NOW & THEN
12 APRIL
1545: France’s King Francis I ordered massacre of Vaudois Protestants.
1606: The Union Flag was adopted as the flag of England, Wales and Scotland.
1709: The Tatler magazine was first published.
1861: The American Civil War began with the bombardment of Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina by the southern Confederate army under General Pierre Beauregard.
1903: World’s first motor omnibus service inaugurated between Eastbourne Station and Meads, Sussex.
1914: George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion opened in London with Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle and Sir Herbert Tree as Professor Higgins.
1945: Harry S Truman was sworn in as United States president after death of Franklin D Roosevelt at age 63.
1954: Bill Haley recorded Rock Around The Clock, the first record to sell a million in Britain.
1957: West German nuclear physicists refused to co-operate in producing or testing of atomic weapons.
1961: Soviet Union put first man in space – Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made safe landing after one orbit of Earth.
1963: First armed attack by Indonesian forces on Malaysia.
1966: American bombers carried out their first strikes against North Vietnam.
1981: The US launched its pioneering space shuttle Columbia from Cape Canaveral.
1987: Soviet media reported that two cosmonauts walking in space successfully linked space module to orbital space station Mir.
1989: Lord Lloyd-webber’s Cats was performed for the 3,358th time at the New London Theatre, Drury Lane, making it Britain’s longest-running musical.
1990: Soviet Union admitted the massacre of up to 15,000 Polish officers at Katyn in 1940.
1991: Tanker loaded with millions of gallons of oil burned for a second day off the Italian Riviera after ferry collidision.
1991: German chancellor Helmut Kohl formed a pact with the opposition to rescue eastern Germany from collapse.
1993: Serbian shelling killed 56 people, including 15 children, in besieged Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
1996: The government’s majority in the House of Commons was reduced to one after Labour won Staffordshire South-east from the Conservatives in a by-election. 1996: West Indies captain Brian Lara scored a Test record 400 not out in the fourth against England, in Antigua.
1999: US president Bill Clinton was cited for contempt of court for giving “intentionally false statements” in a sexual harassment civil lawsuit.
2002: A female suicide bomber detonated at the entrance to Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda open-air market, killing seven and wounding 104.
2009: Zimbabwe officially abandoned the Zimbabwe Dollar as their official currency.
2010: A train derailed near Merano, Italy, after running into a landslide, causing nine deaths and injuring 28 people.