On this day in conspiracies

The trial of Hunanyan and his co-defendants opens in Yerevan's Kentron and Nork-Marash district court. Over nearly three years it hears extensive testimony but, critics say, sheds little light on whether anyone stood behind the attackers.

IOC President Jacques Rogge, acting on an ISU recommendation, announces that Salé and Pelletier will be awarded a duplicate gold medal, while Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze keep theirs, since no wrongdoing is attributed to the skaters themselves.

Security forces arrest Fathi Terbil in Benghazi. The arrest brings the victims' families and their supporters into the streets; the protest swells into a broader revolt that spreads across eastern Libya, marking the start of the uprising that will topple Gaddafi.

A roughly 20-meter asteroid enters the atmosphere undetected and explodes over Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring about 1,500 people, mostly from shattered glass. The event is real and genuinely unforeseen, and conspiracy theories seize on it as proof that dangerous objects 'sneak through' or are quietly known. In fact it shows the honest limit: small bodies can be missed, but small is not planet-killer.

Malaysian authorities conduct a post-mortem examination. Police begin arresting suspects, including the Indonesian woman Siti Aisyah and the Vietnamese woman Doan Thi Huong, both captured on airport CCTV, and a Malaysia-based North Korean man; four North Korean suspects are already reported to have flown out of the country on the day of the attack.

France's Court of Cassation, the country's highest court, confirms the closure of the investigation, ending a legal saga of more than two decades with no one charged and the attribution formally unresolved.