Today is Thursday, April 4, the 94th day of 2002. There are 271 days left in the year.

On this date

<*In 1818, Congress decided the flag of the United States would consist of 13 red-and-white stripes and 20 stars, with a new star to be added for every new state of the Union.

In 1841, President William Henry Harrison succumbed to pneumonia one month after his inaugural, becoming the first US chief executive to die in office.

In 1850, the city of Los Angeles was incorporated.

In 1887, Susanna Medora Salter became the first woman elected mayor of an American community — Argonia, Kan.

In 1902, 100 years ago, British financier Cecil Rhodes left $10 million in his will to provide scholarships for Americans at Oxford University.

In 1945, during the Second World War, US forces liberated the Nazi death camp Ohrdruf in Germany.

In 1949, 12 nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty.

In 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was shot to death in Memphis, Tenn.

In 1975, more than 130 people, most of them children, were killed when a US Air Force transport plane evacuating Vietnamese orphans crashed shortly after take-off from Saigon.

In 1981, Henry Cisneros became the first Mexican-American elected mayor of a major US city — San Antonio, Texas.

Thought for Today

<*‘A man is only as good as what he loves’ — Saul Bellow, American author.