August 1977

August 1, 1977 (Monday)

• The Jiu Valley miners' strike, the largest protest movement in Romania up to that time against the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, began near Lupeni as 35,000 of the 90,000 coal miners in the area walked off of the job because of poor working conditions and compensation. Soon, other miners in Transylvania's Jiu Valley followed suit, causing an economic crisis.
• The government of Turkey's Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel won a vote of confidence in the Grand National Assembly, 229 to 219 in his favor.
• The University of the District of Columbia was created from the merger of three historically black colleges, District of Columbia Teachers College, Federal City College, and Washington Technical Institute.
• The first oil from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was shipped with the departure of the Arco Juneau, a tanker carrying 800,000 barrels of oil, from Valdez.
• North Korea announced its establishment of a "military sea boundary", unprecedented in international law, that extended from the North Korean coast into the Sea of Japan and into the Yellow Sea separating North Korea from China. The United Nations Command nations, including South Korea and the U.S., refused to recognize the claim, which went beyond the limit for territorial waters.
• Born: Haspop, French dancer and choreographer; in Lyon
• Died:
• *Francis Gary Powers, 47, American CIA pilot best known for being shot down over the Soviet Union in the U-2 incident, was killed in the crash of a news helicopter he was operating for the KNBC TV station in Los Angeles, along with the KNBC cameraman, George Spears. Powers and Spears had departed from Burbank, California in a Bell 206B JetRanger helicopter to provide aerial coverage of a wildfire in Santa Barbara County, and Powers underestimated the amount of fuel on the flight back. The main rotor halted as the helicopter was above a field in Encino where Powers was attempting an autorotation to an open field, killing both men.
• *Sita Valles, 25, political activist and doctor, was executed by a firing squad at the prison of the Angola Information and Security Directorate, after she was tortured and raped.

  August 2, 1977 (Tuesday)

• U.S. President Jimmy Carter transmitted a statement, "Drug Abuse Message to Congress", endorsing the decriminalization of marijuana, by reducing the federal penalty for possession from a felony to a misdemeanor, and to eliminate any penalty at all for possession of an ounce or less of the drug. "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself," Carter stated, "and where they are, they should be changed."
• Two days of voting concluded in Syria for all 195 seats in the People's Council. The ruling Ba'ath Party won 125 seats for a large majority, and four other parties affiliated with the Ba'ath Party won 24 races, and independent candidates had 46. Voting had extended by a day because an insufficient number of ballots had been cast on August 1.
• Born: Edward Furlong, American film actor; in Glendale, California
• Died: Cardinal Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, 88, Roman Catholic Patriarch of Lisbon and the oldest member of the College of Cardinals

  August 3, 1977 (Wednesday)

• Romania's dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was booed by many people in a crowd of at least 35,000 people while giving a speech at Lupeni, site of the largest labor strike in a Communist nation's history. The strikeleader, Costică Dobre, presented Ceaușescu with a list of 26 demands on behalf of the miners. Ceaușescu delivered a speech where he promised to implement reforms, then returned to Bucharest to make plans to punish the people who walked out on strike. Dobre and other strike organizers were deported to other parts of the country and assigned new work, while thousands of other identified strikers were relocated to other jobs.
• U.S. President Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, requiring mining companies to restore the condition of land where strip mining had been used to reach the minerals on and beneath the property. The new law required that companies file a reclamation bond to ensure that the reclaiming would take place when the property was no longer being mined.
• In the U.S., the Tandy Corporation, owner of the Radio Shack chain of electronics stores, introduced the first mass-produced microcomputer, TRS-80. The model was unveiled and demonstrated at a press conference at the Warwick Hotel in New York City.
• The Soviet Union launched Kosmos 936, the fourth of the Bion series of satellites for biological experiments in weightlessness. The satellite carried experiments from nine nations. The U.S. spy agency had turned over evidence of 149 different projects that had enlisted researchers at 80 different institutions, and human test subjects, none of whom were aware that they were gathering data on "mind control", the regulation of human behavior with chemical substances.
• Born:
• *Tom Brady, American NFL quarterback, three time NFL Most Valuable Player, 7-time Super Bowl champion; in San Mateo, California
• *Deniz Akkaya, Turkish fashion model and actress; in Istanbul
• Died:
• *Makarios III, 63, President of Cyprus since 1960 to 1974 as well as the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Cyprus. Spyros Kyprianou, leader of the Cyprus House of Representatives, became the acting president, with recognition on the Greek Cypriot sector on the southern part of the island, and full president when no candidate announced a plan to oppose him in the September 10 election. Makarios was succeeded as archbishop by Christoforos Aristodimou, bishop of Paphos, who took the name Chrysostomos I.
• *Alfred Lunt, 84, American stage actor and film director known for his partnership with his wife Lynn Fontanne

  August 4, 1977 (Thursday)

• The United States Department of Energy was created as U.S. President Carter signed legislation into law. Former U.S. Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger was sworn into office the next day as the first U.S. Secretary of Energy, and the DOE began operations on October 1.
• An underground mine explosion in Mozambique at Moatize killed 150 miners of coking coal. The blast occurred at the Moazambique Coal Mining Company's Chipanga No. 3 mine. In September, 1976, a previous explosion at the company's Moatize mines had killed 95 employees. Angry at the lack of safe working conditions, a group of employees killed nine foreign mining engineers who had been hired from Portugal and Belgium.
• The eviction of the remaining 55 tenants of San Francisco's International Hotel was carried out by 400 of the city's riot police, seven months after a court order directing the residential hotel's mostly Filipino American population to leave. In January, 3,000 protesters, led by Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple cult, had surrounded the hotel and the San Francisco Sheriff had refused to carry out the order. Jones would later relocate to Guyana, where his followers would meet a tragic end in 1978. The hotel building would finally be demolished in 1981.
• Died:
• *Edgar Adrian, 87, English electrophysiologist and 1932 Nobel Prize winner
• *Ernst Bloch, 92, German philosopher

  August 5, 1977 (Friday)

• New York became the first U.S. state to enact a "Plain English law", requiring all consumer loan agreements to be written in a form that used fewer words, avoided small print, formatted with shorter paragraphs, and that placed bold print for emphasis on the most important requirements. The legal requirements were based on a revised loan agreement form that had been adopted earlier in the year by Citibank, and soon adopted by other lending institutions as well.
• The Youth Employment and Demonstration Projects Act was signed into law by U.S. President Carter, amending the 1973 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act to provide programs for employment and job training of people in their late teens and early 20s.
• Born: David Chang, Korean-American restaurateur, founder of the Momofuku restaurant chain; in Arlington, Virginia

  August 6, 1977 (Saturday)

• In Rhodesia, a bomb went off inside a Woolworths department store in Salisbury, killing 11 civilians and injuring 76 others.
• Born: Marílson Gomes dos Santos, Brazilian long-distance runner and twice winner of the New York City Marathon; in Brasília
• Died: Alexander Bustamante, 93, the first Prime Minister of Jamaica, who served from 1962 to 1967

  August 7, 1977 (Sunday)

• An All Nippon Airways jetliner with 317 people on board was struck by debris from a volcano as it flew at high altitude over the Japanese island of Hokkaido. The Lockheed TriStar airliner was on its way from Sapporo to Nagoya when it was caught in the sudden eruption of the Mount Usu volcano, which sent a column of smoke high into the atmosphere, and two of the cockpit's windows were cracked.
• Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, Prime Minister of Iran for more than 12 years, resigned along with his cabinet. Hoveyda was replaced by Interior Minister Jamshid Amouzegar, would serve as Premier for a little more than a year before leaving Iran permanently. Hoveyda would decline to leave Iran before the Iranian Revolution, and would be executed by a firing squad on April 7, 1979, less than two years after he had last served as the premier.

  August 8, 1977 (Monday)

• Communist China's Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping delivered the speech "Some Comments on Work in Science and Education" to delegates to a national meeting of scientists and government officials in Beijing, announcing an end to the campaign against intellectuals that had been part of the Cultural Revolution since 1966. Deng noted that the development of China's productive forces depended on developing science and technology, and that the development had not been going well. Deng proposed that the Chinese Science and Technology Commission should be re-established, along with college entrance examinations to select the most qualified entrants into the nation's universities. An author would note later that "The decision changed the fate of a generation of students, and provided the basis of human resources for internally-sourced technology progress and science development."
• The Salyut 5 space station, the last to be put into orbit for espionage and surveillance purposes, was de-orbited after 13 months of service, and five months after its last use by a crew. By 1977, reconnaissance satellites had been perfected to the point that the same data could be collected without the use of a space station crew.
• On the recommendation of his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, based on representations by the government of Saudi Arabia, U.S. President Carter announced that if the Palestine Liberation Organization accepted United Nations Security Council Resolution 242— the 1967 peace proposal by which Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Israel would acknowledge "the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries"— then the United States would open a dialogue with the PLO as representatives of the Palestinian people in the Middle East. The PLO's council, however, rejected the offer on August 28.
• Near the town of Sequim, Washington, farmer Manny Manis discovered the tusks of a mastodon and its skeleton while excavating a pond. Carbon-14 dating indicated that the skeleton was 13,800 years old; inspection of the skeleton would also show that part of a spearhead was embedded in the animal's ribs, the earliest evidence of humans in North America.
• Died:
• *Son Ngoc Thanh, Cambodian politician who had served as Prime Minister of the Khmer Republic from March to October, 1972, and of the Kingdom of Cambodia from August to October, 1945; died in a Vietnamese prison, two years after having been arrested following the Fall of Saigon.
• *Eduard Roschmann, 68, Austrian Nazi war criminal known as "The Butcher of Riga" for overseeing the liquidation of Latvia's Jewish Riga Ghetto in 1943, and who fled to South America, died in Paraguay after fleeing West German investigators who had located his home in Argentina.