February 1974

[February 1], 1974 (Friday)

• A fire killed 177 people and injured 293 others in the 23-story Joelma Building at São Paulo in Brazil. Another 11 later died of their injuries. The blaze began on the 12th floor of the building, apparently from a short-circuit in a faulty air conditioner.
• Acting without authority from the Brazilian government, British detectives captured master thief Ronald Biggs in Rio de Janeiro at the Hotel Trocadero on the Copacabana Beach. Biggs, who had been sentenced to 30 years imprisonment for the "great train robbery" of 1963, had been living in Brazil under the alias Michael Haynes and working as a carpenter after escaping from prison in 1965.
• On the last day of the 1974 British Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, New Zealand, Tanzanian athlete Filbert Bayi set a new world record of 3 minutes, 32.2 seconds in the 1500 metres race.
• Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, was declared a Federal Territory.
• In the U.S., Lynda Ann Healy, a 21-year-old student at the University of Washington in Seattle, disappeared from her basement apartment and was subsequently killed, becoming the earliest of at least 30 women murdered by serial killer Ted Bundy.
• Born: Roberto Heras, Spanish road cyclist and 4-time winner of the Vuelta a España; in Béjar
• Died:
• *Jackie Kannon, 47, Canadian stand-up comedian, entrepreneur and publisher, died of a heart attack.
• *Alice Eversman, 88, American opera singer and music critic

  [February 2], 1974 (Saturday)

• After the 1972 declaration of martial law by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and the seizure of the private ABS-CBN Corporation network, the Government Television channel was launched in Manila on VHF channel 4. It would become Maharlika Broadcasting System in 1980, and, after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship, be rebranded as People's Television Network.
• The 10-day-long 1974 British Commonwealth Games concluded in Christchurch, New Zealand.
• Born:
• * Woo Mi-hwa, award-winning South Korean stage, television and film actress; in Jecheon, North Chungcheong Province
• * Osgood "Oz" Perkins, American actor, screenwriter and director, son of actors Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson; in New York City
• * Qin Kanying, Chinese chess grandmaster, five-time Chinese national champion; in Shanghai
• * Fariha Pervez, Pakistani pop music singer; in Lahore
• Died:
• * Jean Absil, 80, Belgian composer
• * Marieluise Fleisser, 72, German writer and playwright
• * Stephen Hymer, 39, Canadian economist, was killed in a car accident in Shandaken, New York.
• * Imre Lakatos, 51, Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, died of a heart attack.
• * Sir Frank Messervy,, 80, British Indian Army general who was the first commander-in-chief of the Pakistan Army after the Dominion of Pakistan's independence in 1947.
• * Mauro Pelliccioli, 87, Italian art restorer who worked on the conservation-restoration of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper
• * Lydia Sokolova, 77, English ballerina

  [February 3], 1974 (Sunday)

• Voting took place in Costa Rica for the Central American nation's President and for the 57 seats of the Asamblea Legislativa. After receiving 43.4% of the vote, the threshold for avoiding a runoff election between the top two finishers, Daniel Oduber Quirós was elected to a four-year term to start on May 8, and his National Liberation Party won 27 seats in the Asamblea.
• Born:
• * Shahab Hosseini, Iranian actor and film director; in Tehran
• * Ayanna Pressley, U.S. representative for Massachusetts and one of the eight persons on the far left Democrat group "The Squad"; in Chicago
• * Miriam Yeung, Hong Kong actress and singer; in Sai Ying Pun, British Hong Kong

  [February 4], 1974 (Monday)

• In one of the most famous kidnappings in U.S. history, three members of the left-wing terrorist Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped 19-year-old Patty Hearst, a granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, from her apartment in Berkeley, California. At 9:30 p.m., two African-American men and a white woman invaded the Berkeley, California apartment of Hearst, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of California. Hearst's fiancé Steven Weed and a neighbor were beaten, and gunshots were fired at nearby witnesses as the group loaded Hearst into the trunk of a car in the apartment's parking garage.
• In the United Kingdom, the bombing of a bus killed nine soldiers and three civilians and injured 38 others. The bus was traveling on the M62 motorway in England when the bomb, hidden in the luggage compartment, exploded near Batley, West Yorkshire, at 12:30 in the morning. The bombing was carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army, but the identity of the specific perpetrator or perpetrators remains unknown. Judith Ward was wrongfully convicted of the bombing in November 1974; her conviction was overturned in 1992.
• War resumed between Syria and Israel, with a group of 500 Cuban soldiers joining a Syrian tank division at Mount Hermon in Syria, and then proceeding to battle in the Golan Heights, formerly Syrian territory occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War. The fighting lasted until a ceasefire was agreed upon on May 31.
• Armed intruders entered the Ya Sin Mosque in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City, leading to a shootout in which two of the intruders, a mosque member and the mosque's leader, Minister Bilal Abdullah Rahman, were killed.
• Born: Urmila Matondkar, Filmafare Award winning Indian actress; in Bombay, Maharashtra
• Died: Satyendra Nath Bose, 80, Indian mathematician and theoretical physicist known for the Bose–Einstein condensate

  [February 5], 1974 (Tuesday)

• The U.S. space probe Mariner 10, launched on November 3, made the first successful broadcast to Earth of images of the planet Venus, starting with the transmission of 4,165 photographs. At 17:01 UTC, it made its closest approach, coming within of Venus, then proceeded toward the planet Mercury.
• Cardinal József Mindszenty of Hungary, long a symbol of resistance against totalitarian governments by the Roman Catholic Church, was dismissed by Pope Paul VI from his positions as Archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary. Mindszenty had been imprisoned for eight years in Hungary and then spent another 15 years inside the U.S. diplomatic legation in Budapest, before being allowed to leave the country in 1971. The dismissal was linked to the Vatican's campaign to establish better relations with the Communist nations in Eastern Europe and Mindszenty's refusal to resign, a condition demanded by the Hungarian Communist Party in negotiations with the Vatican.
• Dr. Raymond Damadian received U.S. Patent No. 3,789,832 for his invention of a proposed "Apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue" using nuclear magnetic resonance, after applying on March 13, 1972. The patent described a means of scanning, but not of generating images from a scan, the basis for the magnetic resonance imaging scanner.
• Mats Wermelin of Sweden set a record by scoring 272 points for his team in a 272 to 0 win in a regional boys tournament in Stockholm. The story was reported the next day in the Stockholm tabloid Aftonbladet. Wermelin would later play professional basketball for the Stockholm Capitals.
• A two-year-old child who had been kidnapped at knife point more than a year earlier was rescued by the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department in California. Tommy Lauver, who had been taken from his mother on January 20, 1973, from a supermarket parking lot in Modesto, was found at the home of Robert Coffey and Marjorie Coffey in West Modesto, California, who were arrested after a tip from their neighbor, who had read a story in a local newspaper, The Modesto Bee.
• Harold Potts, the Fire Chief for Gladewater, Texas, was killed by a gunman, and two other firemen were wounded, after responding to a call to extinguish a blaze at a tavern.
• Died: Mestre Bimba, 74, master of the Brazilian martial art form capoeira who performed as "Mestre Bimba".

  [February 6], 1974 (Wednesday)

• A Palestinian guerrilla group seized the Japanese Embassy in Kuwait and took Ambassador Ryoko Ishikawa and several members of his staff hostage, demanding that the four guerrillas trapped aboard the ferryboat Laju in Singapore harbor be flown to Kuwait aboard a Japanese airliner. The Japanese government acceded to the guerrillas' demands, and the hostages were released unharmed after 48 hours.
• The U.S. House of Representatives voted almost unanimously, 410 to 4, to grant the bipartisan House Judiciary Committee the power to subpoena any witness in its inquiry on whether to impeach U.S. President Richard Nixon. A Republican amendment that would have set a deadline of April 30 for any impeachment inquiry failed by a vote of 70 to 342.
• The Roman Catholic Church issued proposed revisions in its ritual for the Sacrament of Penance or confession of sins, with a 121-page document titled Ordo Paenitentiae.
• The science fantasy film Zardoz, directed by John Boorman and starring Sean Connery, opened in Los Angeles and New York City.
• Born: Javier Payeras, Guatemalan poet, novelist and essayist; in Guatemala City
• Died: Dana Latham, 75, former U.S. Commissioner of Internal Revenue.

  [February 7], 1974 (Thursday)

• At one minute after midnight, the Caribbean island of Grenada became independent of the United Kingdom after 210 years as a British colony. Eric Gairy became the nation's first prime minister, while former colonial governor Leo de Gale became the nation's first Governor-General.
• After being unable to resolve his nation's strike of coal miners, Prime Minister Edward Heath of the United Kingdom said in a televised speech that he would ask for the Crown to dissolve Parliament and to call for a new election for the House of Commons to take place on February 28.
• An agreement between the U.S. and Panama to negotiate a revision of the 1903 Panama Canal Treaty was signed in Panama City by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Panamanian Foreign Minister Juan Antonio Tack.
• Moro rebels in the Philippines massacred 25 civilians in a raid on the town of Pikit on the island of Mindanao.
• Produced by Mel Brooks, the popular satire of movie westerns, Blazing Saddles, had its world premiere in Burbank, California, at the Pickwick Drive-in Theater for 250 invited guests who rode in on horseback rather than in cars, before being released to other U.S. theaters during the winter and spring.
• Born:
• * Steve Nash, Canadian NBA basketball player, NBA Most Valuable Player in 2005 and 2006; in Johannesburg, South Africa
• * J Dilla, American record producer and rapper; in Detroit
• * Nujabes, Japanese record producer and DJ; in Nishi-Azabu, Minato, Tokyo
• Died:
• *Donald C. McGraw, 76, American publisher who served as president of McGraw-Hill from 1953 to 1966
• *Hiroshi Nakamura, 83, Japanese biochemist, cartographer and nutritionist