dec.: In Beijing British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang sign an agreement providing for the transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997.
21 Dec.: In Montreal gunmen seize two Merrill Lynch couriers and escape with $51.3 million in securities.

1985

Gabriel García Márquez publishes El amor en los tiempos del cólera (translated as Love in the Time of Cholera).
New Zealand novelist Keri Hume publishes The Bone People.
British author D. H. Lawrence is enshrined in Poet's Corner at London's Westminster Abbey.
Masahiro Shinoda films MacArthur's Children.
Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette is released.
Europe experiences an unprecedented rash of terrorist attacks and bombings by Arab, French, Islamic, and Palestinian groups, the worst of which occurs in simultaneous attacks on the Rome and Vienna airports on 27 December. The attacks kill 18 people and injure 111.
Guatemalan leader Gen. Oscar Mejía Victores turns over his power to the elected civilian president, Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo,

4 Feb.: New Zealand refuses to allow a U.S. warship entry into its waters on the grounds that the ship carries nuclear arms.
11 Mar.: Soviet Communist Party general secretary Konstantin Chernenko, 73, dies. He is succeeded by agricultural minister Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, 54.
13 Mar.: Following two widely publicized incidents of soccer rioting, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher commissions a group to study the problem of soccer hooliganism.
16 Mar.: Terry Anderson, U.S. foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, is kidnapped by Lebanese terrorists in Beirut. He is held hostage until 4 December 1991.
11 Apr.: Albanian dictator and Communist Party chief Enver Hoxha, 78, dies after forty-one years in power. He is succeeded by Ramiz Alia.
1 May: U.S. president Ronald Reagan orders a trade embargo on Nicaragua, denouncing the Sandinista regime as a threat to U.S. national security.
29 May: Thirty-eight people die during a riot by soccer fans and structural collapse at the European Cup Finals in Brussels.
10 July: The French secret service bombs the antinuclear protest ship, Rainbow Warrior, in Auckland harbor, New Zealand, killing photographer Fernando Pereira. The bombing and subsequent cover-up will lead to the resignations of French defense minister Charles Hernu and French secret service chief, Adm. Pierre Lacoste.
13 July: British pop star Bob Geldof stages Live Aid, simultaneous concerts in London and Philadelphia, as a benefit for African famine relief.
20 July: In response to continuing racial violence, South Africa declares an indefinite state of emergency, the first declaration of its kind in twenty-five years.
17 Aug.: In the continuing Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi forces armed with French Exocet missiles attack the Iranian oil terminal of Kharg Island.
13 Sept.: Saudi Arabian oil minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani announces a new oil pricing discount system, spurring plummeting oil prices for the next six months.
7 Oct.: Terrorists hijack the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean and kill an American passenger the next day.
8 Oct.: Les Miserables debuts at London's Palace Theatre.
15 Oct.: Military ruler Gen. Samuel K. Doe is elected president of Liberia despite accusations of election fraud.
3 Nov.: Tanzanian president Julius K. Nyerere, who led his nation to independence, resigns after twenty-one years in power. He is succeeded by Vice President Ali Hassan Mwinyi.
9 Nov.: In Moscow, world chess master Anatoly Karpov is defeated by Soviet chess master Gary Kasparov.
11 Nov.: Nicaraguan Sandinista president Daniel Ortega Saavedra rejects the latest peace plan drafted by the Contradora (neutral Latin American) nations, citing the absence of provisions forbidding U.S. military maneuvers in the region.
21 Nov.: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. president Ronald Reagan meet for a summit on foreign affairs.
25 Nov.: The musical Black and Blue, featuring vaudeville songs from the 1920s and 1930s, debuts at Paris's Chatelet theater.
30 Dec.: Pakistani president Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq declares an end to eight and one-half years of martial law.

1986

British novelist Kingsley Amis publishes The Old Devils.
Argentinean director Luis Puenzo's La historia oficial (The Official Story), a dramatization set during Argentina's Guerra Sucia (Dirty War) of 1976-1983 in which thousands of designated subversives "disappeared," is released. It wins an Oscar for best foreign film of 1986.
French filmmaker Claude Berri releases Jean de Florette, starring Yves Montand and Gérard Depardieu.
Barbara Sukowa stars in Margarethe von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg.
Juzo Itami's comedy Tampopo, with Ken Watanabe and Tsutomu Yamakazi, is released.
Europe continues to be plagued by terrorist attacks and bombings.
The Annacis Bridge in Vancouver, British Columbia, is completed, making it the world's longest cable-stayed bridge.
Testing of the abortion drug, RU 486, begins in France.
U.S. officials express alarm at the Soviet "peace offensive" led by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, who is winning diplomatic gains throughout Western Europe.

1 Jan.: In a sign of lessening Cold War tensions, U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev exchange New Year's greetings televised in the United States and Soviet Union.
6 Jan.: Gen. Samuel K. Doe is inaugurated as president of Liberia. His government becomes famous for corruption and human-rights abuses.
6 Feb.: Following a week-long state of siege, Haitian President-for-Life Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, 34, is forced to flee the island nation for exile in France.
11 Feb.: Russian dissident Anatoly Shcharansky is freed by the Soviet Union in an East-West prisoner exchange.
26 Feb.: Following ten days of national protests over a presidential election marked by widespread vote fraud, twenty-year Philippine ruler Ferdinand Marcos is forced into exile in Hawaii. He is succeeded by his opponent in the election, Corazon Aquino, widow of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino, who was assassinated in 1983.
28 Feb.: Swedish prime minister and peace activist Olof Palme, 59, is assassinated in Stockholm.
4 Mar.: During Austrian elections, evidence surfaces that presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim, former U.N. secretary general, had been a member of Nazi organizations during World War II. He is elected president nonetheless.
7 Mar.: South African president Pieter W. Botha lifts the martial law in place in black South African districts since 1985.
15 Mar.: Paris mayor Jacques Chirac is elected to head a Conservative Parliament and share power with Socialist president François Mitterrand, who has been in power since 1981.
5 Apr.: A terrorist bombing at a West Berlin discotheque kills two people, including a U.S. serviceman, and leaves 230 injured.
10 Apr.: After approximately twenty people die in Italy in within a few weeks as a result of drinking wine contaminated with methanol, the U.S. government warns consumers not to drink Italian wine.
13 Apr.: In what is believed to be the first papal visit to a Jewish house of worship, Pope John Paul II visits Rome's main synagogue.
14 Apr.: Civil rights leader Desmond Tutu is elected Anglican Archbishop of South Africa.
15 Apr.: After the U.S. government accuses Libya of sponsoring the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque, U.S. warplanes strike the Tripoli and Benghazi headquarters of Libyan strongman Mu'ammar Gadhafi. In reprisals for the attacks, three hostages in Beirut are killed.
18 Apr.: South African "pass laws," restricting the movement of blacks, are repealed.
26 Apr.: At the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Kiev, Ukraine, a serious accident occurs, resulting in the release of an enormous radioactive cloud into the atmosphere. More than thirty firefighters and plant workers die in the weeks following the accident; predictions of future deaths from radiation exposure range from sixty-five hundred to forty-five thousand.
1 May: Nearly 1.5 million South Africans protest apartheid in the nation's largest strike.
24 May: Margaret Thatcher begins a three-day visit to Israel. She is the first British prime minister to visit the country.
27 May: The United States agrees to comply with the terms of the 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, suspended since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
12 June: Anticipating protests marking the tenth anniversary of the Soweto uprising, South Africa once again declares a state of emergency.
26 June: Irish voters reject a measure to end the nation's ban on divorce.
27 June: The International Court of Justice in The Hague rules that the United States has broken international law by mining the harbors of Nicaragua and by aiding antigovernment rebels. The United States ignores the ruling.
29 June: Argentina wins the World Cup by defeating West Germany, 3-2, in international soccer competition.
6 July: In parliamentary elections in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party and Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone win landslide reelection.
15 July: U.S. officials announce that army troops have been sent to Bolivia to aid in the war on drug trafficking.
26 July: Following a Reagan administration secret arms trade to Iran, Shiite Muslim terrorists release American priest Lawrence Jenco from captivity in Lebanon.
18 Aug.: The Soviet Union announces it will continue its yearlong moratorium on nuclear testing, which expired on 6 August.
21-26 Aug.: In Cameroon, volcanic explosions release toxic gas, killing fifteen hundred to seventeen hundred people.
11 Sept.: Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres meet in the first summit between the nations in five years.
16 Sept.: The EEC agrees to a series of economic sanctions directed against apartheid in South Africa.
5 Oct.: Nicaraguan military forces shoot down a U.S. cargo plane carrying arms and capture the pilot, Eugene Hasenfus of Wisconsin.
7 Oct.: In London a politically neutral daily, The Independent, begins publication.
9 Oct.: Andrew Lloyd Weber's musical The Phantom of the Opera, starring Michael Crawford, debuts at London's Majesty Theatre.
12 Oct.: During a summit in Reykjavík, Iceland, U.S. president Ronald Reagan offers Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev complete nuclear disarmament. The offer falls through when the Soviets insist that the American Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars," be included in the disarmament package.
14 Oct.: Holocaust survivor and human-rights activist Elie Wiesel wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
21 Oct.: English playwright Hugh Whitemore debuts Breaking the Code, a play about World War II codebreaker Alan Turing, at London's Haymarket Theater.
1 Nov.: A fire at the Sandoz pharmaceutical warehouse in Switzerland discharges one thousand tons of toxic chemicals into the Rhine, killing millions of fish and contaminating water supplies.
2 Nov.: As part of continuing Reagan administration arms trades with terrorists, American University administrator David Jacobsen is released by Shiite extremists in Lebanon.
25 Nov.: Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev visits India, the first Soviet leader to do so since 1980.
28 Nov.: The United States officially violates the 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union by deploying a B-52 bomber capable of carrying cruise missiles.
30 Nov.: Punjabi extremists commandeer a public bus and kill twenty-two Hindu prisoners.
8 Dec.: French prime minister Jacques Chirac withdraws a bill to reform the French university system following more than two weeks of violent student protests.
17 Dec.: Nicaragua releases American pilot Eugene Hasenfus.
20 Dec.: In Shanghai, China, some fifty thousand students march for democratic rights.

1987

British novelist Penelope Lively publishes Moon Tiger.
Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye Children), by Louis Malle, is released.
Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci releases The Last Emperor.
Mbongeni Ngema's Sarafina! debuts at Johannesburg's Market theater.
The United States regains the America's Cup when Stars and Stripes sweeps Australia's Kookaburra III in international sailboat racing.
Nearly eighty thousand square miles of Amazonian rain forest are burned in eighty days by Brazilian landowners, sparking environmental fears that razing the forest will contribute to a global "greenhouse effect."
Canadian officials sign the Meech Lake Accord, granting Quebec special status as a "distinct society," beginning a ratification process that is to be completed by 1990.
South African politics are rent by a bloody civil war between Zulus led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Party and Nelson Mandela's African National Congress.

4 Jan.: The Communist Party of China expels dissidents.
22 Feb.: Syrian troops seize West Beirut in an attempt to stabilize the anarchical political situation in the city.
6 Mar.: The ferry Herald of Free Enterprise sinks in the English Channel, killing 192 people.
11 Apr.: Protests aimed at winning release for detainees are banned in South Africa.
17 May: Iraqi missiles hit the U.S. frigate Stark in the Persian Gulf, killing thirty-seven men. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein apologizes, explaining the attack as a mistake in the Iraq-Iran War.
11 June: British prime minister Margaret Thatcher is elected to a third term.
25 June: Soviet Party general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev announces perestroika, sweeping economic reforms designed to improve Russian industrial production.
4 July: A French court sentences former Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, 73, to life in prison for war crimes during World War II.
1 Aug.: In Mecca clashes between Shiites and other Muslims on hajj (pilgrimage) leave nearly four hundred people dead.
7 Aug.: Five Central American nations agree to a peace process drafted by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sanchez.
1 Oct.: Nicaragua's anti-Sandinista newspaper, La Prensa, resumes publication.
2 Oct.: Great Britain begins tests of the French abortion pill, RU 486.
3 Oct.: Canada and the United States sign a free-trade agreement opposed by Canadian liberals and socialists.
27 Oct.: Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage, starring Maggie Smith, opens at London's Globe Theater.
9 Nov.: A bomb explosion in Colombo, Sri Lanka, leaves thirty-two dead and more than seventy injured. The bombing is the latest in continuing ethnic violence between Indians and Tamils.
7 Dec.: Soviet leader Gorbachev arrives in Washington for a three-day summit with U.S. president Reagan. The summit results in the completion of a treaty to dismantle all Soviet and U.S. medium-range nuclear missiles.
16 Dec.: Roh Tae Woo, the handpicked successor to South Korean military leader and president Chun Doo-Hwan, is elected by a direct popular vote.
A sensational Sicilian Mafia trial ends in the sentencing to prison of 338 of 452 defendants charged primarily with heroin trafficking.
17 Dec.: Czech Communist Party leader Gustav Husak, who has ruled for eighteen years, is replaced by Milos Jakes, a Gorbachev-style reformer.
31 Dec.: In a move that angers U.S. officials, Medellín drug lord Jorge Luis Ochoa is released from a Colombian prison.

1988

British novelist Salman Rushdie's satire, The Satanic Verses, incenses Muslim readers with alleged "blasphemies," leading Islamic leader Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran to pronounce a death sentence against Rushdie and offer __BODY__ million reward to any person who kills him.
Indian novelist Bharati Mukherjee publishes The Middleman and Other Stories.
Foucault's Pendulum, a mystery by Umberto Eco, is published.
German filmmaker Wim Wenders releases Wings of Desire.
Marcel Ophuls's documentary about Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, Hotel Terminus, is released.
Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is released.
In international sailboat racing, Stars and Stripes of the United States successfully defends the America's Cup against New Zealand by using a catamaran, which tends to be faster than monohulled ships. New Zealand protests, and the outcome of the race is contested in court for the next year and a half. Ultimately, Stars and Stripes is granted the cup.
Floods in Bangladesh—the worst in seventy years—kill thousands and leave millions homeless.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continue to stage protests in an intifada (uprising) against Israeli occupation. The protests will cost nearly three hundred Arabs their lives before the year is out.
Political unrest racks Burma as the military dictatorship authorizes police to shoot and kill thousands of student protesters led by human-rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi.
Seeking a return of the outlawed union Solidarity, Polish workers strike in August.

28 Jan.: The Canadian Supreme Court rules that a law restricting abortion is unconstitutional.
5 Feb.: A U.S. grand jury indicts Panamanian dictator and onetime CIA functionary Gen. Manuel Noriega on charges of accepting bribes from drug traffickers.
16 Mar.: Iraqi troops drop poison gas on Kurdish civilians in the town of Halabja, killing four thousand to twelve thousand people.
14 Apr.: The Soviet Union announces that its military forces will begin to withdraw from Afghanistan on 17 May. Experts estimate that the casualties total fifteen thousand Soviets and one million Afghans since the Soviet invasion was initiated in 1979.
1 July: Delegates to a Communist conference in Moscow endorse Mikhail Gorbachev's reform proposals, including transfer of party power to a democratically elected legislature.
3 July: The U.S. warship Vincennes mistakes an Iran Air A300 Airbus for an attacking plane and shoots it down, killing all aboard. Washington apologizes for the attack and offers reparations to the survivors of the 290 victims.
8 July: French voters reelect President François Mitterrand.
13 July: Peace talks brokered by U.S. assistant secretary of state Chester A. Crocker among Angolan, South African, and Cuban officials bring long hostilities in Angola and Namibia to an end.
20 July: After nearly eight years of war, Iran and Iraq agree to a cease-fire. Direct talks to resolve the conflict follow. The war has cost an estimated 105,000 Iraqi and one million Iranian lives.
18 Aug.: Pakistani president Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq and U.S. ambassador Arnold I. Raphel are killed in a midair explosion of a Pakistani Air Force plane.
24 Sept.: France and China authorize use of the abortion pill, RU 486.
1 Dec.: Benazir Bhutto, daughter of former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, is elected prime minister of Pakistan. She becomes the first woman to head a modern Islamic state and brings eleven years of military rule to an end.
5 Dec.: The West German environmental ministry confirms that a serious accident occurred at a nuclear power plant near Frankfurt in December 1987, as reported by an American journal.
21 Dec.: A Pan Am 747 explodes in midair over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 passengers and 11 persons on the ground. The explosion inaugurates a massive international search for Middle Eastern terrorists suspected of planting a bomb aboard the plane in Frankfurt, Germany.
22 Dec.: Brazilian rubber tapper and environmentalist Francisco "Chico" Mendes is killed at his home in Xapuri. Mendes had been the foremost opponent of Brazilian landowners clearing the Amazonian rain forest.

1989

Japanese-English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro writes The Remains of the Day.
Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali dies.
Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso is released.
Kenneth Branagh directs and stars in a film version of William Shakespeare's Henry V.
The World Health Organization estimates that the number of AIDS cases worldwide will increase from 450,000 in 1989 to five million in the year 2000.

7 Jan.: Emperor Hirohito of Japan dies at age eighty-seven after sixty-two years of rule. He is succeeded by his fifty-five-year-old son, Akihito.
2-3 Feb.: Alfredo Stroessner, for thirty-five years the dictator of Paraguay, is overthrown in a military coup.
26 Mar.: Multicandidate parliamentary elections in the Soviet Union result in an embarrassing defeat for the Communist Party and the ascension of former Communist and Moscow city head Boris N. Yeltsin, who is now leader of the non-Communist opposition.
30 Mar.: Following renovations the Louvre Museum in Paris reopens, featuring a striking glass pyramid entrance designed by architect I. M. Pei.
15 Apr.: Chinese students meet in Beijing's Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of Politburo member Hu Yaobang, 73. The students remain in the square and turn the occasion into a prodemocracy demonstration that lasts for weeks, sparking similar demonstrations throughout China.
7 May: Panamanians vote to oust strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega, but he ignores the election results.
11 May: Fearing the extinction of African elephants, Kenya calls for a worldwide ban on the trade of ivory.
14 May: In the first peaceful transfer of power since 1927, Argentinean voters elect Peronist leader Carlos Saúl Menem president.
24 May: The Exxon Valdez hits a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and spills approximately ten million gallons of oil.
4 June: Iranian president Ayatollah Khomeini dies. He is succeeded in office by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
8 June: The prodemocracy demonstrations in China are crushed when government troops fire on protesters in Tiananmen Square and the leaders of the movement are executed. Despite worldwide condemnation Western powers, led by the United States, quickly normalize relations with the Chinese government.
23 July: Plagued by scandal, Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party suffers electoral defeat for the first time since 1955.
15 Aug.: South African president Pieter W. Botha resigns. He is replaced by F. W. de Klerk, who permits antiapartheid marches and releases some political prisoners in the fall.
18 Aug.: Following non-Communist victories in June parliamentary elections, the Polish government forms a cabinet with non-Communist figures—the first Polish multiparty government in forty years. Solidarity leader Lech Walesa is named president.
Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán is assassinated, reputedly by drug lords. President Virgilio Barco Vargas of Colombia declares war on the Medellfín and Cali cocaine cartels. By year's end more than 187 civilians and officials have been killed; 265 bombings have occurred; and officials have made nearly five hundred arrests and seized $250 million worth of property.
23 Aug.: Hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians form a human chain across their three states to demand autonomy from the Soviet Union.
26 Sept.: Following eleven years of occupation, the last Vietnamese military forces leave Cambodia.
5-7 Oct.: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visits East Germany to help celebrate the country's fortieth anniversary. Meanwhile, nearly 170,000 East Germans are migrating to the West via newly opened borders in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
7 Oct.: The Hungarian Communist Party renames itself the Hungarian Socialist Party and renounces communism in favor of democratic socialism.
9 Oct.: For the first time since 1917, the Supreme Soviet grants workers the legal right to strike, albeit under limited conditions.
18 Oct.: East German political leader Erich Honecker resigns and is replaced by Egon Krenz.
The Hungarian National Assembly drafts a new constitution and sets new multiparty elections for 1990.
19 Oct.: The British Court of Appeals voids the conviction of the "Guildford Four," Irish prisoners convicted of 1974 bombings of pubs in Guildford and Woolwich.
23 Oct.: On the thirty-third anniversary of the 1956 uprising, Hungary declares itself a free republic.
28 Oct.: A ten-thousand-strong prodemocracy demonstration in Prague is broken up by Czechoslovaks an police. Leading dissidents, including playwright Vaclav Havel, are arrested.
3 Nov.: An estimated nine thousand people demonstrate in Sofia, Bulgaria, for democratic reforms.
9 Nov.: East Germany allows citizens to visit the West without visas.
10 Nov.: President Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria resigns after eighteen years in power. He also resigns as general secretary of the Communist Party, which he has directed since 1954.
11 Nov.: In El Salvador the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) launches a "final offensive" in its ten-year-old civil war against the government after the rightist leader Alberto Cristiani is elected to the presidency. The offensive fails, but the murder of six Jesuit priests on 16 November brings calls in the U.S. Congress for the cessation of U.S. financial and military support for El Salvador.
23 Nov.: Former Czechoslovakian leader Alexander Dubcek, who ushered in the reform "Prague Spring" of 1968, addresses seventy thousand prodemocracy demonstrators in Braislava.
24 Nov.: The Czechoslovakian Communist Party Presidium, including General Secretary Milos Jakes, resigns en masse.
29 Nov.: In Yugoslavia the southern republic of Serbia severs economic relations with the northern republic of Slovenia.
1 Dec.: Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev meets Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, the first-ever meeting between the head of the Soviet Union and the head of the Catholic Church.
3 Dec.: The entire leadership of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity party resigns, including all 163 members of the Central Committee.
7 Dec.: Czechoslovakian premier Ladislav Adamec resigns, creating a political crisis. President Gustav Husak resigns three days later. Dissident leaders Vaclav Havel and Alexander Dubcek announce their candidacies for the presidency. On 29 December Havel is elected president and Dubcek is elected chairman of parliament.
The Lithuanian Supreme Soviet votes to remove the Communist Party's monopoly on power.
10 Dec.: Nearly fifty thousand people demonstrate in Sofia for an end to Communist rule in Bulgaria.
11 Dec.: Two hundred thousand people demonstrate in Leipzig for the reunification of Germany.
15 Dec.: Demonstrators in Timisoara, Romania, surround a church and prevent the secret police from arresting a popular cleric, Rev. Laszlo Tokes.
Gen. Manuel Noriega's Panamanian regime declares war on insurgents. A U.S. Marine is killed by Panamanian soldiers.
16 Dec.: The United States launches an invasion of Panama City, "Operation Just Cause," to protect American citizens. The invasion, which results in the death of 22 Americans and 202-4,000 Panamanians, succeeds in seizing Gen. Manuel Noriega on 3 January 1990 and sending him to Florida to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. The United Nations denounces the invasion as a "flagrant violation of international law."
Romanian security forces shoot antigovernment demonstrators in Timisoara.
20 Dec.: The Lithuanian Communist Party declares itself independent of the Soviet Communist Party.
21 Dec.: In Romania a speech by Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is drowned out by prodemocracy demonstrators. In what has become a civil war, his security forces battle units of the army. On 22 December, Ceausescu and his wife are captured by the army, and three days later they are executed by a military firing squad.
22 Dec.: Germans celebrate the opening of the Brandenburg Gate between East and West Berlin, symbolically reuniting East and West Germany and symbolically ending the Cold War.