On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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LEAD: Now that the Evil Empire notion is out of vogue, the capital has been looking for the perfect symbol for this week's symbiosis between East and West.
LEAD: U.S. Pilot Reported Held A small plane was shot down Sunday over Nicaragua, and its American pilot was captured, a Sandinista army spokesman said. Page A10. Witness Discloses Bigamy A major witness in a Wedtech bribery trial told a jury he had two wives and had offered loans to associates at annual rates above 50 percent.
LEAD: An industry group representing some of the country's largest corporate pension funds, with more than $400 billion in assets, has singled out the New York Stock Exchange specialist system for contributing to the mid-October stock market collapse.
LEAD: Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward said yesterday that an inquiry into allegations of scores of false arrests by four transit police officers would be widened to include five other officers cited as having made an unusually high number of sexual-abuse arrests in 1983 and 1984.
LEAD: Mikhail S. Gorbachev arrived in Washington today and immediately challenged President Reagan to offer ''some new words'' that would lead to a treaty dramatically reducing Soviet and American strategic nuclear arsenals.
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of December 2, 1987, covering December 8, 1987.
Soundtrack
Michael Jackson
Whitesnake
Pink Floyd
Bruce Springsteen
1987Cold War: The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty is signed by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the White House.[†]
The Cold War was a period of global geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term cold war is used because there was no direct fighting between the two superpowers, though each supported opposing sides in regional conflicts known as proxy wars. In addition to the struggle for ideological and economic influence and an arms race in both conventional and nuclear weapons, the Cold War was expressed through technological rivalries such as the Space Race, espionage, propaganda campaigns, embargoes, and sports diplomacy.
1987An Israeli army tank transporter kills four Palestinian refugees and injures seven others during a traffic accident at the Erez Crossing on the Israel–Gaza Strip border, which has been cited as one of the events which sparked the First Intifada.[†]
Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country, village or house over the course of the 1948 Palestine war and during the 1967 Six-Day War. Most Palestinian refugees live in or near 68 Palestinian refugee camps across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In 2019 more than 5.6 million Palestinian refugees were registered with the United Nations.
In 1987, the world population was approximately 5,049,746,397 people[†]