Today is Monday, Sept. 1, the 244th day of 2025
with 121 to follow.
This is Labor Day in the United States.
The moon is waxing. Morning stars are Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus and Venus. Evening stars are Mars, Mercury, Neptune and Saturn.
On this date in history:
In 1715, France's King Louis XIV died after ruling the country for 72 years, the longest reign for a French monarch.
In 1807, Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States under Thomas Jefferson, was acquitted of treason charges growing out of an alleged plot to set up an independent empire in the country's south and west.
In 1914, the last known passenger pigeon died at the Cincinnati Zoo.
In 1923, an earthquake struck Yokohama, Japan. The so-called Great Kantō earthquake killed an estimated 143,000 people.
In 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, Great Britain and France served an ultimatum on Adolf Hitler but it was ignored. This date is considered to be the start of World War II.
In 1964, Masanori Murakami became the first Japanese player to appear in a Major League Baseball game in the San Francisco Giants' 4-1 loss to the New York Mets. He finished out the 1964 season and played another full season in 1965 with the Giants before returning to Japan to play for the Nankai Hawks.
In 1972, American Bobby Fischer defeated Russian Boris Spassky for the world chess championship.
In 1983, a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 -- Flight 007 -- strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down by a Soviet jet fighter. All 269 people on the airliner died.
In 1985, scientists found the wreck of the British luxury liner Titanic, sunk by an iceberg in 1912, in the Atlantic Ocean south of Newfoundland.
In 1991, U.S. President George H.W. Bush established diplomatic relations with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
In 1998, a law passed in 1991 went into effect requiring all vehicles sold in the United States to have airbags on both sides of the front seat.
In 2004, a group of Chechen separatists took more than 1,000 people hostage at a school in Beslan, Russia, ultimately killing nearly 340 people, including children.
In 2008, Hurricane Gustav slammed into Louisiana southwest of New Orleans as a Category 2 storm, forcing the evacuation of about 2 million people. New Orleans' levee system, strengthened since 2005's Hurricane Katrina devastated the area, held against a 12-foot storm surge.
In 2015, Pope Francis said priests can forgive women who have had an abortion if they seek forgiveness during the upcoming extraordinary jubilee.
In 2019, Hurricane Dorian made landfall in the Bahamas as a Category 5 storm. The hurricane killed 84 people, mostly in the Bahamas, but also in Puerto Rico, Florida and North Carolina, and caused more than $4 billion in damage.
In 2020, BTS became the first all-Korean musical group to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart with their single "Dynamite."
In 2022, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's independent committee on vaccines recommended the first reformulated booster shot to combat the Omicron variants of the COVID-19 virus.
