Today is the 241st day of 2017. There are 124 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2005: Hurricane Katrina plows into the below-sea level US city of New Orleans with 145-mph (233-kph) winds and rain that submerge 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 repared 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.

1970: The Soviet Union delivers arms to Egypt to replace the heavy losses suffered during three months of intensive Israeli air strikes.

1972: North and South Korean Red Cross officials meet in North Korea openly for first time to discuss reuniting divided families.

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 Department of Veterans Affairs announces tests of 85,000 Vietnam vets reveal no adverse health effects related to Agent Orange exposure.

1991: Soviet lawmakers suspend Communist Party activities nationwide and freeze its bank accounts because of party’s role in failed coup attempt.

1996: A Russian plane carrying coal miners 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.

1997: Hooded men kill more than 300 people in an Algerian farm village in the worst carnage since an Islamic insurgency began.

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

1999: East Timorese vote in a historic referendum on independence from Indonesia.

2003: A large car bomb explodes outside the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, Iraq. The explosion killed at least 80 people, including Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir al-Hakim, a top Shiite Muslim cleric.

2004: Chechens battered by five years of war and misery vote for a regional president in an election that the Kremlin portrays as a step towards stability and critics denounce as a fraud. Violence shadows the balloting when a man blows himself up near a polling station.

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.

2011: Moammar Gadhafi’s wife and three of his children flee Libya to neighbouring Algeria, firm evidence that the long-time leader has lost his grip on the country.

2012: In a striking admission, President Syrian President Bashar Assad says that his armed forces will need time to defeat the rebels, an acknowledgement that a stalemate has developed that could prolong the civil war.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, French painter (1780-1867); John Locke, English philosopher (1632-1704); Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian author (1862-1949); Ingrid Bergman, Swedish actress (1917-1982); Charlie Parker, US jazz musician (1920-1955); Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslav president and war crimes suspect (1941-2006); Michael Jackson, American pop star (1958-2009); Richard Attenborough, British actor, director (1923- ); Rebecca DeMornay, US actress (1962- )

— AP