December 1981

[December 1], 1981 (Tuesday)

• Inex-Adria Aviopromet Flight 1308, a McDonnell Douglas MD-80 flying from Yugoslavia, crashed into the side of Mont San Pietro in Corsica while approaching Ajaccio, killing all 180 people on board. The group was on a one-day sightseeing trip.
• Beginning what would later be called the Iran-Contra scandal, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed a Presidential Finding, secretly authorizing the CIA to provide direct assistance to Nicaragua's Contra rebels, led by Edén Pastora, in overthrowing the Sandinista government. A Congressional committee would cite the action later in a section entitled "Misuse of Findings", concluding that the President authorized more than had been reported to Congress.

  [December 2], 1981 (Wednesday)

• Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan began his third term as the President of the United Arab Emirates as that nation celebrated the 10th anniversary of its founding. Zayed, who was also the Emir of Abu Dhabi and the first president of the UAE, would be re-elected every five years by the Supreme Council of the Federation, consisting of the seven monarchs who had agreed to unite in 1971. He would die in 2004, more than halfway through his seventh term.
• Born: Britney Spears, American singer and entertainer; in McComb, Mississippi
• Died: Hershy Kay, 62, American orchestrator for Broadway musicals.

  [December 3], 1981 (Thursday)

• Tibetan dissident Lobsang Wangchuk was arrested in China after police found the manuscript and copies of a book he had written, A History of Tibetan Independence. Initially sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison, the 67-year-old religious leader was given a death sentence, then had his term commuted to 18 years. He would die, still incarcerated, on November 4, 1987.
• Born:
• * Brian Bonsall, American TV actor; in Torrance, California
• * David Villa, Spanish national team footballer; in Langreo
• Died: Walter Knott, 91, American farmer who created the Knott's Berry Farm theme park

  [December 4], 1981 (Friday)

• Dudley Wayne Kyzer, convicted of three murders, was sentenced to two life terms and 10,000 years in prison. The sentence, which was reported as a superlative in the Guinness Book of World Records was upheld on appeal, but Kyzer remained eligible for parole because Alabama law set the minimum at one-third of the sentence, or 10 years, whichever is less. Kyzer's most recent bid for parole was denied on August 3, 2010, with 3,371 years remaining on his sentence, and he will be eligible again in 2015.
• The Republic of Ciskei became the fourth "homeland" to be granted independence, joining Transkei, Bophuthatswana and Venda as independent nations for black residents of white-ruled South Africa. In the capital at Bisho, Chief Minister, and later President, Lennox Sebe, oversaw the ceremonies for the 2,100,000 Xhosa-speaking citizens of Ciskei, who were stripped of South African citizenship. No other nations recognized the independence of Ciskei, and the nation was abolished after South Africa attained black majority rule in 1994.
• A sudden power failure at the Qutab Minar tower in New Delhi caused a stampede of 300 tourists who ran for the exits in the dark. Forty-five people were killed and 24 injured.
• Executive Order 12333 was issued by President Reagan, grouping the various federal intelligence gathering agencies as the Intelligence Community. The Director of Central Intelligence, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and seven other entities were brought under jurisdiction of the Community.
• Born: Bobbie Jo Stinnett, American crime victim; in Skidmore, Missouri

  [December 5], 1981 (Saturday)

• Two years after directing the invasion and occupation of Cambodia, the leaders of Vietnam removed Pen Sovan as the Kampuchean Communist Party leader, and replaced him with Heng Samrin.
• On their way to perform a pregame show for a football game between the University of Hawaii and the University of South Carolina, 11 of the 12 members of the skydiving team Jump Hawaii were killed, along with their pilot, when the plane they were on went out of control and crashed into the East Loch of Pearl Harbor. One member of the team managed to parachute out as the plane crashed, while three others jumped but were too low to open their chutes.

  [December 6], 1981 (Sunday)

• Interviewed by satellite in Tripoli by the ABC News program This Week With David Brinkley, Libya's President Muammar Gaddafi denied a U.S. State Department report that he had sent a "hit squad" to assassinate U.S. President Reagan. Speaking in English, Gaddafi said "We are sure we haven't sent any people to kill Reagan or any other people in the world... if they have evidence, we are ready to see this evidence." He added, "How you are silly people! You are superpower, how you are afraid? Oh, it is silly this administration, and this president." Despite rumors that a 5, 10 or 14 member death squad had landed in the U.S. the previous weekend, nothing was ever confirmed and no person was ever arrested or detained.
• At least 49 people were killed in Ahmedabad in India after "The Gabbar", a five-story high wood and canvas model of the Himalayan mountains, caught fire while the group of more than 100 was at the top level.

  [December 7], 1981 (Monday)

• Manufacture of the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar, Lockheed's wide-body jumbo jet, was discontinued after only eight new orders for the $50,000,000 planes were placed in 1981, and three of those later cancelled. Lockheed Chairman Roy A. Anderson announced that the last of 21 contracts for manufacture would be finished by 1984.
• Eight coal miners were killed in an explosion at the Adkins Coal Company Mine No. 18 near Topmost, Kentucky.

  [December 8], 1981 (Tuesday)

• General Electric CEO Jack Welch delivered an address to Wall Street analysts at The Pierre hotel in New York, which has been described as a speech "that was to have enormous consequences for U.S. business and the U.S economy over the next three decades." The vision, outlined in "Growing Fast in a Slow-Growth Economy", was to get rid of any subsidiary in which GE wasn't number one, or at least second. Within four years, GE fired 112,000 of more than 411,000 employees, and annually terminated 10% of its executives who had the worst records, while steadily increasing revenues, and other corporations followed the strategy.
• One day after the mining disaster in Kentucky, 13 coal miners were killed in an explosion at Tennessee Consolidated Coal Company Mine No. 21 in Whitwell, Tennessee.
• Arthur Scargill was elected President of Britain's National Union of Mineworkers, receiving 70% of the votes cast in the race to succeed outgoing NUM President Joe Gormley.
• As labor unrest continued in Poland, 100,000 Soviet troops massed along the nations' common border, apparently poised for an invasion if the crisis continued.

  [December 9], 1981 (Wednesday)

• Mumia Abu-Jamal, formerly Wesley Cook, was arrested after he shot and killed Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. After writing his own book from prison, Live from Death Row, Abu-Jamal would be called by some "the world's most renowned political prisoner".

  [December 10], 1981 (Thursday)

• Javier Pérez de Cuéllar of Peru was nominated as the fifth Secretary-General of the United Nations by the U.N. Security Council, which approved his nomination 10–1, with four abstentions, one of the latter being that of China. It was later learnt that it had been Tunisia which had cast the negative vote. Pérez de Cuéllar was in fact the only one of several candidates whose candidacy had not been vetoed by at least one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. On the first 18 ballots, incumbent Kurt Waldheim of Austria, was repeatedly vetoed by China in his bid for a third five-year term, while Tanzanian Foreign Minister Salim Salim was blocked by U.S. vetoes. Sadruddin Aga Khan was runner up to Pérez de Cuéllar but a 9–2 vote in his favor included one veto among the no votes, that of the Soviet Union. The General Assembly approved Javier Pérez de Cuéllar by acclamation the next day.
• Spain was accepted as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after signing the Protocol of Accession in Brussels.

  [December 11], 1981 (Friday)

• In El Salvador, army units killed 900 civilians, including women and children, in three towns, with more than half shot in the town of El Mozote. More than a decade later, investigators found 143 skeletons buried at the town, and estimated that 85% of them had been children under 14.
• At the age of 39, former world champion Muhammad Ali participated in his last professional boxing bout and lost in a unanimous decision, after ten rounds in the fight with Trevor Berbick, in Nassau, The Bahamas.
• The U.S. Department of State effectively banned travel by Americans to Libya, directing that U.S. passports were not to be used to go there.
• Lt. General Roberto Viola, who had been on sick leave from his job as President of Argentina since November 21, was dismissed by the three-man military junta that had placed him in power. The Interior Minister, Horacio Liendo, had been serving as acting president during Viola's absence. The junta temporarily put Rear Admiral Carlos Lacoste as President for 10 days, until the junta leader, General Leopoldo Galtieri, assumed the office on December 22.
• Born: Javier Saviola, Argentine soccer player; in Buenos Aires

  [December 12], 1981 (Saturday)

• Meeting in Gdańsk, the national commission of the Polish independent union Solidarity discussed lobbying for a referendum to set up multiparty elections in the Polish People's Republic. By then, police across the nation had been informed by the government that the first phase of arrests would begin at 11:30 pm. At 11:57 pm, all 3.4 million private telephones in Poland were cut off.
• Dmitri Donskoi, the first of the Soviet Union's s and the largest sub that had been built up to that time, was commissioned. The previous largest submarine to be commissioned had been, first of the s, which had been commissioned a month earlier, on November 11, 1981.
• West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt visited East Germany, where he was welcomed by SED First Secretary Erich Honecker, who proclaimed in a toast, "Whatever differences may exist between our countries, either politically or socially, we cannot and must not permit ourselves to be pulled away from our responsibility to the people of Europe.
• Died:
• * Queen Khamphoui of Laos, 69, former Queen Consort of King Savang Vatthana who had ruled from 1959 to 1975, died in a Communist re-education camp. She was preceded in death by her husband and her son, former Crown Prince Vong Savang, who had died in the internment camp at Sop Hao in 1979.
• * Charles P. Alexander, American entomologist who cataloged over 10,000 species of insects, primarily crane flies in the genus Tipula, during his career.