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The events of August 26 · Read the full edition → · More from August 26 →
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A van marked IBM delivers a bomb to Harvey's casino floor

The note inside says even its builder cannot disarm it without $3 million.

Harvey's Resort Hotel in Stateline, Nevada, was packed with late-summer gamblers on August 26, 1980, when men in a white van marked "IBM" wheeled a large steel box onto the second floor, posing as copier technicians. Inside was roughly 1,000 pounds of dynamite stolen from a Fresno construction site, rigged into what the FBI called the most complex improvised explosive device it had ever examined. A ransom note soon surfaced demanding $3 million and warning that no one, not even the bomb's own builder, could safely disarm it…

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More from August 26
1920

Colby signs the paper: women's suffrage is now the law of the land

No ceremony, no witnesses, just a secretary of state's signature at his home in Washington.
1791

Fitch gets his patent, but so does everyone else claiming the steamboat

The federal Patent Commission hands identical recognition to four rival inventors on the same afternoon.
1968

Democrats open in Chicago; protesters scale a Civil War statue in Grant Park

Police pull a demonstrator down and break his arm as chants of "kill the pigs" rise over the park.
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Gunfire follows the blast at the crowded evacuation gate, and every entrance to the airfield slams shut.
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Read the full August 26 edition →Everything that happened on August 26 →
More from Cold War America
1968

A jet 2½ times the size of anything flying rolls out of Boeing's new Everett plant

Representatives of 26 airlines that had already ordered the plane came to see what they'd bought.
1953

Two months after the armistice, Washington signs a defense pact with Seoul

Dulles and South Korean Foreign Minister Pyun Yeong-tae put the alliance in writing; the Senate still has to approve it.
1980

The House votes 376 to 30 to expel Michael Myers; no member has left this way since the Civil War

Caught on FBI tape taking a $50,000 bribe, the Pennsylvania Democrat becomes the first lawmaker expelled from Congress in more than a century.
1962

Schirra rides Sigma 7 into orbit, six times around on the Mercury program's first full-day test

A steak sandwich rode along in the storage compartment, but the real test was whether the hardware could outlast six orbits.
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