Michael Jackson earns his 12th and final solo #1 with “You Are Not Alone”
Pop star Michael Jackson’s song “You Are Not Alone” reaches number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100—his 12th #1 hit.
Jackson’s incredible run of chart-topping hits began in 1972 with the release of his fifth single, “Ben,” from the motion picture of the same name. A touching ballad about a sensitive boy’s devotion to a rat, “Ben” may seem a strange pop-cultural artifact in retrospect, but it raised few eyebrows at the time, when it made Jackson the third-youngest recording artist (after Stevie Wonder and Donny Osmond) to earn a solo #1 hit. It would be another seven years before Jackson again reached the top of the pop charts, but when he did, it marked the beginning of a 10-year run as great as any in pop history.
Qaddafi leads coup in Libya Muammar al-Qaddafi, a 27-year-old Libyan army captain, leads a successful military coup against King Idris I of Libya. Idris was deposed and Qaddafi was named chairman of Libya’s new governing body, the Revolutionary Command Council. Qaddafi was born in a tent in the Libyan desert in 1942, the son of a Bedouin farmer.
