On this day in conspiracies

The 17th episode of CBS Radio's The Mercury Theatre on the Air airs at 8 p.m. Eastern. Adapted by Howard Koch and narrated by Orson Welles, it relocates the invasion to Grovers Mill, an unincorporated village in West Windsor, New Jersey, and stages the first half as a sequence of realistic breaking-news bulletins interrupting dance music.

In the aftermath of Kisumu, the government bans the opposition Kenya People's Union, detains its leaders, and places Odinga under house arrest, moves that turn Kenya into a de facto one-party state and deepen the Kikuyu-Luo rift the assassination had opened.

Baden goes public, telling reporters the neck injuries look to him more consistent with homicidal strangulation than hanging. Dr. Sampson rejects his conclusion and stands by the suicide ruling. The dispute is about manner of death; both sides agree Epstein is dead.

Lula defeats Bolsonaro in the runoff by roughly 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent. Bolsonaro does not concede for days, and 'the machines stole it' spreads through supporter networks.

As the scale of the disaster becomes clear, early online rumors circulate: that the deaths were exaggerated or staged, that partygoers were high on drugs, and that a named celebrity had drawn the crowd. Actor Yoo Ah-in's agency states he was abroad and unconnected to the event.

New York City and State agree to pay a combined $36 million (about $26 million from the city, $10 million from the state) to Aziz and to Islam's estate to settle their wrongful-conviction claims.

President Biden signs Executive Order 14110 on 'Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,' the most sweeping US governance action on AI to date; days later, 28 countries and the EU sign the Bletchley Declaration on frontier-AI safety.

Amazon announces roughly 14,000 corporate job cuts. On the earnings call, Jassy says the reductions were “not really” financially driven and “not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” attributing them instead to culture and cutting management layers, even as the company's own messaging elsewhere cited transformative technology.

3I/ATLAS reaches perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, at about 1.36 astronomical units, just inside the orbit of Mars. It never comes near Earth and poses no threat.