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August 1976

Month in 1976 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

August 1976
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August 22, 1976: Luna 24 lander brings moon rocks back to the Soviet Union[1]
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August 17, 1976: Tsunami kills more than 5,000 people in the Philippines
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August 19, 1976: U.S. President Gerald Ford (pictured with running mate Bob Dole) narrowly wins Republican nomination over Ronald Reagan
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August 1, 1976 (Sunday)

  • Trinidad and Tobago became a republic, with the Governor-General, Sir Ellis Clarke, becoming the first President. Clarke, who had previously served as the head of state as representative of Queen Elizabeth II, said that he would hold the office of president until the Caribbean island nation could elect a successor.[2]
  • Defending F1 World Champion Niki Lauda suffered extensive burns in an accident in the German Grand Prix that nearly cost him his life. Fellow racer Arturo Merzario of Italy pulled Lauda from the flaming automobile and saved his life.[3]
  • The United Nations High Commission on Refugees arranged for the evacuation of 49 U.S. citizens and their dependents from Vietnam, as the new Communist government allowed a chartered Air France flight from Tan Son Nhut airport near Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) to Bangkok. The group of 23 U.S.-born Americans and 14 spouses and 14 children had been stranded in South Vietnam when Saigon fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975, and most had waited for more than a year for permission to leave. A few of the Americans said that they "had pleaded to no effect to be allowed to stay in Vietnam," while three others had been held in the Chi Hua Prison[4]
  • Syria's Prime Minister Mahmoud al-Ayyubi resigned after almost four years in office, and President Hafez al-Assad appointed Ayyubi's predecessor, retired Major General Abdul Rahman Khleifawi to replace him.[5]
  • In Austria, Vienna's Reichsbrücke (translated as the "Empire Bridge") collapsed without warning into the Danube River, blocking river traffic and causing almost constant traffic jams within the city. The fall of the bridge, only 42 years old, occurred at around 5:00 in the morning and the structure was not crowded, but the driver of one vehicle was killed.[6] A wider replacement bridge would open two years later, despite original forecasts that there would not be a substitute before 1981.
  • The 1976 Summer Olympics ended in Montreal. Among the events that took place on the final day of competition, Waldemar Cierpinski of East Germany won the marathon. Teófilo Stevenson of Cuba (who had beaten his other opponents in two rounds or fewer) won the heavyweight boxing gold medal in the third round against Romania's Mircea Șimon, and East Germany beat Poland, 3 to 1, to win the soccer competition.[7]
  • The Seattle Seahawks played their first American football game, a preseason contest at the Kingdome against the visiting San Francisco 49ers, and lost 27 to 20. The 49ers had played as the "home team" in Seattle for preseason games six times in the 20 years before the Seahawks were founded.[8]
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August 2, 1976 (Monday)

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August 3, 1976 (Tuesday)

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Congressman Litton
  • U.S. Congressman Jerry Litton of Missouri won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator, then died in a plane crash while flying to a victory party to celebrate his victory.[12][13] Litton, his wife and their two children, and the pilot and a co-pilot were on a twin-engine Beechcraft airplane that lifted off from the airport in Chillicothe, Missouri shortly after 9:00 p.m., then crashed 19 seconds later after a crankshaft broke in the left engine. The airplane, which had been chartered to fly to a victory party in Kansas City, plummeted into a soybean field and exploded on impact, killing all six people on board.
  • Valery Sablin, a Soviet Navy officer who had led a mutiny in 1975 on the anti-submarine ship Storozhevoy on November 8, 1975, was executed after being found guilty of treason in a court-martial.
  • Born: Anoop Menon, Indian film actor, screenwriter and director in Malayalam films; in Kozhikode, Kerala state

August 4, 1976 (Wednesday)

  • The government of Sudan executed 81 people who had been summarily tried and convicted of participation in a July 2 attempt to overthrow the government of Jaafar Nimeiry.[14] The next day, an additional 17 people were executed including former Sudanese Brigadier General Mohammed Nur Saeed, who had led the effort involving more than 1,000 troops who had been trained in Libyan camps.[15]
  • Roman Catholic Bishop Enrique Angelelli, of the diocese of La Rioja in Argentina, was assassinated by a group of people in two trucks. As he was returning from a Mass in the city of Chamical with another priest, Father Arturo Pinto, Angelelli's truck was forced off the road at the town of Punta de los Llanos. Pinto survived, but after recovering consciousness, he saw that Bishop Angelelli had been beaten to death. Local police described the death as an accident and closed the case. After the restoration of democracy in Argentina, a new investigation would conclude in 1986 that Angelelli had been murdered on orders from an Argentine Army officer.
  • American serial killer and teenager Montie Rissell murdered the first of five female victims in the Washington, DC suburb of Alexandria, Virginia.[16] After having sex with Aura Gabor, a 26-year-old prostitute who lived in the same apartment complex where he lived, he drowned her in a nearby ravine. In a period of nine months, he would rape 12 women and kill five of them before being arrested on May 18, 1977.
  • The Sun Belt Conference, a group of college basketball in the southeastern United States, was formed by six universities. Only one of the original members, the University of South Alabama, remains in the now 12-member conference.
  • Died: Lord Thomson of Fleet, Canadian-born British publishing mogul who built the Thomson Organization that owned The Times of London[17]
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August 5, 1976 (Thursday)

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The clockworks halted attribution: Paulobrad
  • Big Ben, the largest bell within London's Clock Tower of Westminster, failed to ring and the clock stopped at 3:45 in the morning after metal fatigue caused the machinery to stop running.[18] Although the hands of the clock's four faces were soon operating again after the repairs made by Westminster's chief engineer, Geoffrey Buggin,[19] a winding drum fell off, breaking the 110-year-old chiming mechanism.[20] The bells of Big Ben— which had operated regularly since 1859— would be require multiple repairs over the next nine months, but restored in time for the silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth's coronation in May.
  • An explosion at an underground mine in Yugoslavia's Bosnian republic, at Breza, killed 17 of the 118 workers underground. The blast occurred at a depth of 600 feet (180 m).[21]
  • As part of the American Basketball Association–National Basketball Association merger, a dispersal draft was conducted for teams to pick the players who had been under contract for the two ABA franchises which had folded, the Kentucky Colonels and the Spirits of St. Louis (who had announced that they would play in Salt Lake City as the "Utah Rockies" if there was a 1976-77 ABA season). The Chicago Bulls, who had had the worst record during the 1975–76 NBA season, selected Artis Gilmore of the Colonels as the first pick overall; the Bulls had drafted Gilmore in the seventh round of the 1971 NBA draft. Twelve players were selected overall by the 23 NBA teams, with 11 teams electing not to draft anyone at all.[22]
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    • Mapetla Mohapi, 28, black South African inmate who was the first person to be detained under Section 6 of the new Terrorism Act, was found dead in his cell, supposedly strangled by a pair of jeans. A purported suicide note was later shown to have been a forgery.
    • Dr. Fager, 12, American thoroughbred racehorse and 1968 American Horse of the Year, after winning seven major races that year.
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August 6, 1976 (Friday)

  • The Indian state of Maharashtra became the first governmental unit to enact legislation mandating compulsory sterilization of men and women, passing the Family (Restrictions on Size) Bill on its third reading and sending it to the President of India for the required assent. The President reacted favorably and sent the bill back to the Maharashtra government with suggested amendments that would be necessary for an enactment, but before the measure could be passed, new elections were called and the legislation was not passed.[23] Under the terms of the bill, "couples with three or more living children" (with the exception of all boys or all girls) were required "to submit one parent for sterilization or face six months in jail."[24] More specifically, the law obligated men up to the age of 55 to receive a vasectomy "within 180 days of the birth of their third living child", except if a vasectomy would endanger the man's life, in which case a woman up to age 45 would have to submit to a tubal ligation.[25] The national government's incentive program, however, reportedly resulted in a 200 percent increase in sterilizations compared to 1975.[26]
  • Former UK Postmaster General John Stonehouse was sentenced to 7 years' jail for fraud, theft and forgery.
  • Born:
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August 7, 1976 (Saturday)

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The Viking 2 orbiter
  • Viking 2 entered into orbit around Mars.[28]
  • The Republic of the North Solomons, whose residents had declared their independence from the Australian-administered Territory of Papua and New Guinea on September 1, 1975, abandoned its secession. The unrecognized republic, consisting of Bougainville Island and Buka Island, joined the now independent nation of Papua New Guinea as the "North Solomons Province", and the republic's president, Alexis Sarei, became the province's premier.[29]
  • The decomposing body of former Chicago mobster John Roselli was found by two fishermen in Florida's Biscayne Bay, 10 days after he had disappeared. Roselli had last been seen on July 28, when he departed from his sister's home in Plantation, Florida, to play golf. His car had been found a few days later at the Miami International Airport. According to the deputy chief medical examiner for Dade County, Roselli's body had been packed into an oil barrel that had been chopped with holes and weighed down with chains to sink to the bottom of the sea, but "Gases formed by the decomposition and trapped inside body tissue and the barrel had brought it to the surface." Referring to Roselli's killers, Dr. Ronald Wright told reporters "These guys went to an incredible amount of trouble trying to make sure the body was never found."[30]
  • The charred body of a person identified by his family as David Graiver, an Argentine banker accused of embezzlement, money laundering, and assistance to the Montoneros leftist guerrilla group, was found in the wreckage of a Dassault Falcon 888AR business jet on a hillside near Acapulco in Mexico. Mexican investigators never took fingerprints of the remains found in the crash, consisting of "three severed hands", and Graiver was only confirmed by his relatives from "a piece of torso and a fragment of shirt", and the remains were later cremated, leading investigators to doubt that he had actually died.[31]
  • Apsarasas Kangri, at 23,770 feet (7,250 m) the 96th highest mountain in the world, was climbed for the first time. Yoshio Inagaki, Katsuhisa Yabuta and Takamasa Miyomoto of the Osaka University Mountaineering Club of Japan made the first ascent, reaching the peak over the west ridge.[32]
  • Born: Karen Olivo, American stage actress; in the South Bronx, New York City
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August 8, 1976 (Sunday)

  • An intoxicated Soviet border guard shot and killed six members of a group of Estonian gas company employees, and wounded 14 others, after getting into an argument with members who were having a picnic at the scenic Cape Letitpea park on the Gulf of Finland. The shooting took place near the village of Kunda in the Estonian SSR, at the time a part of the Soviet Union. Information about the crime was not reported in the Soviet-controlled press, but a monument would be placed at the site on the 15th anniversary of the killing in the final year of the Soviet Union's existence.[33]
  • Defying more than 100 years of professional baseball tradition, the Chicago White Sox became the first team to wear short pants for summer games, defeating the visiting Kansas City Royals, 5 to 2, while dressed in Bermuda shorts. The unpopular innovation was the idea of White Sox owner Bill Veeck.[34][35] The Sox played in shorts again on August 21 and August 22 before retiring the uniforms on their way to one of their worst seasons ever, finishing with 64 wins and 98 losses.[36]
  • Seven children ranging from 3 to 8 years old were killed, along with two adults, when a train struck the church bus they were on in the town of Stratton, Nebraska.[37] Eight other children on the bus were hospitalized. All of the victims were local residents being driven by their pastor and his wife to Sunday school at the Stratton Church of Christ.[38]
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August 9, 1976 (Monday)

August 10, 1976 (Tuesday)

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August 11, 1976 (Wednesday)

  • Thirteen people were killed and seven injured as a fire swept through the six-floor Hotel d'Amerique in Paris. Most of the victims were immigrant workers from Morocco and Algeria. As with most hotels in France at the time, the hotel had no fire escape; nine people died in their rooms or in hallways while two others died after jumping from their rooms.[47] The blaze was the most deadly of five low-rate hotel fires that had been deliberately set since June.[48]
  • A pair of terrorists attacked a group of airline passengers waiting to board El Al Flight 582 at Istanbul's Yesilkoy Airport, where they were planning to fly to Tel Aviv in Israel. Four passengers— two Israelis, one Japanese and one Spaniard— were killed and 20 others wounded when the guerrillas threw hand grenades and fired submachine guns.[49]
  • A sniper entered the downtown Holiday Inn in Wichita, Kansas (at the time the tallest building in the U.S. state of Kansas), carried two rifles and ammunition in an elevator to the 26th floor, walked into an unlocked empty room and fired from a balcony. During an 11-minute rampage that began at 2:54 in the afternoon, the 19-year-old gunman shot nine people, killing three and wounding six others before police shot and wounded him.[50] One of the dead was a freelance photographer who was driving to the scene after hearing that a crime was in progress.[51][52]
  • The fall of a meteor was observed at 11:00 in the morning in Mexico, north of Acapulco and a 1.914 kg (4.22 lb) meteorite was recovered 15 minutes later by witness Leodegario Cardenas.[53] Examples of the acapulcoite, whose mineral composition is primarily olivine, orthopyroxene, plagioclase, meteoric iron, and troilite, would be found later in 86 other specimens whose fall to Earth was not observed.
  • David Jimenez Sarmiento, alias "El Chano", leader of the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre rebels in Mexico, was shot and killed while he and three other members attempted to kidnap the sister of Mexico's President. Margarita López Portillo, sister of outgoing President José López Portillo, was being driven through Mexico City when three men and a woman emerged from a taxicab ahead of them and fired on the car, which crashed into a drug store. Jimenez Sarmiento was killed in the gunbattle that followed, along with one of Margarita López's bodyguards.[54]
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August 12, 1976 (Thursday)

  • More than 1,500 Lebanese Palestinian refugees, and perhaps as many as 3,000, were killed in a massacre of civilians at the Tel al-Zaatar camp in northeastern Beirut by a Christian militia group.[58] The camp had been created and administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency during the Lebanese Civil War and most of the men, women and children housed at Tel al-Zaatar were Palestinian Muslims.[59][60]
  • The trial of the San Quentin Six, the longest and most expensive in the U.S. state of California up to that time, came to an end after 16 months and a cost of more than two million dollars, "to convict three men who were already imprisoned, two with life sentences."[61] The six prisoners on trial had been charged with an escape attempt that had killed six people almost five years earlier on August 21, 1971.[62] Three defendants— Fleeta Drumgo, Luis Talamantez and Willie Tate— were acquitted of all charges and, having served out their original sentences at San Quentin for other crimes, paroled afterward. Johnny Spain, already serving a life sentence for a 1967 murder, was convicted of the 1971 murder, but his conviction would be overturned on appeal and he would be released in 1988. David Johnson and Hugo Pinell were convicted of assaulting guards. Johnson would be released in 1993. Pinell, who had already been serving a life sentence for murder of prison guard at the Soledad prison, would be killed in a prison riot on August 12, 2015, thirty-nine years after the verdict.
  • An explosion killed 12 maintenance workers at a 30-story tall tower at the Tenneco Oil Company refinery in Chalmette, Louisiana, and injured 14 others.[63] All but two of the dead were subcontractor employees of the Delta Field Erection Company. An official of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, to which the 10 Delta Field employees belonged, said that the blast had been caused by human error, noting "It was just a mistake on a man's part."[64]
  • The National Swine Flu Immunization Program, meant to vaccinate all 200 million residents of the U.S. against swine flu, was signed into law by U.S. President Gerald Ford.[65]
  • Died:
    • Tom Driberg, 71 controversial British House of Commons member who served as an MP from 1942 to 1955, and 1959 to 1974, despite having been a former member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and being openly gay. Driberg, who had been ennobled as "Lord Bradwell of Bradwell Juxta Mare" in December, was dead on arrival at a hospital after collapsing in a taxi cab at Bayswater, London.[66]
    • Roger Q. Williams, 82, American aviator and aircraft designer

August 13, 1976 (Friday)

  • Democrat Joseph DiCarlo and Republican Ronald MacKenzie, both Massachusetts state senators and partners in crime, were indicted by a federal grand jury and arrested on charges of extortion of $40,000 from a consulting company, McKee-Berger-Mansueto, Inc. After posting bond, both would be convicted by a jury on February 25, fined, and sentenced to one year confinement at a minimum security prison near Allenwood, Pennsylvania. MacKenzie would resign on March 30, 1977, while DiCarlo would become the first legislator in state history to be expelled from office, losing his seat on April 4 by a 28 to 8 vote.
  • Died: Liz Moore, 31, British sculptor known for her elaborate designs of film props and miniatures in Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, was killed in a car accident in the Netherlands. She had been working on the film set of the war movie A Bridge Too Far.[67]

August 14, 1976 (Saturday)

  • Eight people were killed and 51 injured in Egypt by a bomb that exploded on a train that they were boarding at the Alexandria railway station. Most of the casualties were construction workers and farmers who were preparing to make the 700 mi (1,100 km) trip to their workplaces in Aswan.[68] Egypt accused Libya of having had someone plant the time bomb, which exploded at 10:45 in the morning, in an unclaimed suitcase in a luggage rack. Casualties would have been higher but the train was still waiting outside of the station when the bomb exploded, and the people killed had boarded in order to get an early seat.
  • Around 10,000 Protestant and Catholic women demonstrated for peace in Northern Ireland.
  • The Senegalese political party PAI-Rénovation was recognized by the West African nation's government, becoming the third legal party in that West African nation.

August 15, 1976 (Sunday)

August 16, 1976 (Monday)

  • Leaders from 85 "Third World" nations, officially "non-aligned" nations that were allied with neither Communist nations nor the world's major capitalist nations, opened in Sri Lanka at the capital, Colombo.[77]
  • Switzerland's government announced the arrest of the former commander of the Swiss Air Force, Brigadier General Jean-Louis Jeanmaire, on charges of having supplied top secret military information and documents to the Soviet Union.[78]
  • New Zealand's Private Schools Conditional Integration Act took effect, in the first program to allow private schools to come under the regulation and tax support of the government. The schools, most of them Roman Catholic, became tuition-free while still retaining their "special character", subject to providing equal rights and opportunities for students.
  • The Convention on Psychotropic Substances, signed in Vienna on February 21, 1971, entered into effect,
  • American golfer Dave Stockton won the PGA Championship tournament at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland. Stockton sank a 15 foot (4.6 m) putt on the 18th hole for a final score of 281 on 72 holes of golf, finishing one stroke ahead of Don January and Ray Floyd, who both had a score of 282, and avoiding a three-way overtime playoff.[79]
  • The first National Football League game ever played outside of North America took place in Tokyo, at a preseason exhibition that the St. Louis Cardinals won, 20 to 10, over the San Diego Chargers, before a crowd of 38,000 fans.[80]
  • The Ramones made their first "professional" performance, debuting as the feature band at CBGB, a bar in New York's East Tavern that initially limited its music to "country, blue grass and blues" music but soon moved into punk rock and new wave music.

August 17, 1976 (Tuesday)

  • A tsunami killed more than 5,000 people in the Philippines on the islands of Mindanao and Sulu shortly after an earthquake that struck offshore at 11 minutes after midnight local time (16:11 UTC on August 16).[81] Waves as high as 29 feet (8.8 m) were reported to have swept over Lebak on Mindanao. According to the Philippines' National Disaster Coordinating Center the next day, 3,131 people were confirmed dead and 3,117 were missing.[82]
  • Meeting at the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations (commonly called "The Third World Conference" by the western press), held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Vietnam's Communist Prime Minister Pham Van Dong told fellow Third World leaders that Vietnam wanted to develop normal diplomatic relations with the U.S., with whom it had fought the Vietnam War, and to develop economic ties with the U.S. and other capitalist nations.[83]
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August 18, 1976 (Wednesday)

  • At Panmunjom, North Korea, two United States soldiers were killed while trying to trim the branches on a tree which had obscured their view of their northernmost observation post in the Korean Demilitarized Zone.[84] The trimming operation took place on the South Korean side of the "Bridge of No Return" near Panmunjom, as a group of six American and four South Korean border guards under the United Nations Command, along with five South Korean civilians were performing a routine task when they were approached by 11 North Korean soldiers. Under the terms of the truce creating the Korean DMZ, soldiers on both sides of the border were "guaranteed free movement and access inside the small, jointly administered zone designated as the Joint Security Area," informally referred to as the "Peace Village". At first the Communists approved of the project and even offered suggestions on pruning the trees. A few minutes later, two North Korean officers and some soldiers approached and demanded that the tree trimmings stop. The work continued and a truck with 20 more North Korean soldiers arrived and an officer gave the order "Kill them."[85] At 10:45 in the morning local time, the North Koreans "rushed the Americans and South Koreans with axes, metal spikes and ax handles." The two dead were U.S. Army Captain Arthur G. Bonifas, 33, and First Lieutenant Mark T. Barrett, 25.[84] In the 23 years since the end of the Korean War up until then, more than 1,000 people, including 49 Americans, had been killed in confrontations within the DMZ.[85] According to the U.S. Department of Defense, the DEFCON level of state of readiness of defense condition was temporarily raised from DEFCON 4 to DEFCON 3 for the first time since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.[86]
  • The South African governmental unit administering South West Africa as United Nations mandate announced that "a multiracial government" would be installed to lead the territory to full independence from the Union of South Africa by December 31, 1978. South Africa's apartheid white minority government, which had refused to give up its mandate during British rule, before the apartheid racial segregation policy had been implemented.[87] The United Nations Council for Namibia rejected the plan as "ambiguous and equivocal."[88] Namibia would attain independence as a majority-ruled black African nation in 1990.
  • The Soviet Union's uncrewed spacecraft Luna 24 landed on the Moon, touching down in the Sea of Crises almost two years after Luna 23 had crashed into the same area in November 1974.[89] During its stay of slightly less than 23 hours, Luna 24 drilled into the lunar surface two meters deep and picked up a soil sample and was launched back to lunar orbit to prepare for return to Earth.[90]
  • Three Mexican campesinos, who had crossed into the United States illegally, were caught and tortured by rancher George Hanigan and his two sons after being caught trespassing on Hanigan's ranch near the border town of Douglas, Arizona as they walked to a farm job in Elfrida. The Mexican men escaped the Hanigan Ranch and fled back across the border from Douglas to Agua Prieta, where they notified local police. The police contacted the Mexican consul in Douglas, who in turn appeared before a federal grand jury which indicted the Hanigans.[91] George Hanigan would die of a heart attack on March 22, one week before the scheduled federal criminal trial.[92] One of the sons, Patrick Hanigan, would be convicted of violating the civil rights of Manuel García Loya, Eleazar Ruelas Zavala, and Bernabe Herrera.[93][94]
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  • Died: Reverend Roman Kotlarz, 47, Polish Roman Catholic priest in the city of Radom, an opponent of Poland's Communist government, died after being beaten into unconsciousness by agents of Poland's secret police, the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (SB)

August 19, 1976 (Thursday)

  • U.S. President Gerald Ford edged out challenger Ronald Reagan, 1,187 to 1,070 in delegate votes, on the first ballot to win the Republican Party presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention at Kemper Arena in Kansas City. Ford, the only U.S. president who had never been elected as either the presidential or vice-presidential nominee, had succeeded to the office after initially being confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Vice President of the United States in 1973 to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of Spiro Agnew, and then being sworn in after the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The balloting was close enough between Ford and Reagan that in an alphabetical roll-call of the U.S. states' delegations, he didn't receive the necessary 1,131 majority until receiving the 20 votes from the West Virginia delegates at 12:29 in the morning local time. Ford then drove to Reagan's hotel and met with the former California governor for 27 minutes.[95]
  • Later in the day, President Ford selected Bob Dole, Republican U.S. Senator for Kansas, as his running mate to be the Republican nominee for Vice President of the United States.[96] In addition, for the first time since 1960, the nominees of the two parties agreed to nationally-televised presidential debates as Ford made the challenge and Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter accepted.[97]
  • Born: Ucu Agustin, Indonesian journalist and documentary filmmaker; in Sukabumi

August 20, 1976 (Friday)

August 21, 1976 (Saturday)

August 22, 1976 (Sunday)

  • The Soviet Union's Luna 24 spacecraft returned to Earth with the first sample of soil from the Mare Crisium, one of five areas on the Moon that has extremely dense rock. The existence of these dense areas had been found by the U.S. probe Lunar Orbiter 5 in January 1968.[112] The 170.1 grams (6.00 oz) of lunar soil[113] would as the last to be brought to Earth from the Moon for more than 40 years until December 16, 2020, the date of Earth landing of the Chinese sample return mission probe Chang'e 5 with 1.731 kilograms (3.82 lb) of lunar soil.[114][115]
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August 23, 1976 (Monday)

  • All 98 hostages (92 passengers and six crew) on EgyptAir Flight 321 were rescued, unharmed, by Egypt's commando team, the El-Sa‘ka Forces after three hijackers had taken over the Boeing 737 as it was flying from Cairo to Luxor.[116] The armed group from the Abd al-Nasir organization, whose members later told police that they had been paid $50,000 of a $250,000 fee for the hijacking, demanded the release of five Libyan nationals imprisoned in Egypt, and for the aircraft to be flown to Libya. After the pilot convinced the hijackers that the plane had only had enough fuel to reach its destination, Flight 321 landed in Luxor and needed maintenance. Two commandos, posing as airport workers, made several trips in and out of the EgyptAir plane to give the appearance of checking on mechanical problems, and then gave the signal for the rest of the rescue team (commanded by Egyptian Army Colonel Sayed El Sharkawy) stormed the plane and took everyone alive, including the three terrorists.
  • A spokesman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced that the Viking 1 lander had found no signs of life on the planet Mars, based on its test of looking for organic material by heating soil samples to temperatures of 500 °C (932 °F) and then attempting to detect carbon by tandem mass spectrometry. Dr. Klaus Biemann told a press conference, "We can say if there was as much as 12 parts per billion we would see it. Organically speaking, it's a very clean material."[117]
  • Fighting between black South African groups began in Johannesburg after two-thirds of the population of the city's black neighborhoods in Soweto refused to return to work, while another one-third ignored the strike. As many as 1,500 Zulu workers in the suburb of Orlando West went from house to house after several Zulu residents of a hostel in Mzimhlope had been taunted and had rocks thrown. After returning from work, the Zulu laborers returned home, gathered weapons, and took revenge on the demonstrators, killing at least four. The demonstrators then burned down the Zulu hostel, and, with apparent approval by the white South African government and its Johannesburg police force, the Zulus created a vigilante mob to protect other black South African employees who had returned from work, while violently attacking demonstrators.[118][119]
  • The southern African nation of Botswana introduced a new currency the pula, to replace the South African rand, which had been used as the legal currency since the republic's independence from the United Kingdom in 1966.[120] Each pula, which had par value with the rand, was worth 100 thebes.
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August 24, 1976 (Tuesday)

August 25, 1976 (Wednesday)

  • Jacques Chirac resigned as Prime Minister of France in anger over the lack of authority given to him by President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. Chirac was replaced by Foreign Trade Minister Raymond Barre. "I am quitting because I don't have the means I consider necessary for the effective performance of my functions as Prime Minister," Chirac said, "and in these conditions I've decided to end them."[122]
  • The International Track Association (ITA), the first professional track and field athletics association, announced that it was suspending operations after having had only six track meets in its 1976 season. Michael F. O'Hara, the ITA president, made the announcement as the sixth ITA meet of the season concluded at Mount Hood Community College in the Portland suburb of Gresham, Oregon, attracted a crowd of only 1,000 paying customers, and told reporters "We're not closing down, but merely curtailing our season." Scheduled ITA events at Minneapolis, Cleveland and Boston were canceled.[123] The ITA had been created in 1972 to pay track athletes who had been forbidden by amateur rules from accepting compensation. In the final meet, "Nineteen athletes competed and only six of nine scheduled events took place." Winners of the final ITA competition were Rod Milburn in the 120-yard hurdles over Lance Babb; Ed Lipscomb in the pole vault over Steve Smith; John Radetich in the high jump; Warren Edmonson over John Smith and Larry James in the 300-meter race; Ken Swenson in the 880-meter race over Tommie Fulton and John Kipkurgat; and Brian Oldfield as the only competitor in the shot put. In the final event, "A print medley team comprised of Edmonson, Smith, J.J. Johnson and Kipkurgat, running against no one, finished with a time of 3:19.6."[124] Ironically, the concept of a professional track and field league failed because amateur athletes received more money by being paid covertly and not being caught. O'Hara explained "We did not anticipate the amateur athlete making the dollar he now is making."[125]
  • Born: Alexander Skarsgård, Swedish TV and film actor, Emmy Award winner; in Stockholm
  • Died: Eyvind Johnson, 76, Swedish novelist and co-winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature

August 26, 1976 (Thursday)

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colorized 20000x magnification of Ebola[126]
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Prince Bernhard[127]
  • The first known outbreak of Zaire ebolavirus occurred in the village of Yambuku in northern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, when Mabalo Lokela, a 44-year-old teacher at the Yambuku Mission School, first sought treatment at a clinic.[128] His condition worsened, and Lokela was admitted to the Yambuku hospital on September 5, dying on September 8. Within a week, nine other village residents had died after developing similar symptoms.[129] From August 10 to 22, Mr. Lokela and six co-workers had been on vacation, traveling to villages and towns and he had experienced symptoms of what he thought was malaria.
  • Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, Prince Consort of the Netherlands husband of Queen Juliana, resigned from almost all various posts over a scandal involving alleged corruption, in connection with business dealings with the Lockheed Corporation. Prime Minister Joop den Uyl told a session of Parliament that a board of inquiry said that there was no firm evidence to confirm allegations the Prince Bernhard had accepted $1.1 million in bribes, but noted that he had "allowed himself to be tempted to take initiatives which were completely unacceptable."[130]
  • Died:

August 27, 1976 (Friday)

August 28, 1976 (Saturday)

August 29, 1976 (Sunday)

August 30, 1976 (Monday)

August 31, 1976 (Tuesday)

References

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