January, 1980. Over 5000 gold-diggers arrive in the interior Amazon jungle of Brazil, having heard about the discovery of a gold nugget at a place called Serra Pelada.

January 22, 1980. Andrei Sakharov, a prominent Soviet physicist and dissident, is jailed and exiled by the Soviet government.

“Yet our state is similar to a cancer cell—with its messianism and expansionism, its totalitarian suppression of dissent, the authoritarian structure of power, with a total absence of public control in the most important decisions in domestic and foreign policy, a closed society that does not inform its citizens of anything substantial, closed to the outside world, without freedom of travel or the exchange of information.” ~Andrei Sakharov

March 4, 1980. Robert Mugabe is elected prime minister of Zimbabwe. Mugabe continues to rule in Zimbabwe to this day, although 2008 elections forced him to share power with two other men.
I read Peter Godwin’s book, The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, and was appalled by the tales of torture and suffering that make up a good part of that book.

April 12, 1980. Samuel Kanyon Doe takes over Liberia in a military coup, ending over 130 years of democratic presidential succession in that country. Doe and his associates kill President William R. Tolbert, Jr. and later execute a majority of Tolbert’s cabinet and other government officials. “President” Doe will rule Liberia for the next ten years until his assassination in 1990.

April 25, 1980. An American attempt to rescue the 53 hostages being held by the Iranians in the American embassy in Tehran fails when an American helicopter crashes in the Iranian desert. The rescue attempt had already been called off because of equipment failure, but the helicopter crash resulted in the deaths of eight American soldiers who were in the process of withdrawing from Iran when the crash occurred.

May 22, 1980. Pac-Man (the best-selling arcade game of all time) is released in Japan.

September, 1980. Polish workers win the right to organize trade unions and set up the central organization called Solidarity under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. Solidarity is the first non-communist trade union in a Warsaw Pact country.

September 23, 1980. Iraqi troops attack western Iran. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein hopes to take advantage of the revolutionary chaos in Iran and and has his army attack without formal warning. The Abadan oil refinery is blazing after being bombarded by Iraqi artillery and bombs. The United States and the Soviet Union are both remaining neutral in the conflict.

November 4, 1980. Republican challenger and former Governor Ronald Reagan of California defeats incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter to become the 40th president of the United States of America.

November, 1980. The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn, when it flies within 77,000 miles of the planet’s cloud-tops and sends the first high resolution images of the world back to scientists on Earth.

March 14, 1978. Israeli troops attack Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon in retaliation for attacks perpetrated by the Palestinians from those camps.

March 17, 1978. The oil tanker Amoco Cadiz runs aground on the coast of Brittany, resulting in the largest oil spill of its kind (4000 tons of fuel oil) in history to that date.

April 27-30, 1978. Afghanistan President Daoud Khan is killed during a military coup. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan is proclaimed, under pro-communist leader Nur Mohammed Taraki.

May 9, 1978. Ex-prime minister Aldo Moro of Italy is kidnapped (in March) and murdered by members of the Red Brigade in Rome.

July 26, 1978. The world’s first “test-tube baby”, Louise Brown, is delivered by Caesarean section at Oldham Hospital in Great Britain. The baby was conceived by means of in-vitro fertilization where the the mother’s egg was fertilized by sperm in a test tube, and then the embryo was implanted into the mother’s womb to grow there until birth.

September 17, 1978. Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Egypt meet at Camp David in Maryland to work out a peace agreement between the two countries. Following thirteen days of secret negotiations, the Camp David Accords are signed between Israel and Egypt. The Camp David Accords are the result of 18 months of intense diplomatic efforts by Egypt, Israel, and the United States that began after Jimmy Carter became President. Sadat and Begin will winthe 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for their progress toward achieving a Middle East accord.

October 16, 1978. The Year of Three Popes: The Vatican announces Polish archbishop Karol Wojtyla is to be the successor to Pope John Paul I, who died of a heart attack just 34 days after his inauguration as pope and successor to Pope Paul VI. Pope John Paul II (Wojtyla) will be the first non-Italian pope to be elevated to head the Catholic Church in over 400 years.

November 29, 1978. Mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana. More than 900 members of the People’s Temple, a religious cult group with its headquarters in San Francisco, commit suicide and/or murder at the behest of their leader, Jim Jones, who leads them to drink fruit juice laced with cyanide and administer the poison to their children. The Jonestown tragedy becomes the largest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the events of September 11, 2001. I hope sometime soon to read A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown by Julia Scheeres, published in 2011, to get a more detailed perspective on this horribly tragic story of misplaced faith.

December, 1978. Mass protests in Iran call for the abdication of the Shah and the end of military rule in that country.

December 25, 1978. Vietnam launches a full-scale invasion of Kampuchea (Cambodia) and subsequently occupies the country after the Khmer Rouge is removed from power.