On this day in conspiracies

Yale lecturer Hiram Bingham, guided by local farmers, reaches the overgrown ruins and brings them to international attention. Local people already knew the site; Bingham's photographs and publications make it globally famous.

At roughly 2:45 a.m., Eastern Air Lines Flight 576, a DC-3 en route from Houston to Atlanta, is cruising near Montgomery, Alabama, at about 5,000 feet in clear moonlit conditions. Captain Clarence Chiles sees a glowing object approaching from ahead and to the right and alerts first officer John Whitted.

The Supreme Court rules unanimously in United States v. Nixon that the president must surrender the subpoenaed tapes to the special prosecutor.

Yudkowsky responds angrily, later recounting that he “very foolishly yelled at him, called him an idiot,” deletes the post, and bans discussion of the topic on LessWrong. He frames it as a potential information hazard: something better not spread, on the chance an unknown variant might genuinely harm someone.

The US Federal Trade Commission announces a record 5 billion dollar penalty against Facebook for privacy violations, and separately sues Cambridge Analytica while settling with Nix and Kogan.

CrowdStrike publishes a Preliminary Post Incident Review. It identifies that the defective Rapid Response Content passed the Content Validator and was not caught by further checks because of trust in prior successful deployments of the same template type, so it reached online hosts before the fault was detected.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly President Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer, interviews Maxwell over two days at the federal courthouse in Tallahassee under a grant of limited immunity. Days later she is transferred from FCI Tallahassee to the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, a move Democratic senators demand documents on.

A doctored version of the PTI clip spreads online. The real video is kept, but the original audio is swapped for an AI-generated track that makes Goyal appear to demand that protesters be violently punished, a line that plays on the CJP's own name. A separate fabricated clip circulates showing PM Modi appearing to threaten students.

A dramatically altered version appears online, appearing to show Trump collapsing as he tries to enter the vehicle. It spreads on X and TikTok, shared by many as alleged evidence that his declining health is being hidden.

A fresh wave breaks: a post and video by an account on Threads reasserts that Iran struck a US carrier with ballistic missiles. An AI-detection tool rates the clip very likely synthetic at high confidence, and Lead Stories debunks it as a digital creation, noting no credible outlet reported any such strike.