August 1975

August 1, 1975 (Friday)

• The Helsinki Accords, recognizing Europe's national borders and respect for human rights, were signed by the leaders of 35 nations in Finland, including the 15 member states of NATO and the 7 Warsaw Pact nations. Among other things, the agreement conceded the legality of the Soviet Union's annexation of the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, but also provided the first mechanism for holding the Communist nations to commitments toward human rights, and was later cited by Václav Havel as a key to the success of liberating Eastern Europe in 1989.
• The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment commenced in India, bringing television for the first time to 2,500 villages in six Indian states and territories, in a project conducted by the Indian Space Research Organisation and NASA with the ATS-6 satellite. It would operate until July 31, 1976.
• The skull of "KNM ER 3733", a woman of the species Homo ergaster, was discovered by Bernard Ngeneo, 1,750,000 years after her death, at the Koobi Fora Ridge near Lake Turkana in Kenya. By August 9, the nearly intact skull had been carefully unearthed.
• The Republic of Cabinda unilaterally declared independence.

  August 2, 1975 (Saturday)

• The highest temperatures ever recorded in Massachusetts and Rhode Island took place during a heatwave in northeast United States.
• Carrying U.S. President Ford on his departure from the Helsinki summit, Air Force One strayed from its flight plan and veered into restricted air space near Swedish military installations, prompting the Swedish Air Force to send a J35 Draken to intercept the jet and turn it away. Major Carl-Christen Hjort said that the fighter was equipped with air-to-air missiles, "but, of course, there were no plans to use them".
• Billy Martin had his first game as manager of baseball's New York Yankees for owner George Steinbrenner being hired and fired several times between 1975 and 1988. In his outing, he guided the Yankees to a 5–4 "home" win over the Cleveland Indians. The team was still playing at Shea Stadium as their own stadium was undergoing renovations until the 1976 season.

  August 3, 1975 (Sunday)

• Less than four weeks after becoming the first President of the Comoros, Ahmed Abdallah was overthrown in a bloodless coup. Foreign mercenaries, sponsored by French soldier of fortune Bob Denard, seized the lone radio station and television station in Moroni, the capital city. An hour later, opposition leader Ali Soilih announced that he was the new President. Solih would place Said Mohamed Jaffar in the office of president, before assuming the job himself in January.
• A chartered ALIA, Royal Jordanian Airlines Boeing 707 crashed into the side of a mountain while attempting to land at Agadir after departing Paris three hours earlier. All but four of the passengers were Moroccans who worked in France and were coming home on their vacations. All 188 people on the jet were killed.
• A0620-00, the first x-ray nova to also be visible on an optical telescope, was seen and detected to flare. After eight months, the flare diminished, and the object is considered to be likely to be a black hole that was created around the time of the 10th century BCE based on its distance from earth of an estimated 3,000 light years.
• The Louisiana Superdome opened in New Orleans.
• Died: Jack Molinas, 43, gambler and former college and professional basketball player convicted for "fixing" games, was shot and killed while standing in his backyard at his home in Hollywood Hills, California, in what was believed to have been a mob hit. The gunman, Eugene Conner, was convicted of murder in 1978 after being turned in by his own brother.

  August 4, 1975 (Monday)

• Members of the Japanese Red Army terrorist group fought their way into the American consulate in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, then took 52 hostages, only five of whom were American. The group demanded the release of 7 jailed Red Army members. Five of the JRA prisoners accepted the offer of safe passage and were flown to Libya.

  August 5, 1975 (Tuesday)

• U.S. President Ford signed into law a U.S. Senate resolution posthumously restoring the American citizenship of Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee, restoring his American citizenship. Lee had died in 1870, but had signed an oath of allegiance in 1865 as part of being granted amnesty. "Although more than a century late," President Ford said, "I am delighted to sign this resolution and to complete the full restoration of General Lee's citizenship."
• The Parliament of India retroactively changed the 1971 election law that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had violated four years earlier while running for her seat in the Lok Sabha. Gandhi had been convicted on June 12 of violating campaign laws, with a mandatory penalty of being barred from public office for six years, then declared an emergency. Most citizens of India were unaware of the rewriting of the law because of censorship of the press.
• South African troops drove ten miles into Angola, resulting in a decision by Cuba to increase its presence in the African nation.
• An armored car of the Hang Seng Bank was robbed of 75 million Hong Kong dollars, equivalent to USD $10,000,000.
• Born: Kajol, Indian film actress and five-time winner of Filmfare Award for Best Actress; as Kajol Mukherjee in Mumbai

  August 6, 1975 (Wednesday)

• The United Nations Security Council declined to approve South Korea's application for membership. The United States would veto the application of North Vietnam and South Vietnam a week later.
• One day before it was to expire, the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965 was extended for another ten years. The Act of 1975 had passed the U.S. House of Representatives 341-70 on June 4, 1975, and the U.S. Senate 77-12 on July 24.
• The death of Hercule Poirot was announced worldwide by the publishers of Agatha Christie's novel Curtain.
• The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet unanimously approved the Helsinki Accords, and a resolution praying "that all countries represented at the conference will live up to the agreements reached. As to the Soviet Union, it will act precisely in this way."

  August 7, 1975 (Thursday)

• Typhoon Nina produced the heaviest one-day rainfall ever recorded from a Pacific Ocean typhoon, with 97 centimeters at Linzhang County in the Hebei Province. The typhoon itself had killed 12 people up to that point, in Taiwan, but the downpour continued for 26 hours, leading to a dam burst in mainland China the next day.
• Alger Hiss was sworn back in as an attorney, 23 years after having been disbarred in 1952 for perjury, after denying that he had given U.S. State Department documents, nicknamed the "Pumpkin Papers", to Communist spy Whittaker Chambers.
• Born:
• *Charlize Theron, South African-born American actress, 2004 Academy Award winner for Best Actress for portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the film Monster, in Benoni, Gauteng
• *David Hicks, Australian man imprisoned by the United States at Guantanamo Bay from 2001 to 2007 while awaiting trial on charges of supporting terrorism in Afghanistan; in Adelaide

  August 8, 1975 (Friday)

• The Banqiao Dam, in China's Henan Province, failed after a freak typhoon, drowning over 26,000 people and leading to famine and disease that killed 145,000 more. At 12:30 am local time, the Shimantan Dam, on the Ru River, gave way from a downpour; thirty minutes later, the pressure caused the Banqiao dam to burst, and 62 more dams further downstream failed as well. A large wave, at least 3 meters high, swept through the valley rendering eleven million people homeless. The People's Republic of China would not acknowledge the disaster until 30 years later.
• Singer Hank Williams Jr. was seriously injured in a near-fatal mountain climbing accident at Ajax Peak in Montana, when the ground beneath him gave way, and fell 500 feet down the slope. After two years of reconstructive surgeries, Williams would set about rebuilding his career and become one of the best-selling country music artists in history.
• Died: Cannonball Adderley, 46, former high school music teacher who became a contemporary jazz artist

  August 9, 1975 (Saturday)

• The COS-B satellite, a project of the European Space Research Organisation, was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. "It is difficult to overestimate the importance of COS-B in the historical evolution" of ESRO, it would be written later. Operating five years longer than expected, up until April 25, 1982, the European mission provided the first detailed view of gamma ray sources in the Milky Way.
• Samuel Bronfman II, son of the president of Seagram's, was reported kidnapped and held for ransom after disappearing from his home in Purchase, New York. After the ransom was paid, Bronfman was located August 17 by the FBI and by the New York Police Department. Defendants Mel Patrick Lynch and Dominic Byrne would later persuade a jury that Bronfman was their accomplice, and would be acquitted of kidnapping charges, and convicted only of extortion of the Bronfman family. Byrne's attorney wrote a memoir before his death in 2020, confessing that the defense was a lie, and Bronfman had been an innocent victim.
• Planning began to move the capital of Nigeria from Lagos to a new location. A committee, headed by Akinola Aguda, would select a site for the Federal Capital Territory to be made up of part of the states of Nasarawa, Niger and Kogi, for the building of the new city of Abuja.
• Mark Donohue set the world record for speed on a closed race course, averaging 221.120 miles per hour while driving a Porsche 917.30 at the Talladega Motor Speedway in Talladega, Alabama. The record would stand for 11 years, but Donohue would be killed in a racing accident ten days later.
• Hours after their birth, two baby girls, born as Siamese twins, were separated by a team of 25 surgeons, anesthetists and nurses, led by Dr. Peter Jones at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne.
• Died: Dmitri Shostakovich, 68, Russian composer