Sunday, August 16

Metal shards tore through the cabin of the royal Boeing 727. At an altitude of 3,000 meters, four Moroccan Air Force F-5 fighter jets, piloted by officers loyal to General Mohamed Oufkir, were shooting at their own monarch. King Hassan II, returning from France to Rabat, was aboard. The attack killed eight people and wounded dozens. The king, unharmed, grabbed the intercom and impersonated a dead officer, telling the rebel pilots their mission was accomplished. It was not.

The coup was the second attempt in fifteen months. General Oufkir, the king’s own defense minister and the architect of a failed 1971 palace siege, orchestrated this aerial assassination. The plot relied on the loyalty of senior air force personnel. It failed because the aging Boeing, though damaged, remained airborne, and because the king’s presence of mind created confusion. Upon landing at Rabat-Salé Airport, Hassan II walked down the stairs, inspected the bullet-riddled aircraft, and smoked a cigarette. Oufkir was found dead later that night from what was officially declared suicide.

This event mattered because it consolidated the king’s power through a paradox of perceived divine survival and ruthless secular repression. The narrative of the monarch’s miraculous escape, bolstered by his calm performance on the tarmac, was woven into state propaganda. Simultaneously, it triggered a severe crackdown. The air force was purged, and dissent was silenced more forcefully than before.

The attack’s legacy is a historical footnote of Cold War-era instability, often overshadowed by regional conflicts. It cemented Hassan II’s rule for another three decades, demonstrating that in Morocco, the ultimate authority flew not in a fighter jet, but on a commercial airliner that refused to fall.

The transfer involved no parchment deed. On the dry ground at Wattie Creek, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam bent down, gathered red soil into his hand, and poured it into the palm of Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari. “Vincent Lingiari,” he said, “I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people.” The gesture on August 16, 1975, concluded the Wave Hill walk-off, a pastoral workers’ strike that began in 1966 over wages and evolved into a landmark claim for Indigenous land rights.

The action was profoundly symbolic and deliberately limited. The government returned approximately 3,250 square kilometers of the Gurindji’s traditional country, not the entire Wave Hill station. The ceremony’s power lay in its recognition of prior ownership, a concept Australian law had long denied. The strike itself was a sustained act of defiance. Two hundred Aboriginal stockmen and their families walked off the Vestey’s cattle station, establishing a settlement at Daguragu and enduring years of hardship to assert their connection to the land.

Official narratives sometimes frame this as a benevolent government grant. It was, in fact, the result of relentless pressure and strategic activism. The Gurindji framed their demand not as a request for new property, but as a repatriation of what was already theirs. Their campaign garnered support from unionists and urban activists, creating a political force Whitlam could not ignore.

The event created a legal and moral precedent that directly informed the Native Title Act of 1993. It transformed the national conversation about sovereignty and dispossession. The handover is commemorated annually as Freedom Day, and its essence was distilled into Paul Kelly’s 1991 song “From Little Things Big Things Grow,” which chronicles the patience and resolve of the nine-year struggle. The ceremony was a theatrical moment, but the soil was real.

A low scrubland of red dust and rock, known as Scene 1, holds the fact. On August 16, 2012, a line of South African Police Service officers advanced toward a group of striking miners gathered on a rocky outcrop near the Marikana platinum mine. The miners, armed with traditional weapons like spears and machetes, had been in a days-long standoff over wages. The police, armed with R5 assault rifles, used a barbed wire fence as a containment cordon. When a group of miners moved to break through the cordon, the police opened fire. The shooting lasted approximately two minutes. Thirty-four men died. Seventy-eight were wounded. It was the single deadliest use of force by South African security forces against civilians since the 1960 Sharpeville massacre.

The event was a fracture in the narrative of the post-apartheid Rainbow Nation. The victims were black laborers. The authorities were a democratic, majority-black government. The conflict was economic, rooted in the vast inequality perpetuated by the mineral extraction industry. The police operation, later found by a commission of inquiry to have been tactically unsound and politically influenced, echoed the violent suppression of the past it was supposed to have ended.

Marikana exposed the continuities of power. The state protected capital and order with a violence that seemed borrowed from another era. The dominant trade union, the National Union of Mineworkers, was seen as part of a compromised political establishment, leading workers to rally behind the more militant Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union. The killings were not a spontaneous riot control failure but the culmination of a week of failed negotiations and escalating tension.

The impact is a stain and a symbol. A monument now stands at the site. Annual commemorations are held. The Farlam Commission’s report led to few prosecutions. Wages eventually increased, but the fundamental conditions—the hostels, the poverty, the distance between corporate profits and worker pay—persist. Marikana demonstrated that the machinery of state violence could be deployed irrespective of the color of the government controlling it.

Cecelia Cichan was four years old. Rescuers found her in the wreckage of Northwest Airlines Flight 255, still fastened in her seat, which had been torn from the fuselage and thrown clear. The McDonnell Douglas MD-82 had clipped a light pole and then the roof of a rental car building just after takeoff from Detroit Metropolitan Airport on August 16, 1987. It cartwheeled across Interstate 94, disintegrating and erupting into fire. The crash killed all 153 other passengers and crew, along with two people on the ground. Cecelia’s parents and older brother died. Her survival defied every statistical and physical logic.

The investigation determined the probable cause was the flight crew’s failure to set the wing flaps and slats for takeoff, combined with their failure to perform the pre-takeoff checklist. A critical warning system, the takeoff configuration warning horn, did not sound because a circuit breaker was reportedly pulled, a practice sometimes used to silence nuisance alarms. The aircraft simply never achieved sufficient lift. The crash remains one of the deadliest aviation accidents in U.S. history.

Public memory often focuses on the miracle of the lone child. This obscures the systemic failures the crash revealed: procedural laxity, crew resource management flaws, and design compromises in warning systems that allowed a single point of failure to be catastrophic. The National Transportation Safety Board issued recommendations that changed checklist discipline and warning system design.

Cecelia Cichan grew up in relative anonymity, a fact she has guarded fiercely. Her existence poses an unanswerable question within the tragedy. She is a living artifact of random chance, a person whose entire life is framed by an event she cannot remember. In 2013, she allowed a small tattoo of an airplane to be photographed; it is on her left wrist, a permanent, private marker of the moment that chose her, alone, to continue.