On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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LEAD: The Soviet Union's first re-usable spacecraft made a triumphant maiden voyage today. No hitches were reported from the moment a giant Energiya booster rocket powered the unmanned craft off a launching pad in central Asia until it glided to a smooth automated landing seven miles from the launching site.
LEAD: Shamir Seeks Coalition Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel invited his rival, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, to join a new national unity government. Page A11. Western Ads for Soviets Izvestia, the Soviet Government daily newspaper, plans a special supplement featuring Western ads for Western goods.
LEAD: A State Supreme Court justice in Albany rejected yesterday an effort to force the Health Commissioner to declare AIDS and HIV infection to be communicable and sexually transmitted diseases.
LEAD: The Gearhart family, which has been growing Christmas trees on its farm here for almost 50 years, plans to ship 25,000 of them in coming weeks, and each will carry a tag with a number that identifies the grower and certifies the tree's quality.
LEAD: Continental Airlines is raising its cheapest and most widely used discount fares for about two-thirds of its domestic routes. It will cut the fares for the rest of its system.
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of November 16, 1988, covering November 16, 1988.
U2
Guns N' Roses
Soundtrack
Bon Jovi
Anita Baker
1988The Supreme Soviet of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic declares that Estonia is "sovereign" but stops short of declaring independence.[†]
The Supreme Soviet was the common name for the legislative bodies (parliaments) of the Soviet socialist republics (SSR) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). These soviets were modeled after the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, established in 1938, and were nearly identical.
1988In the first open election in more than a decade, voters in Pakistan elect populist candidate Benazir Bhutto to be Prime Minister of Pakistan.[†]
Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, is a country in South Asia. It is the fifth-most populous country, with a population of over 241.5 million, having the second-largest Muslim population as of 2023. Islamabad is the nation's capital, while Karachi is its largest city and financial centre. Pakistan is the 33rd-largest country by area. Bounded by the Arabian Sea on the south, the Gulf of Oman on the southwest, and the Sir Creek on the southeast, it shares land borders with India to the east; Afghanistan to the west; Iran to the southwest; and China to the northeast. It shares a maritime border with Oman in the Gulf of Oman, and is separated from Tajikistan in the northwest by Afghanistan's narrow Wakhan Corridor.
In 1988, the world population was approximately 5,141,992,542 people[†]