Today is the 258th day of 2020. There are 108 days left in the year.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2005: US President George W Bush says that “I take responsibility” for failures in dealing with Hurricane Katrina, and says the disaster raised broader questions about the government’s ability to respond to natural disasters as well as terror attacks.

OTHER EVENTS

1536: Holy Roman Emperor Charles V abandons siege of Marseilles after disastrous campaign and sails from Genoa to Barcelona.

1586: Anthony Babington and fellow conspirators go on trial for attempting to seize throne of England for Mary Queen of Scots by plotting to murder Queen Elizabeth I.

1788: The first US national election is authorised.

1882: British defeat Egyptians at Tel el-Kebir, Lower Egypt, and proceed to occupy Egypt and the Sudan.

1943: Chiang Kai-shek becomes president of China.

1948: Republican Margaret Chase Smith of Maine is elected to the US Senate, becoming the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress.

1959: Elvis Presley first meets his future wife, 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, while stationed in West Germany with the US Army. (They married in 1967, but divorced in 1973.)

1962: Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett rejects the US Supreme Court’s order for the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith, a black student, declaring in a televised address, “We will not drink from the cup of genocide.”

1964: Egypt and Saudi Arabia announce agreement of peaceful settlement of two-year-old Yemeni civil war.

1970: The first New York City Marathon is held; winner Gary Muhrcke finishes the 26.2-mile run, which takes place entirely inside Central Park, in 2:31:38. Israel arrests 450 Arabs in occupied Jordan and says it will exchange them for hostages held by guerrillas.

1971: A four-day inmates’ rebellion at Attica Correctional Facility in western New York ends as police and guards storm the prison; the ordeal and final assault claims the lives of 32 inmates and 11 hostages.

1982: At least 700 persons are killed and 17 million left homeless by floods across the north and east of India during the monsoon season since June.

1986: Iraqi warplanes bomb five airfields in Iran as demonstrators seek revenge for Iran’s missile attack on Baghdad.

1991: The US and the Soviet Union agree to discontinue their military aid to government and rebel forces in Afghanistan after more than a year of US-Soviet negotiations aimed at bringing a settlement in the 12-year-old Afghan civil war.

1993: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat shake hands on the lawn of the White House at the signing of a peace accord providing for mutual recognition and Palestinian control over Gaza and the West Bank.

1994: At UN International Conference on Population and Development, 180 nations adopt a 20-year blueprint to slow world population growth.

1995: A military transport aircraft crashes into the sea off the coast of western Sri Lanka, killing all 75 people on-board.

1997: Funeral services are held in Calcutta, India, for Nobel peace laureate Mother Teresa.

1998: The Yugoslav republic of Montenegro deports thousands of Kosovo refugees to Albania.

1999: The fourth major blast in Russia in two weeks destroys an apartment building in Moscow and kills 118 people.

2001: An international arrest warrant is issued for Peru’s exiled former President Alberto Fujimori for his alleged role in massacres by the Grupo Colina paramilitary death squad in the early 1990s.

2004: North Korea says a huge cloud caused by an explosion was the planned demolition of a mountain for a hydroelectric project and invites a British diplomat to visit the site.

2006: A gunman opens fire at a Montreal college and wounds at least 20 people — six critically — before shooting himself dead.

2007: Three powerful earthquakes jolt Indonesia in less than 24 hours, sending a 10-foot tsunami crashing to shore, damaging hundreds of houses and terrifying residents. At least 10 people are killed.

2008: Rescue crews venture out to pluck people from their homes in an all-out search for thousands of Texans who had stubbornly stayed behind overnight to face Hurricane Ike.

2009: President Hugo Chavez says Russia has opened a US$2.2-billion line of credit for Venezuela to purchase weapons including armored vehicles and surface-to-air missiles.

2013: By truck and helicopter, thousands of people stranded by floodwaters are brought down from the Colorado Rockies. A pre-dawn fire sweeps through a Russian psychiatric hospital, killing 37 people.

2017: Firefighters who were called to a sweltering nursing home in Hollywood, Florida, where air conditioning had been knocked out by Hurricane Irma, find three people dead and evacuate 145 others to hospitals; five others died later in the day.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Walter Reed, US bacteriologist (1851-1901); Arnold Schoenberg, Austrian-born composer (1874-1951); Claudette Colbert, US actress (1903-1996); Roald Dahl, British writer (1916-1990); Oscar Arias Sanchez, president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1941- ); Jacqueline Bisset, British actress (1944- ); Michael Johnson, US athlete (1967- ).

— AP