July 1980

July 1, 1980 (Tuesday)

• "O Canada" became the national anthem for Canada after the National Anthem Act received royal assent and took effect as part of the Dominion Day celebrations.
• In Ohio, The Columbus Dispatch became the first newspaper to provide an electronic edition for computer users, as part of a service from the electronic CompuServe Information Service. In a precursor to newspaper websites on the Internet, the text of the Dispatch could be read on the home computers of CompuServe's 3,000 subscribers in Columbus. Initially the service was available from 6:00 in the evening to 5:00 in the morning on weekdays, and all day on weekends and holidays, and transmitted at a rate of 300 words per minute. The cost was an additional 8.33 cents per minute. CompuServe unveiled similar deliveries for 10 other metropolitan newspapers, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Sun-Times.
• The Los Angeles Unified School District became the largest school system in the United States to adopt a calendar of year-round school as part of easing congestion in 44 overcrowded schools, starting with ten units, Malaysian fashion designer and TV personality; in Kuala Lumpur
• Died: C. P. Snow, 74, English novelist

  July 2, 1980 (Wednesday)

• The government of Poland announced that the price for consumer goods was being increased, after 14 years of prices being maintained at the same level with government subsidies. Two previous attempts to raise the price of meat— in December 1970 and June 1976— had been rescinded after rioting. Trybuna Ludu, the official newspaper of the ruling Polish United Workers Party, announced that increases were made because "there are now ways speedily to improve the market situation." The price of beef doubled from $1.50 per pound to $3.00 per pound, and raw bacon to $2.30 per pound. The first reported reaction was that 6,000 employees of a tractor factory in the Warsaw suburb of Ursus walked off the job in a one-day strike. Two days later, thousands of Polish workers walked off the job on what would be the first of many labor strikes that would lead to the recognition of the Solidarity Movement in August.
• U.S. President Jimmy Carter issued Presidential Proclamation 4771 and re-instated the requirement that young men register with the Selective Service System. At that time it was required that all males, born on or after January 1, 1960, register with the Selective Service System. Those who were now in this category were male U.S. citizens and male immigrant non-citizens between the ages of 18 and 25; they were required to register within 30 days of their 18th birthday even if they were not actually eligible to join the military.
• The government of Turkish Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel narrowly survived a vote of confidence in the lower house of parliament, with 214 supporting his removal and 227 opposed. Turkish military leaders had planned for a coup d'état to take place on July 11, but called it off in the wake of the vote; the Supreme Military Council met again on August 26 and overthrew Demirel's government on September 12.
• A U.S. federal judge in Miami ordered a halt to deportation of more than 4,000 black Haitians. In a 180-page decision, James L. King wrote that people who fled Haiti were victims of prejudice by the United States government and had been denied due process by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
• The comedy Airplane!, a parody of the popular disaster film genre, was released throughout the U.S. and Canada, and attracted generally favorable reviews. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that "'Airplane!' has jokes— hilarious jokes— to spare. It's also clever and confident and furiously energetic." and Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called in "a thrillingly nutty send-up of the movies, with the redeeming and overdue social value of generous and innocent laughter." However, Kathleen Carroll of the Daily News wrote that after the first hour, "'Airplane' loses its buoyancy. Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker... become so desperate for laughs that the jokes descend to a much cruder level. And 'Airplane' does an abrupt nosedive, turning into a hopelessly flat movie."
• Greenland's first national soccer football team played its first international match. The meeting, at Sauðárkrókur at the first annual Greenland Cup in Iceland, was against another Danish territory, the Faroe Islands. The new team lost its first game, 6–0. The next day, Greenland hosted Iceland in Húsavík, losing 4–1, finishing third in the tournament.
• Harborplace opened as a centerpiece of the revival of downtown Baltimore and the rebuilding of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. The $20 million shopping center had 120 restaurants, specialty markets and shops shielded beneath two glass-enclosed pavilions.

  July 3, 1980 (Thursday)

• The pilot of a crop-dusting airplane used his aircraft to take himself and 19 other people out of the Socialist Republic of Romania to flee the Communist government of Nicolae Ceaușescu. After taking off from Arad, Aurel Popescu flew across the Hungarian People's Republic for two hours before his fuel ran out as he crossed into Austria and glided to a safe landing in a cornfield near the village of Pertlstein.
• Two weeks before the Moscow Olympics, Elena Mukhina, the 1978 world champion in gymnastics was severely injured while training in Minsk. Mukhina fractured her cervical spine while practicing difficult maneuvers and was permanently paralyzed from the neck down.
• Born:
• *Harbhajan Singh, Indian cricket bowler; in Jalandhar, Punjab state
• *Roland Schoeman, South African swimmer, gold medalist in the 2005 and 2007 world championships and member of 2004 Olympic relay team; in Pretoria
• Died: Abdelhamid Sharaf, 41, Prime Minister of Jordan since December; from a heart attack. King Hussein announced the death in a live radio broadcast and said that "His death could not have come at a worse time."

  July 4, 1980 (Friday)

• Evonne Goolagong of Australia defeated Chris Evert Lloyd of the U.S. to win the women's singles title at Wimbledon for the first time in nine years.
• A group of 26 illegal aliens from El Salvador were smuggled across the border from Mexico into the United States, and then robbed by their guides and abandoned in the Yuma Desert within the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Arizona. The next day, one of the survivors reached Arizona State Route 85 near the town of Ajo. Searchers from the Pima County sheriff's office, the U.S. Border Patrol, the U.S. Customs Service, the National Park Service and the Arizona Department of Public Safety then searched the area and found 12 other survivors, along with 13 bodies of the unfortunate travelers who had died from dehydration. Border patrol agents had found three survivors on Friday night, who had insisted that there were no other people in the park, and a search was not started until 24 hours later.

  July 5, 1980 (Saturday)

• Björn Borg of Sweden defeated John McEnroe of the United States to win his fifth consecutive singles title at Wimbledon in what one reporter described as "the tennis match to end all tennis matches". The finals match came down to a tiebreaker in the fifth game of the fifth set after McEnroe edged Borg, 7 games to 6 in a tie breaker to even the best-of-5 match, two sets to two.
• Born: Fabián Ríos, Colombian TV actor, in Curití
• Died: Hans Bayer, known by the pseudonym Thaddäus Troll, 66, German journalist and Swabian German dialect poet, by suicide.

  July 6, 1980 (Sunday)

• The abolition of legal slavery was announced in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania by the ruling Military Committee for National Salvation, led by its chairman, Lt. Col. Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Louly. A communique from the capital, Nouakchott, announced that the committee, after consultation with Islamic legal scholars "of the nation, on the question of slavery, which is considered by the regime to be anachronistic." The government said further that "The overwhelming majority of the oulemas recognized the justification of slavery under Islamic law", but that the scholars "had reservations as to its origins in Mauritania and the way the system is operated in our country." The order had no immediate effect on the practice of wealthy, white and light-skinned Arab-Berber exercising ownership over impoverished black Haratin residents.
• The Observer, London's Sunday newspaper, broke the news that computer scientists had found confirmation that William Shakespeare was the likely author of The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore. The Edinburgh University team, led by Thomas Merriam, had used a stylistic analysis of the words of the play in comparison to Shakespeare's other works. "If the attribution is accepted, The Observer noted, "it will be the first new play to be added to the Shakespeare canon since Pericles was included in the third folio edition of 1664."
• Seventy-one people, most of them Cuban tourists who were passengers on a double-decker excursion boat on the Canimar River, were killed when the XX Aniversario was hijacked by rebels, and then shelled and sunk by the Cuban Armed Forces.
• Born:
• *Pau Gasol, Spanish pro basketball player, 2002 NBA Rookie of the Year, and six-time All-Star; in Barcelona
• *Sami Khan, Pakistani film and TV actor; in Lahore
• Died: Gail Patrick, 69, American actress and television producer who served as executive producer of the Perry Mason series

  July 7, 1980 (Monday)

• The massacre of 81 civilians occurred in Lebanon in the coastal town of Safra, after fighting between two rival Christian groups in the Lebanese Civil War. Safra, a stronghold of former Lebanese president Camille Chamoun's National Liberal Party was taken over by Bashir Gemayel's Phalangist militia. According to witnesses, the victims had spent the day on the beach while fighting went on in Safra, and were arrested and shot to death by Phalangist soldiers.
• The parliament of Syria passed a law making membership in the Muslim Brotherhood punishable by death. President Hafez al-Assad announced the next day that members of the Muslim Brotherhood would be spared the death penalty if they surrendered before being confronted by law enforcement. The legislation provided legal authority for "shoot on sight" raids on suspected Brotherhood hideouts.
• Military leaders in Iraq were informed of a decision, made the day before by the ruling Ba'ath Party under the leadership of President Saddam Hussein, to prepare to launch a war against Iran. An invasion would take place in September.
• Iran's chief prosecutor, the Ayatollah Ali Ghoddusi, issued an order requiring all female government employees to wear the full-length chador and the traditional black head veil in accordance with the Ayatollah Khomeini's order for women to comply with the Islamic dress code or to be fired. In the first year of the Iranian Revolution, western-style clothing had been tolerated by the new regime.
• The final performance by Led Zeppelin of "Stairway to Heaven" was made at the closing concert of the band's Tour Over Europe 1980, at the Eissporthalle near Berlin in the suburb of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. After the death of drummer John Bonham in September, the heavy metal group broke up on December 4. The band would not do another full-length concert for more than 27 years until the reunion of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones December 10, 2007, in London.
• Born: Michelle Kwan, American figure-skater and five time World Championship ladies singles gold medalist; in Torrance, California
• Died:
• *Isadore "Dore" Schary, 74, Oscar-winning American screenwriter, playwright and later President of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
• *Cleveland Denny, 24, Guyanese boxer and former Canadian lightweight champion, died in Montreal 17 days after being knocked out in a June 20 bout with Gaetan Hart. Denny never regained consciousness after the match at Olympic Stadium.
• *Dan White, 72, American character actor who appeared in hundreds of westerns on film and on television