April 12 - Palestinian gunmen take Israeli bus number 300 hostage. Israeli special forces storm the bus freeing the hostages (1 hostage, 2 hijackers killed). 2 other hijackers were captured and then killed in secret service interrogations, causing a major scandal and secret service upheaval (Kav 300 affair).
May 19 - Game show contestant Michael Larson takes $100,000 in winnings from the game show Press Your Luck. It is later revealed he won the money by focusing exclusively on two squares of the Press Your Luck "Big Board."
May 22 - Canadian heiress Helen Branch declared legally dead (she disappeared 1977)
June 6 - Indian troops storm the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the Sikh's holiest shrine, killing an estimated 1000 people.
June 8 - A deadly F5 Tornado nearly destroys the town of Barneveld, Wisconsin, killing nine people, injuring nearly 200, and causing over $25m in damage.
June 20 - The biggest exam shake-up in the British education system in over 10 years is announced with O-level and CSE exams to be replaced by a new exam, the GCSE.
July 10 - British custom officials open a wooden crate of diplomatic post due to an unpleasant smell and find the body of Alhaji Umaru Dikko, former transportation minister of Nigeria
July 23 - Vanessa Williams becomes the first Miss America to resign when she surrenders her crown, after nude photos of her appeared in "Penthouse" magazine.
November 19 - A series of explosions at the Pemex petroleum storage facility at San Juan Ixhuatepec in Mexico City ignites a major fire and kills about 500 people.
December 3 - Bhopal disaster: A Methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India, kills more than 2,000 people outright and injures anywhere from 150,000 to 600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom would later die from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
A peace agreement between Kenya and Somalia was signed in the Egyptian capital Cairo in December 1984. With this agreement, in which Somalia officially renounced its historical territorial claims, relations between the two countries began to improve.
Imane Khalifeh, Sewa (Self-Employed Women's Association) / Ela Bhatt, Winefreda Geonzon / FREE LAVA (Free Legal Assistance Volunteers' Association) and Wangari Maathai / Green Belt Movement
Fictional references
The novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell in the 1940's, presents a dystopian view of how life might be in the year the protagonist believes to be 1984.
