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May 1978

Month of 1978

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
36 min read
Source updated September 8, 2026
Image credit is listed at the end of this article.
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The following events occurred in May 1978:

01May 1, 1978 (Monday)

  • The 35-member Revolutionary Council of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, led by Nur Muhammad Taraki, held a meeting three days after Taraki had overthrown the existing government to form a Communist state, in order to select a cabinet of ministers. Taraki was approved as Chairman of the Council, equivalent to a prime minister, with Babrak Karmal as the Deputy Premier.
  • The United States allowed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to open the Palestine Information Office in Washington, D.C., but did not establish diplomatic relations nor recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. The office closed in 1987 after the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act was signed into law by U.S. President Reagan, in that the PLO was on the United States Department of State list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.
  • An exchange of prisoners was made at the U.S. Embassy in East Berlin as East Germany released Alan Van Norman, a 20-year-old American college student who had been caught trying to help a family escape to West Germany, and the U.S. released Robert Thompson, a former U.S. Air Force clerk turned Soviet spy, who had sold photos of hundreds of secret documents to the Soviet Union. Thompson had been incarcerated in a U.S. federal prison for more than 13 years after being arrested in 1965. Van Norman had been held for more than nine months after being sentenced to 30 months in solitary confinement in an East German jail.
  • In Algiers, the Algerian Cup championship of the North African nation's soccer football league was won by 9th-place CR Belcourt over 4th-place USK Alger, on a penalty shootout after the teams were still tied, 0 to 0, following 30 minutes of extra time. Belcourt outscored Alger in the shootout, 2 to 0. The match was played before 80,000 people at the Stade du 5 Juillet.
  • William Steinberg, who had been in declining health for several years, conducted a concert of the New York Philharmonic orchestra with an appearance by Isaac Stern as a guest violinist. Steinberg was hospitalized after the concert was over and died 15 days later.
  • The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed a decision by the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that had dismissed the indictment of Dr. Jeffrey R. MacDonald for the 1970 murder of his wife and two daughters, striking down the appellate court's finding that Dr. MacDonald had been denied the constitutional right to a speedy trial.
  • The Düsseldorf Panther, the oldest semi-pro American football team in Germany, was founded in Düsseldorf in West Germany. In the years that followed, the team would win eight German championships and the 1995 Eurobowl.
  • Born:
  • Died:
1978 Scottish Cup final
1978 Scottish Cup final

02May 2, 1978 (Tuesday)

  • The Canadian-founded worldwide Greenpeace environmentalist and anti-war organization launched its flagship, Rainbow Warrior, after purchasing and remodeling the British government trawler Sir William Hardy.
  • Died: Vong Savang, 46, former Crown Prince of Laos as son of the last monarch, Sisavang Vatthana, died in a Pathet Lao re-education camp.

03May 3, 1978 (Wednesday)

  • The first use of an electronic messaging system to send an unsolicited message to a large number of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, now commonly called spamming, was made when a representative of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Gary Thuerk, sent the same message, simultaneously, to 393 users of ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. The message informed all recipients that "Digital will be giving a product presentation of the newest members of the DECsystem-2020 family," inviting them to attend sessions on May 9 and May 11 at hotel lobbies in Los Angeles and San Mateo, and invited them to "please feel free to contact the nearest DEC Office for more information about the exciting DECsystem-2020 family." The ARPANET manager responded by noting that the advertisement was "a flagrant violation of the use of ARPANET as the network is to be used for official U.S. government business only," and adding that "appropriate action is being taken to preclude its occurrence again."
  • R.S.C. Anderlecht, runner-up for the 1976 Belgian Cup, defeated FK Austria Wien, winner of the 1977 Austrian Cup, 4 to 0, to win the European Cup Winners' Cup before a crowd of 48,679 people at Parc des Princes in Paris.
  • The successful stage musical Annie, which had been running in the U.S. on Broadway since April 21, 1977, premiered on London's West End at the Victoria Palace Theatre for the first of 1,485 performances. Andrea McArdle, who had opened the title role on Broadway, appeared for the first 40 performances on the West End before being succeeded by Briton Ann Marie Gwatkin.
  • Died: Roberto Pineda, 25, Mexican horse racing jockey, was killed while competing in the U.S. at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, when a horse ridden by another jockey, Rudy Turcotte, broke her foreleg and caused a chain reaction with two other horses. Pineda was riding the horse "Easter Bunny Mine" in the second race of the day when Turcotte's horse, Easy Edith, collapsed. Pineda was thrown head-first from Easter Bunny Mine, and two other horses went down in a pileup. Pineda had severe head injuries and died at a nearby hospital.

04May 4, 1978 (Thursday)

05May 5, 1978 (Friday)

06May 6, 1978 (Saturday)

07May 7, 1978 (Sunday)

  • Former Italian Premier Aldo Moro was informed by his kidnappers that, since the Italian government had refused their final demands to release 13 prisoners, he was going to be killed. Moro was allowed to send a final letter to his wife and wrote, "They have told me that they are going to kill me in a little while, I kiss you for the last time."
  • The first episode of the long-running Philippine television variety program GMA Supershow, hosted by German Moreno, was broadcast at noon on the GMA Network. GMA Supershow would run for 978 episodes over more than 18 years before concluding on January 26, 1997.
  • Ricardo Cardona of Colombia won the World super bantamweight title of the World Boxing Association by defeating reigning champion Hong Soo-hwan of South Korea in a bout in Seoul. Cardona would hold the title for almost a year before losing to Leo Randolph on May 4, 1980.
  • After being denied permission to leave Saudi Arabia for almost six months, and having his U.S. passport taken away because of a contract dispute with Saudi government officials, an American businessman from Texas, John L. McDonald, escaped the country by substituting himself for the contents of a shipping crate that had cleared customs after he had paid for freight transportation at the Dhahran airport. After the crate was sent to freight pickup at an airport in Europe, McDonald, president of Heritage Building Systems International of Houston, climbed out and went to a local U.S. Embassy.

08May 8, 1978 (Monday)

  • Reinhold Messner of Italy and Peter Habeler of Austria made the first ascent of the world's highest mountain, 29,031-foot (8,849 m) Mount Everest, without supplemental oxygen. The pair brought along oxygen tanks in case of an emergency, and endured tiredness and confusion from hypoxia, but reached the top.
  • Norway officially began production from the Frigg gas field, a large source of natural gas, administered by the French company Elf Aquitaine, in the Polar Sea.
  • David Berkowitz, the serial killer known as "the Son of Sam", entered a guilty plea to 6 counts of second-degree murder and 7 counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to six consecutive terms of 25 years in prison for the six murders, but, as a condition of his plea, he was eligible for parole within 25 years.
  • Rodrigo Carazo Odio was sworn for a four-year term as the 36th President of Costa Rica.

09May 9, 1978 (Tuesday)

  • At 1:30 in the afternoon local time in Rome (1130 UTC), the body of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, who had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades terrorist organization on March 16, was found in a car parked on Rome's Via Michelangelo Caetani. Moro's death came after the Italian government refused to negotiate or to meet the demand that 16 jailed prisoners be released. Moro, 61, had served as prime minister twice, from 1963 to 1968 and from 1974 to 1976.
  • David Cook of England became the first pilot to cross the English Channel while flying a hang glider. He used a Volmer VJ-23 Swingwing glider, with a small motor.
  • A group of 30 troops from the Soviet Union crossed the Ussuri River in patrol boats and entered the People's Republic of China, according to a protest by China's Vice Foreign Minister, Yu Chan, to the Soviet ambassador in Beijing, Vasily Tolstikov. The Chinese charged that the troops landed at the Yueyapao District of Heilongjiang Province, and had attempted to drag 14 civilian hostages to the river side before villagers pursued the invaders and forced the hostages' release. The Soviets admitted three days later that they had crossed into China, and claimed it was an error, but apologized for the incident.
  • Britain's House of Commons narrowly voted to reject the Labour Party government's proposal to raise taxes, with 304 in favor but 312 against. A further setback came the next day when Tories and Liberals combined with other opposition parties, 288 to 286, to raise the threshold for qualifying for a higher tax bracket.
  • By a margin of more than 4 to 1, voters in the U.S. city of Wichita, Kansas, overwhelmingly voted to repeal the city's ordinance, passed in September, that had prohibited discrimination against gay and lesbian people. The final count was 47,246 to repeal and only 10,005 to retain the law.
  • India's premier soccer football tournament, the Indian Federation Cup, ended with East Bengal FC and Mohun Bagan FC, both based in Calcutta (now spelled Kolkata), being declared joint champions. On May 7, the two had played to a 0 to 0 draw at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Coimbatore, with the score unchanged after extra time. In the rematch, the result was again a scoreless draw after extra time.
  • Born: Marwan al-Shehhi, Emirati terrorist who hijacked and piloted United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, killing all 65 people aboard the Boeing 767 jet and 630 people in the building; in Al Qusaidat, Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates (d. 2001)
  • Died:
    • Aldo Moro, 61, former Prime Minister of Italy from 1963 to 1968 and 1974 to 1976, was assassinated by kidnappers.
    • Giuseppe "Pepino" Impastato, 30, Italian politician and a candidate for office in the city of Cinisi, was killed by a hitman from the Italian Mafia, after which an explosive charge was placed beneath his body to give the appearance that he had died accidentally while attempting to bomb a railway line.
    • Miguel Ángel Cárcano, 88, Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs 1961 to 1962

10May 10, 1978 (Wednesday)

11May 11, 1978 (Thursday)

12May 12, 1978 (Friday)

  • In Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, a group of 4,000 rebels occupied the city of Kolwezi, the mining center of the province of Shaba, and were supplemented by troops from Cuba. The Zairean government asked the U.S., France and Belgium to restore order.
  • In a suburb of Ankara, in Turkey, a fire killed 40 people in a six-story building that housed a shopping center on the bottom floor and a vocational school on upper floors. There were about 500 in the building when the fire broke out in a shoe store, and most were customers able to escape from the first floor below. Ladders that could reach to upper floors rescued 250 more people. A dozen people from the school reached the roof and were evacuated by a mechanical ladder, but the gears failed and the ladder "swayed away from other screaming victims," and an attempt to rescue other people by helicopter failed.
  • The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. agency in charge of meteorology, announced that it would end the practice of solely using female names for storms and hurricanes, and begin using male and female identifications for tropical storms in the Eastern Pacific immediately, and effective in 1979 for those in the Atlantic Ocean. After Tropical Storm "Aletta", the next storm would be identified as "Bud".
  • Born:
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13May 13, 1978 (Saturday)

14May 14, 1978 (Sunday)

  • Franz Oppurg of Austria became the first person to climb Mount Everest by himself. Obburg and Josl Knoll had been partnered and reached the last camp before the summit when they discovered that they only had one oxygen mask suitable for climbing further, so Knoll urged Oppurg to complete the ascent. After reaching the South Summit of Everest, Oppurg found that he did not have enough bottled oxygen to ascend further and to return to the camp but continued after discovering an unused oxygen bottle from a previous French expedition.
  • A presidential election was held in the nation of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) for the first time since 1965. General Sangoulé Lamizana, who had overthrown the elected president in 1966, received 42% of the vote as the leader among four candidates on the ballot. Because nobody had a majority of the votes, General Lamizana and second-place finisher Macaire Ouédraogo were the two choices in a runoff election two weeks later.
  • Born: Elisa Togut, Italian women's volleyball player and the MVP of the 2002 World Championship; in Gorizia
  • Died: Bill Lear, 75, American inventor who founded the Learjet company, manufacturer of smaller jet aircraft for use by businesses, and helped develop the car radio and the 8-track cartridge audio system, died of leukemia.

15May 15, 1978 (Monday)

16May 16, 1978 (Tuesday)

Wreckage of Flight 193 being pulled out of the water
Wreckage of Flight 193 being pulled out of the water

17May 17, 1978 (Wednesday)

  • The Army of the Dominican Republic halted the counting of ballots in the national elections after it was clear that President Balaguer and his party were losing by a 2 to 1 margin. Balaguer's opponent, Antonio Guzman, declared himself to be the winner and asked U.S. President Carter to make sure that the victory was recognized. The next day, counting of the votes resumed and Balaguer's Reformist Party proclaimed itself to be leading in the votes. Balaguer relented two days later and ordered the withdrawal of the soldiers from voting sites.
  • Charlie Chaplin's coffin was found buried 2 feet (0.61 m) deep in a cornfield 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) from the Swiss cemetery from which it was stolen more than two months earlier. On March 2, Chaplin's body had been stolen from the family center at Corsier, near Lake Geneva. Police had arrested the first of two suspects after staking out 200 public telephones in Lausanne.
  • Born: Imran Khan, Indian computer programmer and web application developer; in Khareda, Rajasthan state
  • Died:
    • Selwyn Lloyd, 73, English politician who served as Speaker of the House of Commons from 1971 to 1976, and previously as Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1963-1964, and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1955-1960
    • Armin T. Wegner, 91, German human rights activist, known for documenting the Armenian genocide while stationed in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and later for being jailed in 1933 for publicly denouncing Nazi Germany's persecution of Jews.

18May 18, 1978 (Thursday)

  • Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov was sentenced to seven years at hard labor, to be followed by five years of internal exile for distributing "counterrevolutionary material".
  • Sarajevo was selected by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to host the 1984 Winter Olympics, on the second round of balloting. On the first round, Sarajevo (in Yugoslavia), Sapporo (in Japan) and Gothenburg (in Sweden) were all competing, with no team receiving the necessary 38 votes out of 75, and Sapporo (which hosted in 1972) having a plurality against Sarajevo, 33 to 31. With the second round limited to the top two vote-getters, Sarajevo edged Sapporo, 39 votes to 36.
  • At the same IOC meeting, Los Angeles (in the U.S.) was selected to host the 1984 Summer Olympics, after the only other bidder, Tehran (in Iran), withdrew because of ongoing political violence. The award to Los Angeles was conditioned upon the city signing a contract, by July 1, to take full financial responsibility for the Summer Games.
  • Voters across South Korea voted for the 2,581 electors who would meet on July 6 to formally re-elect President Park Chung-hee. All but four of the electors, all of whom were pledged in advance to President Park, were approved.
  • Born:
  • Died:
    • Wei Tao-ming, 78, Taiwan politician who served as the Republic of China's Ambassador to the U.S. from 1942 to 1946, then as the first Chairman of the Taiwan Provincial Government from 1947 to 1949 as the Chinese Communist Revolution, and finally as the Foreign Minister of Taiwan from 1966 to 1971
    • Bashar Rashid, 29, former Iraqi footballer who had played for the Iraq national team during the 1974 FIFA World Cup qualifications, was executed after being convicted of having been a member of the outlawed Iraqi Communist Party.

19May 19, 1978 (Friday)

  • Colonel Philippe Erulin, commander of the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment of the French Foreign Legion, led 700 paratroopers in landing in Kolwezi in the African nation of Zaire, to rescue a group of 2,000 Europeans in the middle of the Shaba II civil war. Another 1,000 Belgian troops arrived from Kamina, 130 miles (210 km) from Kolwezi. Upon the paratroopers arrival, they found that 44 white foreign hostages had already been shot to death. The remaining hostages were freed the next day as French and Belgian armies recaptured Kolwezi and the Zairean rebels retreated. At that time, the estimate of dead foreigners had increased to 100, with 60 other foreigners carried off as hostages during the retreat.
  • Aeroflot Flight 6709 within the Soviet Union, with 134 people on board, lost power while flying from Baku in the Azerbaijani SSR toward Leningrad in the Russian SFSR. The pilots were able to land the Tupolev Tu-154B in a potato field at Maksatikha in Russia, with all but four of the people on board surviving the impact and a subsequent fire.
  • Two Soviet Georgian dissidents, writer Zviad Gamsakhurdia and musicologist Merab Kostava, both founders of the Georgian Helsinki Group, were sentenced to three years at hard labor and two more years of internal exile.
  • Born: Muttath Suresh, Indian footballer with 70 caps for the India national team; in Edattummal, Kasaragod district, Kerala state
  • Died: Moses Kotane, 72, Secretary-General of the South African Communist Party since 1939, in exile in the Soviet Union.

20May 20, 1978 (Saturday)

  • At the age of 53, Mavis Hutchinson of South Africa, referred to in the press as "The Galloping Granny", became the first woman to run across the continental United States as she arrived in front of New York City Hall. She had started at Los Angeles City Hall in California on March 12, and began running eastward while her support crew, led by her husband Ernie Hutchison, provided supplies during the journey. She covered 2,908 miles (4,680 km) in 69 days, two hours and 40 minutes.
  • The Pioneer Venus Orbiter was launched from the United States with multiple instruments to study the planet Venus, including a surface radar mapper, an infrared radiometer, an ultraviolet spectrometer, a magnetometer, and a cloud photopolarimeter. The probe entered orbit around Venus on December 4 and would return data for almost 14 years.
  • The private West German rocket manufacturer OTRAG, founded in 1974, made its second, and last, successful launch from the African nation of Zaire in three attempts. None of the OTRAG rockets reached orbit, but the first one attained an altitude of 12,000 metres (7.5 mi) on May 17, 1977, and the second reached 9,000 metres (5.6 mi).
  • Chiang Ching-kuo was inaugurated on the island of Taiwan as the new President of the Republic of China, succeeding Yen Chia-kan, who had served the remainder of the term of Chiang Kai-shek, who had died on April 6, 1975. The new president was sworn in immediately after being elected unanimously by Taiwan's national electoral college.
  • The Preakness Stakes, second leg of the Triple Crown of American horse racing, was run at the Pimlico Race Track in Maryland, near Baltimore. As with the Kentucky Derby two weeks earlier, Affirmed finished first and Alydar finished second, while Believe It came in third.
  • Born: Mike Flanagan, American filmmaker known primarily for horror films, including Oculus; in Salem, Massachusetts
  • Died:

21May 21, 1978 (Sunday)

  • U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski met privately in Beijing with Huang Hua, Foreign Minister of the People's Republic of China, and announced that he was authorized by U.S. President Jimmy Carter to accept the three conditions set by Beijing for normalization of diplomatic relations, specifically for the U.S. to sever its relationship with Taiwan, including the withdrawal of U.S. troops and severing its diplomatic and military pacts with the Taiwanese government, provided that the U.S. would be able to announce that China would resolve its issues with Taiwan peacefully.
  • Near Tokyo, the Narita International Airport began operations after delays caused by sabotage carried out by protesters. At 8:02 in the morning local time, a Japan Air Lines (JAL) DC-8 cargo jet arrived at Narita from Los Angeles, becoming the first commercial aircraft to land. The first passenger plane arrived at 12:03 p.m. from Moscow, with 82 travelers on board. Takeoffs were scheduled for the next day.
  • In the Soviet Union, the Republican Party of Georgia (Sakartvelos Respublikuri Partia) was founded clandestinely by four independence activists in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, Vakhtang Dzabiradze, Vakhtang Shonia, Levan Berdzenishvili and David Berdzenishvili, with a goal of an independent Georgian nation with guarantees of human rights and a free market economy. The four Georgians would be arrested and jailed in 1983 for anti-Soviet activity, then released in time to participate in the first free elections of the Republic of Georgia.
  • Exiled Comoros President Ahmed Abdallah returned to the capital at Moroni, along with former Vice-president Muhammad Ahmad returned to the Comoros, after Ali Soilih had overthrown him in a coup d'état on May 12.

22May 22, 1978 (Monday)

23May 23, 1978 (Tuesday)

  • Heng Samrin, who would become the President of Democratic Kampuchea (later Cambodia) in 1979 and stop the genocide that had started in 1975, was saved from certain arrest and execution by a high-ranking official of the ruling Kampuchean Communist Party, So Phim. Heng had been taken into custody on the order of a higher-ranking official, Ke Pauk. So Phim, the director of Kampuchea's East Zone, intervened by summoning Heng to his office and then transferring him to the Prey Veng province, on the border with Vietnam, where Heng escaped to safety. Eleven days later, when Ke Pauk discovered the overriding of the arrest order, So Phim committed suicide to avoid capture, torture and execution.
  • Paul Southwell became the new Premier of Saint Kitts and Nevis, two Caribbean islands that had been elevated to the autonomous status of part of the West Indies Associated States in 1967, before becoming an independent nation in 1983. Southwell, who had been the Chief Minister of the colony of Saint Kitts and Nevis, succeeded Premier Robert Llewellyn Bradshaw, 61, who had died in office the same day. Southwell himself would die after slightly less than a year, on May 18, 1979.
  • The crash of a test flight of a Soviet Tupolev Tu-144D supersonic passenger jet halted flights completely. A crew of eight was making the final test before the jet's scheduled delivery to the Soviet Union national airline, Aeroflot and departed Moscow's Zhukovsky Airport. A fuel line had ruptured and caused eight tons of fuel to leak into the Tu-144's right wing, but the flight engineers concluded that the instrument reading was incorrect and failed to report the problem to the flight captain. Half an hour later, when the Tu-144 was at an altitude of 3,000 metres (9,800 ft) a fire broke out and the two right-side engines were shut down. Within six minutes, the crew made a belly landing in a field near Kladkovo, and two flight engineers were killed. The last Tu-144 flight took place two weeks later, June 6. The Soviets confirmed the Tu-144 crash five months after it happened. By then, the Tu-144 program had been canceled.
  • Bill Walton of the Portland Trail Blazers was named the National Basketball Association regular season MVP.

24May 24, 1978 (Wednesday)

25May 25, 1978 (Thursday)

  • The protest occupation of Bastion Point by 222 members of New Zealand's Māori people was forcibly ended after 506 days by 800 police, with the assistance of the New Zealand Army. Led by Joe Hawke, the protest had started on January 5, 1977, two days before construction was to have started for high-income housing. A new government would return Takaparawhau/Baston Point to the Māoris in 1988.
  • The first attack of the Unabomber took place when a mail bomb exploded at a campus police building of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, injuring a security guard. Over the next 17 years, 26 people would be injured, three of them fatally, by the Unabomber until he was arrested and identified as former University of California mathematics professor Ted Kaczynski.
  • The Montreal Canadiens defeated the Boston Bruins, four games to two, to win the National Hockey League's Stanley Cup.
  • Died: Xhafer Deva, 74, Albanian politician who partially collaborated with the Nazi occupiers of Albania during World War II and served as the Internal Affairs Minister and police agencies, died in San Francisco in the U.S. after having been recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1956. Despite collaborating with the Nazi occupation, Deva had successfully resisted Nazi requests for lists of Albanian Jews or the relocation of Jews into a single location.

26May 26, 1978 (Friday)

  • The first legal gambling casino in the eastern United States opened at 10:00 in the morning, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with the debut of the addition of the casino and a theater to the newly remodeled Resorts International Hotel. Singer Steve Lawrence, who was performing at the hotel's Super Star Theater with his wife, Eydie Gormé, opened the gambling era in New Jersey by throwing the first roll of the dice at one of the craps tables. The success of the casino in New Jersey, at the time, the only U.S. state other than Nevada to legalize casino gambling, would be followed by the loosening of laws against gambling in the rest of the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.
  • The criminal penalties against adultery were repealed in Spain with the elimination of Articles 449 and 452 of the Spanish penal code. The law, enacted in 1963, provided for incarceration for a married woman who had sexual relations with a man other than her husband, for terms ranging from six months to six years; a married man, on the other hand, had been permitted to have sex with a mistress other than his wife, even within the family home. The 1963 law had been an improvement over the previous rule which legalized revenge murder if a husband caught his wife in bed with another man, with the killing of the wife and her lover being permissible.
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27May 27, 1978 (Saturday)

  • In West Berlin, two members of the 2 June Movement in West Germany, Inge Viett and Nabil Harb, helped terrorist Till Meyer escape from the medium security Moabit Correctional Facility. The three escaped by train to East Berlin and then through East Germany to Bulgaria. Although Bulgaria was a Communist nation like East Germany, Bulgarian police and West German anti-terrorist detectives worked together to arrest Meyer and three other suspects on June 20, and Bulgaria then allowed for his extradition back to West Germany for trial the next day.

28May 28, 1978 (Sunday)

29May 29, 1978 (Monday)

  • At least 30 protesters were killed in Guatemala, and perhaps as many as 106, in the town of Panzós after Guatemalan Mayan peasants traveled from the villages of Cahaboncito, Semococh, Rubetzul, Canguachá, Sepacay, Moyagua, and La Soledad to state their claims for land confiscated from their ancestors by the Spanish colonists.
  • The price of mailing a letter in the United States increased from 13 cents to 15 cents, after the U.S. Postal Service had voted on May 19 to approve the increase.
  • At Yorkville, Illinois, in the U.S., the new radar equipment of Project NIMROD (Northern Illinois Meteorological Research On Downburst) made the first recording of a radar image of a microburst, using the CP-3 Doppler weather radar.
  • Yitzhak Navon took office as the fifth president of Israel, a largely ceremonial office.
  • The Cape Verde national football team, created shortly after the Cape Verde islands became an independent nation, played their first international game, losing to Guinea, 1 to 0.
  • Born: Sébastien Grosjean, French professional tennis player who was ranked fourth-best in the world in 2002, but never advanced further than the semi-finals in a Grand Slam tournament; in Marseille
  • Died:
    • Sy Bartlett (born Sacha Baraniev), 77, Ukrainian-born American novelist, screenwriter, and producer
    • Yury Dombrovsky, 69, Russian writer and dissident who spent 18 years in prison and in internal exile in the Soviet Union.
    • Nazli Sabri, 83, former queen consort of Egypt as wife of King Fuad I from 1919 to 1936

30May 30, 1978 (Tuesday)

31May 31, 1978 (Wednesday)

  • A team of mountaineers, led by S. P. Mulasi, of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, made the first ascent of Hardeol, a 23,461-foot (7,151 m) peak in the Himalayas.
  • Born: Sara Duterte, Vice President of the Philippines since 2022; in Davao City
  • Died:
    • József Bozsik, 52, Hungarian footballer with 101 caps for the Hungary national team, died of heart failure.
    • José Gonzalvo, 58, Spanish footballer and manager, died after an operation.
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