On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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LEAD: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran declared today that the author and publishers of a novel deemed offensive to Islam had been ''sentenced to death.'' The novelist, Salman Rushdie, author of ''The Satanic Verses,'' said he was taking the threat seriously.
LEAD: With his plan to set higher ethical standards for his Administration, President Bush has inadvertently created problems for two of his closest advisers and pitted them against each other in a tense public conflict over ethics.
LEAD: Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher said today that the domestic steel industry was assured continued trade protection because there was no chance anytime soon of concluding an international agreement that would ban trade-distorting steel subsidies.
LEAD: Ending a legal battle over compensation for victims of the world's most deadly industrial disaster, the Indian Supreme Court today ordered the Union Carbide Corporation to pay $470 million in damages for the toxic gas leak at Bhopal.
LEAD: James A. Baker 3d said today that he had decided to sell his shares in Chemical Bank and all his other stocks so as to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest with financially related decisions he might make as Secretary of State.
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of February 15, 1989, covering February 15, 1989.
Bobby Brown
Guns N' Roses
Traveling Wilburys
Edie Brickell & New Bohemians
Guns N' Roses
1989Mark Canha, American baseball player[â ]
Mark David Canha is an American professional baseball outfielder and first baseman for the Kansas City Royals of Major League Baseball (MLB). He has previously played in MLB for the Oakland Athletics, New York Mets, Milwaukee Brewers, Detroit Tigers, and San Francisco Giants. He made his MLB debut in 2015.
1989SovietâAfghan War: The Soviet Union officially announces that all of its troops have left Afghanistan.[â ]
The SovietâAfghan War took place in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan from December 1979 to February 1989. Marking the beginning of the 46-year-long Afghan conflict, it saw the Soviet Union and the Afghan military fight against the rebelling Afghan mujahideen, aided by Pakistan. While they were backed by various countries and organizations, the majority of the mujahideen's support came from Pakistan, the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Iran, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, in addition to a large influx of foreign fighters known as the Afghan Arabs. American and British involvement on the side of the mujahideen escalated the Cold War, ending a short period of relaxed Soviet UnionâUnited States relations. Combat took place throughout the 1980s, mostly in the Afghan countryside, as most of the country's cities remained under Soviet control. The conflict resulted in the deaths of one to three million Afghans, while millions more fled from the country as refugees; most externally displaced Afghans sought refuge in Pakistan and in Iran. Between 6.5 and 11.5% of Afghanistan's erstwhile population of 13.5 million people is estimated to have been killed over the course of the SovietâAfghan War. The decade-long confrontation between the mujahideen and the Soviet and Afghan militaries inflicted grave destruction throughout Afghanistan and has also been cited by scholars as a significant factor that contributed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; it is for this reason that the conflict is sometimes referred to as "the Soviet Union's Vietnam" in retrospective analyses.
In 1989, the world population was approximately 5,234,431,732 people[â ]