Today is the 153rd day of 2016. There are 213 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2006: A contrite US Army Corps of Engineers takes responsibility for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.

OTHER EVENTS

1792: Kentucky becomes the 15th state of the union.

1796: Tennessee becomes the 16th state.

1813: The mortally wounded commander of the

USS Chesapeake, Captain James Lawrence, gives the order, “Don’t give up the ship”, during a losing battle with the British frigateHMS Shannon in the War of 1812.

1868: James Buchanan, the 15th president of the United States, dies near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, at age 77.

1915: The T S Eliot poem

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is first published inPoetry: A Magazine of Verse in Chicago.

1916: Louis Brandeis takes his seat as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court, the first Jewish American to serve on the nation’s highest bench.

1926: Actress Marilyn Monroe is born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles.

1943: A civilian flight from Portugal to England is shot down by Germany during World War II, killing all 17 people aboard, including actor Leslie Howard.

1955: The romantic comedy

The Seven Year Itch, starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, has its world premiere in New York.

1968: Author-lecturer Helen Keller, who’d earned a college degree despite being blind and deaf almost all of her life, dies in Westport, Connecticut, at age 87.

1977: The Soviet Union formally charges Jewish human rights activist Anatoly Shcharansky with treason. (Shcharansky was imprisoned, then released in 1986; he’s now known by the name Natan Sharansky.)

1990: President George H W Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail S Gorbachev sign the foundation of a landmark treaty for the first-ever cuts in strategic nuclear missiles and a pact to slash chemical weapons stockpiles.

2006: Six world powers, including the US, agree on a package of incentives to persuade Iran to halt its uranium enrichment programme. Seven family members are shot to death in an Indianapolis house. (Two suspects were later convicted of murder; Desmond Turner was sentenced to life in prison without parole, while co-defendant James Stewart received 425 years in prison.)

2009: Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330 carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashes into the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of everyone on board.

2011: In a face-to-face meeting, Republican leaders complain to President Barack Obama that he had not produced a detailed plan of spending cuts and accused him of playing politics over Medicare; the White House said Obama had in fact led on the issue, and accused Republicans of trying to destroy the popular health care programme for seniors. Space shuttle

Endeavour and its six astronauts returned to Earth, closing out the next-to-last mission in NASA’s 30-year programme.

2015: South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham opens his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. The Supreme Court throws out the conviction of a Pennsylvania man prosecuted for making threats on

Facebook, but the justices stopped short of laying out broad constitutional protections for such comments. A cruise ship capsizes in China’s Yangtze River, killing 442 people.Vanity Fair releases its cover photo, featuring the former Bruce Jenner, with the headline, ‘Call Me Caitlyn’, as the Olympic gold medalist publicly completed his gender transition.