The following events occurred in December 1988: For a more complete listing of notable deaths this month, see Deaths in December 1988.
December 1, 1988 (Thursday) In Ordzhonikidze, North Ossetian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Union, four men and a woman hijacked a bus carrying 30 schoolchildren, a teacher and a driver and demanded US$2 million in ransom and a cargo plane to leave the country. Carlos Salinas de Gortari took office as President of Mexico.
The first World AIDS Day was held. NASA postponed the planned launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the STS-27 mission due to weather. Born: Ashley Monique Clark, American television actress; in Brooklyn, New York City Nadia Hilker, German actress; in Munich, Bavaria, West Germany Tyler Joseph, American singer; in Columbus, Ohio Zoë Kravitz, American actress, singer and model; in Los Angeles, California Dan Mavraides, Greek-American professional basketball player; in Boston, Massachusetts Taione Vea, Tonga rugby union player; in Auckland, New Zealand Died: J. Vernon McGee, 84, American Presbyterian minister and theologian, died of heart failure. Alun Oldfield-Davies , 83, Welsh broadcaster and public servant
December 2, 1988 (Friday) A cyclone in Bangladesh left 5 million homeless and thousands dead. Benazir Bhutto was sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan, becoming the first woman to head the government of an Islam-dominated republic. Agreeing to the bus hijackers' demands, the Soviet government gave them $2 million and an Aeroflot Ilyushin-76 cargo plane with a crew of eight to fly it. After the plane took off from Mineralnyye Vody, the hijackers decided to fly to Israel rather than Pakistan or Iraq, as they had intended. The plane landed at a military airstrip near Ben Gurion Airport in Lod, Israel, where the hijackers surrendered. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Minister of Defense, criticized the Soviet response to the hijacking, saying, "I must admit I can't understand how they could manage to leave the Soviet Union without the Soviet authorities doing anything to prevent it."
At 9:30:34 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, NASA launched Space Shuttle Atlantis on the classified STS-27 mission. Unbeknownst to the five-man crew, 85 seconds after liftoff, falling insulation from one of the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) severely damaged the shuttle's thermal protection system. A few hours later, astronaut Mike Mullane used the shuttle's robot arm to deploy the mission's cargo, the Lacrosse 1 satellite (also known as ONYX) for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office and the Central Intelligence Agency. In a 2001 interview, shuttle commander Robert L. Gibson would reveal that the satellite experienced a problem after deployment which required that the shuttle rendezvous with it for the issue to be corrected. Gibson's comments and confusion over the identification of the 100th U.S. spacewalk during the STS-98 mission in February 2001 would lead to speculation that STS-27 crewmembers—possibly astronauts Jerry L. Ross and William Shepherd—conducted a classified spacewalk to repair the satellite. U.S. President-elect George H. W. Bush and his defeated opponent in the presidential election, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, held a joint press conference. Born: Edward Windsor, Lord Downpatrick, English fashion designer; in London, England Alfred Enoch, British actor; in London, England Fuse ODG (born Nana Richard Abiona), English rapper; in Tooting, South London, England Stephen McGinn, Scottish footballer; in Glasgow, Scotland Died: Karl-Heinz Bürger, 84, German SS and police leader Tata Giacobetti (born Giovanni Giacobetti), 66, Italian singer and jazz musician (Quartetto Cetra), died of a heart attack. Lloyd Rees AC CMG, 93, Australian landscape painter
December 3, 1988 (Saturday) In the United Kingdom, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health Edwina Currie provoked outrage by stating that most of Britain's egg production was infected with the salmonella bacteria, causing an immediate nationwide decrease in egg sales.
Mission Control requested that the STS-27 crew use Atlantis robot arm to photograph the heat shield under the shuttle's right wing. According to his own later account, when shuttle commander Robert L. Gibson saw the tile damage on the camera monitor, he thought, "We are going to die." Due to the classified nature of the mission, the crew was required to use an encryption technique to send video of the damage to mission control, causing ground controllers to underestimate the severity of the damage and inform the crew that it was no worse than on previous flights. Born: Melissa Aldana, Chilean tenor saxophone player; in Santiago, Chile Kevin Clark, American child actor and musician; in Highland Park, Illinois (d. 2021, bicycle accident)
December 4, 1988 (Sunday) Riding his motorcycle without a helmet, American actor Gary Busey had a near-fatal accident, sustaining a head injury that placed him in a coma for four weeks. He would regain consciousness on January 6, 1989, and would subsequently recover and resume his acting career. Born: Miki Kanie, Japanese Olympic archer; in Gifu, Gifu Prefecture, Japan Mario Maurer (a.k.a. Nutthawuth Suwannarat), Thai model and actor; in Bangkok, Thailand Andriy Pylyavskyi, Ukrainian footballer; in Kiev, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union Died: Osman Achmatowicz, 89, Polish chemist and academic Jan Mesdag (born Jan Henry de Vey Mestdagh), 34, Dutch singer and cabaret artist, died of complications from AIDS. Fernand Mourlot, 93, French printer and publisher Joseph Zimmerman, M.S.F., 64, Swiss Catholic prelate, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Morombe in Madagascar, died due to a fall from stairs.
December 5, 1988 (Monday) The day before reentry, STS-27 commander Gibson, still convinced that there was a strong possibility he and his shuttle crew would die the next day, told them to relax, saying, "No reason to die all tensed up." A U.S. Navy Grumman EA-6B Prowler on a training mission from the disappeared over the Pacific Ocean about west of San Diego, California. All four crewmen were lost. The United States Secret Service and the Soviet Mission to the United Nations notified the Trump Organization that Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev would not visit Trump Tower during their upcoming visit to New York City. Trump spokespeople cited scheduling and security issues as reasons for the cancellation, but senior Soviet officials said that the Kremlin canceled the visit because of the problematic symbolism of the event. Born: Joanna Rowsell, English Olympic champion cyclist; in Carshalton, Greater London, England Died: Einar Forseth, 96, Swedish artist Monica Beatrice McKenzie, 83, New Zealand dietitian
December 6, 1988 (Tuesday) The Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988 granted self-government to the Australian Capital Territory. U.S. President-elect Bush nominated Thomas R. Pickering as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, despite reports that Pickering helped arrange a secret donation to the Nicaraguan Contras when he was U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador. Pickering was only the second career diplomat ever named to the post. Speaking about the cancellation of the Gorbachevs' visit to Trump Tower, Donald Trump commented, "Trump Tower represents something very beautiful but also very opulent, and I had always questioned whether or not they'd be able to do it, on a political basis."
Space Shuttle Atlantis and its crew returned safely to Earth at the end of the STS-27 mission, surviving the damage to the orbiter's heat shield and landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California at 3:36:11 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. During reentry, Gibson kept a close eye on a gauge that would indicate a developing problem, saying afterwards that this would have given him "at least 60 seconds to tell mission control what I thought of their analysis." 707 of the shuttle's heat shield tiles proved to have been damaged; one tile near the shuttle's nose was completely lost, causing a metal antenna anchor plate underneath it to become partly melted during reentry. Had the damage been in a different location, Atlantis would have been destroyed during its return to Earth, as Space Shuttle Columbia would be after sustaining similar damage in 2003. Born: Laurent Bourgeois and Larry Nicolas Bourgeois, Les Twins, French identical twin brother new style hip-hop dancers; in Sarcelles, Val-d'Oise, France Adam Eaton, American Major League Baseball outfielder; in Springfield, Ohio Ravindra Jadeja, Indian international cricketer; in Navagam Ghed, Jamnagar district, Saurashtra, Gujarat, India Sandra Nurmsalu, Estonian musician; in Alavere, Harju County, Soviet-occupied Estonia, Soviet Union Sabrina Ouazani, French actress; in Saint-Denis, Seine-Saint-Denis, France Nils Petersen, German professional and Olympic footballer; in Wernigerode, East Germany Nobunaga Shimazaki, Japanese voice actor; in Shiogama, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan Johnny Strange, English performance artist, street performer and stunt performer; in Lancashire, England Died: Timothy Patrick Murphy, 29, American actor, died of AIDS. Roy Orbison, 52, American rock musician, died of a heart attack. Veerendra (aka Veerinder Singh; born Subhash Dhadwai), 40, Indian film actor, writer, producer and director, was shot along with actress Manpreet Kaur and cameraman Pritam Singh Balla while filming a scene for the movie Jatt Te Zameen on location in Talwandi Kalan, Punjab, India. Veerendra died at the scene; the other two victims survived.
December 7, 1988 (Wednesday)
In Soviet Armenia, the 6.8 Spitak earthquake killed nearly 25,000, injured 31,000 and left 400,000 homeless. The town of Spitak was completely destroyed. Singing Revolution: The Estonian language replaced Russian as the official language of the Estonian SSR. In South Africa, anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela was transferred from the Constantiaberg Clinic, the second of two hospitals where he had been treated for tuberculosis, to a house at Victor Verster Prison, where he would serve the last 14 months of his imprisonment until his release on February 11, 1990. Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, made an official visit to the United States, meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan and President-elect Bush at the Governors Island Summit in New York City. Gorbachev also promised major cuts in defense spending in a speech at the United Nations before cutting his visit short and flying home due to the earthquake in Armenia. In his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City, American visual artist Chuck Close collapsed due to pain. He was able to present an award at the residence of the Mayor of New York City that evening, but then went to the hospital, where he experienced a convulsion and became paralyzed. Due to a blood clot damaging his spinal cord, Close would continue to have limited mobility, but would develop a new artistic style in the process of learning to paint again. Born: Juan Abarca, Chilean footballer; in San Vicente de Tagua Tagua, Chile Nathan Adrian, American Olympic champion swimmer; in Bremerton, Washington Emily Browning, Australian actress; in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Angelina Gabueva, Russian tennis player; in Ordzhonikidze, North Ossetian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union James Marshall, New Zealand rugby union player; in Auckland, New ZealandDied: Christopher Connelly, 47, American actor, died of lung cancer. Dorothy Jordan, 82, American actress, died of congestive heart failure. Peter Langan, 47, Irish restaurateur, died due to injuries from an October fire.
December 8, 1988 (Thursday)