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