Today is Saturday, April 12, the 102nd day of 2014. There are 263 days left in the year.
1204 ― Fourth Crusade occupies and plunders Constantinople
1606 ― England adopts the Union Jack as its flag
1857 ― Gustave Flaubert's “Madame Bovary” published
1927 ― General Chiang Kai-shek begins counter revolution in Shanghai
1942 ― Japan kills about 400 Filipino officers in Bataan
1954 ― Bill Haley & the Comets record “Rock Around the Clock"
1961 ― Douglas MacArthur declines offer to become baseball commissioner
1980 ― U.S. Olympic Committee endorses a boycott of the Moscow games
1988 ― Harvard University patents genetically engineered mouse (first for animal life)
1990 ― First meeting of East German democratically elected parliament, acknowledges responsibility for Nazi holocaust and asks for forgiveness