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Top Song(s)
• Kim Carnes - Bette Davis Eyes
• Starsound - Stars On 45
• Olivia Newton-John - (Let's Get) Physical
• Soft Cell - Tainted Love
• John Lennon - Woman
Top Film(s)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Blow Out
• An American Werewolf in London
• The Road Warrior
• Thief
Best Selling Book(s)
• Cujo - Stephen King
• The Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving
• Gorky Park - Martin Cruz Smith
• Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
• Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
Famous Deaths
• January 5 - Harold Urey, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
• February 18 - Jack Northrop, American airplane manufacturer
• March 1 – Roberto Francisco Chiari Remon, 14th President of Panama
• May 12 – Benjamin Sheares, Singaporean politician and professor, 2nd President of Singapore
• June 16 – Sir Thomas Playford, Australian politician, Premier of South Australia
• July 26 – Stafford L. Warren, American physician and radiologist; inventor of the mammogram
• September 8 - Hideki Yukawa, Japanese physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• October 6 - Anwar Sadat, 37th Prime Minister of Egypt and 3rd President of Egypt
• November 22 - Hans Adolf Krebs, German physician and biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize
• December 8 – Ferruccio Parri, Italian partisan and politician, 29th Prime Minister of Italy
Medical/Science/Technology
• Pantanal Matogrossense National Park designated in Brazil.
• The ZX81, a pioneering British home computer, is launched by Sinclair Research.
• The Osborne 1, the first successful portable computer, is unveiled.
• The IBM Personal Computer is released.
• Dr. Michael R. Harrison, performs the world's first human open fetal surgery.
• AIDS pandemic begins in the United States.
• Bruce Reitz leads the team that performs the first successful heart–lung transplant.
• LeCompte maneuver first performed.
• English psychiatrist Lorna Wing introduces the term "Asperger syndrome".
• The first launch of a Space Shuttle: Columbia launches on the STS-1 mission.
Political
• January 14 - US Federal Communications Commission frees stations to air as many commercials an hour as they wish.
• January 20 – Ronald Reagan is sworn in as the 40th president of the United States.
• February 18 – President Reagan delivers his first address to the 97th Congress.
• March 5 - US government grants Atlanta $1 million to search for black boy murderer.
• March 23 - US Supreme Court upholds law making statutory rape a crime only for men.
• March 30 – President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by John Hinckley Jr.
• July 7 – President Reagan nominates the first woman, Sandra Day O'Connor, to the Supreme Court of the United States.
• July 8 – California Governor Jerry Brown, faced with a Mediterranean fruit fly infestation.
• August 5 – President Ronald Reagan fires 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers who ignored his order for them to return to work.
• September 25 - Sandra Day O'Connor takes her seat as the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
National
• January 12 - -35°F (-37°C), Chester, Massachusetts (state record).
• January 16 – Women in Housing and Finance: conduct first meeting in New York City.
• February 10 – A fire at the Las Vegas Hilton hotel-casino kills eight and injures 198.
• March 19 – Three workers are killed and five are injured during a test of the Space Shuttle Columbia.
• June 12 - Major League Baseball goes on strike.
• August 24 – Mark David Chapman is sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, after being convicted of murdering John Lennon.
• September 15 – The John Bull becomes the oldest operable steam locomotive in the world, at 150 years old.
• November 12 – STS-2: Space Shuttle Columbia (Joe Engle, Richard Truly) lifts off for its second mission.
• December 8 – The No. 21 Mine explosion in Whitwell, Tennessee kills 13.
• December 28 – The first American test-tube baby, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, is born in Norfolk, Virginia.
Worldwide
• January 21 – The first DeLorean automobile, rolls off the production line in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland.
• February 4 – Gro Harlem Brundtland becomes Prime Minister of Norway.
• March 11 – Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet is sworn in as President of Chile for another 8-year term.
• April 15 – The first Coca-Cola bottling plant in China is opened.
• May 1 – The new Chilean pension system, based on private pension funds, begins.
• June 18 - The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States is founded.
• July 10 - Mahathir Mohamad becomes the 4th Prime Minister of Malaysia.
• August 31 – A bomb explodes at the United States Ramstein Air Base in West Germany, injuring 20 people.
• September 15 - Our Lady of Akita in Japan cries for the last time, on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.
• October 6 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is assassinated during a military parade.