On this day in conspiracies

Astronomers Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp independently discover a bright new comet, later designated Hale-Bopp. Over the following year it becomes one of the most widely observed comets of the century, and the Heaven's Gate group comes to regard it as the marker of their long-awaited departure.

A record of a Downing Street meeting of Blair's senior advisers, later leaked and published in 2005 as the Downing Street Memo, states that in Washington “military action was now seen as inevitable” and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” The meaning of “fixed” is disputed to this day.

The local newspaper The Independent runs the photograph under the punning headline "The Hound of Bonacville." The light piece speculates that the creature could be a turtle without its shell or an experiment from the nearby federal animal-disease lab.

A user named Roko posts “Solutions to the Altruist’s burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick.” Buried in it is the argument that a future friendly AI might, to hasten its own creation, pre-commit to punishing those who understood it was coming but did not help. Roko’s own intent was partly cautionary: a reason to be wary of building such an agent.

A Carrington-class coronal mass ejection tears across Earth's orbit at more than 2,000 kilometres per second and misses the planet by roughly nine days of solar rotation. NASA documents the near-miss openly, and a 2013 analysis estimates a direct hit could have cost the United States alone between 600 billion and 2.6 trillion dollars. The event that most vindicates the real hazard was disclosed by the agencies, not concealed.

Epstein is found semiconscious on his cell floor at about 1:27 a.m. with a strip of bedsheet around his neck and marks on it. His cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, a former police officer awaiting trial on unrelated murder charges, is questioned and cleared of any involvement. Epstein is placed on suicide watch.

Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle testifies to a congressional committee and faces bipartisan criticism over the agency's account; she resigns the next day. Shifting and incomplete official explanations in the following weeks deepen public suspicion, even as investigators frame the problem as failure rather than design.

The UK Supreme Court unanimously quashes the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, ruling that jury misdirection at their trials had undermined the fairness of the proceedings. The court does not find that the rate was honestly set; it finds that whether a submission reflected a submitter's genuine opinion was a factual question wrongly taken from the jury. The Serious Fraud Office declines to seek retrials.

Press Trust of India records Goyal speaking to reporters outside Parliament during the protest controversy. This genuine footage will shortly become the raw material for a deepfake: the visuals are authentic, and only the audio is later replaced.