On this day in conspiracies

FBI agents execute simultaneous search warrants on Church of Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The Los Angeles raid alone uses 156 agents, at the time the largest single FBI raid on record, and the two raids seize roughly 48,000 documents.

Dave Shealy records VHS footage of a tall, dark, silhouetted figure moving through waist-deep water and sawgrass, which becomes the best-known Skunk Ape video. Skeptics, including the Smithsonian, say it is extremely hard to see anything but a person in a gorilla suit.

Iran's state outlets Fars and IRNA, Bahrain's Gulf Daily News, and Western conspiracy sites including InfoWars report the fabricated “Hornet's Nest” story as fact, giving it a veneer of news-agency credibility and pushing it worldwide.

After 45 years and more than a thousand suspects investigated, the FBI suspends active work on the case, redirecting resources elsewhere.

Dawn Sturgess, 44, dies in hospital in Amesbury, near Salisbury. She and her partner Charlie Rowley had been exposed on 30 June after Rowley found a discarded counterfeit perfume bottle; it had been used to carry and dispense the Novichok. Rowley survives.

The indictment is unsealed and Epstein pleads not guilty. Prosecutors move to detain him without bail, arguing he is an extraordinary flight risk given his wealth, private aircraft, and foreign ties.

Haitian authorities announce that the president was killed by a foreign hit squad. Over the following days security forces kill three of the attackers and detain most of the others, identifying the bulk of them as former Colombian soldiers, along with two Haitian-American men.

At around 11:30 a.m., Shinzo Abe, 67, is shot from behind while delivering a campaign speech for a Liberal Democratic Party candidate outside Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara. The masked attacker fires twice from close range with a bulky homemade firearm and is tackled at the scene; Abe is airlifted to a hospital and pronounced dead that afternoon.

Fact-checkers publish. Lead Stories debunks the furries 'ABC7' clip as AI-generated, pointing to the garbled ticker text and duplicated background figures, and examines the 'before Patriot Front' video, noting AI tells even as an automated Google detection tool gave shifting answers. Snopes separately addresses and rejects the broader claim that the rally itself was faked.