June 1971

[June 1], 1971 (Tuesday)

• Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, an organization claiming to represent the majority of U.S. Vietnam War veterans who served in Southeast Asia, sponsored an event to speak against war protests.
• The East Pakistan Razakar Ordinance, promulgated by Pakistan Army General Tikka Khan, made the Razakars, a paramilitary organization that has carried out massacres of Bengali civilians in East Pakistan, recognized members of the Pakistan Army.
• Died: Reinhold Niebuhr, 78, American theologian and political commentator

  [June 2], 1971 (Wednesday)

• Sergey Mikhailovich Izvekov was elected by bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church to be the new Patriarch of Moscow, leader of the Church, and took the name Pimen. As Pimen the First, he was enthroned the next day.
• Ajax Amsterdam of the Netherlands defeated Panathinaikos FC of Athens in Greece, 2 to 0, to win soccer football's European Cup Final, held at Wembley Stadium in England before a crowd of 83,179.
• The first issue of the daily newspaper Al Ra'i, owned by the government of Jordan, was published, in Amman.
• Born:
• *Rustam Sharipov, Ukrainian gymnast and 1992 Olympic gold medalist; in Dushanbe, Tajik SSR, Soviet Union
• *Anthony Montgomery, American television actor known for Star Trek: Enterprise; in Indianapolis, Indiana

  [June 3], 1971 (Thursday)

• Jimmy Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, announced from prison that he would not be running for re-election for president of the labor union. Hoffa had been incarcerated at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania for the past four years for pension fraud and attempted jury fixing.
• Lew Alcindor, winner in 1970 of the NBA's Most Valuable Player award, announced that he had changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The former Alcindor says that he had chosen the name in 1968 after converting from Roman Catholicism to Islam, and that "Kareem" means "noble", "Abdul" was "servant of Allah" and "Jabbar" means "powerful".
• In the second of two games of the 1971 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup Final, held in Leeds, Leeds United F.C. played to a 1–1 draw with Juventus FC, after a 2–2 tie at Turin. Leeds was awarded the win based on a tiebreaker, based on "away goals," having had 2 goals in Italy compared to one goal by Juventus in Leeds.
• The comedy No Sex Please, We're British, opened at the Strand Theatre, beginning a 16-year run that would make it the eighth longest-running stage production in London's West End.
• Born: Luigi Di Biagio, Italian footballer and caretaker for the Italian National Team from 2018 to 2020; in Rome
• Died: Gertrud Natzler, 63, Austrian-American artist who popularized ceramics art

  [June 4], 1971 (Friday)

• Kosmos 426 was launched by the Soviet Union as part of the Dnepropetrovsk Sputnik programme, for the purpose of studying charged particles and radiation in the Earth's magnetosphere. It operates for six months, but remains in orbit until 2002.
• United Airlines Flight 796, a Boeing 737-200 with 72 people on board, in a flight from Charleston, West Virginia, to Newark, New Jersey, United States, was hijacked by a drunk passenger, Glen Elmo Riggs, who demanded to be flown to Israel. The plane diverted to Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, where Riggs was overpowered.
• Born:
• *Ekrem İmamoğlu, Turkish politician, Mayor of Istanbul, in Trabzon
• *Joseph Kabila, former President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Rwanda

  [June 5], 1971 (Saturday)

• The Six Flags Over Mid-America theme park was opened in St. Louis, Missouri.
• West Germany's premier soccer football league, the Bundesliga, completed its regular season, with Borussia Mönchengladbach finishing in first place ahead of Bayern Munich, after Munich lost, 0 to 2, to MSV Duisburg and Mönchengladbach defeated Eintracht Frankfurt, 4 to 1.
• Born: Mark Wahlberg, American film actor and producer, and former rap artist who had founded Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch; in Boston.
• Died: André Trocmé, 70, French pacifist pastor and war hero

  [June 6], 1971 (Sunday)

• Soyuz 11, with cosmonauts Vladislav Volkov, Georgi Dobrovolski and Viktor Patsayev, was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 10:55 in the morning local time for rendezvous with the Salyut-1 space station.
• All 44 passengers and five crew members aboard Hughes Airwest Flight 706 were killed when the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 jetliner collided with a U.S. Marine Corps F-4B Phantom jet fighter in the skies over Duarte, California. After the mid-air collision, the DC-9 crashed into a remote canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains near Mount Bliss, approximately three miles north of Duarte. One of the two crew survived the crash of the F-4B in another canyon.
• A special train from Moorgate to Neasden depot, comprising No. L94 and a selection of maintenance rolling stock, was run by London Transport to mark the end of its time operating steam locomotives.
• Died: Sergei Denisov, 61, Soviet fighter pilot and twice awarded holder of the Hero of the Soviet Union medal

  [June 7], 1971 (Monday)

• Philippine government official Manuel Elizalde, the head of the PANAMIN Foundation, reported that he had discovered the Tasaday people, purported to be an isolated tribe, described as living in the "Stone Age", on the island of Mindanao, in the rain forest near Lake Sebu. For the next 15 years, contact with the Tasadays was restricted by the Philippine government, but after the fall of the regime of President Ferdinand Marcos, anthropologists were permitted to study the tribe further, discovering that the supposed cave people were living nearby in modern conditions and that Elizaide's discovery has been a hoax. The Australian Broadcasting Company would later produce a TV documentary called "The Tribe that Never Was" revealing the government had hired what would be described as "rain forest clock punchers".
• The three Soyuz 11 cosmonauts become the first humans in history to step aboard an orbiting space station after their capsule successfully docked with Salyut 1.
• All but three of 30 people on Allegheny Airlines Flight 485 died when the Convair CV-580 crashed on landing at New Haven, Connecticut and the plane burst into flames. The aircraft plowed through three vacant summer cottages and set fire to a fourth one, but the dwellings "were unoccupied because the season had not yet begun and no one on the ground was injured". Although all but one person survived the initial impact, the people killed had been unable to open the emergency exit.
• The government of Pakistan issued a decree removing the two highest denominations of the Pakistani rupee paper currency notes from circulation and setting a deadline for citizens to exchange their 500-rupee and 100-rupee banknotes in return for a receipt promising new notes at some point in the next few weeks. The decision came after Bangladesh separatists in East Pakistan had flooded West Pakistan with counterfeited currency.
• In Silver Spring, Maryland, the federal Alcohol Tobacco Firearms Division raided the home of Kenyon F. Ballew, beginning a cause célèbre in the debates between advocates of gun control and advocates of gun owner rights in the U.S.
• Died:
• *J. I. Rodale, 72, American nutritionist, author and pioneer in organic gardening, died of a heart attack while appearing as a guest for the taping of The Dick Cavett Show that was scheduled to be shown that evening. After telling Cavett in the interview, "I've decided to live to be a hundred. I never felt better in my life," Rodale appeared to fall asleep while Cavett was interviewing his other guest, newspaper columnist Pete Hamill.
• *Leo Burnett, 79, American advertising executive and creator of memorable ad campaign characters including "Tony the Tiger", the "Maytag Repairman" and slogans like "You're in Good Hands" for Allstate Insurance.
• *Camille Gutt, 86, Belgian economist and politician and the first managing director of the International Monetary Fund, from 1946 to 1951
• *Dr. Rolla Dyer, 84, U.S. physician and director of the National Institutes of Health from 1942 to 1950

  [June 8], 1971 (Tuesday)

• In Chile, a terrorist squad assassinated Edmundo Pérez Zujovic, an opponent of President Salvador Allende and the former Vice President of Chile for Allende's predecessor Eduardo Frei.
• Born: Mark Feuerstein, U.S. actor, in New York City
• Died: Onni Hiltunen, 75, Finnish politician who briefly served as the Deputy Prime Minister of Finland

  [June 9], 1971 (Wednesday)

• King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand celebrated his Silver Jubilee.
• Abdul Zahir replaced Mohammad Nur Ahmad Etemadi as Prime Minister of Afghanistan.
• The helicopter museum of the German Army Aviation Corps, opened at Bückeburg.
• Born: Deahnne McIntyre, Australian paralympic gold medalist in women's powerlifting, in Canberra.

  [June 10], 1971 (Thursday)

• The U.S. ended its trade embargo of the People's Republic of China, more than 21 years after China came under control of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. President Richard Nixon authorizes the American export of "nonstrategic items" and lifts all controls on imports from China.
• Almost 120 protesting students were killed by "Los Halcones", a paramilitary group trained by the Mexican government.
• Amtrak had its first fatal accident when 11 people were killed and 163 injured in the derailment of the City of New Orleans train near Tonti, Illinois.
• The U.S. and the Soviet Union exchanged samples of lunar soil after representatives met in Moscow to sign an agreement on expanding co-operation in space research. NASA official Lee R. Scherer provided six grams of material gathered by the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 missions, and Aleksandr V. Vinogratov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences gave Scherer three grams collected by the uncrewed lunar probe Luna 16
• Born: Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, the first U.S. state governor of South Indian ancestry, Governor of Louisiana from 2008 to 2016; in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
• Died: Michael Rennie, 61, English actor best known for the lead role as Klaatu in the science fiction film ''The Day the Earth Stood Still''