November 1976


The following events occurred in November 1976:

November 1, 1976 (Monday)

  • Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bagaza of the Burundi Army led a bloodless coup d'état overthrowing President Michel Micombero, who had overthrown the monarchy of the African nation in 1966. The 30-member Supreme Revolutionary Council that replaced Micombero named Bagaza as President of Burundi on November 10.
  • Universities and schools in Thailand reopened after having been closed for nearly a month because of violence that had led to a military coup d'état and closure on October 6.
  • Born: Adah Almutairi, American nanotechnology engineer; in Portland, Oregon

November 2, 1976 (Tuesday)

November 3, 1976 (Wednesday)

  • Jacques Mayol of France became the first person to dive to a depth of without the use of scuba gear. Mayol, age 49, held his breath and went down into the Mediterranean Sea off of the island of Elba.
  • The worst railroad accident in Poland in more than ten years killed 25 people and injured 60 others after an express train crashed into the back of a passenger train that had been making a scheduled stop at the station at Julianka. The express between Lublin and Wrocław, traveling in a dense fog, came in behind the other train.
  • Brian DePalma's horror film Carrie, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, premiered in select cities before going into general release nationwide on November 16.
  • Born: Emiliano Reali, Italian novelist, in Rome
  • Died: Henk Korthals, 65, Dutch politician and former Deputy Prime Minister of the Netherlands, 1959 to 1963

November 4, 1976 (Thursday)

November 5, 1976 (Friday)

November 6, 1976 (Saturday)

November 7, 1976 (Sunday)

  • The prototype of the Dassault Falcon 50 business jet made its first flight.
  • The Party of Labor of Albania, the Communist party of Albania, completed its five-year Congress at Tirana and re-elected Enver Hoxha, who had been the party's leader since its founding 35 years earlier. Hoxha, who had been the de facto leader of the Balkan nation for more than 30 years, was the last Stalinist in power in Eastern Europe. All twelve members of the Party of Labor Politburo were re-elected by the Central Committee, including Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu.
  • Born: Mark Philippoussis, Australian pro tennis player, 1999 and 2003 Davis Cup team winner, 1998 U.S. Open and 2003 Wimbledon finalist; in Melbourne
  • Died: Mathew Charles Lamb, 28, Canadian spree killer who shot four people in 1966 and then joined the Rhodesian Army after his release from custody, was accidentally killed by friendly fire from another member of his unit.

November 8, 1976 (Monday)

November 9, 1976 (Tuesday)

November 10, 1976 (Wednesday)

  • The Supreme Court of Utah ruled, 4 to 1, that convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was entitled to be executed as he had requested, and lifted a stay of execution that had been made earlier by the state's Court of Appeals, clearing the way for Gilmore to face a firing squad within five days. While the Governor of Utah issued a stay of execution the next day, Gilmore would be executed on January 17, 1977.
  • At least 5,000 Syrian Army combat troops, accompanied by 60 tanks, entered peacefully into Beirut without firing a shot, marking the first time since 1958 that the capital of Lebanon had been under foreign military control. The United States Marines had landed in and occupied Beirut 18 years earlier to prevent a coup d'état.

November 11, 1976 (Thursday)

November 12, 1976 (Friday)

November 13, 1976 (Saturday)

  • A second earthquake struck the Chinese city of Tangshan, which had been destroyed by an earthquake on July 28.
  • Lieutenant Colonel Edouard Nzambimana was named as the new Prime Minister of Burundi.
  • Angola's National Museum of Anthropology was opened in Luanda to preserve Angola's heritage.
  • The first of 18 editions of the celebrity sporting competition Battle of the Network Stars premiered on the U.S. television network ABC with 10 TV stars apiece from the three television networks that existed in the United States at that time in various sports, racing in running, swimming and bicycling; and a tug-of-war competition at the end between the two network teams that had done the best. The show, hated by TV critics, "drew a surprisingly large audience" as the 12th highest rated program of the week.

November 14, 1976 (Sunday)

  • Members of the church of which U.S. President-Elect Jimmy Carter was a member, the Plains Baptist Church of Plains, Georgia, voted to drop a ban that the church had maintained since 1965 against attendance by non-white people, after Carter spoke to the congregation prior to the evening's vote. In 1965, the church had voted to ban attendance by African-Americans. By a vote of 120 to 66, the church members amended the bylaws with a statement of purpose "to open the doors to all who want to worship Jesus Christ."

November 15, 1976 (Monday)

  • The first megamouth shark was discovered off the island of Oahu at Hawaii, when it became entangled in the anchor cable of a United States Navy ship, AFB-14, at a depth of about.
  • The Parti Québécois, a separatist party advocating the independence of the Canadian province of Quebec as a separate nation, won 71 of the 110 seats in elections for the provincial legislature, overwhelmingly defeating the Quebec Liberal Party, which lost all but 26 of the 102 seats it had held before the vote. Rene Levesque became the new Premier of Quebec, replacing the QLP's Robert Bourassa.
  • Japan began the return of the Soviet Union's stolen MiG-25 jet fighter to the Soviets. Thirty crates, each filled with parts from the advanced jet fighter had been loaded onto the Russian freighter Taigonos on November 12 at the port of Hitachi and would arrive on November 18.
  • Britain's parliament passed an act amending the Motorcycle Crash Helmet Act of 1972 to permit Sikh wearers of turbans to be exempt from the requirement of wearing a helmet. The legislation followed a four year campaign by Manchester resident Gyani Sundar Singh Sagar, popularly known as Gyan Ji, who had been repeatedly arrested by defying the law in the name of his religious faith.
  • Multiparty elections were allowed in Brazil for the first time in over a decade as part of a gradual reform promised by the right-wing military government of General Ernesto Geisel, with voting for aldermen and mayors in the South American nations 3,789 municipalities. Although the government's Alliance for National Renewal was unopposed in 1,789 locations, the opposition Brazilian Democratic Movement had candidates in the other 2,000. An accident killed 38 people who were being transported to the polling location, when the driver of a bus failed to stop at a ferry crossing and fell into the Urubu River.
  • Born: Claudia Llosa, Peruvian film director; in Lima
  • Died: Jean Gabin, 72, French film actor

November 16, 1976 (Tuesday)

  • The government of Chile, led by General Augusto Pinochet, announced that it would release all but 20 of the 343 people it considered "political prisoners", those held without being charged with a crime during the state of siege that had existed in the South American nation since the coup d'état that had overthrown President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Another 900 people who had been convicted of security offenses, or were charged and awaiting trial, remained incarcerated and were not considered to be political prisoners by the government. The next day, Chile released 130 political prisoners from the Tres Alamos detention camp near Santiago.
  • East Germany singer and poet Wolf Biermann, a dissident opposed to that nation's Communist government, was informed while on a concert tour of West Germany that he had been deprived of his East German citizenship and would not be allowed to return. In response, thirteen of East Germany's best-known artists and authors, all risking their careers, signed a letter to the government announcing that "We protest against his being stripped of his citizenship. Within two days, more than 70 other leading East German playwrights, actors, directors and singers had joined the protest.
  • Died:
  • *Robert L. Lippert, 67, American film producer and cinema chain owner
  • *Niwa Kawamoto, 113, Japanese woman who had been the oldest living person in the world since the death of Mito Umeta on May 31, 1975.

November 17, 1976 (Wednesday)

November 18, 1976 (Thursday)

November 19, 1976 (Friday)

November 20, 1976 (Saturday)

  • Thailand's 24-member military junta, which had been leading the Asian kingdom since a coup d'état in October 6, announced its appointment of a new National Assembly of 340 people, more than half of whom were current or former military officers, and most of whom were considered to be right-wing politically. The junta stated further that it would act in "a purely advisory capacity" to the civilian Prime Minister" while still making clear its position on principal folicy decisions.
  • With only 11 days left in his term, Mexico's President Luis Echeverria Alvarez began implementing a policy of land reform, ordering the government confiscation of of land owned by wealthy families, for redistribution to poorer families under the public policy that every Mexican peasant had a right to a piece of land. The decision was overturned on December 7 by a Mexican federal judge.
  • A landslide in the Colombian village of Chámeza, located in the departamento of Casanare killed 20 people as a row of huts were swept away and buried.
  • Born: Dominique Dawes, American gymnast; in Silver Spring, Maryland
  • Died:
  • *Trofim Lysenko, 78, controversial, but influential, Soviet geneticist and botanist whose pseudoscientific theories were blamed for famines in the Soviet Union and later the People's Republic of China
  • *Hugh D. Auchincloss, 79, American stockbroker, former father-in-law of U.S. President John F. Kennedy as stepfather of Jackie Kennedy

November 21, 1976 (Sunday)

  • The Accord on the Transportation of Perishable Foods, signed on September 1, 1970, by Austria, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland, went into effect upon ratification by five states, and now applies to food shipment through 50 nations, mostly European but also the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.
  • Shahab Sheikh Nuri, Anwar Zorab and Mamosta Jafar Abdulwahid, Iraqi Kurdish nationalists and leaders of the Komalay Ranjdaran organization, were jointly executed by the government of Iraq.
  • Born: Daniel Whiston, English ice dancer; in Blackpool, Lancashire
  • Died: Niles Welch, 88, American stage and silent film star

November 22, 1976 (Monday)

  • The British House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament whose approval of measures passed in Commons was usually taken for granted, overwhelmingly voted to reject the government-sponsored measure to nationalize Britain's aircraft and shipbuilding industries, with only 90 in favor and 197 against. The Lords refused to accept the bill as written and insisted on exemptions from takeover for ship-repairing companies that had made a profit.
  • The popular newspaper comic strip Cathy, written by adveritising agency vice president Cathy Guisewite, made its debut and began a run of almost 34 years, concluding on October 3, 2010. Described as "by a woman and about a woman" and distributed by Universal Press Syndicate, Cathy was in 1,400 newspapers at its peak and was reprinted in more than 20 books and inspired three animated TV specials.
  • The United Kingdom's Energy Act 1976 received royal assent, empowering the British Secretary of State to control the production, supply, acquisition and use of fuels and electricity, and included measures for the conservation of fuels.
  • Born:
  • *Torsten Frings, German soccer football midfielder and with 79 appearances for the Germany national team; in Würselen, West Germany
  • *Sultan Munadi, Afghanistan journalist
  • Died: Jesse F. McClendon, 95, American physiologist and inventor of the McClendon pH-probe to measure the acidity of a patient's stomach contents

November 23, 1976 (Tuesday)

  • All 46 passengers and four crew on Olympic Airways Flight 830 were killed when the turboprop airliner crashed into a mountain near the village of Servia during its flight from Athens to Kozani. Cleared to fly at, the plane impacted the mountain in foggy weather at.
  • The Nuclear Emergency Search Team, created in the U.S. in 1974 to respond to threats of nuclear terrorism, carried out its first known mission in responding to a threat, by a group that called itself "Days of Omega", to contaminate the city of Spokane, Washington by explode containers, each with five pounds of nuclear waste from the nearby Hanford Nuclear Plant, throughout the area unless it received a $500,000 extortion demand. NEST agents found no evidence of increased radioactivity in the area and found that the threat was a hoax. The matter was kept secret until its revelation 19 months later on the first episode of the ABC News show 20/20.
  • Born: Chiril Gaburici, Prime Minister of Moldova for four months in 2015; in Loganesti, Moldavian SSR, Soviet Union
  • Died: André Malraux, 75, French novelist and former Minister of Cultural Affairs; in Paris

November 24, 1976 (Wednesday)

November 25, 1976 (Thursday)

  • The United States and Mexico signed a prisoner-exchange treaty to allow several hundred Americans, incarcerated in Mexican prisons, to return to the U.S. to complete their sentences in American jails, and to allow the estimated 1,200 Mexican inmates of U.S. jails to be repatriated to Mexico if they wished. Neither the U.S. nor Mexico had ever signed a prisoner exchange agreement before.
  • Syria and Iraq announced that they were both pulling back their military forces that had been concentrated along the Middle Eastern nations' mutual border.
  • West German theoretical physicist Burkhard Heim publicly introduced, for the first time, his completed unified field theory in a presentation, including the methodology for calculating the mass spectrum of elementary particles, to engineers at Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm.
  • Born: Donovan McNabb, American NFL quarterback known for his all-star career with the Philadelphia Eagles; in Chicago
  • Died:
  • *Theodor Rosebury, 72, British-born American expert on oral microbiology, dealing with diseases of the mouth
  • *Fernando María Castiella, 68, Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1957 to 1969

November 26, 1976 (Friday)

  • The first punk rock song, "Anarchy in the U.K.", was released by EMI Records after being recorded by the Sex Pistols on October 17.
  • At least 10 people were killed, and 76 injured, in the explosion of a ruptured natural gas line in Barrientos, a suburb in northern Mexico City. The blast occurred when a mechanical digger struck the pipeline while excavating.
  • The trademark for Microsoft was officially registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico. On the application, the registrants noted that the name had been in continuous use since November 12, 1975.
  • The Warsaw Treaty Organization joint secretariat was established.
  • Born: Maia Campbell, American TV actress known for In the House; in Takoma Park, Maryland
  • Died: Marcel Delgado, 75, Mexican-born U.S. film effects specialist known for his development of stop motion animation for film with models, notably for ''King Kong''

November 27, 1976 (Saturday)

  • The first multiracial title fights in South Africa were held at the Rand Stadium in Johannesburg, as part of a plan to allow boxers from the racially-segregated nation to compete in fights sanctioned by the world's pro boxing organizations. In the first bout, black middleweight champ Elijah 'Tap Tap' Makhatini beat white champion Jan Kies in the third round to become the undisputed South African middleweight champion. Gerrie Coetzee defeated the top black challenger James Mathatho with a seventh round knockout for the heavyweight title.
  • Born: Jaleel White, African-American television actor and comedian known for portraying the popular character Steve Urkel on the TV sitcom Family Matters; in Culver City, California
  • Died: Sarah Stewart, 71, American cancer researcher and viral oncologist

November 28, 1976 (Sunday)

  • Aeroflot Flight 2415 crashed shortly after taking off from Moscow on a flight to Leningrad, killing all 67 passengers and six crew. The Tupolev Tu-104B departed in bad weather at 6:53 local time and lost altitude while banking to the right, coming down from the airport and exploding on impact.
  • The government of Australia, led by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, ordered the devaluation of the Australian dollar by 17½ percent in order to increase the demand for its exports to other nations and to encourage foreign investment and increase its foreign exchange reserves. At the end of trading on November 26, the AUD had been worth almost US$ 1.24. The new value, 82½ % of its previous level, was about $1.02.
  • The incident that would become the basis for a 1988 documentary film, The Thin Blue Line took place when Dallas, Texas police officer Robert W. Wood was shot and killed, in a murder for which Randall Dale Adams was wrongfully convicted. Wood, a highway patrolman one of only four American Indians on the Dallas police force, had made a routine traffic stop of an automobile when he was shot five times.
  • The incident that would become the basis for a 2008 documentary film, Harry: A Communication Breakdown, took place when Harry De La Roche, Jr., a military academy cadet at The Citadel, shot and killed his parents and his two younger brothers while on furlough for the Thanksgiving holiday.
  • The annual championship of the Canadian Football League was played between the "Rough Riders" and the "Roughriders", the Ottawa Rough Riders won the Grey Cup, defeating the Saskatchewan Roughriders, 23 to 20. Ottawa trailed, 16 to 20, with 0:20 left to play until Tom Clements threw the winning touchdown pass to Tony Gabriel.
  • The Brady Bunch Variety Hour earned high ratings as a Thanksgiving weekend TV special on the ABC television network, marking the first reunion of almost all of the cast of The Brady Bunch, which had gone off the air more than two years earlier. The success of the show would become a weekly series, The Brady Bunch Hour, in January, and reunions would follow in 1981, 1988 and 1990 on the two other U.S. networks.
  • Born: Ryan Kwanten, Australian TV actor and comedian; in Sydney
  • Died:
  • *Rosalind Russell, 69, American film actress and comedian
  • *Len Harvey, 69, Welsh professional boxer who had fought in all five of the weight classes during his career, and who had won a championship in three weight classes during his 25-year career. Within the British Commonwealth he was middleweight champion, light heavyweight champ and heavyweight champ twice.

November 29, 1976 (Monday)

November 30, 1976 (Tuesday)

  • West German police arrested lawyer Siegfried Haag, one of the leaders of the terrorist group the Red Army Faction and another member, Roland Meyer, after pulling their vehicle over on the highway between Frankfurt and Kassel. Both were later sentenced to 14 years imprisonment.
  • The emirates of Dubai and Sharjah, both states of the United Arab Emirates, agreed to settle the ongoing boundary dispute that had existed for more than 20 years, by submitting the matter for arbitration by the Federal Supreme Council. The Council eventually decided to go with the recommendations of J. P. Tripp, at the time the British political agent for the Trucial States.
  • Died:
  • *Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, 64, Soviet Army officer and commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact forces since 1967
  • *Laurie Erskine, 82, Scottish-born American children's author noted for the Renfrew of the Royal Mounted series of books