March 1978

March 1, 1978 (Wednesday)

• Charlie Chaplin's remains were stolen from Corsier-sur-Vevey in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland.
• All 18 people aboard a Nigeria Airways airliner were killed when the Fokker F28 Fellowship jet from Sokoto was landing at Kano at the same time that a Nigerian Air Force MiG-21 training aircraft was taking off. The two collided, killing the occupants of both airplanes.
• Continental Airlines Flight 603, an American DC-10 airliner, crashed while attempting to take off from Los Angeles International Airport, killing two people and injuring 84 others, including 11 firefighters. All but two of the 183 people on board were able to escape the aircraft. The airplane was accelerating on the runway when it blew two tires and then tilted on to one wing, whose fuel tanks were ruptured. The two who died disregarded warnings and went out of the left side emergency exit and into a fire.
• Born:
• *Liya Kebede, Ethiopian-born supermodel and clothing designer, as well as the World Health Organization's Ambassador for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health; in Addis Ababa
• *Jensen Ackles, American TV actor known for Supernatural; in Dallas
• Died: Paul Scott, British novelist known for his tetralogy The Raj Quartet; in London

  March 2, 1978 (Thursday)

• Soyuz 28 was launched from the Soviet Union to link up with the orbiting space station to dock with rendezvous with Salyut 6. The flight was the first to carry a space traveler from a nation other than the U.S. or the Soviet Union. As the first cosmonaut trained through the Interkosmos program, Czechoslovakian Vladimír Remek was launched along with Aleksei Gubarev.
• By a vote of 3 to 2, the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals ruled that a life form could be created "by what is sometimes referred to as 'genetic engineering'." The life form in question was a bacterium created by the General Electric company to consume petroleum, and to be used in cleaning up oil spills.
• After not having recorded a deadly tiger attack since 1962, the nation of India had the first in a series of 90 deaths over a four-year period. At the Dudhwa National Park in the state of Uttar Pradesh, an employee of the Forest Corporation of Satiana, identified in the press as Akbar, was killed while he was taking a bathroom break. Soon, two other tigers were responsible for attacks at the towns of Goia and Sarada.
• Born:
• *Tomáš Kaberle, Czech ice hockey player in the National Hockey League and the Czech Extraliga, as well as for the national team; in Rakovník, Czechoslovakia
• *Sebastian Janikowski, Polish-born American NFL football kicker; in Wałbrzych
• Died:
• *Mario Pei, 77, Italian-born American linguist and author of multiple bestselling books about etymology and linguistics, including The Story of English, The Story of Language and How To Learn Languages And What Languages To Learn
• *Ruth Dwyer, 81, American silent film actress

  March 3, 1978 (Friday)

• Ethiopia admitted that its troops were being assisted by soldiers from Cuba in the war against Somalia's army in the Ogaden.
• Rhodesia attacked Zambia.

• Rhodesia's white prime minister, Ian Smith, signed an agreement with three moderate black leaders for a transitional government that would lead the southern African nation to majority black rule as Zimbabwe by the end of the year.
• In Venezuela, all 47 people aboard an LAV airliner were killed when the HS 748 turboprop plunged into the Caribbean Sea shortly after takeoff from Caracas on a flight to Cumaná.
• The New York Post published an article about David Rorvik's book In His Image: The Cloning of Man, about a supposed cloning of a human being. Rorvik claimed that in 1975, scientists had created a human baby from a single cell and that the child, born in December 1976, "was paid for by a millionaire who wanted an exact duplicate of himself." The book came to light when it was advertised in Publishers Weekly by the J. B. Lippincott company. At the time of the announcement, cloning of animals had been limited to frogs and sea urchins, but an attempt to clone a mammal had been unsuccessful. Dr. Bernard Talbot of the National Institutes of Health told reporters, "All scientific data we have would make it seem very, very unlikely. It is very, very probable that it is a hoax."
• Surgeons in Columbus, Ohio successfully separated a pair of conjoined twins who had been joined at the abdomen. The two boys shared a liver, a thoracic diaphragm and a pericardium, but each had his own heart, lungs, kidneys and circulatory system.
• Born:
• *Tanishaa Mukerji, Indian film actress known for Code Name Abdul; in Bombay
• *Aarti Mann, American TV actress known for playing the recurring role of "Priya Koothrappali" in ''The Big Bang Theory''

  March 4, 1978 (Saturday)

• Soviet cosmonauts Yuri Romanenko and Georgy Grechko broke the old record for longest time in outer space as they marked their 85th day in orbit on the Salyut 6 space station. The previous record, set in 1974 by the crew of Skylab 3 had been 84 days, one hour and 16 minutes, set by U.S. astronauts Gerald P. Carr, Edward G. Gibson and William R. Pogue. Romanenko had been in space since December 10 when Soyuz 28 was launched.
• The Chicago Daily News, an afternoon newspaper that had published in Chicago since 1876, printed its last issue.
• Born: Denis Dallan, Italian rugby union footballer with 42 caps for the Italy national team; in Asolo, province of Treviso
• Died:
• *Wesley Bolin, 68, who had been sworn in as Governor of Arizona on October 20, died of a heart attack.
• *Robert W. Prescott, 64, American businessman who had been a flying ace during World War II and then founded the Flying Tiger Line air cargo carrier.

  March 5, 1978 (Sunday)

• Delegates to the 5th National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China adopted the nation's third Constitution, replacing the 1975 Constitution. The People's Congress also re-elected Hua Guofeng as Premier and leader of the Communist Party.
• Voting was held in Guatemala for the President and for the 61-member Congreso de la República. Three candidates ran for president, none of whom received a majority of the popular vote. General Fernando Lucas Garcia had a plurality of 40%, followed by 34% for a former president, Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia, who led a coup d'état in 1963 and served until the 1966 election. The two parties supporting General Lucas Garcia— the Partido Institucional Democrático and the Partido Revolucionario— won 31 of the 61 seats of the Congreso. The Congreso elected Lucas Garcia as president, giving him 35 of the 60 votes, while the other 25 legislators cast blank votes.
• The Battle of Jijiga ended with a victory by Ethiopia, which had recently obtained aid from the Soviet Union, over Somalia in the Ogaden War after almost six months of fighting. The loss at Jijiga effectively ended the war between the two north African nations.

  March 6, 1978 (Monday)

• U.S. President Jimmy Carter invoked the Taft–Hartley Act to force an end to the United Mine Workers Association strike that had been going on for three months during winter. In invoking the act for the first time since 1971, Carter said "My responsibility is to protect the health and safety of the American public and I intend to do so," adding that "the country cannot afford to wait any longer."
• Troops from the white minority-ruled nation of Rhodesia crossed the Zambesi River to invade Zambia. The Rhodesians killed 38 Zimbabwean nationalist guerrillas and lost one member.
• Larry Flynt, the publisher of the pornographic magazine Hustler, was shot by a sniper and left paralyzed from the waist down while outside the courthouse in Lawrenceville, Georgia. The attempted killing was later traced to white supremacist and domestic terrorist Joseph Paul Franklin, who was responsible for at least 21 murders, and would say later that he was angered by photographs in Hustler depicting sexual intercourse between a black man and a white woman.
• The crash of a helicopter in Libya killed all 11 people aboard, including members of a delegation from East Germany who were negotiating a trade agreement with the North African nation. The dead included Werner Lamberz and Paul Markowski, members of East Germany's parliament, the Volkskammer and the Communist Party's Central Committee, with official photographer Hans-Joachim Spremberg and the Libyan Minister of Transport, Taha El Sherif Ben Amer. Lamberz, referred to by one newspaper as "Honecker's Crown Prince", was a trusted aide of East Germany's leader Erich Honecker and a possible successor to the Communist Party leader.
• The U.S. state of Wyoming became the first state in more than 104 years, and the ninth overall, to ratify the proposed Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution. The text declared that "No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened," and was passed in Wyoming initially as a protest against the members of the U.S. Congress voting to increase the amount of their own salaries. The proposed amendment had been introduced in 1789 and ratified by seven of the then 15 U.S. states by 1792, short of the necessary 12 required for a three-fourths majority. After almost 80 years, Ohio became the eighth state to ratify. Following Wyoming's ratification, the number of states following the Wyoming example began increasing in 1983, and the amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on May 7, 1992, more than 200 years after it was introduced.
• Born: Nate Walcott, American film score composer; in Albany, New York
• Died: Micheál Mac Liammóir, 78, English-born Irish stage actor and playwright, known for writing and acting in the one-man show The Importance of Being Oscar.