On this day in conspiracies

Britain votes. The Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin win a landslide, taking 413 seats; Labour falls to 151 and leaves office after less than a year. Rakovsky and Moscow denounce the letter as a 'clumsy forgery.'

Around midday, two French police officers, Louis Souchon and Roger Voitot, stop Ben Barka outside the Brasserie Lipp on Boulevard Saint-Germain and ask him to come with them. He is driven to a villa at Fontenay-le-Vicomte, south of Paris, owned by the gangster Georges Boucheseiche. He is never seen in public again.

A Darwin jury convicts Lindy Chamberlain of murder; she is sentenced to life with hard labour. Michael is convicted as an accessory and given a suspended sentence. Lindy, pregnant at the time of the trial, later gives birth to a daughter while imprisoned. No body, no murder weapon, and no motive is ever produced.

With Israeli agreement, Arafat is airlifted to the Percy military hospital in Clamart, near Paris, for treatment. His condition continues to worsen, and he slips into a coma.

Lion Air Flight 610, a nearly new 737 MAX 8, crashes into the Java Sea minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing all 189 aboard. A miscalibrated angle-of-attack sensor feeds MCAS false data; the system repeatedly pushes the nose down while the confused crew, unaware MCAS exists, fights to pull up.

Around 10 p.m. on Halloween weekend, a bidirectional crowd jams a narrow, downward-sloping alley beside the Hamilton Hotel in Itaewon. Compression in densities well above 10 people per square meter kills 159 and injures scores more, most of them young people at the first mask-free Halloween since the pandemic.