Gabriel Garcia Marquez publishes El amor en los tiempos del colera (translated as hove in the Time of Cholera).

New Zealand novelist Keri Hume publishes The Bone People.

British author D. H. Lawrence is enshrined in Poet's Corner at London's Westminster Abbey.

Masahiro Shinoda films MacArthur's Children.

Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette is released.

Europe experiences an unprecedented rash of terrorist attacks and bombings by Arab, French, Islamic, and Palestinian groups, the worst of which occurs in simultaneous attacks on the Rome and Vienna airports on 27 December. The attacks kill 18 people and injure 111.

Guatemalan leader Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores turns over his power to the elected civilian president, Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo.

4 Feb.

New Zealand refuses to allow a U.S. warship entry into its waters on the grounds that the ship carries nuclear arms.

11 Mar.

Soviet Communist Party general secretary Konstantin Chernenko, 73, dies. He is succeeded by agricultural...