one last effort to delay when one Tory MP unsuccessfully moved to defer the final reading until the Supreme Court of Canada decide on the measure's constitutionality. Under the new law, government services in both languages was to be offered in any designated "bilingual districts" in "areas where 10 percent or more of the population speaks the official language not spoken by the majority." There were no "nays" heard on the voice vote, though at least one PC member said in advance that we would abstain. Canada's Senate would approved the next day, the Governor General gave Royal Assent on July 9, and the law would come into effect 90 days later on September 7. Twenty-one coal miners in Taiwan were killed, and 59 others injured, in a methane gas explosion west of the capital at Taipei. Born: Joe Sakic, Canadian ice hockey center; in Burnaby, British Columbia Sylke Otto, German luge athlete, winner of four world championships and two Olympic gold medals; in Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany (now Chemnitz, Germany) Cree Summer, Canadian-American actress and singer, known for Inspector Gadget, A Different World, and Rugrats Died: Gladys Swarthout, 68, American mezzo-soprano for the New York Metropolitan Opera, and film actress July 8, 1969 (Tuesday) The first of 25,000 American troops to be withdrawn from the Vietnam War arrived at McCord Air Force Base in the state of Washington, south of Seattle at 6:30 in the evening, when a C-141 transport plane, one of nine to land at McCord, arrived. The drawdown, announced a month earlier, would be completed in a little more than seven weeks with the departure on August 28 of the 25,000th soldier; most of the troops would come from the U.S. Army 9th Infantry Division and from some U.S. Marine air squadron units. American nerve gas weapons were accidentally released from their containers by a crew of U.S. Air Force members at Kadena Air Base on the Japanese island of Okinawa. The mishap, which injured 23 troops and a civilian, involved either VX or Sarin, both nerve agents. Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser to U.S. President Nixon, would later blame the accident on an unidentified Air Force major "whose aesthetic sense exceeded his judgment" and who had ordered the troops "to have the canisters painted white" and that some of the drums were punctured during the sandblasting that preceded the painting. Despite attempts by the military