On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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City's Sanitation Dept and other interests will be able to resort to trucking, at least in part, nearly 10,000 tons of city refuse accumulated during strike by tugboat crewmen; tugboat illus (S)
Gov Corey urges legis that would merge 11 types of trial courts in state into 1 statewide court and would empower him to choose several hundred judges involved; new legis would provide for elimination of such trial cts as Family Cts, Surrogates Cts and Supreme Cts and for creating 1 type of statewide trial ct to be called Supreme Court (M)
Article on direct-reduction steel-mfg process being promoted by Hylsa SA of Mexico; such installations require no coke, no pig iron and no blast furnace--only natural gas; HYL, sister mktg co, has lined up joint ventures with foreign cos, which will provide all engineering and construction needed to install such plants; process is particularly attractive to developing countries because it requires smaller investment and is suitable for small scale operations; HYL is trying to convince estab steel-makers that they should add direct-reduction plants to their blast-furnance operations, thereby reducing need for coke and raising productivity; drawback of process is need for abundant supplies of natural gas; diagram of blast-furnace and direct-reduction processes; Hylsa and HLY execs comment (M)
Calif Gov Brown asks Nuclear Regulatory Comm to temporarily shut down Rancho Seco nuclear power plant near Sacramento, which was built by Babcock & Wilcox, bldr of 3 Mile Island plant; is concerned that accident at Pa plant might be due to generic defect; elected dirs of Sacramento Munic Utility Dist, which owns and operates plant, vote 3 to 2 against closing; Paul Carr, dir, says Brown is motivated by pol; 13 persons are arrested in antinuclear demonstration at Rancho Seco site (M)
EEC Exec Comm urges new barriers against Japanese exports if Japan fails to act to reduce growing trade surplus by June economic summit meeting in Tokyo (M)
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of March 28, 1979, covering April 2, 1979.
Bee Gees
The Doobie Brothers
Dire Straits
Gloria Gaynor
Rod Stewart
1979A Soviet bio-warfare laboratory at Sverdlovsk accidentally releases airborne anthrax spores, killing 66 plus an unknown amount of livestock.[†]
On 2 April 1979, spores of Bacillus anthracis were accidentally released from a Soviet Armed Forces research facility in the city of Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union. The ensuing outbreak of the disease resulted in the deaths of at least 68 people, although the exact number of victims remains unknown. The cause of the outbreak was denied for years by the Soviet authorities, which blamed the deaths on consumption of tainted meat from the area, and subcutaneous exposure due to butchers handling the tainted meat. The accident was the first major indication in the Western world that the Soviet Union had embarked upon an offensive programme aimed at the development and large-scale production of biological weapons.
In 1979, the world population was approximately 4,368,539,528 people[†]