1981 Calendar
What Happened In Year 1981?
- February 5, 1981 – New Year’s Day in Chinese calendar. Start of the year of the Metal Rooster in Chinese astrology.
- February 6, 1981 – The National Resistance Army of Uganda launches an attack on a Ugandan Army installation in the central Mubende District to begin the Ugandan Bush War.
- February 14, 1981 – Stardust Disaster: A fire in a Dublin nightclub kills 48 people
- March 1, 1981 – Provisional Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands begins his hunger strike in HM Prison Maze.
- March 5, 1981 – The ZX81, a pioneering British home computer, is launched by Sinclair Research and would go on to sell over 1.5 million units around the world.
- March 6, 1981 – After 19 years of presenting the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite signs off for the last time.
- March 27, 1981 – The Solidarity movement in Poland stages a warning strike, in which at least 12 million Poles walk off their jobs for four hours.
- April 26, 1981 – Dr. Michael R. Harrison of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center performs the world’s first human open fetal surgery.
- May 25, 1981 – In Riyadh, the Gulf Cooperation Council is created between Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
- June 13, 1981 – At the Trooping the Colour ceremony in London, a teenager, Marcus Sarjeant, fires six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II.
- July 17, 1981 – The opening of the Humber Bridge by HM The Queen in England.
- September 15, 1981 – The John Bull becomes the oldest operable steam locomotive in the world when the Smithsonian Institution operates it under its own power outside Washington, D.C.
- October 6, 1981 – Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat is assassinated.
- November 1, 1981 – Antigua and Barbuda gain independence from the United Kingdom.
- December 1, 1981 – A Yugoslavian Inex Adria Aviopromet DC-9 crashes in Corsica killing all 180 people on board.
- December 4, 1981 – South Africa grants independence to the Ciskei “homeland” (not recognized by any government outside South Africa).
- December 9, 1981 – Philadelphia Police Department officer Daniel Faulkner is killed during a routine traffic stop; Mumia Abu-Jamal is later convicted for it and he goes on to become “perhaps the world’s best known death-row inmate” before his sentence is commuted to life without parole in December 2011.
- December 14, 1981 – Arab-Israeli conflict: Israel’s Knesset passes The Golan Heights Law, extending Israeli law to the area of the Golan Heights.
- December 30, 1981 – In the 39th game of his 3rd NHL season Wayne Gretzky scores 5 goals giving him 50 on the year setting a new NHL record previously held by Maurice Richard and Mike Bossy who earlier had each scored 50 goals in 50 games.
- December 31, 1981 – A coup d'état in Ghana removes President Hilla Limann’s PNP government and replaces it with the Provisional National Defence Council led by Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings.
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