This year is notable for Apollo 11's first landing on the moon. Events January January 4 – The Government of Spain hands over Ifni to Morocco. January 5 Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701 crashes into a house on its approach to London's Gatwick Airport, killing 50 of the 62 people on board and two of the home's occupants. January 14 – An explosion aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise near Hawaii kills 27 and injures 314. January 19 – End of the siege of the University of Tokyo, marking the beginning of the end for the 1968–69 Japanese university protests. January 20 – Richard Nixon is sworn in as the 37th President of the United States. January 22 – An assassination attempt is carried out on Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev by deserter Viktor Ilyin. One person is killed, several are injured. Brezhnev escaped unharmed. January 27 Fourteen men, 9 of them Jews, are executed in Baghdad for spying for Israel. Reverend Ian Paisley, Northern Irish Unionist leader and founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster is jailed for three months for illegal assembly. January 28 – 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill: A blowout on Union Oil's Platform A spills 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil into a channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County in Southern California; on February 5 the oil spill closes Santa Barbara's harbor. The incident inspires Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson to organize the first Earth Day in 1970. February February 4 – In Cairo, Yasser Arafat is elected Palestine Liberation Organization leader at the Palestinian National Congress. February 8 The Allende meteorite explodes over Mexico. After 147 years, the last weekly issue of The Saturday Evening Post is published in the United States. (The magazine is later briefly resurrected as a monthly magazine.) February 9 – The Boeing 747 "jumbo jet" is flown for the first time, taking off from the Boeing airfield at Everett, Washington. February 13 – Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorists bomb the Montreal Stock Exchange. February 14 – Pope Paul VI issues Mysterii Paschalis, a motu proprio, deleting many names from the Roman calendar of saints (including Valentine, who was celebrated on this day). February 17 – Aquanaut Berry L. Cannon dies of carbon dioxide poisoning while attempting to repair the SEALAB III habitat off San Clemente Island, California. February 24 – The Mariner 6 Mars