May 1979

May 1, 1979 (Tuesday)

• The Republic of the Marshall Islands was granted self-government within the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands administered by the United States, with a transition to full independence by 1986.
• Greenland was granted limited autonomy from Denmark, with its own Parliament and the capital, Godthåb being renamed Nuuk. Jonathan Motzfeldt was inaugurated as the first prime minister of Greenland and served for almost 12 years. The 31-member Inatsisartut was sworn in as the first Greenlandic parliament.
• Malacañang Palace, the presidential residence of the Philippines in Manila, was reopened after two years of remodeling and rebuilding.
• American Communist Angela Davis was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union.
• Born: Mauro Bergamasco, Italian rugby union flanker with 106 appearances for the Italian national team; in Padua
• Died:
• *Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari, Iranian Shia Muslim theologian, Chairman of the Council of the Islamic Revolution and a close associate of the Ayatollah Khomeini, was assassinated in Tehran by the Forghan Fighters, an underground group that had killed General Vali Gharani on April 23. Motahari was leaving a dinner party at the home of Iran's Minister of Revolutionary Affairs at 10:20 in the evening, and was shot as he walked to his car.
• *Sérgio Paranhos Fleury, 45, Brazilian law enforcement official and chief of the agency DOPS, drowned before he could be tried.

  May 2, 1979 (Wednesday)

• The Houston Angels won the first championship of the Women's Professional Basketball League, the first pro basketball circuit for women, winning the fifth game of the best-3-of-5 series against the Iowa Cornets. Houston won the first two games, Iowa the second two, setting up the deciding game, which Houston won, 111 to 104 with Paula Mayo being the high scorer with 36 points.
• Died: Julius Kravitz, 67, American grocery chain executive and chairman of First National Supermarkets, was fatally wounded during a kidnapping attempt the day before in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Kravitz was shot three times in the chest and once in the back by two men masquerading as police officers. Police arrested the former president of Multi-Chem Industries and another Multi-Chem employee.

  May 3, 1979 (Thursday)

• Voting for the House of Commons took place in the UK and the Conservative Party won a 339-seat majority of the 635 Commons seats, making Margaret Thatcher the nation's first woman prime minister and ending the government of James Callaghan and the Labour Party. Among the candidates becoming MPs for the first time was future prime minister John Major, representing the County Huntingdonshire constituency, formerly occupied by David Renton, who departed Commons to take a seat in the House of Lords.
• The last U.S. Army soldier for the United States Taiwan Defense Command left the island of Taiwan.
• Ted Giannoulas, the originator of the oldest pro baseball team mascot, the "San Diego Chicken", was fired by radio station KGB-FM after five seasons of wearing the costume of what was originally called the "KGB Chicken". When San Diego Padre fans learned that another radio station employee had been substituted for Giannoulas, the replacement was booed off the field. After a successful lawsuit, Giannoulas returned in a different costume with a different mascot name, "The Famous Chicken", on June 29.

  May 4, 1979 (Friday)

• Margaret Thatcher, leader of Britain's Conservative Party, took office as the first woman to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Shortly after noon, Prime Minister James Callaghan submitted his resignation to Queen Elizabeth II and, a few minutes later, Thatcher accepted the Queen's request to form a new government, after which Thatcher went directly to her new office at 10 Downing Street.
• The independent low cost British airline Air Europe began commercial service, with a Boeing 737 flight that departed London Gatwick Airport to take vacationers to the Spanish resort of Palma de Mallorca on the Balearic Islands. The airline would exist until going bankrupt in 1991.
• The first Team Ice Racing World Championship with the Soviet Union finishing first, Czechoslovakia second and West Germany third.
• Born:
• *Lance Bass, American singer and record producer; in Laurel, Mississippi
• *Wes Butters, English radio broadcaster; in Salford, Lancashire
• *Réhahn, French photographer and cultural preservationist; in Bayeux
• Died:
• *Leif Erland Andersson, 35, Swedish astronomer who calculated the first observable astronomical transits of the planet Pluto
• *Elisabeth von Dyck, 27, West German militant and suspected member of the Red Army Faction, was shot in the back by police in Nuremberg as she was seen running into a suspected Faction safe house.

  May 5, 1979 (Saturday)

• The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, more commonly called the "Revolutionary Guards" in the Western press and "the Sepâh" in Iran, was formed following an April 22 decree of the Ayatollah Khomeini as an intelligence agency and an internal security bureau to investigate and counteract anti-government activity. The Revolutionary Guards would later be designated by the United States and by Saudi Arabia as a terrorist organization.
• The U.S. Secret Service arrested a man at the Civic Center Mall in Los Angeles, 10 minutes before U.S. president Jimmy Carter was scheduled to address a crowd, and found him carrying what appeared to be a pistol. Raymond Lee Harvey was carrying a starter pistol loaded with blank rounds, and told police that he had been hired to fire the blanks into the ground as a distraction in order for Carter to be assassinated by a sniper team that was stationed in the Alan Hotel overlooking the plaza. Los Angeles police found a shotgun case and three unspent bullets in the hotel room identified by Harvey.
• In the United Kingdom, "Radio Lollipop" began broadcasting as a low-power radio station with children's programming intended for the benefit of patients at Queen Mary's Hospital for Children in Carshalton, Surrey. The network was then expanded to serve other children's hospitals and hospital wards in the UK and later to Australia, New Zealand, the United States and South Africa.
• At the Pista di prova di Nardò della Fiat, a test track in Italy for the automaker Fiat at the town of Nardò, a commercially available automobile exceeded for the first time, covering the track in slightly less than two minutes at an average speed of.
• British commercial diver B. Eke drowned when his diving helmet came off during a surface-orientated dive to conduct routine maintenance on fixed platform 48/29C in the North Sea.

  May 6, 1979 (Sunday)

• Parliamentary elections were held in Austria for the 183 seats of the Nationalrat. The Social Democratic Party, led by Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, increased its slim majority from 93 to 95 seats.
• The first large protest against nuclear power since the Three Mile Island disaster, organized by Timothy Massad and Donald K. Ross, took place in Washington, D.C., and attracted between 65,000 and 125,000 demonstrators.
• To call attention to its campaign for the independence of the island of Corsica from France, the Fronte di liberazione naziunale di a Corsica carried out the simultaneous bombing of 20 bank branches in Paris.
• Born:
• *Gerd Kanter, Estonian discus thrower, 2007 world champion and 2008 Olympic gold medalist; in Tallinn, Soviet-occupied Estonia
• *Jon Montgomery, Canadian athlete and 2010 Olympic gold medalist in the skeleton individual sled racing competition; in Russell, Manitoba
• *Benita Willis, Australian long-distance runner and gold medalist in the women's cross country race in the 2004 world championships; in Mackay, Queensland
• Died: Joe Hooper, 40, U.S. Army captain and Medal of Honor recipient for heroism during the Vietnam War in 1968, died of a cerebral hemorrhage

  May 7, 1979 (Monday)

• British pilot Gerry Breen set a distance record, which still stands, for a flight on a powered hang glider, flying from a location in Wales to Norwich, using a Soarmaster, the flight took about 4 hours with a tailwind of about 25 knots and reportedly consumed only of fuel.

  May 8, 1979 (Tuesday)

• Ten people, all but one of them shoppers, died in a fire at the Woolworth's department store, a six-storey tall building in downtown Manchester in England. The fire was later traced to an electrical cable on the third floor behind furniture, fueled by highly flammable and toxic polyurethane foam inside the cushions.
• Police in San Salvador, capital of the Central American nation of El Salvador, fired on a crowd of 300 anti-government demonstrators who had taken control of the Metropolitan Cathedral, killing 22 and wounding 38 others.
• The legality of the business model of Amway, a direct sales company that enlists individuals as its distributors of its own manufactured cleaning products, nutritional supplements, and beauty care products, was certified by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in its ruling in In re Amway Corp., more than four years after the FTC had filed a complaint against the corporation.
• The Islamic Republic of Iran executed 21 former members of the Imperial government, including Majlis speaker Javad Saeed, Information Minister Gholam Reza Khanpour, Education Minister Mohammad Reza Ameli Tehrani, Armored Division Brigadier General Ali Fathi Amin, and 15 officers of the SAVAK, the Shah's secret police.