Today is the 69th day of 2025. There are 296 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2006: In response to legislation in the US House of Representatives that would make illegal immigration a felony, some 300,000 people jam downtown Chicago to demand rights for undocumented migrants — a turnout that surprises even organisers of the march and that ignites similar rallies in other major US cities.

OTHER EVENTS

1876: Alexander Graham Bell’s “liquid” transmitter design permits the first transmission of speech by Bell to his assistant, Thomas Watson.

1933: Soon after Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor, the first Nazi concentration camp in Germany opens at Dachau where at least 32,000 people will die from disease, malnutrition, physical oppression, and execution.

1938: The rights of Rumanian Jews to citizenship are extensively revised.

1942: Metropolitan opera basso Ezio Pinza is taken to Ellis Island as an enemy alien by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

1962: A conference of 48 wheat-producing nations approves, at Geneva, a three-year agreement to stabilise wheat and flour prices.

1970: New York City police speculate that a Greenwich Village townhouse demolished by explosions four days earlier had been used as a bomb factory by members of the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

1971: William McMahon is sworn in as prime minister of Australia, following a parliamentary Liberal Party vote of no confidence in Prime Minister John Gorton.

1976: In a written deposition taken on January 15 and released on March 10, former US President Richard M Nixon testifies he ordered the FBI to tap the telephones of national security aides and newsmen in 1969, and that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger selected those who were to be tapped.

1981: The foreign ministers of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates establish a Gulf Cooperation Council during a meeting in Muscat, Oman; the six Persian Gulf nations hope to improve security and stability in their part of the world by coordinating their economic, political and security policies.

1997: The espionage trial of Harold J Nicholson begins in Alexandria, Virginia, USA.

1998: The elected president of Sierra Leone, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, returns from 10 months in exile; his return follows the ejection, by an international military force led by Nigeria, of the military government formed after a coup by Major Johnny Paul Koromah.

2001: The Nuu-chah-nulth, the largest native tribal group in British Columbia, agree to a treaty with the provincial and federal governments which gives the natives a measure of autonomy, a share in the land’s resources, and a large one-time payment.

2002: Denis Sassou-Nguesso is overwhelmingly elected to continue in the presidency of the Republic of Congo for a term of seven years.

2003: German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom announces its losses in 2002, about US$27.1 billion — the biggest shortfall in European corporate history.

2006: Six young Japanese are found dead from asphyxiation in a car north-west of Tokyo — victims of a surge in suicide pacts arranged over the Internet.

2007: Year-long talks on the future status of Kosovo between Serbia’s Government and the disputed province’s pro-independence ethnic Albanian leadership end in deadlock, with Serbia rejecting a UN-mediated proposal.

2009: A gunman, 28-year-old Michael McLendon, kills 10 people including his mother, four other relatives, and the wife and child of a local sheriff’s deputy across two rural Alabama counties, before committing suicide.

2010: The board of the troubled school district of Kansas City, Missouri, votes to close 28 of the city’s 61 schools.

2011: King Mohammed VI says that Morocco will revise its constitution for the first time in 15 years, aiming to strengthen democracy in the face of a push across the Arab world.

2015: See You Again, released by Wiz Khalifa and featuring Charlie Puth, is commissioned by the Furious 7 film as a tribute to Paul Walker; it wins Billboard Song of the Year for 2015. Marvin Gaye’s family wins a record US$7.3-million lawsuit — for music copyright infringement of Gaye’s Gotta
Give It Up
— against Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and T.I for their 2013 song
Blurred Lines.

2017: South Korean politician Park Geun-Hye’s presidency ends as the country’s Constitutional Court upholds her impeachment; she becomes South Korea’s first democratically elected president to be removed from office.

2018: Two girls, ages 8 and 6, become the first female weightlifters to appear on Iranian television, after a protest.

2021: Video gaming platform Roblox goes public on the New York Stock Exchange, valued at US$45 billion.

2023: Gary Lineker, the BBC’s highest-paid presenter, is suspended for tweeting that the UK Government’s immigration policy is an “immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s”.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Kim Campbell, prime minister of Canada and first female prime minister of her country (1947- ); Timbaland, US rapper-producer (1972- ); Emily Osment, American actress in Hannah Montana and Spy Kids singer (1992- ); Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio), Puerto Rican rapper and singer-songwriter (1994- ); Belinda Bencic, Swiss tennis player (Hopman Cup 2018-19 with Roger Federer) (1997- )

— AP