Wednesday, September 23

Juan Perón cast his ballot in the Argentine presidential election from Madrid. He had not set foot in his country for eighteen years, deposed by a military coup in 1955. On September 23, 1973, the results delivered a verdict more overwhelming than any poll: 62% for Perón, a margin of nearly five million votes. His running mate was his third wife, Isabel. The military junta that had ruled since 1966 permitted the election, calculating it could control an ailing, 77-year-old figurehead. It miscalculated.

The campaign was fought in a haze of myth and desperation. Peronist guerrillas had secured his return through violence and political pressure. The electorate—a coalition of left-wing militants, orthodox unionists, and a frightened middle class—sought a savior who could halt the spiraling violence between left and right. They voted for a symbol, not a platform. Perón’s plane landed in Buenos Aires two months later, greeted by a crowd of millions and sniper fire that killed at least thirteen.

His victory closed one cycle of Argentine history and violently opened another. He inherited an economy in freefall and a polity already at war with itself. The colossal mandate papered over fatal contradictions. His coalition shattered within months of his inauguration. Perón died nine months after taking office, leaving power to Isabel, whose incompetence precipitated a new and far more brutal military dictatorship in 1976.

The 1973 election is often framed as a triumphant homecoming. It was, in fact, a last-ditch exorcism that failed. The vote represented not a resolution but a final, peaceful attempt to reconcile irreconcilable forces. When that failed, the state’s machinery of violence consumed everything.

The announcement came shortly after noon. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron stated a grand jury had returned three counts of wanton endangerment against Detective Brett Hankison. The charges concerned bullets that penetrated a neighboring apartment wall during the raid on Breonna Taylor’s home. No indictments were filed against any officer for causing Taylor’s death. Cameron, the state’s first Black attorney general, cited the officers’ claim of identifying themselves and Taylor’s boyfriend firing a single shot first. The doctrine of self-defense, he said, barred prosecution.

Protests erupted in Louisville within hours. By nightfall, demonstrations spread to New York, Portland, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The demand, echoed on signs and in chants for over six months, had been to “arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor.” The legal system produced a different answer. The wanton endangerment charges treated the adjacent apartment’s occupants as the only identifiable victims of stray gunfire. The outcome turned on a specific, narrow reading of Kentucky law and the grand jury’s secret proceedings.

This event exposed a fundamental disconnect between public outcry and prosecutorial calculus. The movement saw a woman shot multiple times in her own home during a botched, no-knock raid for a suspect already in custody. The state’s presentation focused on the split-second dynamics of the raid itself. The non-indictment became a case study in the limitations of criminal law in addressing systemic police practices.

The lasting impact is found not in a courtroom but in legislation. The raid directly catalyzed Louisville’s ban on no-knock warrants, dubbed “Breonna’s Law.” It fueled a national re-examination of such warrants and became a central reference point in the broader 2020 protest movement. The legal door closed, but the political and policy response accelerated.

The wind shifted without warning. One moment, thousands of small boats dotted the southern basin of Lake Michigan near Chicago and Michigan City. The next, a cold front unleashed 50-knot winds and eight-foot waves. It was September 23, 1967, the opening weekend of Michigan’s first coho salmon sport fishing season. The fishery was a new, deliberately stocked attraction. Boats—many of them undersized, overloaded, and operated by inexperienced anglers—were caught miles from shore. Over 150 vessels capsized.

The Coast Guard and commercial tugboats launched a chaotic rescue in near-zero visibility. They pulled hypothermic men from the water and from overturned hulls. Seven died. Forty-six were injured. The disaster was a product of specific human enthusiasm. State agencies had successfully promoted the coho, or “silver salmon,” as a hard-fighting game fish that would revive Great Lakes sport fishing. The marketing worked too well. An estimated 10,000 anglers mobbed the ports that morning, desperate to be among the first to catch the novel species. Weather forecasts predicting afternoon storms were ignored or unheard.

The event forced a reckoning for the burgeoning Great Lakes salmon program. Authorities had created a economic and recreational success without a parallel safety infrastructure. In the aftermath, Michigan and the Coast Guard implemented stricter small-craft warnings, improved marine weather broadcasting, and launched public education campaigns on Lake Michigan’s notorious volatility.

The squall is a footnote in environmental history. It underscores the unintended consequences of ecological engineering. The coho salmon transformed the lakes, but its introduction also revealed a dangerous gap between managerial ambition and public preparedness. The water was the same; the reason for being on it had dramatically changed.

The aircraft was Qantas Flight 1, a Boeing 747-400 with 410 people on board, arriving from Sydney. The runway at Bangkok’s Don Mueang airport was wet from a torrential monsoon rain. The pilot landed long. The jet’s wheels failed to gain traction on the waterlogged surface. It hydroplaned, sheering through 200 meters of grass and soft ground beyond the pavement’s end, crashing through a localizer antenna and a perimeter fence before lurching to a stop. The landing gear collapsed. Engines tore loose. Fuel leaked from ruptured tanks into the mud. Not a single person died.

This event matters as a masterclass in controlled catastrophe. The crew’s training and the aircraft’s robust design contained a situation that, with a different angle of impact or an ignition of fuel, could have ranked among aviation’s worst disasters. Evacuation slides deployed into the muddy field. Only 45 people sustained minor injuries during the escape. The investigation pinpointed the cause: a combination of a late touchdown on a contaminated runway and the use of reverse thrust, which can reduce wheel braking effectiveness on very wet surfaces.

The accident is often remembered as a miracle of survival. In engineering terms, it was a validation. The 747-400’s structure absorbed immense deformation while preserving the passenger cabin. The post-crash response prevented fire. The findings led to updated international guidance on landing assessments on wet runways and the limitations of reverse thrust.

Qantas Flight 1 sits in an unusual category: a major airframe hull loss with no loss of life. It demonstrated the hidden margins of safety built into modern aviation. The jet was written off, left for years in that Thai field as a rusting monument to a very bad landing that, against considerable odds, was not a crash.