• Today is Friday, May 18, the 139th day of 2012. There are 227 days left in the year.
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• Today's Highlight in History:
• On May 18, 1926, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanished while visiting a beach in Venice, Calif. (McPherson reappeared more than a month later, saying she'd escaped after being kidnapped and held for ransom, an account that was greeted with skepticism in some quarters.)
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• On this date:
• In 1012, Theophylact, son of Gregory, Count of Tusculum, became Pope Benedict VIII, succeeding Pope Sergius IV.
• In 1642, the Canadian city of Montreal was founded by French colonists.
• In 1765, about one-fourth of Montreal was destroyed by a fire.
• In 1896, the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, endorsed "separate but equal" racial segregation, a concept renounced 58 years later in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
• In 1910, Halley's Comet passed by earth, brushing it with its tail.
• In 1912, singer Perry Como was born in Canonsburg, Pa.; movie writer-director Richard Brooks ("Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"; "Elmer Gantry"; "In Cold Blood") was born in Philadelphia.
• In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure creating the Tennessee Valley Authority.
• In 1953, Jacqueline Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier as she piloted a Canadair F-86 Sabre jet over Rogers Dry Lake, Calif.
• In 1969, astronauts Eugene A. Cernan, Thomas P. Stafford and John W. Young blasted off aboard Apollo 10 on a mission to orbit the moon.
• In 1980, the Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington state exploded, leaving 57

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