On this day in conspiracies

A conference convenes at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, drawing senior physicists including Edward Teller and laboratory director Norris Bradbury, meteor experts Lincoln LaPaz and Joseph Kaplan, and military and intelligence officers. The group debates meteors, electrical phenomena, and other ideas but cannot agree on what the fireballs are. Kaplan tells LaPaz he knows of no secret project that would explain them.

President Carlos Andrés Pérez, weeks into his second term, announces a shock economic package aligned with IMF conditions, nicknamed El Paquetazo. It includes cuts to fuel subsidies and steep increases in public-transport fares.

On a TikTok Live, Gomez tells commenters that her weight fluctuates because of her lupus medication: when she is on it she holds water weight, and off it she loses weight. She says she would rather be healthy, that she is 'not a model,' and tells body-shamers to 'go away.' The changes the theory treats as uncanny, she has already explained as ordinary and medical.

The military announces it has finished recovering the balloon's debris off South Carolina, including the payload structure, electronics, and optics, and that the material has gone to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, for analysis.

Russian prison authorities announce that Navalny has died at the IK-3 penal colony in Kharp, above the Arctic Circle, at the age of 47. His widow and allies say he was killed; Western governments hold the Russian state responsible for his death.