● The government was to look into the case of Kwong Wah Hospital, where 121 patients had committed suicide over a nine-and-a-half-year period. Nurses at the hospital had complained of understaffing and overcrowding there. They agreed that money should be made available to put railings around windows, from which many patients had jumped to their deaths.

● Singapore Airlines might drop the Concorde supersonic jet service to London because of declining demand. In an internal report, the company explained its decision by saying: “It is not clear why the appeal of Concorde is diminishing. Perhaps the novelty has worn off.”

August 4, 1980

● Dozens of angry holidaymakers, many of them nudists, went on a rampage on Le Levant, a French island in the Mediterranean. At one point they stormed the town jail, locked up three policemen and freed a young woman from a holding cell. The riot first started in a bar the night before when the officers arrested the woman for drunken behaviour.

August 5, 1980

● Chinese immigrants had built themselves a little shanty town made from corrugated iron sheets under a pedestrian flyover in Wong Tai Sin. The 170-plus residents included legal mainland immigrants and families who could no longer afford to pay Hong Kong’s soaring rents.

August 6, 1980

● Frederick Hill, a British activist who protested against the compulsory wearing of helmets by motorcyclists, went back to jail for the 18th time for breaking the law and not paying the fines. Hill’s campaign against the helmet law intensified in 1976 after the Sikh community gained an exemption. He said no community should be treated favourably and insisted on equal treatment for all. Hill had accumulated a large number of unpaid summonses, and it was his refusal to pay the fines that often led to his imprisonment.

August 7, 1980

● A family kept their “mad son” chained to a tree trunk in a cave for 43 years in the village of Dom Basilio, in the northeast region of Brazil. A local newspaper said Pedro Miguel da Silva had a fit of rage in 1937 when he was 21, and the family decided it was best to hold him prisoner. He was fed daily and shaved twice a week by his two sisters. His plight became known after the sisters, who found his skin had turned completely yellow, called a local doctor. His condition was caused by a lack of sunlight.

● An elderly man robbed a bank in Galveston, Texas, and then sat back to wait for police so he could be arrested, police in Dallas said. An officer said the 74-year-old man had no relatives and had been wandering all over Texas, trying to commit a crime so he could be arrested and sent to prison where he wanted to spend the last days of his life.

● The head of a court at Mamasani in southern Iran had been given 25 lashes in a public flogging for smoking during the fasting hours of Ramadan, a local newspaper reported. It said the official was caught smoking by revolutionary guards in the court’s cafeteria.

August 8, 1980

● British pop icon Elton John had the temerity during a reception in the House of Commons to sit in the Speaker’s chair and on the government front bench, a Conservative member of parliament complained in a letter. John Carlisle had written to the leader of the House, Norman St John-Stevas, demanding an explanation of this “flouting of the conventions and customs” of parliament. St John-Stevas, who was the minister for the arts, was the one who invited the singer and other pop stars to the reception.

August 9, 1980

● A leaking valve on a truck carrying explosive propane gas forced the closure of the 14-lane double-tier George Washington Bridge and spawned one of the largest traffic jams in New York City’s history. The leak disrupted the travel of hundreds of thousands of commuters across the metropolitan area. It took seven hours for the leak to be plugged before the bridge could be reopened to traffic.

Remember A Day looks at significant news and events reported by the Post during this week in history