June 1980

June 1, 1980 (Sunday)

• The first 24-hour news channel, Cable News Network, was launched. The U.S.-based network launched at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time from Atlanta with an original staff of 170 employees, and 130 more in bureaus in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The inaugural broadcast on the channel was an introduction by Ted Turner. Following the introduction and a pre-recorded version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" performed by three military bands, the husband and wife team of Dave Walker and Lois Hart anchored the channel's first newscast at 6:05 with a live report from Fort Wayne, Indiana, about reaction there to the wounding of civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. Among the first segments was a videotaped interview with then-President Jimmy Carter by Daniel Schorr. At the beginning, CNN was available to two million households that had cable television and whose provider carried the channel.
• Rioting broke out at the Cuban refugee center at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas after 200 stationed inside broke through the front gates and threw rocks at soldiers and local law enforcement officers. At least 15 officers were injured, along with four refugees and a civilian. The refugees retreated after troopers fired 20 shots from pistols and shotguns.
• Full-time color television broadcasting began in Venezuela on the Venevisión network and on Radio Caracas Television.
• The suicidal pilot of an air taxi killed himself and nine other people in Barra do Garças, Mato Grosso state. Mauro Milhomem had taken on four government officials as passengers in an Embraer Sertanejo-721 plane for the Taxi Aereo Garapu service and then crashed after an unsuccessful attempt to crash into the hotel where his wife was staying. All four of his passengers were killed, and five employees of an accounting firm died when Milhomem's airplane impacted a two-story building.
• Thierry Vigneron broke the world record for the pole vault, surpassing the mark of Władysław Kozakiewicz with a vault of 5.75 meters at the French Club championships in Colombes. Vigneron tipped the bar as he leapt over it, but it stayed in place.
• The All-Ireland Hurling championship was played, as Castlegar of Galway defeated McQuillan's of Antrim 1–11 to 1–8.
• Died:
• *Arthur C. Nielsen, 83, American market researcher and founder of the A.C. Nielsen survey that tracks viewing preferences and issues the Nielsen ratings measurements for television programming.
• *Rube Marquard, 93, American baseball pitcher and inductee into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

  June 2, 1980 (Monday)

• In South Africa, the oil plants at Sasolburg was attacked by Umkhonto we Sizwe, the African National Congress's military wing. They bombed two strategically important SASOL plants and an oil refinery.
• Bassam Shakaa, the Palestinian Mayor of Nablus, Ibrahim Tawil, the mayor of Al-Bireh, and Karim Khalaf, the mayor of Ramallah were all victims of car bombs placed by the terror group Jewish Underground. Khalaf lost one leg, while Shakaa had to have both legs amputated. Moshe Zer, one of the first Israeli settlers in the northern West Bank, was the person who led the Jewish underground "hit team" that tried to assassinate Shakaa. Zer was convicted for causing serious injury and belonging to a terror group, but was sentenced to only four months in prison.
• Hernán Siles Zuazo, the former President of Bolivia and the front runner in the June 29 presidential election, avoided catastrophe after prior commitments led him to cancel plans for flying with six colleagues on a private plane. Siles Zuazo's running mate, Jaime Paz Zamora, was the only person to survive the crash of a twin-engine Piper aircraft, which lost its right engine shortly after taking off from La Paz.
• The New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper merged with its only competitor, the New Orleans States-Item and published as The Times-Picayune/States-Item. Effective October 1, 1986, the newspaper was known again as the Times Picayune.
• Chinese Jesuit and Roman Catholic bishop Dominic Tang was released from a Chinese prison after more than 21 years. Tang had been arrested on February 5, 1958 by the Communist Chinese government and was charged by the People's Republic as being "the most faithful running-dog of the reactionary Vatican" and held in a labor camp, without ever being brought to trial. Later appointed by Pope John Paul II as the Archbishop of Guangzhou, Tang would live 15 more years after his release before his death in 1995.
• Died: Frank Coe, 73, former U.S. Treasury Department official and the first Director of the International Monetary Fund until he was identified as a member of the U.S. Communist Party. He defected to China in 1958 and died in Beijing.

  June 3, 1980 (Tuesday)

• A computer communications device failure caused warning messages to sporadically flash at North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Air Force command posts around the world that a Soviet nuclear attack was taking place. The malfunction happened again on June 6. The false alert would provide inspiration for the 1983 film WarGames.
• The number of Cuban refugees arriving at Key West, Florida through the Mariel Boatlift reached 100,000— one percent of the population of Cuba— after a boat arrived with 65 additional people. All of the refugees were arrested, along with the skipper of the ship. On the same day, the largest number of Cubans to be unloaded since the boatlift started arrived on the freighter Red Diamond V, which carried 731 people.
• Charles C. Diggs, the first African American elected to Congress from Michigan and the longest-serving black U.S. Representative up until that time, resigned from Congress one day after losing the appeal of his 1978 conviction on 11 counts of mail fraud and filing false payroll forms. On July 24, Diggs began a three-year prison sentence at the minimum security federal prison camp at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, and would be paroled after 14 months.
• In primary elections for the Democratic Party in eight U.S. states, Democratic challenger Teddy Kennedy defeated President Jimmy Carter in California, New Jersey, Rhode Island and South Dakota, but Carter's wins in Ohio, West Virginia, New Mexico and Montana yielded him 334 delegates, putting him past the 1,666 needed to capture the nomination on the first ballot at the Democratic National Convention.
• A series of seven tornadoes touched down in or near the city of Grand Island, Nebraska, destroying 600 structures in and around the city and injuring 200 people. Because of early warnings, only five people died.
• For the first time since it was erected in 1886, the Statue of Liberty sustained damage from a bomb. The explosion happened at 7:25 in the evening, 70 minutes after the last ferry boat of tourists had left. Nobody was injured, but the bomb destroyed several exhibits in a museum in the base of the statue.
• Born: Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Emir of Qatar since 2013; in Doha
• Died: Fred Lieb, 92, American journalist and the first sportswriter to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame

  June 4, 1980 (Wednesday)

• In West Germany, a contingent of 5,000 police and border guards used water cannons and bulldozers to end a protest that had started on May 3 near the village of Gorleben, where a nuclear waste dump was to be constructed near the border with East Germany. About 1,300 protesters made a settlement of 70 huts and tents and declared their site the "Free Republic of Wendland" in order to stop construction teams from the first stage of construction, the drilling of test holes. In the early morning hours, the troops surrounded and then evicted the occupiers.
• John Turnley, Chairman of the Irish Independence Party, and a leading Protestant politician in Northern Ireland, was assassinated in the village of Carnlough as he was walking down the steps of the village meeting hall. A group of three masked men, suspected of being members of a Protestant militant group, fired submachine guns at Turnley and struck him in the head and the chest. Turnley had advocated the reunification of British-controlled and predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland with the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland.
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Film Company and the Columbia Broadcasting System announced the formation of MGM-CBS Home Video, a joint venture to sell VHS and Betamax videotapes, and video discs, of many of MGM's 1,600 films and CBS's television shows for customers to view at home on their own television sets.
• Britain's premiere horse race, the Epsom Derby was won by Henbit, ridden by Willie Carson. The thoroughbred horse had stumbled furlongs from the finish line and finished, injured, of a length ahead of Master Willie.
• Real Madrid, beat their own reserve team, Real Madrid Castilla, to win Spain's national championship tournament, the Copa del Rey. before 65,000 people in Madrid.
• Fortuna Düsseldorf defeated 1. FC Köln, 2–1, to win the DFB-Pokal Cub, West Germany's national championship tournament.
• Fifteen hours before his scheduled execution in the electric chair, convicted murderer Jack Howard Potts changed his mind about an earlier refusal to appeal his death sentence. Potts, who had murdered an auto mechanic in 1973, was on death row at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, Georgia, and was scheduled to be electrocuted the morning at 10:00, after a federal judge concluded that there was no basis for a stay of execution. The electrocution would have been the first use of capital punishment in Georgia in more than 15 years. The U.S. state of Georgia would resume executions in 1983. After Potts made his decision at 7:08 p.m. to let the American Civil Liberties Union appeal the death warrant, he lived for 25 more years before dying of liver cancer on September 2, 2005 at a prison hospital.
• Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin gave his first— and only— interview from exile, after having been removed from power in 1979. Amin was questioned in his new home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, by BBC Reporter Brian Barron.
• Died:
• *Earle R. MacAusland, 90, founder of the first monthly publication devoted to cooking and wine selection, Gourmet magazine.
• *Charles Miller, 41, American saxophonist for the band War, was killed during a robbery.