1989

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Centuries:	19th century · 20th century · 21st century
Decades:	1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s
Years:	1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992

1989 by topic:
Arts
Architecture - Art - Film - Literature Music (Country, UK) - Television - Home video
Science and technology
Archaeology - Aviation Meteorology - Rail transport - Radio - Science
By country
Australia - Canada - France - Germany - India Ireland - Malaysia - Mexico - New Zealand - Pakistan Singapore - South Africa - UK - Wales - Zimbabwe
Other topics
Awards - Sport - Law - State leaders - Sovereign states - Religious leaders - Video gaming
Birth and death categories
Births - Deaths
Establishments and disestablishments categories
Establishments - Disestablishments
Works category
Works

**1989 in other calendars**
Gregorian calendar	1989 MCMLXXXIX
Ab urbe condita	2742
Armenian calendar	1438 ԹՎ ՌՆԼԸ
Chinese calendar	4685 – 4686 戊辰 – 己巳
Ethiopian calendar	1981 – 1982
Hebrew calendar	5749 – 5750
Hindu calendars
- Vikram Samvat	2044 – 2045
- Shaka Samvat	1911 – 1912
- Kali Yuga	5090 – 5091
Iranian calendar	1367 – 1368
Islamic calendar	1410 – 1411
* Era was changed on January 8.

1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar.

Events

January

January 7 - Showa period ends, due to the death of Emperor Hirohito (aka Emperor Showa) in Japan. Akihito becomes Emperor of Japan, beginning the Heisei period the following day.
January 8 - The Kegworth Air Disaster: A British Midland Boeing 737 crashes on approach to East Midlands Airport, leaving 44 dead.
January 10 - Cuban troops begin withdrawing from Angola.
January 12 - George Bush names William Bennett to be his Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and James Watkins as Secretary of Energy.
January 16 - January 18 - Race riots occur in Overtown, Miami.
January 17 - The Stockton massacre: Patrick Edward Purdy kills 5 children, wounds 30 and then shoots himself in Stockton, California.
January 18 - Poland's Communist party votes to legalize Solidarity.
January 20
- George Herbert Walker Bush succeeds Ronald Wilson Reagan, becoming the 41st President of the United States of America.
- The Soviets begin to airlift supplies to Afghanistan as they pull out.
January 24 - Serial killer Ted Bundy is executed in Florida's electric chair.
January 30 - American Olympic medalist Bruce Kimball is sentenced to 17 years in prison for killing 2 teenagers in a drunk driving accident.

February

February 1 - Joan Kirner becomes Victoria's first female Deputy Premier, after the resignation of Robert Fordham over the VEDC (Victorian Economic Development Co-operation) Crisis.
February 2
- Soviet war in Afghanistan: The last Soviet Union armored column leaves Kabul, ending 9 years of military occupation.
- Satellite television service Sky Television plc is launched in Europe.
February 3
- A military coup overthrows Alfredo Stroessner, dictator of Paraguay since 1954.
- After a stroke, P.W. Botha resigns his party's leadership and the presidency of South Africa.
February 7 - The Los Angeles, California City Council bans the sale or possession of semiautomatic weapons.
February 10 - Ron Brown is elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, becoming the first African American to lead a major American political party.
February 11 - Barbara Clementine Harris is consecrated as the first female bishop in the Episcopal Church (United States of America).
February 14
- Union Carbide agrees to pay USD $470 million to the Indian government for damages it caused in the 1984 Bhopal Disaster.
- Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini encourages Muslims to kill The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie.
- The first of 24 satellites of the Global Positioning System is placed into orbit.
February 15 - Soviet war in Afghanistan: The Soviet Union officially announces that all of its troops have left Afghanistan.
February 16 - Pan Am flight 103: Investigators announce that the cause of the crash was a bomb hidden inside a radio-cassette player.
February 23 - After protracted testimony, the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee rejects, by a vote of 11-9, President Bush's nomination of John Tower for Secretary of Defense.
February 24
- Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini places a three-million-US dollar bounty on the head of The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie.
- United Airlines Flight 811, a Boeing 747 bound to New Zealand from Honolulu, Hawaii, rips open during flight, sucking 9 passengers and crew out of the first class section.
February 27 - Venezuela is rocked by the Caracazo.

March

March 1
- The Berne Convention, an international treaty on copyrights, is ratified by the United States.
- A curfew is imposed in Kosovo, where protests continue over the alleged intimidation of the Serb minority.
- Louis Wade Sullivan starts his term of office as U.S. Secretary of Commerce.
- James D. Watkins starts his term of office as U.S. Secretary of Energy.
- The Politieke Partij Radicalen, Pacifistisch Socialistische Partij, Communistische Partij Nederland and the Evangelische Volks Partij amalgamate to form Netherlands political party the GroenLinks (GL, GreenLeft).
March 2 - Twelve European Community nations agree to ban the production of all chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by the end of the century.
March 3 - Veikko "Jammu" Siltavuori abducts and murders two 8 year old girls in Myllypuro suburb in Helsinki, Finland
March 4
- Time, Inc. and Warner Communications announce plans for a merger, forming Time Warner.
- The Purley Station rail crash leaves 5 dead and 94 injured.
- The first ACT (Australian Capital Territory) elections are held.
March 7 - Iran breaks off diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom over Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.
March 9 - A strike forces financially troubled Eastern Air Lines into bankruptcy.
March 14
- Gun control: U.S. President George H. W. Bush bans the importation of certain guns deemed assault weapons into the United States.
- Christian General Michel Aoun declares a 'War of Liberation' to rid Lebanon of Syrian forces and their allies.
March 18 - In Egypt, a 4,400-year-old mummy is found in the Great Pyramid of Giza.
March 20 - Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke weeps on national television as he admits marital infidelity.
March 23
- Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announce that they have achieved cold fusion at the University of Utah.
- A 300 m (1,000 ft) diameter Near-Earth asteroid misses the Earth by 500,000 km (400,000 miles).

The Exxon Valdez

March 24 - Exxon Valdez oil spill: In Alaska's Prince William Sound the Exxon Valdez spills 240,000 barrels (11 million gallons) of oil after running aground.
March 27 - The first free elections for the Soviet parliament go against the Communist Party.

April

April 1 - Margaret Thatcher's new local government tax, the Poll tax, was introduced in Scotland.
April 2 - April 2 was the night of Wrestlemania V which ended Hulk Hogan defeating Randy Savage (with Miss Elizabeth in the neutral corner) to become the WWF Champion.
April 4 - Richard M. Daley is elected mayor of Chicago.
April 6 - National Safety Council of Australia chief executive John Friedrich is arrested after defrauding investors to the tune of $235 million.
April 7 - The Soviet submarine K-278 Komsomolets sinks in the Barents Sea - 41 dead.
April 9 - Georgian demonstrators are msssacred by Red Army soldiers in Tbilisi's central square during a peaceful rally; 20 citizens are killed (most of them young women), many injured.
April 15 - The Hillsborough disaster, one of the biggest tragedies in European football, claims the life of 96 Liverpool supporters.
April 16 - The Dilbert comic strip is syndicated for the first time.
April 18 - The Hillsborough disaster claims its 95th victim when 14-year-old Lee Nichol dies in hospital from his injuries.
April 19
- Trisha Meili is savagely attacked while jogging in New York City's Central Park; as her identity remains secret for years, she becomes known as the "Central Park Jogger."
- Seven crew members die after a gun turret explodes on the U.S. battleship Iowa.
April 20 - NATO debates modernising short range missiles; although the U.S. and UK are in favour, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl obtains a concession deferring a decision.
April 21 - Students from Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, and Nanjing begin protesting in Tiananmen Square.
April 21 - Nintendo begins selling the Game Boy in Japan.
April 25 - The term of Baginda Almutawakkil Alallah Sultan Iskandar Al-Haj ibni Almarhum Sultan Ismail as the 8th Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia ends.
April 26 - Sultan Azlan Muhibbudin Shah ibni Almarhum Sultan Yusuff Izzudin Shah Ghafarullahu-lahu, Sultan of Perak, becomes the 9th Yang di-Pertuan Agong of Malaysia.

May

May 1- Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World opens to the public for the first time.
May 2- Hungary dismantles 150 miles of barbed wire fencing, opening its border to Western Europe.
May 9 - Andrew Peacock deposes John Howard as Federal Opposition Leader.
May 11 - The ACT (Australian Capital Territory) Legislative Assembly meets for the first time.
May 12 - A Southern Pacific Railroad freight train crashes on Duffy Street in San Bernardino, California.
May 14 - Mikhail Gorbachev visits China, the first Soviet leader to do so since the 1960s.
May 15 - Australia's first private tertiary institution, Bond University, opens on the Gold Coast.
May 19 - Tiananmen Square protests of 1989: Zhao Ziyang meets the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.
May 20 - Tiananmen Square protests of 1989: The Chinese government declares martial law in Beijing.
May 25
- The Calgary Flames win the Stanley Cup: The Calgary Flames of the National Hockey League (NHL) win their first and only Stanley Cup with a 4-2 victory over the Montreal Canadiens.
- Thirteen days after a Southern Pacific train derails, a Calnev pipeline explodes at the same section of Duffy Street in San Bernardino, California.
May 30 - Tiananmen Square protests of 1989: The 10 m (33 ft) high Goddess of Democracy statue is unveiled in Tiananmen Square by student demonstrators.

June

The Unknown Rebel holds up a column of Chinese tanks sent to crush the student rebellion in Tiananmen Square
Jeff Widener (The Associated Press)

June 1 - The SkyDome (now known as Rogers Centre) is opened in Toronto.
June 3 - The Ayatollah Khomeini dies.
June 4
- The Tiananmen Square massacre takes place in Beijing on the army's approach to the square, and the final stand-off in the square is covered live on television.
- Ufa train disaster: A natural gas explosion near Ufa, Russia kills 645 as 2 trains passing each other throw sparks near a leaky pipeline.
- Solidarity's victory in the first partly free parliamentary elections in post-war Poland is the first of many anti-communist revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 (almost all of them peaceful).
June 7 - 176 people are killed in Surinam's worst air disaster.
June 8 - Kurt Waldheim is elected president of Austria.
June 13 - The wreck of the German battleship Bismarck, which was sunk in 1941, is located 600 miles west of Brest, France.
June 14 - Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor is arrested in Beverly Hills, California after slapping a motorcycle police officer.
June 16 - A crowd of 250,000 gathers at Heroes Square in Budapest for the historic reburial of Imre Nagy, the former Hungarian prime minister who had been executed in 1958.
June 21 - British police arrest 250 citizens for celebrating the summer solstice at Stonehenge.
June 22 - Ireland's first universities established since independence in 1922, Dublin City University and the University of Limerick, open.

July

July 2 - Andreas Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece resigns. A new government formed under Tzannis Tzannetakis.
July 5 - The television show Seinfeld premieres.
July 9-12 : U.S. President George H. W. Bush travels to Poland and Hungary, pushing for U.S. economic aid and investment.
July 14 - France celebrates the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.
July 14-July 16 - At the annual G-7 Summit, leaders call for restrictions on gas emissions
July 19 - A Douglas DC-10 carrying United Airlines flight 232 crashes in Sioux City, Iowa killing 112; due to extraordinary efforts by the pilot and crew, 184 on board survive.
July 20 - Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is placed under house arrest.
July 26 - A federal grand jury indicts Cornell University student Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. for releasing a computer virus, making him the first person to be prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

August

August 7 - U.S. Congressman Mickey Leland (D-TX) and 15 others die in a plane crash in Ethiopia.
August 8 - STS-28: The Space Shuttle Columbia takes off on a secret 5-day military mission.
August 9 The asteroid 4769 Castalia is the first asteroid directly imaged by radar from Arecibo.
August 13 - Thirteen people die in a hot air balloon accident near Alice Springs, Australia.
August 18 - Leading presidential hopeful Luis Carlos Galán is assassinated near Bogotá in Colombia.
August 19 - Polish president Wojciech Jaruzelski nominates Solidarity activist Tadeusz Mazowiecki to be Prime Minister, the first non-communist in power in 42 years.
August 20
- In Beverly Hills, California, Lyle and Erik Menendez shoot their wealthy parents to death in their family's den.
- Fifty-one people die when the Marchioness pleasure boat collides with a barge on the River Thames adjacent to Southwark Bridge.
August 23
- Two million indigenous people of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, then still occupied by the Soviet Union, join hands to demand freedom and independence, forming an uninterrupted 600 km human chain.
- Hungary removes border restrictions with Austria.
- All of Australia's 1,645 domestic airline pilots resign over an airline's move to sack and sue them over a dispute.
August 24
- Record-setting baseball player Pete Rose agrees to a lifetime ban from the sport following allegations of illegal gambling, thereby preventing his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
- Indonesia's first privately owned television station, Rajawali Citra Televisi Indonesia, (RCTI) begins broadcasting.

Neptune on 1989-08-25

August 25 - Voyager II passes the planet Neptune and its moon Triton.
August 29 - Yusef Hawkins is shot in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, sparking racial tensions between African Americans and Italian Americans.

September

September 5 - U.S. President George H. W. Bush holds up a bag of cocaine purchased across the street at Lafayette Park in his first televised speech to the nation.
September 6 - England holds Sweden to a 0-0 draw in Sweden, qualifying for the 1990 FIFA World Cup. The game became famous after Terry Butcher sustained a deep cut to his forehead early in the game. He received stitches but played on the entire game. By the end of the game, the front of Butcher's white shirt and shorts where almost entirely covered in blood.
September 10 - The Hungarian government opens the country's western borders to refugees from the German Democratic Republic.
September 21 - Hurricane Hugo makes landfall in South Carolina, causing $7 billion in damage.
September 22 - Deal barracks bombing: An IRA bomb explodes at the Royal Marine School of Music in Deal, United Kingdom, leaving 11 dead and 22 injured.

October

October 5 - U.S. televangelist John Nunes is found guilty of embezzlement of $158 million.
October 9
- An official news agency in the Soviet Union reports the landing of a UFO in Voronezh.
- In Leipzig, East Germany, protesters demand the legalization of opposition groups and democratic reforms.
October 13 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunges 190.58 points, or 6.91 percent, to close at 2,569.26 most likely after the junk bond market collapsed. This mini-crash became known as the Friday the 13th Mini-Crash.
October 17 - The Loma Prieta earthquake, measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale, strikes the San Francisco-Oakland region of Northern California, killing 63.
October 18 - The Communist leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, is forced to step down as leader of the country after a series of health problems.
October 19 - The Guildford Four are freed after 14 years.
October 23 - The Hungarian Republic is officially declared by president Mátyás Szűrös (replacing the Hungarian People's Republic).
October 30 - The qualification for the 1990 Football World Cup ends.

November

Germans celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

November 4 - Typhoon Gay devastates the Thai province of Chumphon.
November 7
- Douglas Wilder wins the governor's seat in Virginia, becoming the first elected African American governor in the United States.
- Cold War: The Communist government of East Germany resigns, although SED leader Egon Krenz remains head of state.
- David Dinkins becomes the first African American mayor of New York City.
- In California, convicted murderer Richard Ramirez (the "Night Stalker") is sentenced to death.
November 9 - Cold War: East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall, allowing its citizens to freely travel to West Germany for the first time in decades (the next day celebrating Germans began tearing the wall down).
November 10
- After 45 years of Communist rule in Bulgaria, Bulgarian Communist Party leader Todor Zhivkov is replaced by Foreign Minister Petar Mladenov, who changes the party's name to the Bulgarian Socialist Party. This is the latest of several events this week which have signalled the beginning of the end for communism in Eastern Europe.
- Gaby Kennard becomes the first Australian woman to fly non-stop around the world.
November 12 - Brazil holds its first free presidential election since 1960.
November 16
- Six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter are shot in San Salvador, El Salvador.
- South African President F.W. de Klerk announces the scrapping of the Separate Amenities Act.
November 17 - Cold War: The Velvet Revolution begins - In Czechoslovakia a peaceful student demonstration in Prague is severely beaten back by riot police. This sparks a revolution aimed at overthrowing the Communist government (it succeeds on December 29).
November 20 - Cold War: Velvet Revolution - The number of peaceful protesters assembled in Prague, Czechoslovakia swells from 200,000 the day before to an estimated half-million.
November 21 - North Carolina celebrates its bicentennial statehood.
November 22 - In West Beirut, a bomb explodes near the motorcade of Lebanese President Rene Moawad and kills him.
November 28 - Cold War: Velvet Revolution - With other Communist regimes falling all around it and with growing street protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announces they will give up their monopoly on political power (elections held in December bring the first non-communist government to Czechoslovakia in more than 40 years).
November 30 - Deutsche Bank board member Alfred Herrhausen is killed by a terrorist's bomb (the Red Army Faction claims responsibility for the murder).

December

December 1 - Cold War: East Germany's parliament abolishes the constitutional provision granting the Communist-dominated SED its monopoly on power. Egon Krenz, the Politburo and the Central Committee resign two days later.
December 3 - Cold War: In a meeting off the coast of Malta, US President George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev release statements indicating that the Cold War between their nations may be coming to an end.
December 6 - The École Polytechnique Massacre (or Montreal Massacre): Marc Lépine, an anti-feminist gunman, murders 14 young women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal.
December 10 - Tsakhiagiyn Elbegdorj announces the establishment of Mongolia's democratic movement, that peacefully changes the second oldest communist country into a democratic society.
December 14 - Chile holds its first free election in 16 years.
December 15 - Drug baron Jose Gonzalo Rodriquez Gacha is killed by Colombian police.
December 17
- In Timişoara, Romania, an uprising begins against the communist regime, sparking the Romanian Revolution.
- Brazil holds its first free election in 29 years; Fernando Collor de Mello wins the election.
- The Simpsons premieres on the FOX TV Network.
December 20 - Operation Just Cause is launched in an attempt to overthrow Panama dictator Manuel Noriega.
December 22
- After a week of bloody demonstrations, Ion Iliescu takes over as president of Romania, ending Nicolae Ceauşescu's communist dictatorship. He flees his palace in a helicopter to escape inevitable execution.
- Two tourist coaches collide on the Pacific highway north of Kempsey, Australia, killing 35.
December 25
- Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena are executed after their unsuccessful bid to escape from the hands of the country's new order.
- Bank of Japan governors announce a major interest rate hike, eventually leading to the peak and fall of the bubble economy.
December 28 - A magnitude 5.6 earthquake hits N