Hector Pieterson

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Red Bird – watercolour on paper

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Hector Pieterson was thirteen when a bullet dropped him in Soweto on June 16, 1976. Sam Nzima's photograph — Hector carried by a screaming Mbuyisa Makhubo — ran worldwide and became the image of apartheid. Makhubo disappeared.

On a Sunday night in August 1971, Nixon told the world — and blindsided every allied government — that dollars were no longer redeemable for gold. The Bretton Woods system died in a 15-minute TV address.

A bullet grazed Frank Costello's skull in 1957 because he turned his head at precisely the wrong — or right — moment. The slug left a two-inch furrow. He read the note in his pocket and walked out.

Bosco, a black Labrador–rottweiler mix, was elected mayor of Sunol, California in 1981 over two human candidates — and held the role until his death in 1994, becoming the town's most beloved public figure.

To swing a 1984 county election in Oregon, Rajneeshees poured salmonella cultures onto ten restaurant salad bars, sickening 751 people — the first bioterror attack on U.S. soil. The plot was conceived by Ma Anand Sheela.

Leon Black founded Apollo after being effectively pushed out of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1990. The SEC barred him from the securities industry — then watched the firm he built grow to manage $600 billion. Bars, it turns out, are negotiable.

In 9 CE, three full Roman legions — 20,000 men — walked into a German forest and never came out. Augustus reportedly roamed his palace at night crying 'Varus, give me back my legions.'

Rapture was built on Ayn Rand's Objectivism — pure individual reason, no government, no God. By the time the player arrives, its citizens are injecting gene-splicing drugs and eating each other. The ideology ate itself first.

Ofili painted the Virgin Mary with a clump of elephant dung as one breast and pornographic collage for her halo. Mayor Giuliani called it 'disgusting' and tried to evict the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.