Today is the 241st day of 2014. There are 124 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2005: Hurricane Katrina ploughs into the below-sea-level US city of New Orleans with 145-mph (233-kph) winds and rain that submerges neighbourhoods up to the rooflines as it moves into the state of Mississippi.

OTHER EVENTS

1526: Turks defeat Hungarians at Battle of Mohacs, ending the Hungarian monarchy and giving way to 150 years of Turkish occupation.

1533: Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro gives Atahuallpa, last Incan king, a choice of being burned at the stake or converting to Christianity. He converts and is strangled the same day.

1756: Frederick II of Prussia invades Saxony, marking start of Seven Years’ War.

1782: Almost 1,100 people drown when English Man-of-War sinks while being repaired at Portsmouth, England.

1793: The French commissioner Leger-Felicite Sonthonax, facing a slave army and a British invasion, declares all slaves free in Haiti.

1935: Queen Astrid of Belgium is killed in car accident in Switzerland.

1943: Danish warships are scuttled at Copenhagen in World War II uprising against Nazis.

1952: Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, undergoes the heaviest air raid of the Korean war. US South African, Australian and South Korean air forces strike the city with about 600 tons of bombs, 4,000 gallons of firebombs and 52,000 rounds of machine-gun ammunition.

1957: US Senator Strom Thurmond from South Carolina, then a Democrat, ends a filibuster against a civil rights bill by talking for more than 24 hours.

1965: US astronauts L Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad make safe landing after a record eight days of orbiting around Earth in Gemini 5.

1980: A crowd of 400 Cuban refugees swarm onto a runway at Lima’s International Airport. Some 168 of them force their way onto a jet and demand to go to Miami. They surrender the next day.

1983: US Veterans Administration announces tests of 85,000 Vietnam vets reveal no adverse health effects related to Agent Orange exposure.

1994: Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation sign an early empowerment accord under which Israel agrees to transfer administrative powers throughout the West Bank to the Palestinian National Authority.

1996: A Russian plane carrying coalminers to work at a remote arctic island smashes into a mountain top, killing all 41 people aboard in the worst air disaster on Norwegian soil.

1998: A Cuban aeroplane bursts into flames and crashes during take-off from Quito, Ecuador, killing 79 people.

2002: Michael Skakel, a member of America’s politically prominent Kennedy family, is sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for the 1975 murder of neighbour Martha Moxley.

2006: A ceasefire aimed at ending Uganda’s brutal war — between its government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army that has terrorised the east African nation for nearly two decades — goes into effect.

2008: Georgia says it will sever diplomatic ties with Moscow to protest the presence of Russian troops on its territory.

2009: Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai widens his lead over his main challenger in election returns, creeping toward the 50 per cent mark that would enable him to avoid a run-off in the divisive presidential contest.

2010: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warns that he will not back down from his threat to pull out of new peace talks with Israel if it resumes construction in West Bank settlements.

2013: The Washington-Moscow Hot Line, used by US and Russian leaders for frank discussions about crises including the 1967 Middle East war and the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, marks its 50th birthday with the nations still grappling with competing interests in regional conflicts.