September 22nd, 1980: Led by Lech Walesa, solidarity, the independent trade union, is founded in Poland
October 6th, 1981: Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is assassinated by Islamic extremists angry at his policy of peace with Israel
April 2nd, 1982: Argentiinian troops occupy the Falkland Islands; the British arrive to expel them; 1,000 casualties.
June 6th, 1982: Israel invades Lebanon to dive out the PLO; Yassar Arafat moves his headquarters to Tunisia
March 23rd, 1983: Us president Ronal Reagan proposes a space-based missile defence system ("Star Wars")
April 23rd, 1984: Medical research team discover that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus; by 1986 the Us has 25,000 cases Of AIDS
October 31st, 1984: Indira Ghandi, prime minister of India, is assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in response to the storming of the temple at Amritsar
Match 11th, 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the Soviet leader, promising perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness)
September 19th, 1985: A massive earthquake kills 20,000 and devastates Mexico City
April 256th, 1986: After an explosion at the nuclear plant in Chernobyl, radioactive fall-out contaminates much of Europe
November 13th, 1986: Iran-Contra scandal reveals funds from US arms sales to Iran were used to support Contras fighting Sandinistas in Nicaragua
February 14th, 1989: The Islamic regime in Iran pronounces the death sentence on Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses
June 4th, 1989: The Chinese government cracks down on democracy protestors in Tiananmen Square; up to 2,000 killed
November 9th, 1989: Fall of the Berlin Wall symbolises the collapse of the communist rule in Eastern Europe
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