On this day in conspiracies

The Soviet Union detonates its first atomic bomb, years earlier than many U.S. officials expected. The shock intensifies an urgent question for American intelligence: how to monitor Soviet plutonium production from a distance by sampling the radioactive gases such plants release.

Two Wasco County officials, county judge William Hulse and commissioner Raymond Matthews, visit Rajneeshpuram and are given glasses of water. Both later fall ill; Hulse becomes seriously sick and is hospitalized. Sheela is later charged with assault for these poisonings, which prosecutors treat as an early use of the same method.

The Court issues its reparations and costs judgment, ordering Venezuela to compensate the families in the cases before it, to resume and complete the exhumations, to identify the remains and return them to relatives, and to investigate and punish those responsible for the killings and the clandestine burials.

In Acatlan, in Mexico's Puebla state, Alberto Flores and his nephew Ricardo Flores, in town to buy building materials, are detained for a minor disturbance. A false WhatsApp and Facebook rumor spreads that they are child-snatching organ traffickers. A mob drags them from the local jail, beats them, and burns them alive. Prosecutors find no evidence either man committed any crime.