1972 News and Interesting History Tidbits



Uganda Idi Amin Gives Ultimatum
General Idi Amin gives British workers an ultimatum to accept reduced pay or be expelled from Uganda in 12 days. This follows his taking control of British firms and interests in the country.

The Ugandan leader, Idi Amin, has ordered most Asians ( estimated to be 60,000 ) to leave the country of Uganda within 90 days or face the consequences. Most Asians in Uganda are British Passport Holders and are expected to move to the UK many have been in the country for two generations and are the backbone to the Ugandan economy running local shops and other businesses, the reasons for the expulsions are the resentment by the black majority over their success.


When the Asians were thrown out 30,000 did emigrate to Britain but arrived with no money as they were not compensated for their businesses .








The Equal Rights Amendment
The Equal Rights Amendment which provided for the legal equality of the sexes and prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex was passed by the U.S. Senate and sent to the states for ratification. .

Additionally, a petition was also made requesting Nixon to ask the Soviet Union to also not discriminate against Jews. The most common form of being treated unfairly was when minorities such as Jews would attempt to participate in cultural and educational activities (particular those of higher education).





Women Admitted as officer cadets US Navy
The United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland where it educates and commissions officers admits women for the first time in its history with the induction of 81 female midshipmen ( officer cadets ).








UK Unemployment Reaches 1 million
UK unemployment has risen to one million for the first time since the depression years of the 1930s.








M*A*S*H First Episode
The first episode of M*A*S*H is shown on CBS in September 1972.

M*A*S*H 4077th was based on the memoirs of Richard Hornberger from his time in the 8055th MASH Unit in Korea, the unit had 10 doctors and 12 patients.

When the series needed more new material CBS purchased real stories from Korean War MASH unit veterans as they were funnier and more interesting than the writers could create

The last episode of M*A*S*H ( Goodbye, Farewell and Amen ) was shown on
February 28th 1983 and over 125 million viewers tuned in to watch it.

Some of the stars who appeared in the series are listed below

Hawkeye Pierce Alan Alda
Margaret Houlihan Loretta Swit
Henry Blake McLean Stevenson
B. J. Hunnicutt Mike Farrell
Radar O'Reilly Gary Burghoff
Maxwell Klinger Jamie Farr
Frank Burns Larry Linville
Father Mulcahy William Christopher
Charles Emerson Winchester III David Ogden Stiers








Buffalo Creek Valley Flooding
A dam In West Virginia’s Buffalo Creek Valley collapses flooding Buffalo Creek Valley and killing 118 people. Another 4,000 people were left homeless.








Flash Flood Rapid City, South Dakota
The Pactola Dam in Rapid City, South Dakota collapses after heavy rain with the resulting flash flood sweeping away homes below the dam in the flood plain area and killing 230 .








Alabama Governor George Wallace
Alabama Governor George Wallace is shot and left paralyzed while campaigning for President of the United States








Farming Output Improves
At this time in history, a typical U.S. farm produced enough food and fiber to supply the needs of up to 45 people (39 at home and six abroad). Ten years prior in 1962, only about 24 people were supported by the yield of an average American farm.


Current Figures


A Typical U.S. farm today supplies enough food and fiber to supply the needs of over 200 people








Northern Ireland Troubles
A Protestant march against the creation of "no-go" areas in Londonderry ends in a bloody battle between marchers and soldiers on the Craigavon Bridge.








Simon and Garfunkel Big Break
Simon and Garfunkel were a folk duo playing small gigs in Greenwich Village when Paul wrote the Sounds Of Silence. Columbia added some additional electrical instruments to the original track and it became a hit.

At the time of the hit making number 1 on the charts Simon and Garfunkel lived separate lives in separate continents, but the number 1 set them on the road to a successful recording career.








The Monkees Big Break
The Monkees started off by answering a local ad in Variety magazine in late 1965 looking for 4 insane boys for a new TV Series who are Folk and Rock Musician Types.
Out of the hundreds who applied Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Micky Dolenz got the job and the rest as they say is history.

The Monkees TV show ran for two seasons
The Monkees Movie
Four of their albums went to Number 1 on the Billboard chart








Bangladesh Gains Independence
Bangladesh divides from Pakistan and Gains Independence in 1972








Cat Scan
A CAT SCAN or to give it it's full title ( Computed Axial Tomography )

The first commercially CAT scanners came from
(1) EMI Central Research Laboratories England in 1972.

(2) Allan McLeod Cormack of Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA independently invented a similar process.


Layman's Description

Both use a series of X Rays up to 250 to build a three-dimensional image of the part of the body that is scanned, and because of the number and detail of the scans can build a 3D image of the internal organs of the human body including the brain, lungs, heart, bones even down to the blood vessels .

The latest CAT Scanners use electron beams

The advantages are well documented but it should also remembered that a CAT scan can expose the patient to up to 200 times the amount of radiation exposure as a simple X-RAY.








The Clean Water Act

The acts governing water pollution control go back over 100 years to the

Refuse Act (33 USC 407 section 13 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 making all industrial discharges into bodies of water a crime.
" prohibits anyone, including any individual, corporation, municipality, or group, from throwing, discharging, or depositing any refuse matter of any kind or any type from a vessel or from a shore-based building, structure, or facility into either (a) the nation's navigable rivers, lakes, streams, and other navigable bodies of water, or (b) any tributary to such waters, unless he has first obtained a permit to do so."


Now lets move onto the 70's / 80's and the beginning of strict enforcement of the Refuse act in 1966 causing problems for many of the biggest polluters, so the US government came up with the

Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments of 1972 and the Clean Water Act of 1977 and the Water Quality Act of 1987

Instead of strengthening the 1899 act the later acts from the 70's onwards are
( set up to allow reasonable amounts to vary by industry, location, type of pollution etc. ) which not only allows industrial waste dumping it condones and make legal the dumping of industrial waste.

The refuse act has been used in modern times very rarely for example in the case of the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1991 and in a few other cases.








Olympic Games 1972
The Summer Olympic Games of the XX Olympiad are held in Munich, West Germany

These Olympic games are remembered for a terrible terrorist attack by a members of the Black September organization who broke into the Olympic Village and took eleven Israeli athletes hostage in their apartment, killing two of them and holding the rest of the hostages in a standoff with police in the Olympic Village for 18 hours.

During the rescue attempt at the military airport of Fürstenfeldbruck, where the captors with their hostages had been transferred by helicopter all the surviving Israeli hostages were killed by the Palestinians. All but three of the Palestinians were killed as well.

Mark Spitz, a swimmer from the United States, set a world record when he won seven gold medals setting new world records for each of his gold medal events.

Olga Korbut, a diminutive Soviet gymnast, became the darling of gymnastics after winning a gold medal in the team competition event and winning two individual gold medals in the Balance Beam and the floor exercise events.








Batavia Indonesia Name Changed to Jakarta
The city of Batavia in Indonesia Changed it's name to Djakarta and later Jakarta
Dates seem to vary greatly depending on source but I think it finally became Jakarta in 1972










Trident Plane Crash Heathrow
A Trident jetliner crashes after takeoff from Heathrow Airport in London, killing 118 people and the cause is never identified apart from indications the plane was to full of passengers and luggage.









Airport Shootings Lod International Airport in Tel Aviv
Three gunmen open fire on crowds at Lod International Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing 26 people and injuring dozens more. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility and said they had recruited the gunmen from the Japanese Red Army who committed the murders.







Lunar Rover Apollo 16
Apollo 16 the fifth mission to land on the Moon with astronauts John W Young and Charles M Duke descend from lunar orbit and land on the moons surface in the Descartes Mountains,
When landed they drove an electric powered Lunar Rover to explore fully the Descartes Plateau. Young and Duke spent three days exploring the Descartes highland region and testing the Lunar Rover getting up to a top speed of eleven miles per hour which still stands as the record speed for any wheeled vehicle on the Moon.








British Union Strikes
280,000 British miners walked out at midnight in their first national strike for almost 50 years looking for an increase of up to £9 a week - on an average take home wage of £25.

42,000 registered dock workers begin a national strike over container companies using cheap labour and concerns over compulsory redundancies.
After one week the government under Edward Heath proclaimed a state of emergency which allowed the use of the British Army to unload cargo.






Power Cuts
Most parts of Britain are suffering with loss of electricity for up to 9 hrs per day, this includes local homes and businesses due to the miners strike now in it's sixth week. Central Electricity Generating Board has announced electricity will be switched off on a rota basis between 0700 and 2400 every day.
Miners accept a pay settlement after a seven-week strike. The strike had caused many companies to institute a three-day week when lack of coal to British power stations caused disruption to electricity supplies.








Ant-War Demonstrations
Antiwar demonstrations draw 100,000 demonstrators in cities across America including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.








Vietnam
North Vietnamese Invades South Vietnam
President Nixon orders a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam above the 20th Parallel to help with peace negotiations scheduled between Henry A. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in Paris on Jan 8








Aldershot Bombing By IRA
The IRA plant a bomb at the 16th Parachute Brigade headquarters at Aldershot, Hampshire killing 5 women and an army priest.








President Richard Nixon Visits Soviet Union
President Richard Nixon the first US president to visit Moscow arrives for talks with Soviet leaders over "international issues" including the war in Vietnam and the current Nuclear Arms Race. During his week long visit a treaty to halt the nuclear arms race Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (Salt) was agreed which limits the two superpowers to 200 defensive nuclear missiles each. The other important agreement was to work together more in space exploration which will the two countries first joint manned venture into space in June 1975.








Richard Nixon arrives in China
US President Richard Nixon arrives in China at the start of a week-long summit aimed at ending 20 years of difficult relations between the US and China.








Earthquake Nicaragua
Ten thousand people are feared dead after a two-hour earthquake wiped out as an estimated 80% of buildings in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua.








Earthquake Iran
An Earthquake centered on the town of Ghir, in southern Iraq kills up to an estimated 5,000 people an aircraft which flew over the area reports that there was not a single dwelling left standing above the ground .
Soldiers, police and villagers dig survivors from the rubble for almost four days after the disaster.








Plane Crash Andes Survivors Found
16 survivors from a plane that crashed in the Argentine Andes over two months earlier, two of the survivors reached civilization yesterday after a 10 day trek to get help. The survivors had lived on chocolate bars, sweets and light food they found in luggage but when food ran out Plane crash survivors resort to cannibalism after being lost in the Andes for two months have admitted they ate the flesh of dead companions to stay alive, 16 of the original 45 passengers survived the ordeal and defended their cannibalism .










California Ends Death Penalty
The California Supreme Court eliminated the death penalty with a 6-1 vote, saying it was unconstitutional








Biological Warfare
Seventy nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, agree to end biological warfare.








Volkswagen Beetle
The 15,007,034th Volkswagen Beetle rolled out of the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, beating the Ford Model T's previous production record to become the most produced car in history, By June 23, 1992 there had been over 21 million Beetles produced.

The Beetle is still the world's best selling single car design, but the Toyota Corrola has sold more ( currently over 30 million cars ) since introduced in 1966 but with many major design changes.








Thalidomide Victims
300 British Thalidomide victims accept a compensation deal said to be worth £20 million over 10 years


Thalidomide became notorious in the mid 50's to early 60's when it was prescribed to pregnant women to ease morning sickness. and was marketed under the names Distaval, Talimol, Nibrol, Sedimide, Quietoplex, Contergan, Neurosedyn, and Softenon.


It was sold in 50 countries around the world and is blamed for causing approximately 10,000 children to be born with severe malformations.


Thalidomide is approved today for the treatment of Leprosy and Multiple Myeloma but strictly controlled in it's use.










Dow Jones Breaks 1000 Barrier
On November 14, 1972 the Dow Jones closed above 1,000 (1,003.16) for the first time








The Start of Watergate
Five men are arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office, hotel, and apartment complex in Washington, D.C. , when they are arrested they have burglary tools, cameras and film, they were later identified as part of Nixon's re-election team.








Queen Elizabeth Sinks
The Ex. Queen Elizabeth renamed Seawise University Ship sunk into a Hong Kong Harbor despite two days worth of effort to put out the fire that had caused it to sink.








Fireworks Factory Explodes
An illegal fireworks factory being run in an eight floor apartment building, exploded in Rome with 15 killed and 100 injured in the blast.








CND March Aldermaston
The CND ( Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament ) organises a four day demonstration against nuclear arms including a march to Aldermaston.








Japanese Soldier Surrenders 1972
28 years after the war ended local farmers found a Japanese sergeant who was unaware that World War II had ended, he had survived in the Jungles of Guam carving tools and hunting for all those years waiting for orders from the Japanese Army












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