TODAY IN HISTORY: Adult actor's vigilante plane attack on notorious mobster
Enraged by the Lockheed bribery scandal that had engulfed his nation's government, Japanese pornographic actor Mitsuyasu Maeno committed an attack against one of the key figures involved on March 23, 1976.
Maeno had become deeply involved in ultra-right wing politics in Japan, and viewed the scandal as a deep shame on his country.
The scandal involved US aerospace company Lockheed bribing senior government figures in order to sell their aircraft.
At the centre of the scandal in Japan was Yakuza figure and political fixer Yoshio Kodama.
Kodama was recovering from a stroke in his home in Tokyo at the time of the attack.
Before the attack, Maeno dressed in a World War II pilot's uniform and posed for photos.
"Sorry I haven't replied for a long time. Long live the Emperor!" he said over the radio before crashing his light plane into Kodama's house.
Maeno was the only person killed in the crash. Kodama was resting in another part of the home at the time.
Maeno's fruitless attack was scorned by senior figures in Japan.
"Maeno was performing an egotistical, grandstand play to win publicity," one top military officer said.
The actor had started off aspiring to be in mainstream films, but a lack of success there steered his career into softcore pornography.
The genre was very popular at the time in Japan, though not well-respected.
Renowned magician Chung Ling Soo suffered a fatal injury in a trick gone wrong on stage in London on March 24, 1918.
Chung Ling Soo was performing a bullet catch trick, a simple illusion where a gun fires a blank, and the magician feigns catching a bullet that had previously been concealed.
But a mishandling of the gun resulted in the magician being shot in the lung.
"Oh my God. Something's happened. Lower the curtain," he said.
The audience was shocked not only by the death but by his final words.
For years the magician performed his act without ever uttering a word on stage, with the explanation given that he did not speak any English.
But the truth was Chung Ling Soo was a white American man named William Ellsworth Robinson.
He had created a persona for himself as a Chinese conjuror to great success, becoming one of the UK's highest paid stage performers at the time.
Australian cricketing legend Allan Border became the first batsman in the sport to score 150 in both innings of a Test match on March 23, 1980.
The Aussie batsman reached 153 runs on the final day of the Test match against Pakistan in Lahore, after his first innings of score of 150.
March 23
On March 23, 2021, the huge container ship Ever Given got stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking all other traffic.
The vessel had crashed into the bank of a single lane stretch of the canal about six kilometres north of the southern entrance, near the city of Suez in Egypt.
The blockage disrupted global shipping and cost billions of dollars.
Hundreds of ships waited in place for the canal to be unblocked, while some ships were forced to take the much longer route around the Cape of Good Hope at Africa's southern tip, requiring additional fuel and other costs.
On March 29, salvage teams freed the Ever Given, ending a crisis that had clogged one of the world's most vital waterways and halted billions of dollars a day in maritime commerce.
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