WHAT ALL HAPPENED FEBRUARY TO DECEMBER 1973
Find out what all happened February to December 1973

John Paul Getty III, a grandson of the oil magnate J. Paul Getty, is kidnapped in Rome, Italy. (10. July 1973)

The Portuguese Socialist Party is founded in the German town of Bad Münstereifel. (19. April 1973)

Skylab program: NASA launches Skylab 4 with a crew of three astronauts from Cape Canaveral, Florida for an 84-day mission. (16. November 1973)

Black September storms the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, resulting in the assassination of three Western hostages. (1. March 1973)

Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the first handheld mobile phone call to Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs, though it took ten years for the DynaTAC 8000X to become the first such phone to be commercially released. (3. April 1973)

A Lockheed C-141 Starlifter, dubbed the Hanoi Taxi, makes the last flight of Operation Homecoming. (4. April 1973)

Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. (16. October 1973)

The Prime Minister of Spain, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, is assassinated by a car bomb attack in Madrid. (20. December 1973)

Operation Barrel Roll, a covert US bombing campaign in Laos to stop communist infiltration of South Vietnam, ends. (29. March 1973)

Launch of the LexisNexis computerized legal research service. (2. April 1973)

John Paul Getty III's ear is cut off by his kidnappers and sent to a newspaper in Rome; it doesn't arrive until November 8. (21. October 1973)

Greeks vote to abolish the monarchy, beginning the first period of the Metapolitefsi. (29. July 1973)

Egypt launches a coordinated attack with Syria against Israel leading to the Yom Kippur War. (6. October 1973)

Watergate scandal: U.S. President Richard Nixon announces that top White House aides H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and others have resigned. (30. April 1973)

Kenyan athlete Kip Keino defeats Jim Ryun at the first-ever professional track meet in Los Angeles. (24. March 1973)

The U.S. Congress overrides President Richard M. Nixon's veto of the War Powers Resolution, which limits presidential power to wage war without congressional approval. (7. November 1973)

Mariner program: NASA launches the Mariner 10 toward Mercury. On March 29, 1974, it becomes the first space probe to reach that planet. (3. November 1973)

In handing down the decision in Miller v. California 413 US 15, the Supreme Court of the United States establishes the Miller Test for obscenity in U.S. law. (21. June 1973)

Alexander Butterfield reveals the existence of the "Nixon tapes" to the special Senate committee investigating the Watergate break in. (13. July 1973)

Watergate scandal: former White House aide Alexander Butterfield informs the United States Senate that President Richard Nixon had secretly recorded potentially incriminating conversations. (16. July 1973)