Today is the 160th day of 2025. There are 205 days left in the year

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
2011: Alabama passes a tough law against illegal immigration, requiring schools to find out if students are in the country lawfully and making it a crime to knowingly give an illegal immigrant a ride; federal courts have since blocked parts of the law.

OTHER EVENTS
68AD: Roman Emperor Nero commits suicide after being ousted in a military coup, imploring his secretary Epaphroditos to slit his throat to evade a Senate-imposed death by flogging.
1358: The Jacquerie, a revolt of French peasants against abuses inflicted upon them by the nobility of north-eastern France, suffers a critical defeat at Meaux.
1549: The Book of Common Prayer is adopted by the Church of England.
1815: Representatives from 200 states, governorships, cities and corporations from all over Europe adopt the Congress Act in Vienna, rearranging Europe after the Napoleonic Wars.
1856: Some 500 Mormons leave Iowa City, Iowa, and head west for Salt Lake City, Utah, carrying all their possessions in two-wheeled handcarts.
1870: English writer Charles Dickens, generally considered the greatest Victorian novelist, dies at Gad’s Hill near Chatham, Kent.
1942: Residents of the village of Lidice (now in the Czech Republic) are rounded up, most to be massacred the next day in reprisal for the assassination by Czech underground fighters of Reinhard Heydrich, deputy leader of the Nazi paramilitary group SS.
1943: The US federal government begins withholding income tax from pay cheques.
1946: Ananda Mahidol, the young king of Thailand who had recently returned to take up his duties, is found dead in his bed with a gunshot wound.
1973: American racehorse Secretariat wins the Belmont Stakes by an unprecedented 31 lengths to capture the Triple Crown; he earlier had won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes to become horse racing’s first Triple Crown winner in 25 years.
1986: The Rogers Commission releases its report on the Challenger disaster, criticising NASA and rocket-builder Morton Thiokol for management problems leading to the explosion that claimed the lives of seven astronauts.
1991: King Hussein and Jordanian politicians sign a document to revive multi-party democracy 34 years after political parties were banned.
1994: Fire destroys the Georgia mansion of Atlanta Falcons receiver Andre Rison; his girlfriend, rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, a member of the famous girl group TLC, admits causing the blaze after a fight and is later sentenced to probation.
1995: Colombian police arrest Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the leader of the Cali drug cartel, the world’s largest drug syndicate.
2002: Australia’s Roman Catholic Church admits that a nondisclosure clause had been included in some compensation agreements between the church and victims of sexual abuse by priests — a violation of church policy.
2006: Hamas’s military wing backs out of a truce after an Israeli artillery strike against suspected rocket-launching sites in the Gaza Strip hits a family beach picnic, killing seven people, including three children.
2011: Syrian policemen turn their guns on each other, soldiers shed their uniforms rather than obey orders to fire on protesters, and three young men who tried to escape are beheaded by forces loyal to President Bashar Assad as more than 2,400 Syrians stream across the open Turkish borders and provide the first accounts of a week of revolt and mayhem in Jisr al-Shughour.
2013: A 29-year-old intelligence analyst who claims to have worked at the National Security Agency and the CIA is revealed as the source of The Guardian’s and The Washington Post’s disclosures about the US Government’s secret surveillance programmes.
2014: The Pakistani Taliban threatens more violence after a five-hour assault on the nation’s busiest airport results in the deaths of 29 people — including all 10 attackers — raising a new challenge to the US ally trying to end years of fighting.
2019: Over one million people protest in Hong Kong over proposed new extradition laws to China, in one of the largest-ever protests in the city.
2023: Four Colombian children are found safe after surviving 40 days in the Colombian jungle after their plane crashed killing the three adults on board.
2024: Narendra Modi is sworn in as only the second third-term prime minister of India at the head of a BJP-led coalition Government at a ceremony in Delhi.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
Michael J Fox, US actor (1961- ); Johnny Depp, US actor (1963- ); Natalie Portman, Israeli-US actress (1981- )
— AP