August 1979

August 1, 1979 (Wednesday)

• Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo was sworn into office as the first female Prime Minister of Portugal, after forming a cabinet of ministers at the request of President António Ramalho Eanes.
• The government of Romania's President Nicolae Ceausescu issued an order requiring all foreign visitors to purchase gasoline using only Western European or North American currency, something unavailable to most vacationers who came to or passed through Romania to stay at beach resorts on the Black Sea. Until then, Eastern Europeans were able to use their own currencies in Romania, which would then exchange the monies with the issuing nations. In response, the neighboring Eastern European nations of Hungary and Czechoslovakia immediately barred travel to Romania. Ceaucescu reversed the order two days later.
• Italian Minister of the Treasury Filippo Maria Pandolfi, designated to become Prime Minister of Italy by President Sandro Pertini if Pandolfi could form a coalition government, announced his failure to put together a cabinet. The Italian Socialist Party had withdrawn its earlier agreement to help Pandolfi's Christian Democracy party.
• The South American nation of Bolivia swore in members of an elected Congress for the first time in more than a decade, administering the oath of office to 27 senators and 117 deputies who had won seats in the July 1 election. The new Bolivian Congress was tasked with selecting a civilian president as none of the 8 presidential candidates on July 1 had received a majority of the vote. At the time, Víctor Paz Estenssoro had the support of 64 of the 144 members of the Congress, nine short of the required 73 needed to be elected president.
• Born: Jason Momoa, American film and TV actor known for his portrayal of Aquaman; in Honolulu

  August 2, 1979 (Thursday)

• Major League Baseball star Thurman Munson was killed during a day off from playing for the New York Yankees, while practicing takeoffs and landings with his private jet, a Cessna Citation I. At 3:02 p.m. local time, Munson, his business partner, Jerry Anderson, and flight instructor Dave Hall were on approach for his fourth landing at the Akron-Canton Regional Airport in Ohio, had glided in too low as he approached a runway, causing his plane to strike the top of a tree and then hit a tree stump. Hall and Anderson survived the impact and a subsequent fire, while Munson broke his neck and died from smoke inhalation when the plane caught on fire. In Munson's last game, a 9 to 1 win over the Chicago White Sox the night before, he had one run after reaching first base in his lone at bat, then struck out and slightly injured his knee at his next at bat.
• The supertanker SS Atlantic Empress, insured for $85 million, sank in the Caribbean Sea along with its cargo of 275,000 tons of crude oil. The ship had been burning since July 19, when it collided with another tanker, the Aegean Captain, east of the island of Tobago.
• The Baltimore Orioles baseball team, controlled by Jerold Hoffberger since 1965, was purchased from Hoffberger by lawyer Edward Bennett Williams for $12,000,000.
• Died: Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, 84, Peruvian politician and President of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the South American republic's constitution weeks earlier.

  August 3, 1979 (Friday)

• Dictator Francisco Macías Nguema of Equatorial Guinea was overthrown in a bloody coup d'état led by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang who would begin his 42nd year in office in 2020. Macías fled the capital with forces loyal to him, but was abandoned within two weeks and captured on August 18 near his home village of Mongomo. On September 29, he and six other defendants were convicted of genocide, embezzlement and treason, and were executed by a firing squad.
• The first voting for candidates in a nationwide election in Iran since the Islamic Revolution began to choose a 73-member assembly to draft a constitution for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Candidates of the ruling Islamic Republican Party captured 55 of the 73 seats, while a number of political groups called for a boycott of the voting on the grounds that the election was "neither free nor fair".
• Born: Evangeline Lilly, Canadian TV and film actor, Screen Actors Guild award-winner for her role in the TV series Lost; in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta
• Died:
• *Bertil Ohlin, 80, Swedish economist and recipient of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Economics
• *Alfredo Ottaviani, 88, Italian Roman Catholic cardinal and Pro-Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

  August 4, 1979 (Saturday)

• All 49 people on an Indian Airlines flight were killed when the turboprop airplane crashed while approaching a landing in Mumbai. The HS 748 had taken off from Pune and was flying in bad weather within the Maharashtra state when it impacted the Kiroli Hills and burst into flame.
• In the U.S. territory of Guam, a proposed new constitution was overwhelmingly rejected by voters, with almost 82% of the voters opposed to it.
• The first-ever game of the six-team American Football Bundesliga, the first German league of American football, was played between the Frankfurter Löwen and the Düsseldorf Panther. Playing in front of 4,000 spectators in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt won, 38 to 0. The six original teams, each of whom was scheduled to play each other twice, were the Löwen, the Panther, the Ansbach Grizzlies, the Berliner Bären, the Bremerhaven Seahawks and the Munich Cowboys.

  August 5, 1979 (Sunday)

• The Polisario Front signed a peace treaty with Mauritania. Mauritania withdrew from the Western Sahara territory it had occupied, and ceded it to the independence activists and residents who had been fighting for an independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. The victory was short-lived, however, when Morocco continued to fight the Polisario guerrillas and annexed the part of the Western Sahara vacated by Mauritania.
• An uprising by insurgents and rebels in Afghanistan against the Communist government there, began at the Bala Hissar fortress in Kabul. The rebellion and the occupation of the fortress were suppressed the same day by the Afghan military, which used aerial bombing and artillery shells to kill many of the Afghanistan Liberation Organization fighters.
• The unsuccessful Broadway musical But Never Jam Today, based on the books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass children's novels by Lewis Carroll, closed five days after its first performance. The show itself was performed only eight times.
• Born:
• *Anne Polinario, Cuban-born Canadian swimmer and three-time Paralympic Games gold medalist; in Havana
• *David Healy, Northern Ireland soccer football striker and national team member; in Killyleagh, County Down
• Died:
• *Homero Hidrobo, 39, Ecuadorian musician and classical guitarist, from liver failure.
• *Christine Böhm, 25, Austrian actress, was killed in an accident while hiking near Lake Maggiore in Italy.

  August 6, 1979 (Monday)

• American economist Paul Volcker was sworn into office as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and would guide U.S. economic planning for more than eight years.
• Bolivia's Congress, faced with selecting a civilian president after no candidate in the July 1 popular election had received a majority of the vote, voted for Walter Guevara Arze as the nation's interim president for a one-year term until new general elections could be held.
• Died: Feodor Lynen, 68, German biochemist and recipient of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

  August 7, 1979 (Tuesday)

• Author and illustrator Kit Williams buried a piece of gold jewelry, in the shape of a hare, at a public park somewhere in Great Britain, then published clues to its location in a best-selling children's book, Masquerade. Hundreds of thousands of copies of Masquerade were sold as readers went on a treasure hunt that required them to describe precisely where they believed the treasure to be located. The location was later revealed to be Ampthill Park in Ampthill, Bedfordshire in England.
• At least 22 people in Spain, including four children, were killed by a fire that swept through a set of vacation cottages at a forest near the town of Lloret de Mar in Catalonia.
• A previously undocumented species of bat, Taphozous hilli was discovered in the state of Western Australia by two collectors, A. Bayness and C. G. Dawe, and confirmed in 1980 as a new species by Darrell Kitchener, who named the bat in honor of mammologist John Edwards Hill of the British Museum.
• The Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its highest-ranking Shia Muslim cleric, declared that the last Friday of the Muslim calendar month of Ramadan would be celebrated as the International Day of Quds to support the Palestinians of the city of Jerusalem, historically referred to as Al-Quds among Arabs. The unofficial holiday was instituted as a response to Israel's celebration of Jerusalem Day, observed on the 28th day of the Jewish calendar month of Iyar. The first Quds Day was observed on Friday, the 24th day of Ramadan 1399 A.H.. The most recent Israeli Jerusalem Day had been observed on Friday, May 25, 1979.
• Roman Catholic Archbishop Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo of the west African nation of Guinea was released from prison after being incarcerated at Camp Boiro for more than eight years. The commutation of Tchidimbo's life sentence was the result of negotiations between the Vatican and the government of Guinean President Sekou Toure. Archbishop Tchidimbo resigned from his position as Archbishop of Conakry on August 13 after having flown to Rome.
• The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting 1979 closed in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, at the end of seven days of discussions between the leaders of 39 nations that were members of the British Commonwealth. The leaders issued the Lusaka Declaration of the Commonwealth on Racism and Racial Prejudice
• Born:
• *Benjamin Wallfisch, British composer of film scores; in London
• *Abigail Spanberger, former U.S. CIA agent and current U.S. Representative ; in Red Bank, New Jersey