Highlights in history on this date:

1204 - In the Fourth Crusade, Constantinople is captured by the Crusaders.

1606 - England adopts as its flag the original version of the Union Jack, which combines the crosses of St George of England and St Andrew of Scotland.

1654 - Ireland and Scotland are united with England.

1709 - The British magazine The Tatler, founded by Sir Richard Steele, is first published.

1782 - Britain opens peace talks with the Americans to end the American Revolution.

1796 - Napoleon's forces defeat the Austrian and Sardinian armies at the end of the Battle of Montenotte; it is Napoleon's first significant victory.

1815 - Austria declares war on Joachim Murat, King of Naples, for occupying Rome.

1850 - French troops restore Pope Pius IX and occupy Rome.

1861 - US Civil War starts as Confederates fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina.

1877 - Britain annexes the Boer South African Republic as the Transvaal.

1905 - Aboriginal bushranger Mary Ann Baker, who partnered Captain Thunderbolt in love and crime in northern NSW, dies aged 70.

1914 - George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion opens in London with Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle and Sir Herbert Tree as Professor Higgins.

1934 - The highest velocity natural wind ever recorded occurs at Mount Washington, New Hampshire, with gusts reaching 371.6 kph.

1938 - Death of Fedor Chaliapin, Russian opera singer.

1945 - Death of US President Franklin D Roosevelt of cerebral haemorrhage, aged 63. Harry Truman is sworn in as his successor.

1954 - Bill Haley and his Comets record breakthrough rock and roll song Rock Around the Clock.

1955 - Salk vaccine against polio is declared safe and effective.

1957 - West German nuclear physicists refuse to cooperate in producing or testing atomic weapons.

1961 - Soviet Union puts first man in space; cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin makes safe landing after one orbit of Earth.

1963 - First armed attack by Indonesian forces on the newly-formed state of Malaysia.

1964 - The Rev Ted Noffs opens Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross, Sydney.

1966 - US bombers carry out their first strikes against North Vietnam.

1981 - Death aged 66 of former world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis; The first re-usable space shuttle, Columbia, blasts off from Cape Canaveral on its first test flight.

1988 - US Patent and Trademark Office issues a patent to Harvard University for a genetically engineered mouse, the first time a patent is granted for an animal life form.

1989 - Death of Sugar Ray Robinson, five-time winner of the world middleweight boxing championship and unbeaten welterweight champion; Cats becomes Britain's longest running musical with 3,358 performances.

1990 - East German parliament names Lothar de Maiziere as prime minister, supports swift reunification, apologises for Holocaust and recognises Polish border

1992 - The United Nations announces a plan to send 100 military observers to Bosnia, where fighting is flaring between Serbs on one side and Muslims and Croats on the other.

1992 - Euro Disneyland opens in France amid controversy as French intellectuals bemoan the invasion of US pop culture - labelling it a "cultural Chernobyl".

1993 - NATO planes begin patrolling no-fly zone over Bosnia.

1994 - The entire Rwandan cabinet flees Kigali while the radio urges civilians to support the armed forces in repelling advancing rebels.

1996 - Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers are declared the world's tallest buildings by a committee of experts meeting in the shadow of the previous titleholder, Chicago's Sears Tower.

1997 - Pope John Paul II visits Sarajevo on a long-delayed mission of peace to Bosnia; Albania's King Leka I returns home after 58 years in exile.

1998 - Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams appeals to IRA supporters to accept Northern Ireland's compromise peace accord.

1999 - Death aged 67 of BoxCar Willie, Country singing star, who blended a mellow voice with a rough-hewn hobo persona.

2000 - An overloaded wooden Philippine ferry headed for Malaysia capsizes off the southern Philippines, killing at least 133 people.

2002 - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez resigns under pressure from military officers after at least 17 people are killed in violent anti-government protests. Chavez returns to power within 48 hours.

2003 - Philippine troops free the last four Indonesian hostages held on the southern island of Jolo since June 2002 by Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim separatist group.

2006 - Fifty-seven people die in a suicide bomb attack on a Sunni Muslim congregation in the southern Pakistani city Karachi.

2007 - A suicide attacker blows himself up in the lunchroom at Iraq's Parliament, killing eight people, including at least three lawmakers, in a stunning breach of security in the heart of the US-protected Green Zone.

2009 - US Navy sniper open fire and kill three pirates holding an American captain at gunpoint, delivering the skipper unharmed and ending a five-day, high seas hostage drama.

2010 - The Vatican makes clear for the first time that bishops and other church officials should report clerical sex abuse to police if required by law. But the policy fails to satisfy victims who charge that the church deliberately hid abuse for decades.

2011 - Japan ranks its nuclear crisis at the highest possible severity on an international scale - the same level as the 1986 Chernobyl disaster - even as it insists that radiation leaks are declining at its tsunami-crippled nuclear plant.

2012 - With less than six months left until election day, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who is fighting cancer, has hardly hit the campaign trail. Instead he travels to Cuba for treatment and publicly vows to defeat his illness.

2013 - Opponents of the late Margaret Thatcher take a kind of musical revenge on the former prime minister, pushing the song Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead up the British charts in a posthumous protest over her polarising policies.

2014 - Prime Minister Tony Abbot warns that the massive search for a missing Malaysian jet would likely continue "for a long time."