In the case of Scotland, use of a blue background for the Saint Andrew's Cross is said to date from at least the 15th century, with the first certain illustration of a flag depicting such appearing in Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount 's Register of Scottish Arms, circa 1542.
Dennis Johnson, a brilliant defensive player who helped propel the Seattle SuperSonics and the to N.B.A. championships, died yesterday in Austin, Tex. He was 52. The cause was a heart attack, the National Basketball Association said.
In December 2009, Johnson revealed that he had been battling Hepatitis C (HCV) for over a decade, which resulted in slow speech and a tendency to regularly get lost in thought in the middle of a discussion. Johnson said that he learned he had the disease in 1998 but did not know how he contracted it.