The News of 1979.

January:

• The United States and the People’s Republic of China establish full diplomatic relations
• The People’s Army of Vietnam and Vietnamese-backed Cambodian insurgents announce the fall of Phnom Penh, Cambodia and the collapse of the Pol Pot regime
• The French tanker Betelgeuse explodes at the Gulf Oil terminal at Bantry, Ireland killing 50
• The Music for UNICEF Concert is held to raise money for UNICEF and promote the Year of the Child; hosted by the Bee Gees, other performers include Donna Summer, ABBA, Rod Stewart and Earth, Wind & Fire
• 16 year-old Brenda Ann Spencer opens fire at a school in San Diego, California, killing two faculty members and wounding eight students and a police officer. Her justification, “I don’t like Mondays”, inspires the Boomtown Rats song of the same name
• UK lorry drivers go on strike, causing new shortages of heating oil and fresh food; this is followed by a 24-hour rail worker strike and tens of thousands of public workers striking in what becomes known as the “Winter of Discontent”

February:

• Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Iran after nearly 15 years of exile; his return sparks the end of the Pahlavi dynasty
• Former Sex Pistol Sid Vicious is released on bail for the second degree murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen after undergoing a 55-day detoxification programme, he suffers a heroin overdose and dies that night
• Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, “The Angel of Death”, suffers a stroke and drowns while swimming in Bertioga, Brazil
• Prime Minister Hissène Habré attempts to overthrow Chad’s President Félix Malloum
• In Kabul, Muslim extremists kidnap the American ambassador to Afghanistan, who is killed during a rescue attempt
• The People’s Republic of China invaded northern Vietnam, launching the Sino-Vietnam War
• The Sahara Desert experiences snow for 30 minutes
• Saint Lucia becomes independent from the United Kingdom
• Trevor Francis becomes Britain’s first £1 million player when he signs for Nottingham Forest

March:

• Scotland votes in favour of a Scottish Assembly in a devolution referendum, though it isn’t implemented as 40% of the electorate must support the proposal; in a similar referendum Wales rejects devolution
• The Voyager 1 space probe photos reveal Jupiter’s rings
• Phillips demonstrates the compact disc publicly for the first time
• Maurice Bishop leads a successful coup in Grenada
• The first fully functional Space Shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for launch
• In a ceremony at the White House, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel sign an Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty
• James Callaghan’s minority Labour government loses a motion of confidence by one vote, forcing a general election to be held in May
• America’s most serious nuclear power plant accident occurs when a partial meltdown of reactor number 2 of Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Philadelphia causes a radiation leak
• Airey Neave, a Conservative MP, is killed, presumably by an Irish Liberation Army bomb in the car park for the House of Commons
• The last British soldier leaves the Maltese Islands after 179 years of presence, Malta declares its Freedom Day
• Sir Richard Sykes, ambassador to the Netherlands, is shot dead by a Provisional IRA member in The Hague
• Nottingham Forest beat Southampton 3-2 at Wembley to win the Football League Cup

April:

• Iran’s government becomes an Islamic Republic by a 98% vote, overthrowing the Shah officially
• Austrian police lock Andreas Mihavecz in a holding cell in Bregenz and forget about him, leaving him without food and drink for 18 days
• A Soviet biowarfare laboratory at Sverdlovsk accidentally releases airborne anthrax spores, killing 66 plus an unknown amount of livestock
• Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto is executed by hanging for the murder of a political opponent
• Fighting breaks out in London between the Anti-Nazi League and the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group; protestor Blair Peach receives fatal injuries during the incident, now officially attributed to the SPG
• Josephine Whitaker, a 19 year-old bank worker, is murdered in Halifax; police believe she is the 11th woman to be murdered by the Yorkshire Ripper

May:

• Greenland is granted limited autonomy from Denmark, with its own Parliament sitting in Nuuk
• The UK general election gives the Conservatives a 43-seat majority and Margaret Thatcher becomes the nation’s first female prime minister. Among the new members of Parliament is 36 year-old Huntingdon MP, John Major.
• Four days after losing his seat in the general election, Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe goes on trial at the Old Bailey charged with attempted murder
• Ten shoppers die in a fire at the Wooldworths department store in Manchester
• The Salvadorian Civil War begins
• A Unabomber bomb injures Northwestern University graduate student John Harris
• The Federated States of Micronesia becomes self-governing
• Dan White is convicted of manslaughter, rather than murder, for the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, prompting the “White Night riots” in the gay community
• American Airlines Flight 191 crashes during takeoff at O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, killing all 271 on board and 2 people on the ground in the deadliest aviation accident in US history
• John Spenkelink is executed in Florida in the first use of the electric chair in America after the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976
• 6 year-old Etan Patz, often referred to as the “Boy on the Milk Carton”, is kidnapped in New York; the investigation becomes one of the most famous child abduction cases of all time, remaining unsolved until 2017
• Liverpool win the First Division title for the 12th time
• Arsenal defeat Manchester United 3-2 in the FA Cup final at Wembley
• The Price Commission, set up under Edward Heath’s Conservative government in 1973 to control inflation, is abolished
• Elton John becomes the first western musician to perform live in the Soviet Union
• Conservative MPs back Margaret Thatcher’s proposals to sell off parts of nationalised industries
• Thorpe Park at Chertsey in Surrey opens
• Nottingham Forest defeat Swedish champions Malmö 1-0 in the European Cup final in Munich

June:

• The first black-led government of Rhodesia in 90 years takes power in the unrecognised republic of Zimbabwe Rhodesia
• Pope John Paul II arrives in his native Poland on his first official stay, becoming the first Pope to visit a Communist country; this visit brings about the solidarity of the Polish people against Communism, ultimately leading to the Solidarity movement
• Los Angeles’ city council pass the city’s first homosexual rights bill
• A blowout at the Ixtoc I oil well in the southern Gulf of Mexico causes at least 176.4 million gallons of oil to be spilled into the waters; some estimate the spill to be 428 million gallons, making it the largest unintentional oil spill until its surpassed by the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010
• In a general election, the Italian Communist Party loses a significant number of seats
• Joe Clark becomes Canada’s 16th, and youngest, Prime Minister
• Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings takes power in Ghana after a military coup in which General Fred Akuffo is overthrown
• The first direct elections to the European Parliament begin, allowing citizens from the nine member states of the EU to elect 410 MEPs
• McDonalds introduces the Happy Meal in the US
• Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT II agreement in Vienna
• Marais Viljoen becomes State President of South Africa
• The new Conservative government’s first budget sees chancellor Geoffrey Howe cut the standard tax rate by 3p and slashes the top rate from 83% to 60%
• Former Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe is cleared of his attempted murder charge, though the furore surrounding it ruin his political career

July:

• Sweden outlaws corporal punishment in the home
• The Sony Walkman goes on sale for the first time in Japan
• The Gilbert Islands become fully independent of the UK as Kiribati
• Carmine Galante, boss of the Bonanno crime family, is assassinated in Brooklyn
• A hotel fire in Zaragoza leaves 72 dead, the worst fire of its kind in Europe for decades
• Iraqi President Hasan al-Bakr resigns and Vice President Saddam al-Tikriti, referred to in Western press as “Saddam Hussein”, replaces him
• Nicaraguan President General Anastasio Somoza Debayle resigns and flees to Miami allowing the Sandinista National Liberation Front to assume power
• Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo becomes prime minister of Portugal
• Iraqi President Saddam Hussein arranges the arrest and later execution of nearly seventy members of his ruling Ba’ath Party
• Morarji Desai resigns as India’s prime minister and is succeeded by Charan Singh
• Sebastian Coe sets a record time for running a mile, completing it in 3 minutes 48.95 seconds in Oslo

August:

• Francisco Macías Nguema, dictator of Equitorial Guinea, is overthrown in a bloody coup d’état led by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo; the overthrown dictator is later convicted of genocide and executed by firing squad
• Two American commercial divers die of hypothermia after their diving bell becomes stranded at a depth of 160m in the East Shetland Basin, leading to important safety changes in the industry
• Raymond Washington, co-founder of the Crips, is killed in a drive-by shooting in LA, the killers have not yet been identified
• The Machchu-2 dam in Morbi, India, collapses, killing between 1800 and 25000 people in one of the worst ever dam failures
• Lord Mountbatten of Burma and two others are killed in a bombing by Provisional Irish Republican Army assassins; on the same day, the Warrenpoint ambush occurs, killing 18 British soldiers
• A national referendum is held in which Somali voters approve a new liberal constitution

September:

• Pioneer 11 becomes the first spacecraft to visit Saturn when it passes the planet at a distance of 21,000km
• Two families flee from East Germany by balloon
• French paratroopers help David Dacko to overthrow Emperor Bokassa in the Central African Republic
• Police discover a woman’s body in an alleyway near Bradford city centre; the woman, 20 year-old student Barbara Leach, is believed to be the 12th victim of the Yorkshire Ripper
• Manchester City pay a British club record fee of £1.45 million for Wolves midfielder Steve Daley; this broken 3 days later in turn by Wolves, who pay just under £1.5 million for Scottish striker Andy Gray
• Margaret Thatcher opens the new Central Milton Keynes Shopping Centre, the largest indoor shopping centre in Britain, six years after the development of the complex began

October:

• Nigeria terminates military rule and the Second Nigerian Republic is established
• Thorbjörn Fälldin returns as Prime Minister of Sweden, replacing Ola Ullsten
• Typhoon Tip reaches an intensity of 870 millibars, making it the most powerful tropical cyclone in known history
• Park Chung-hee, the President of South Korea, is assassinated by KCIA director Kim Jae-gyu
• The eradication of the smallpox virus is announced by the World Health Organisation, making smallpox the first of only two human diseases that have been driven to extinction (rinderpest in 2011 being the other)
• Saint Vincent and the Grenadines gains independence from the UK
• Chairman Hua Guofeng becomes the first Chinese leader to visit Britain
• Martin Webster of the National Front is found guilty of inciting racial hatred

November:

• French police shoot gangster Jacques Mesrine in Paris
• In Greensboro, North Carolina, five members of the Communist Workers Party are shot to death and seven wounded by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis
• Iranian radicals, mostly students, invade the US embassy in Tehran and take 90 hostages beginning the Iranian hostage crisis
• The military junta in Bolivia initiates a crack-down on its opponents in what is named the All Saints’ Massacre
• The International Olympic Committee adopts a resolution whereby Taiwanese Olympic and sports teams will participate under the name Chinese Taipei
• In the trial for the killing of 13 year-old paperboy Carl Bridgewater: James Robinson, 45, and Vincent Hickey, 25, are sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, 18 year-old Michael Hickey is sentenced to indefinite detention on the same charge, while Patrick Molloy, 53, is found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years in prison
• Süleyman Demirel of the Justice Party forms a new government of Turkey
• A group of 200 Juhayman al-Otaybi militants occupy Mecca’s Masjid al-Haram, the holiest place in Islam; French commandos drive them out after bloody fighting that leaves 250 people dead and 600 wounded
• The last episode of the first series of sitcom To the Manor Born on BBC1 receives 23.95 million viewers, the all-time highest figure for a recorded programme in the UK
• The Times is published for the first time in nearly a year after a dispute between management and unions over staffing and technology
• Art historian and former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures Anthony Blunt is revealed to be the “fourth man” of the “Cambridge Five” double agents for the Soviet NKVD during World War II

December:

• Eleven fans are killed during a crowd crush for unreserved seats before The Who concert at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati
• Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini becomes the first Supreme Leader of Iran
• The Hastie fire in Kingston upon Hull leads to the death of 3 boys and begins the hunt for Bruce George Peter Lee, one of the UK’s most prolific killers
• Jack Lynch resigns as Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, he is succeeded by Charles Haughey
• South Korean Army Major General Chun Doo-hwan orders the arrest of Army Chief of Staff General Jeong Seung-hwa without authorisation from President Choi Kyu-hah, alleging involvement in the assassination of ex-President Park Chung-hee
• The unrecognised state of Zimbabwe Rhodesia returns to British control and resumes using the name Southern Rhodesia
• The government of Canada falls in a non-confidence motion
• The Soviet Union covertly launches its invasion of Afghanistan; President Hafizullah Amin is executed and replaced by Babrak Karmal

Other:

• The One-child policy is introduced in China
• VisiCalc becomes the first commercial spreadsheet program
• The first J D Wetherspoon pub is established by Tim Martin in the London Borough of Haringey
• Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is published
• The eleventh film in the James Bond franchise, Moonraker, is the highest grossing film of they year with worldwide gross of $210 million
• Spending nine weeks in the Top 10, including six at number 1, Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes” is the best selling single in the UK