Crime & disaster

Investigators, forensic examiners and a Pakistani government all offered different accounts of exactly how Benazir Bhutto died in December 2007, and none of the competing versions has ever satisfied every observer of the case.

1193

-600

1906

1989

2004

2010

2011

Tacloban's own evacuation shelter was drowned by the storm surge it was supposed to protect people from, because Typhoon Haiyan's warnings focused on wind speed while the water, not the wind, did almost all the killing.

2015

1963

1968

1995

Australia's Black Summer burned an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom and killed an estimated three billion animals, and it happened after fire chiefs had already spent months publicly warning that the country was not ready.

Queensland's premier called the water that hit Toowoomba and Grantham in January 2011 an inland tsunami, a strange thing to say of a town seven hundred metres above sea level, and a court case running to 2022 settled how far the dam upstream was to blame.

Historians still cannot agree whether the 1943 Bengal famine came from an actual shortage of rice or from wartime policy distributing a barely reduced supply catastrophically, and the death toll swings by a factor of five depending which you accept.

2004

Plague pits in Siena were dug so deep the chronicler said dogs dragged out the dead, but nobody recording the disaster could say how many people the plague actually killed.

2016

Genetic testing on teeth from medieval graves finally confirmed in 2010 what centuries of chroniclers had only described in symptoms, that a single bacterium caused a pandemic whose recurring waves lasted from the 1340s into the early nineteenth century.

A treaty signed by a minority faction, ratified by a single Senate vote, overrode a Supreme Court ruling the president simply declined to enforce.

1997

2010

A French army convicted the wrong officer of treason on flimsy handwriting analysis, then spent twelve years defending the verdict rather than admitting the mistake.

Newer research says the exodus most people picture barely happened; population fell mainly because fewer people moved in, not because everyone fled.

79

2003

2011

1888

Official records counted eight deaths; one historian argues the real number, once you count the poor nobody bothered to record, could run into the thousands.

Food kept leaving Ireland by ship while roughly a million people starved, a fact that turns the argument over this famine less into what happened and more into what to call it.

1958

1937

A law that spoke only of voluntary land exchange produced forced marches that killed thousands, and a Supreme Court ruling against it changed nothing because the president simply declined to enforce it.

1999

2003

1995

1755

2005

Hooker Chemical sold the land above its own toxic waste for one dollar, attached a legal waiver, and still ended up found negligent decades later, a sequence that shaped how American law now treats a seller's warning as something less than a shield.

2004

2017

2002

1883

Myanmar's military government let an American aircraft carrier group sit offshore for weeks with aid it refused to accept, while the storm it was refusing help for had already killed as many people as some entire wars.

2016

2015

1988

2002

1927

Nineteen people hanged in a colony of a few thousand, during a decade when witch panics were already fading out across the Europe that colony had come from.

It was never Spanish, and wartime censorship is the only reason the name stuck: Spain simply had a free press willing to report it.

1976

1912