February 1971

February 1, 1971 (Monday)

• The Soviet Union opened the Institute for Management of the National Economy, the first school in a Communist nation for business administration and for management science, long rejected as a feature of Western capitalism. The institute was inaugurated within the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics and had been lobbied for by Dzhermen Gvishiani, the Deputy Chairman of the State Committee for Science and Technology.
• Uganda's President Idi Amin ordered the dismissal of all municipal and village officials in the central African nation, firing every mayor and district councilmen because they had been appointed under the regime of the previous president, Milton Obote. People identified with Obote's political party, the Uganda People's Congress, were attacked throughout the nation.
• The Hague Conference on Private International Law passed its convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters.
• British commercial diver Michael Lally died of hypothermia and drowning due to a decompression problem while conducting a surface-orientated dive in the North Sea from the semi-submersible drill rig Ocean Viking. Another British diver, Michael Brushneen, would die exactly one month later during a dive from the same rig.
• Died:
• *Raoul Hausmann, 84, Austrian artist and writer
• *Harry Roy, 71, English bandleader
• *Amet-khan Sultan, 50, Crimean Tatar fighting ace for the Soviet Air Force, killed in the crash of a Tupolev Tu-16 he was piloting.

  February 2, 1971 (Tuesday)

• The Ramsar Convention, an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of wetlands, was signed by representatives of seven nations in Ramsar, Mazandaran, Iran. By its terms, the treaty went into effect on December 21, 1975. February 2 is now regularly observed by environmentalists as World Wetlands Day. The signing came on the same day that a meeting in the Iranian capital of Tehran, between the 10-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and representatives of 22 oil companies to negotiate a price rise in oil.
• Eight days after leading a coup d'état, General Idi Amin Dada ordered the dissolution of the Ugandan Parliament and declared himself President of Uganda, assuming all executive and legislative authority and pledging to begin rule by decree.

  February 3, 1971 (Wednesday)

• In Tehran, the representatives of the ten OPEC member states adopted the "XXII Conference Resolution", in which each nation pledged that by February 15, they would have in place the necessary regulatory or legislative measures necessary to implement an embargo on shipments of crude oil to any of the 22 oil companies that failed to accept payment of a 55% tax, with the cutoff of oil to take place on February 21. The companies signed the agreement with the OPEC nations on February 14.
• Eight people were killed by the explosion of a gas pipeline in Lambertville, New Jersey at about 8:00 in the morning, two hours after they had escaped injury in an earlier explosion in the same area.
• An explosion at the Thiokol chemical plant near Woodbine, Georgia, killed 29 employees and seriously injured 50 others. The explosion, believed to have been due to a fire caused by tripflares being manufactured by Thiokol for use in the ongoing Vietnam War, occurred at 10:53 in the morning.
• Died: Jay C. Flippen, 71, US actor

  February 4, 1971 (Thursday)

• The British luxury car and jet engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce declared bankruptcy, after sustaining financial losses in developing the engine for the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar jumbo jet under a misjudged price contract agreement. The British government would subsequently nationalise the Rolls engine operations as a matter of national security and British pride.
• Died: Brock Chisholm, 74, Canadian World War I veteran, physician and first Director-General of the World Health Organization

  February 5, 1971 (Friday)

• At 0918 UTC, the Apollo 14 mission commanded by Alan Shepard, achieved the third crewed lunar landing. The lunar module Antares on the Apollo 14 mission, landed on the Moon near the Fra Mauro crater, the site that Apollo 13 had intended to explore. Stuart Roosa remained in orbit on the command module Kitty Hawk. At 9:49 a.m. Eastern, Shepard set foot on the Moon, and then he and Edgar Mitchell began deploying scientific equipment. They were the first Apollo crew to use the Modular Equipment Transporter, a two-wheeled cart used to carry equipment. While on the Moon, Shepard surprised television viewers around the world by driving two golf balls, in the lesser lunar gravity, with a makeshift golf club.
• The beginning of the week of the Hajj, the required pilgrimage to Mecca as one of the Five Pillars of Islam, attracted a record number of believers at its start on the 9th day of Dhu al-Hijjah, with more than one million Saudis and foreign Muslims starting from Mount Ararat to reach Mecca. The growth of the number of pilgrims followed improvements in the Saudi transportation infrastructure, including an expansion of the Jeddah airport that could accommodate 120 aircraft landings and 10,000 visitors per day.
• The first performance of the musical Grease took place at the Kingston Mines Theater in Chicago, with music and lyrics by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. The show would move to New York City and become a long-running hit on Broadway and a popular film.
• The 28th Golden Globe Awards ceremony was held by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California. Love Story and M*A*S*H won the awards for motion pictures for best drama and best musical or comedy. George C. Scott and Ali MacGraw won the Best Actor and Best Actress Awards for a Motion Picture Drama, respectively, and Albert Finney and Carrie Snodgress won the top acting awards for Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. Medical Center and The Carol Burnett Show won the Golden Globes for Best TV Drama and Best TV Comedy.
• Born: Peter Cipollone, American Olympic oarsman and coxswain of the U.S. gold medal-winning team in 2004; in Marietta, Ohio
• Died: Mátyás Rákosi, 78, General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party from 1948 to 1956 until his forced removal under pressure from the Soviet Union prior to the Hungarian Revolution.

  February 6, 1971 (Saturday)

• An earthquake in Italy's Lazio region killed 31 people in the city of Tuscania.
• Gunner Robert Curtis became the first British Army soldier to die in the Northern Ireland Conflict between the majority Protestant and minority Catholic residents of Northern Ireland, and between supporters and opponents of the area remaining within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland rather than as a part of the Republic of Ireland.
• A fire broke out at Mike's Grocery in Wilmington, North Carolina, the product of a firebomb, followed by riots, and leading to the wrongful conviction of the "Wilmington Ten". In 1972, the men would be convicted of arson and conspiracy after prosecutorial misconduct, and receive sentences ranging from 15 to 34 years in prison. The sentences would be reduced in 1978 by the state Governor, and in 1980, the convictions would be overturned by a federal court which concluded that prosecutors had suppressed evidence. Finally, on December 31, 2012, almost 42 years after the initial crime, the Wilmington Ten would be pardoned by North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue.
• At the first open gathering of gay women and men in Australia, held at Balmain, New South Wales, John Ware and Christabel Poll formally organized Campaign Against Moral Persecution, the first LGBT rights advocacy in Australia.
• Apollo 14's lunar module successfully lifted off from the Moon's surface at 1:49 p.m. Eastern time and was reunited with the command module piloted by Stuart Roosa for the return voyage to Earth.

  February 7, 1971 (Sunday)

• In a referendum in Switzerland, male voters approved giving Swiss women the right to vote in national elections and the right to hold federal office, by a margin of 65.7% to 34.3%. In local elections, voting was still prohibited in eight the 22 cantons opposed could still prohibit women from voting in national elections.
• Wladyslaw Gomulka was expelled from the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party, which criticized the former General Secretary of the Polish United Workers Party for "serious mistakes in recent years". Gomulka had already been removed as the leader of the Party and from the Politburo on December 20.

  February 8, 1971 (Monday)

• NASDAQ, a new stock exchange of the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, began operations in New York, initially as the reporter of the NASDAQ Composite Index which consisted of "securities less widely held or those that, for other reasons, do not appear on the daily Over-the Counter list". The first list was of price quotations of companies publicly listed ranging from the wholesale pharmaceutical seller AmerisourceBergen Corporation to the meatpacking company Zemco Industries, now a division of Tyson Foods.
• Operation Lam Son 719, an attack by the First Infantry Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam from South Vietnam into the Kingdom of Laos, was launched in the Vietnam War against North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces operating across the border. The 3,000 ARVN troops crossed the border in armored columns and by American-piloted helicopter troopships and reached a trail complex south of Xépôn, the key enemy supply center for the Communists. The South Vietnamese designation replaced the American code name of "Operation Dewey Canyon II", and was the 719th ARVN operation to honor the Lam Son uprising by the Vietnamese people in 1418 against the Chinese Empire.
• South Africa's white minority government eased its apartheid regulations to a degree by allowing mixed-race Africans to work in construction jobs formerly limited to whites only. Black South Africans were still barred from working on "white" projects in Pretoria, and the change in policy, prompted by a shortage of skilled workers, was limited to bricklayers and plasterers. Gert Beetge, the general secretary of the all-white Union of Building Workers, criticized the decision of the Labor Ministry and said that it marked "the death knell to white building workers".
• The Siahkal incident marked the beginning of guerrilla attacks against the Iranian monarchy, with the killing of three police in the town of Siahkal in order to release two prisoners. The 11 surviving guerrillas, and both prisoners, were executed.
• The IBM company retired its first high-selling computer model, the IBM 1401, that had been introduced in 1959 and sold 12,000 units. The company also halted further sales of its less expensive version of the 1401, the IBM 1440.
• Born: Andrus Veerpalu, Estonian cross-country skier, Olympic gold medalist in 2002 and 2006; in Pärnu, Estonian SSR, Soviet Union