On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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LEAD: A real bullishness crept into the spring rally on Wall Street yesterday and the stock market's blue-chip indicator, the Dow Jones industrial average, soared past 2,500, a level it has not seen since just before the crash of October 1987.
LEAD: The Government called troops into the capital this morning and imposed martial law in parts of the city to crack down on China's growing democracy movement. But tens of thousands of people rushed out of their homes to block troops from reaching student demonstrators in the central square.
LEAD: Poring over recent statistics, many economists have concluded that the economy is managing to walk the line between inflation and recession. It is apparently growing enough to stave off a big rise in unemployment but not enough to push prices up sharply.
LEAD: When Continental Airlines announced last month that it was raising its discount fares as much as 18 percent, it expected the other airlines to follow suit. But some did not, and this week Continental had to retract its increases, bringing a halt to a steady escalation in the price of an airline ticket.
LEAD: The National Collegiate Athletic Association today placed the University of Kentucky's basketball program on probation for three years for recruiting and academic violations, and took the unusual step of banning one Kentucky player, Eric Manuel, from further N.C.A.A. competition. Another player, Chris Mills, was barred from playing at Kentucky.
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of May 17, 1989, covering May 20, 1989.
Madonna
Tone-Loc
Fine Young Cannibals
Guns N' Roses
Bobby Brown
1989Siosia Vave, Australian-Tongan rugby league player[†]
Siosaia Vave is a Tonga international rugby league footballer who plays as a prop for the St Mary's Saints in the Ron Massey Cup. He previously played for the Parramatta Eels, Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles, Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks and the Melbourne Storm in the NRL.
1989John Hicks, English economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1904)[†]
Sir John Richard Hicks was a British economist. He is considered one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS–LM model (1937), which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book Value and Capital (1939) significantly extended general-equilibrium and value theory. The compensated demand function is named the Hicksian demand function in memory of him.
1989Gilda Radner, American actress and comedian (born 1946)[†]
Gilda Susan Radner was an American actress and comedian. She was one of the seven original cast members of the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from its inception in 1975 until her departure in 1980. In her sketches on SNL, she specialized in parodies of television stereotypes, such as advice specialists and news anchors. She also played various original characters. In 1978, Radner won an Emmy Award for her performances on the show. She also portrayed those characters in her highly successful one-woman show Gilda, Live on Broadway in 1979 and later on film in 1980.
1989The Chinese authorities declare martial law in the face of pro-democracy demonstrations, setting the scene for the Tiananmen Square massacre.[†]
Democracy is a form of government in which political power is vested in the people or the population of a state. Under a minimalist definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections while more expansive or maximalist definitions link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights in addition to competitive elections.
In 1989, the world population was approximately 5,234,431,732 people[†]