May 16 – NSW Premier Neville Wran steps
down, in response to allegations raised by the ABC program
Four Corners,
that he attempted to influence the NSW Magistracy.
August 18 – Five
people are killed and 18 others injured when a road train is
deliberately driven into a motel at Ayers Rock (Uluru), NT (the
driver, Douglas Edward Crabbe, is convicted in March1984).
September 25 –
Maze Prison escape: 38 Irish republican prisoners, armed with 6
handguns, hijack a prison meals lorry and smash their way out of
HMP
Maze, in the largest prison escape since WWII and in
British history.
October 21 – At the 17th General
Conference on Weights and Measures, the metre is defined in terms
of the speed of light as the distance
light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of
a second.
November 10 – The anticancer drug
etoposide is approved by the FDA, leading to a curative
treatment regime in the field of combination chemotherapy of
testicular carcinoma.
November 26 –
Brinks Mat robbery: In London, 6,800
gold bars worth nearly UK£26 million are taken
from the Brinks Mat vault at Heathrow Airport. Only a fraction of the gold is ever
recovered, and only 2 men are convicted of the crime.
December 2 – Michael Jackson's world famous music video
for "Thriller" is broadcast
for the first time. It becomes the most often repeated and famous
music video of all time, increasing his own popularity and record
sales of the album "Thriller".
December 5 –
ICIMOD is established and inaugurated with its
headquarters in Kathmandu, Nepal, and
legitimised through an Act of Parliament in Nepal this same
year.
December 9 – The Australian Dollar is floated, by Federal
treasurer Paul Keating. Under the old
flexible peg system, the Reserve Bank bought and sold all
Australian dollars and cleared the market at the end of the day.
This initiative is taken by the government of Bob Hawke.
December 29 – The
Reverend Jesse Jackson travels to
Syria to secure
the release of U.S. Navy Lieutenant Robert Goodman, who has been in Syrian
captivity since being shot down over the country during a
reconnaissance mission.
January 11 – Tikhon Kiselyov (also Kiselev), Belarusian
statesman in the Soviet Union, the de-facto leader of the
Byelorussian SSR from 1980 to 1983 (b. 1917)
January 12 – Nikolai Podgorny, Ukrainian politician,
Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from
1965 to 1977 (b. 1903)