• Today is Thursday, April 26, the 117th day of 2012. There are 249 days left in the year.
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• Today's Highlight in History:
• On April 26, 1937, German and Italian warplanes raided the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, resulting in widespread destruction; estimates of the number of people killed vary greatly, from the hundreds to the thousands. (The raid inspired Pablo Picasso's famous antiwar painting, "Guernica.")
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• On this date:
• In 1607, English colonists went ashore at present-day Cape Henry, Va., on an expedition to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere.
• In 1785, American naturalist, hunter and artist John James Audubon was born in present-day Haiti.
• In 1865, John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was surrounded by federal troops near Port Royal, Va., and killed. (As he lay dying, Booth looked at his hands and gasped, "Useless, useless.")
• In 1909, Abdul Hamid II was deposed as sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
• In 1945, Marshal Henri Philippe Petain (an-REE' fee-LEEP' pay-TAN'), the head of France's Vichy government during World War II, was arrested.
• In 1952, the destroyer-minesweeper USS Hobson sank in the central Atlantic after colliding with the aircraft carrier USS Wasp with the loss of 176 crew members.
• In 1962, the NASA spacecraft Ranger 4 crashed into the moon as planned after failing to transmit images and data.
• In 1968, the United States exploded beneath the Nevada desert a 1.3 megaton nuclear device called "Boxcar."
• In 1972, the first Lockheed L-1011 TriStar went into commercial service with Eastern Airlines.
• In 1986, a major nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union).

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