On this day in conspiracies

The industry runs 'A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers', a full-page advertisement in more than 400 newspapers reaching an estimated 43 million people. It questions the cancer findings, promises that public health is the industry's paramount concern, and announces the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) to sponsor 'impartial' research. It marks the start of the coordinated doubt campaign.

Shastri arrives in Tashkent, in Soviet Uzbekistan, for peace talks with Pakistan's president Mohammad Ayub Khan, mediated by Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin.

President Gerald Ford establishes the Rockefeller Commission by executive order to examine CIA activities within the United States. Later that month the Senate votes 82 to 4 to create the Church Committee.

The Ministry of Intelligence issues a public statement, unprecedented for the Islamic Republic, admitting that “a number of irresponsible, misguided” agents within the ministry had committed the killings and were acting, in the ministry's telling, on their own rather than under orders. Several officials, including the senior security figure Saeed Emami, are arrested.

A separate conspiracy narrative attaches itself to the capture over the first weekend. Alex Jones argues on his show that Venezuela was the base of election fraud and that the capture was intended to extract evidence; the commentator Rogan O'Handley posts a similar reading the next day, as does The Federalist's Sean Davis, whose message is reshared by Ed Martin, who heads the Justice Department's 'weaponization' task force. Democracy Docket, reporting the pattern on 6 January, notes that Trump himself posted several videos repeating false claims about Dominion voting machines in the days after the capture.