Sunday, October 25

The first C-130s touched down at Point Salines airfield just after 5:30 a.m. They met heavier resistance than anticipated. Cuban construction workers, military engineers building the airstrip, exchanged fire with U.S. Rangers in the half-light. The operation, dubbed Urgent Fury, involved over 7,000 U.S. troops joined by 300 from the Caribbean Peace Force. Its public justification was the protection of several hundred American medical students at St. George’s University. The political trigger was the house arrest and subsequent execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and seven of his supporters six days earlier by a faction of his own New Jewel Movement.

The invasion was the first major U.S. military operation since the end of the Vietnam War. It revealed profound flaws in interservice communication and coordination. Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, and Marines operated with incompatible maps, radios, and command structures. A Navy A-7 Corsair mistakenly bombed a ground position, wounding seventeen U.S. troops. The Grenadian and Cuban forces, though outnumbered, were more disciplined than U.S. intelligence had assessed. The medical students were successfully evacuated, but the fighting lasted several days, resulting in 19 U.S. military deaths, 116 wounded, and at least 24 Grenadian military deaths along with 25 Cuban casualties.

The event mattered as a Cold War maneuver. The Reagan administration framed it as a necessary check on Soviet-Cuban expansionism in the hemisphere, pointing to the large airstrip under construction. Internationally, it was condemned by the United Nations General Assembly. Domestically, it provided a short-term boost in national confidence. Militarily, its operational failures directly led to the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which overhauled U.S. command structure and mandated joint operations. The intervention restored a constitutional government, but it also cemented a legacy of American unilateralism in the Caribbean basin.

The Learjet 35 took off from Orlando, Florida, at 9:19 a.m. Eastern Time, bound for Dallas. On board were two pilots, four passengers: golfers Payne Stewart and Robert Fraley, golf course architect Bruce Borland, and Van Ardan, an executive with Leader Enterprises. At approximately 9:44 a.m., air traffic control lost contact. The aircraft failed to turn toward Dallas and continued climbing to its maximum assigned altitude of 39,000 feet, then flew northwest on a straight course. Military fighters were scrambled. They intercepted the jet over northern Florida and reported frost on the windows, a motionless cockpit, and no sign of control surface movement. The plane flew on autopilot for nearly 1,500 miles.

For four hours, the ghost jet traversed the American heartland. It passed over St. Louis, over Kansas. The fighters, low on fuel, handed off tracking to others. The National Guard and FAA tracked its inevitable path. The autopilot held its course until the fuel exhaustion sequence began. Both engines flamed out. The aircraft descended in a spiral from 45,000 feet and impacted the earth at high speed in a pasture near Mina, South Dakota, at 1:24 p.m. Central Time. The crater was ten feet deep. All six occupants were killed instantly, likely within minutes of the initial loss of cabin pressure.

The crash was a national spectacle of eerie, passive tragedy. The NTSB investigation concluded the probable cause was an incapacitation of the flight crew due to hypoxia, the loss of cabin pressure at high altitude. The safety system designed to automatically deploy oxygen masks was found in the off position. No distress call was ever issued. The event led to increased scrutiny of cabin pressure warning systems and pilot training for rapid decompression emergencies. Stewart’s death at 42, at the peak of his career, shocked the sports world. The image of the unresponsive jet, a sealed coffin traversing the sky, endures as a stark lesson in the thin, pressurized line between routine flight and catastrophe.

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 passed on October 25, 1971, with 76 votes in favor, 35 against, and 17 abstentions. The roll call was a diplomatic earthquake. The resolution declared that the representatives of the People’s Republic of China were the only lawful representatives of China to the UN and expelled ‘the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek’ from the place they unlawfully occupied. The vote culminated over two decades of diplomatic struggle. Since its founding in 1949, the PRC had been barred from the UN, with the nationalist government in Taipei holding China’s seat, including its veto-wielding permanent seat on the Security Council.

The shift was the result of sustained geopolitical realignment. A key bloc of newly independent African and Asian nations, recognizing the PRC’s control of mainland China’s population and territory, pushed for the change. The United States, which had long led the effort to keep Taipei in place, switched its strategy in 1971 to advocate for ‘dual representation’—seats for both Chinas. This compromise failed utterly. The Albanian-sponsored resolution for a full transfer gained unstoppable momentum. The vote effectively ended the international legal fiction that the Republic of China government was the legitimate ruler of all China.

The immediate consequence was the physical changing of nameplates. The PRC delegation, led by Qiao Guanhua, took its seat. The Nationalist delegation walked out before the vote’s conclusion. The long-term impact was profound. It normalized the PRC within the global system of diplomacy and law, paving the way for U.S. President Nixon’s visit the following February. It isolated Taiwan diplomatically, forcing it into a shadow existence of informal relations. The ‘One-China Principle’ became the bedrock of most nations’ dealings with Beijing. The vote did not settle the question of Taiwan’s sovereignty, but it decisively answered the question of who would represent China on the world stage. The mechanics of a simple majority vote altered the balance of the Cold War and set the parameters for Asia’s next half-century.

Benfica and CF Os Belenenses played to a 2-2 draw at the Estádio da Luz on October 25, 1989. The match was the first leg of the Supertaça Cândido de Oliveira, Portugal’s super cup. The fixture was normal. The context was not. The trophy is traditionally contested between the winners of the Primeira Liga and the Taça de Portugal from the previous season. The 1988-89 season, however, was canceled in March 1989 due to a refereeing strike and widespread club disputes over the competition’s format. No champion was crowned. No cup winner was decided.

The Portuguese Football Federation faced a peculiar problem. It had a trophy but no logical contestants. Its solution was an administrative creation. It appointed the two clubs that had been leading the abandoned league table—Benfica and Porto—to contest the Supertaça for the league place. For the cup place, it appointed the finalists from the previous year’s 1988 Taça de Portugal, which were Belenenses and FC Porto. Since Porto qualified via both criteria, the federation simply moved to the next eligible cup team from 1988, which was the semi-finalist Estoril. Estoril declined. The spot then went to the other 1988 semi-finalist, Vitória de Guimarães, who also declined. The federation finally offered the place to Belenenses, the 1988 runners-up, who accepted. The 1989 Supertaça was thus a phantom competition for a void season, contested by one team that was leading a canceled league and another that had lost a cup final seventeen months prior.

The second leg was played in January 1990. Benfica won 3-0, claiming a trophy for a season that officially never happened. The event matters as a monument to football bureaucracy’s desire for order over logic. It underscores how competitions can acquire a life of their own, independent of the sporting merit they are meant to certify. The 1989 Supertaça exists in the record books, a perfectly legitimate title with a perfectly absurd pedigree. It is a cup for a championship that wasn’t, a finalist that wasn’t, and a season that dissolved into argument. The game was real. The goals counted. The reason for playing them was an elaborate fiction.