On this date in history:

In 30 B.C., Cleopatra, queen of Egypt and lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, committed suicide following the defeat of her forces by Octavian, the future first emperor of Rome.

In 1780, Gen. Benedict Arnold betrayed the United States when he promised secretly to surrender the fort at West Point to the British army. (He fled to England and died in poverty.)

In 1941, German forces began the 900-day siege of Leningrad. (When it ended, the Russian city lay in ruins and hundreds of thousands of people had died.)

In 1967, the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court was confirmed. Marshall was the first African-American to sit on the court.

In 1983, Guion Bluford became the first African-American astronaut in space.

In 1994, the Lockheed and Martin Marietta corporations agreed to a merger that would create the largest U.S. defense contractor.

In 2003, more than 120 people, including prominent Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, were killed in a bomb attack on Iraq's Imam Ali Mosque.

In 2005, on the day after Hurricane Katrina struck, 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater. Electricity, water, sewage, communication and transportation systems were out. Three-fourths of all houses were reported damaged or destroyed. Thousands of people were rescued, many plucked from rooftops, and some sought shelter in the Superdome. In other areas along the Gulf of Mexico, Katrina flattened much of Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., flooded Mobile, Ala., and heavily damaged smaller towns in between. (The Katrina death toll would top 1,800.)

In 2008, thousands of residents of Mexico City, Tijuana and other cities in Mexico took to the streets to protest an epidemic of drug-related killings and kidnappings and the Mexican government's apparent inability to stop them.

In 2011, two senior U.S. Justice Department officials charged with overseeing the failed government gun-smuggling sting operation dubbed Fast and Furious were replaced amid bitter congressional criticism of the mission. The plan was to pass thousands of weapons to suspected Mexican gun smugglers and trace them to drug leaders, but hundreds of firearms were lost, some showing up at crime scenes, including the 2010 slaying of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

In 2012, a judge sentenced former University of Virginia student George Huguely V to 23 years in prison for the murder of Yeardley Love, his former girlfriend. Both had been lacrosse players at the university.

In 2013, Northern Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney died in Dublin. He was 74.

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