On this day in conspiracies

Five men are arrested inside the Democratic National Committee's offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., caught planting listening devices and photographing documents.

In Milan, Calvi's personal secretary Graziella Corrocher falls to her death from a Banco Ambrosiano window, leaving a note denouncing him. Her death is recorded as a suicide. On the same day Banco Ambrosiano's board is dissolved as the bank collapses.

VirusBlokAda, a small antivirus company in Belarus, flags the malware after an Iranian client's computers keep crashing and rebooting. It is initially named Rootkit.Tmphider; Symantec soon renames it W32.Stuxnet. The wider security industry begins to pull it apart.

A catastrophic fire at Pedrógão Grande kills 66 people, many trapped in their cars. The scale of the disaster and the sense that the state had failed turn wildfires into a national trauma and a magnet for suspicion about who is really to blame.

The Senate passes the GENIUS Act (S.1582) by a bipartisan 68–30 vote. The bill licenses 'permitted' stablecoin issuers, requires full reserve backing, and bars issuers from claiming their tokens are backed by the U.S. government, federally insured, or legal tender.

Spain's official report attributes the blackout to a combination of technical failures, including voltage-control shortcomings and planning gaps in how reactive power was managed, and again rules out a cyberattack.

The videos turn stranger. Franco references mysterious alien friends and says something not human is in the garage where he goes to paint at night, describing glowing eyes and a hand. He says he heard something move before he turned on the light.

Fact-checkers begin addressing the surge. Snopes examines circulating 'crash footage' and the faked-death narrative; reporting confirms the crash and death are real and that no evidence supports a staged disappearance.