This is the 241st day of 2023. 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 roof lines.

OTHER EVENTS

1526: Turks of the Ottoman Empire defeat the Hungarian Empire, ending the Hungarian monarchy and giving way to 150 years of Turkish occupation.

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

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

1825: Portugal recognises the Independence of Brazil.

1842: Great Britain and China sign the Treaty of Nanking, ending the Opium War.

1862: The Bureau of Engraving and Printing began operations at the United States Treasury.

1877: The second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Brigham Young, dies in Salt Lake City, Utah, at age 76.

1910: Korean Emperor Sunjong abdicates as the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty goes into effect.

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

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

1944: 15,000 American troops march down the Champs Elysees in Paris as the French capital continued to celebrate its liberation from the Nazis.

1949: USSR performs its first nuclear test at Semipalatinsk, Kazakh SSR.

1952: Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, undergoes the heaviest air raid of the Korean war when 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.

1962: Malvin R Goode begins covering the United Nations for ABC TV, becoming network television’s first black reporter.

1964: Roy Orbison’s single Oh, Pretty Woman is released on the Monument label.

1963: Martin Luther King, Jr gives his famous I Have a Dream speech when some 200,000 people march on Washington, DC; the demonstration became a high point of the civil rights movement.

1967: The final TV episode of The Fugitive, starring David Janssen, is watched by 78 million people.

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

1972: Swimmer Mark Spitz of the United States wins the third of his seven gold medals at the Munich Olympics, finishing first in the 200-metre freestyle.

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

1991: Soviet lawmakers suspend Communist Party activities nationwide and freeze its bank accounts because of the party’s role in a 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. President Bill Clinton’s chief political strategist, Dick Morris, resigns amid a scandal over his relationship with a prostitute. The 15-year marriage of Charles, prince of Wales, and Diana, princess of Wales, ends as a final divorce decree is issued.

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

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

2003: A large car bomb explodes outside Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, Iraq, killing 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 the Kremlin portrays as a step towards stability but which 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 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.

2010: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warns 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: China and Russia walk out of a UN Security Council meeting after the US pushes for immediate action against Syria’s use of chemical weapons.

2014: American spy John Walker, a US Navy communications specialist who passed classified documents to Soviet agents for nearly two decades before being caught, dies in prison at age 77.

2017: Investigation into Nurse Niels Högel, a German serving a life sentence for killing two patients, concludes he probably killed 86 more.Kenya brings in the world’s toughest ban on plastic bags with a possible US$38,000 fine and four years in jail.

2018 Chinese ride-sharing firm Didi Chuxing issues a public apology after its second Hitch passenger is killed within three months. Puerto Rico raises the official death toll from 2017’s Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975.

2019: The discovery of a 3.8-million-year-old skull of early human ancestor Australopithecus anamensis, found by Yohannes Haile-Selassie at Miro Dora, Ethiopia, upends previous evolutionary theory published in the Nature journal.

2020: Japanese tech company SkyDrive says it completed the first manned test flight of a flying car.

2022: A 1952 Mickey Mantle baseball card sells for US$12.6 million at auction, becoming the world’s most expensive piece of sporting memorabilia.

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); Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslav president and war crimes suspect (1941-2006); Michael Jackson, American pop star (1958-2009); Michael Blackwood, Jamaican former Olympian (1976- )

— AP/ Jamaica Observer