From top left, clockwise: U.S. President Ronald Reagan is shot and injured by John Hinckley Jr. ; the first recognized case of HIV/AIDS begins in United States; the Salvadoran Army kill 800–1,000 civilians in El Mozote village; NASA launches Space Shuttle Columbia ; Pope John Paul II is shot and injured by Mehmet Ali Ağca ; IBM launches its first microcomputer ; seven prisoners from the Provisional Irish Republican Army and three from the Irish National Liberation Army starve themselves to death in a hunger strike ; Prince Charles marries Lady Diana Spencer .
Calendar year
Wikimedia Commons has media related to
1981 .
1981 (MCMLXXXI ) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar , the 1981st year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 981st year of the 2nd millennium , the 81st year of the 20th century , and the 2nd year of the 1980s decade.
Calendar year
Events
January
February
February 4 – Gro Harlem Brundtland becomes Prime Minister of Norway .[ 10]
February 8 – In Greece, 20 fans of Olympiacos F.C. and 1 fan of AEK Athens die, while 54 are injured, after a stampede at the Karaiskakis Stadium in Piraeus , possibly because Gate 7 does not open immediately after the end of the game.
February 9 – Polish Prime Minister Józef Pińkowski resigns and is replaced by General Wojciech Jaruzelski .[ 11]
February 14 – Stardust fire : A fire at the Stardust nightclub in Artane, Dublin , Ireland , in the early hours kills 48 young people and injures 214.[ 12] In 2024 these will be declared as unlawful killings .[ 13]
February 17 –22 – Pope John Paul II visits the Philippines .
February 23 – 1981 Spanish coup d'état attempt ("23-F"): Antonio Tejero , with members of the Guardia Civil , enters the Spanish Congress of Deputies and stops the session where Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo is about to be named president of the government. The coup fails after being denounced by King Juan Carlos .[ 14]
February 24 – A powerful 6.7 magnitude earthquake hits Athens , killing 22 people, injuring 400 people and destroying several buildings and 4,000 houses, mostly in Corinth and the nearby towns of Loutraki , Kiato and Xylokastro .
March
April
April 12 : First Space Shuttle launch: Columbia , April 12, 1981
May
May – Daniel K. Ludwig abandons the Jari project in the Amazon basin .
May 1 – Pensions in Chile : The new Chilean pension system, based on private pension funds , begins.
May 4 – The European Law Students' Association (ELSA) was founded in Vienna by law students from Austria, West Germany, Poland and Hungary.
May 6 – A jury of architects and sculptors unanimously selects Maya Lin 's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. , from among 1,421 other entries.
May 11 – The Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley dies at age 36 from cancer .
May 13 – Pope John Paul II assassination attempt : Pope John Paul II is shot by Mehmet Ali Ağca , a Turkish gunman, as he enters St. Peter's Square in Vatican City to address a general audience. The Pope recovers.[ 18]
May 15 – A prison officer, 31-year-old Donna Payant , disappears at Green Haven Correctional Facility in New York. She is later found to have been murdered by convicted serial killer Lemuel Smith . It is the first time a female prison officer has been killed while on duty in the United States.[ 19]
May 21 – François Mitterrand becomes the first socialist President of the French Fifth Republic .
May 22 – Serial killer Peter Sutcliffe is found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on 13 counts of murder and 7 of attempted murder in England.
May 25 – In Riyadh , the Gulf Cooperation Council is created among Bahrain , Kuwait , Oman , Qatar , Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates .
May 26 – The Italian government resigns over its links to the fascist Masonic cell Propaganda Due .
May 30 – Bangladeshi President Ziaur Rahman is assassinated in Chittagong .
May 31 – Burning of Jaffna library , one of the most violent examples of ethnic biblioclasm of the century.
June
June 5 – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States report that five homosexual men in Los Angeles have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems , the first recognized cases of AIDS .
June 6 – Bihar train disaster : Seven coaches of an overcrowded passenger train fall off the tracks into the Bagmati River in Bihar , India, killing between 500 and 800.
June 7 – The Israeli Air Force destroys Iraq 's Osirak nuclear reactor, killing ten Iraqi troops and a French technician.
June 10 – Alfredo Rampi, a 6-year-old boy, falls into an artesian well in Vermicino, near Rome. After nearly three days of failed rescue attempts followed with bated breath from all over Italy, Alfredo dies inside the well, at a depth of 60 meters (200 ft).
June 13 – At the Trooping the Colour ceremony in London, teenager Marcus Sarjeant fires 6 blank shots close to Queen Elizabeth II , startling her horse.[ 20] [ 21]
June 18
June 22 – Iranian president Abolhassan Banisadr is deposed.
June 27
July
July 1 – Wonderland murders : The Wonderland Gang of cocaine dealers is brutally murdered in Los Angeles.[ 25] Eddie Nash is suspected of involvement, but will never be convicted.[ 26]
July 3 – The Toxteth riots in Liverpool , England, start after a mob prevents a youth from being arrested. Shortly afterward, the Chapeltown riots in Leeds start amid increased racial tension.
July 7 – United States President Ronald Reagan nominates the first woman, Sandra Day O'Connor , to the Supreme Court of the United States .[ 27]
July 9 – Donkey Kong is released, marking the first Donkey Kong and Mario smash hit arcade game developed by Nintendo in Japan.
July 10
July 16 –21 – England become the first team this century to win a cricket Test match after the follow-on when they beat Australia by 18 runs at Headingley cricket ground, Leeds, England.
July 17
July 19 – The 1981 Springbok Tour commences in New Zealand, amid controversy over the support of apartheid .
July 21 – Panda Tohui is born in Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City, the first panda to ever be born and survive in captivity outside of China.
July 29 – A worldwide television audience of over 750 million people watch the Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul's Cathedral in London, UK.[ 30]
July 30 – 1981 Polish hunger demonstrations : As many as 50,000 demonstrators, mostly women and children, take to the streets in Łódź to protest about food ration shortages in Communist Poland .[ 31]
August
August 1 – The first 24-hour video music channel MTV (Music Television) is launched in the United States and airs its first video, "Video Killed the Radio Star " by The Buggles .[ 32]
August 9 – 1981 Major League Baseball strike ends in the United States, and Major League Baseball resumes with the All-Star Game in Cleveland 's Municipal Stadium .[ 33]
August 12 – The original Model 5150 IBM PC (with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor) is released in the United States at a base price of $1,565.[ 34]
August 19 – Gulf of Sidra incident : Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi sends two Sukhoi Su-22 fighter jets to intercept two U.S. Navy fighters over the Gulf of Sidra . The U.S. jets destroy the Libyan fighters.[ 35]
August 23 – South African troops attack SWAPO bases in Xangongo and Ongiva , Angola , during Operation Protea .[ 36]
August 24 – Mark David Chapman is sentenced to 20 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to murdering John Lennon in Manhattan eight months earlier.
August 27 – North Korea fires a surface-to-air missile at a U.S. SR-71 Blackbird spy plane flying in South Korean and international airspace. The missile misses and the airplane is unharmed.[ 37]
August 30 – 1981 Iranian Prime Minister's office bombing : Eight people, including the country's president and prime minister, are killed when a briefcase, planted by People's Mujahedin of Iran , explodes in the building.[ 38]
August 31 – A bomb explodes at the United States Ramstein Air Base in West Germany, injuring 20 people.
September
September – Little Miss Bossy , the first book in the Little Miss series (the female counterpart to the Mr. Men series) is first published.
September 1 – Gregorio Conrado Álvarez is inaugurated as a military de facto President of Uruguay .[ 39]
September 4 – An explosion at a mine in Záluží , Czechoslovakia , kills 65 people.
September 7 – British plantation company Guthrie is taken over by the Malaysian government after successfully purchasing shares to become the major shareholder. This is famously called the 'Dawn Raid attack'.[ 40]
September 10 – Picasso 's painting Guernica is moved from New York to Madrid .
September 15
September 17 – Ric Flair defeats Dusty Rhodes to win his first World Heavyweight Wrestling Championship in Kansas City .
September 18 – France's National Assembly votes to abolish Capital punishment in France .[ 41]
September 19 – Solidarity Day march , in support of organized labor, draws approximately 250,000 people in Washington, D.C.
September 20 – The overcrowded ferry boat Sobral Santos II capsizes in the Amazon River , Ób , idos, Brazil , killing at least 300 people.[ 42]
September 21 – Belize , formerly British Honduras , gains its independence from the United Kingdom.
September 22 , a Northrop F-5 crashes during a military exercise , in Babaeski , Turkey , killing 1 crew and 65 soldiers on ground.[ 43]
September 25 – Sandra Day O'Connor takes her seat as the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court .
September 26
September 27 – TGV high-speed rail service between Paris and Lyon , France, begins.
September 27 –29 – Iran–Iraq War : Iranian forces break the Siege of Abadan in Operation Samen-ol-A'emeh .[ 45]
October
November
November 1 : Antigua and Barbuda .
December
December 1 – An Inex-Adria Aviopromet McDonnell Douglas MD-80 strikes a mountain peak and crashes while approaching Ajaccio Airport in Corsica , killing all 180 people on board.
December 4 – South Africa grants Ciskei independence, not recognized outside South Africa.
December 7 – Rotary International charters the Rotary Club of Grand Baie, Mauritius .
December 8
December 10 – During the Ministerial Session of the North Atlantic Council in Brussels , Spain signs the Protocol of Accession to NATO .
December 11
December 13 – Wojciech Jaruzelski declares martial law in Poland , to prevent the dismantling of the communist system by Solidarity .
December 15 – 1981 Iraqi embassy bombing in Beirut : An Islamic Dawa Party car bomb destroys the Iraqi Embassy in Lebanon , killing 61 people in one of the earliest significant postwar suicide attacks .
December 17 – American Brigadier General James L. Dozier is kidnapped in Verona by the Italian Red Brigades .
December 20 – The Penlee lifeboat disaster : While attempting to rescue those on board the Union Star off the coast of South-West Cornwall (England), the lifeboat Solomon Browne is lost with all crew. Sixteen people in all are killed.[ 55]
December 28 – The first American test-tube baby , Elizabeth Jordan Carr , is born in Norfolk, Virginia .
December 31 – A coup d'état in Ghana removes President Hilla Limann 's PNP government and replaces it with the PNDC led by Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings .
Date unknown
January to March – Heavy snow causes several houses and buildings to collapse in northwestern Japan; 152 are killed.
Cuba suffers a major outbreak of dengue fever , with 344,203 cases.[ 56]
Use of crack cocaine , a smokeable form of the drug, first reported in the United States and Caribbean .[ 57]
Luxor AB presents the ABC 800 computer.
Polybius , an urban legend game, is said to have been released in Portland, Oregon ; there is no evidence for its existence.
The State Council of the People's Republic of China lists the cities of Beijing, Hangzhou , Suzhou and Guilin as those where the protection of historical and cultural heritage, as well as natural scenery, should be treated as a priority project.
Pepsi enters China .[ 58]
Around the end of 1981, China becomes the first country ever to reach a population of 1 billion.[ 59]
Births and deaths
Nobel Prizes
References
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link )
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External links