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Top Song(s)
• Billy Swan - I Can Help
• Abba - SOS
• 10cc - I'm Not in Love
• Captain & Tennille - Love Will Keep Us Together
• Carpenters - Please Mr Postman
Top Film(s)
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Jaws
• Dog Day Afternoon
• Barry Lyndon
Best Selling Book(s)
• Sh?gun - James Clavell
• Salem’s Lot - Stephen King
• Terms of Endearment - Larry McMurtry
• Looking for Mr. Goodbar - Judith Rossner
• Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
Famous Deaths
• January 17 – Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, 19th President of Colombia
• February 18 – Chivu Stoica, 48th Prime Minister of Romania and head of State
• February 25 – Elijah Muhammad, American Nation of Islam leader
• March 30 – Boots Adams, American business magnate, president of Phillips Petroleum Company
• April 5 - Chiang Kai-shek, Chinese nationalist general and politician, 1st President of the Republic of China
• June 3 - Eisaku Sato, Japanese politician, Prime Minister of Japan, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize
• June 13 – Jose Maria Guido, 33rd President of Argentina
• August 15 – Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, 2nd Prime Minister of Bangladesh and 1st and 4th President of Bangladesh
• August 27 – Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia
• October 30 – Gustav Ludwig Hertz, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
Medical/Science/Technology
• Aryabhata, India's first satellite, is launched using Soviet boosters.
• Viking program: NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.
• The term global warming is probably first used in its modern sense by Wallace Smith Broecker.
• Altair 8800 is released, sparking the era of the microcomputer.
• Bill Gates and Paul Allen form a company at this time called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
• The last naturally occurring case of smallpox is diagnosed and treated.
• Lyme disease first recognized at Lyme, Connecticut.
• Mini–mental state examination or Folstein test introduced to screen for dementia or other cognitive dysfunction.
• The Monty Hall problem in probability is first posed, by Steve Selvin.
• The MOS Technology 6502 is introduced.
Political
• January 1 – Watergate scandal: John N. Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are found guilty of the Watergate cover-up.
• January 2 – The Federal Rules of Evidence are approved by the United States Congress.
• February 11 - Margaret Thatcher defeats Edward Heath for the leadership of the opposition UK Conservative Party.
• February 21 – Watergate scandal: John N. Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, are sentenced to prison.
• March US -Senate revises filibuster rule, allows 60 senators to limit debate.
• June 1 – President Ford meets with President Sadat of Egypt for peace talks in the Middle East in Salzburg, Austria.
• July 21 – The Parliament of India voted to approve Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's declaration of a state of emergency.
• August 5 – President Ford posthumously pardons Robert E. Lee, restoring full rights of citizenship.
• November 20 – Former California Governor Ronald Reagan enters the race for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination.
• December 23 – United States Congress passes the Metric Conversion Act.
National
• January 6 - The Indiana Law Enforcement Academy begins operations.
• March 9 – Construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System begins.
• March 9 - Pennsylvania is 1st state to allow girls to compete with boys in HS sports.
• May 6 – A violent F4 tornado hits the Omaha metropolitan area, killing three and injuring more than 137.
• June 26 – Two FBI agents and one AIM member die in a shootout at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
• July 30 – In Detroit, Michigan, Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa is reported missing.
• August 3 – The Louisiana Superdome opens in New Orleans.
• August 20 – Viking program: NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.
• September 14 – Elizabeth Seton is canonized, becoming the first American Roman Catholic saint.
• December 29 – A bomb explosion at LaGuardia Airport kills 11.
Worldwide
• January 15 – Alvor Agreement: Portugal announces that it will grant independence to Angola on November 11.
• February 4 – An earthquake in Haicheng, Liaoning, China, kills 2,041 and injures 27,538.
• March 4 – Television cameras are first permitted in the Parliament of Canada.
• March 15 – In Brazil, Guanabara State merges into the state of Rio de Janeiro.
• April 17 - The Khmer Rouge captures Phnom Penh, Cambodia marking the end of the Cambodian Civil war.
• May 6 – The South African government announces that it will provide all Black children with free and compulsory education.
• June 5 – The Suez Canal opens for the first time since the Six-Day War.
• August 24 – Officers responsible for the military coup in Greece in 1967 are sentenced to death in Athens.
• September 6 – An earthquake of magnitude 6.7 kills at least 2,085 in Diyarbak?r and Lice, Turkey.
• October 31 - The Racial Discrimination Act 1975 takes effect in Australia.