Today is Sunday, April 26, the 117th day of 2020. There are 249 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On April 26, 1994, voting began in South Africa’s first all-race elections, resulting in victory for the African National Congress and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president.
On this date:
In 1607, English colonists went ashore at present-day Cape Henry, Virginia, 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, Virginia, and killed.
In 1933, Nazi Germany’s infamous secret police, the Gestapo, was created.
In 1945, Marshal Henri Philippe Petain (ahn-REE’ fee-LEEP’ pay-TAN’), the head of France’s Vichy government during World War II, was arrested.
In 1961, Roger Maris of the New York Yankees hit the first of his 61 home runs during a 162-game season (compared to Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs during a 154-game season) as he hit a roundtripper off Paul Foytack at Tiger Stadium.
In 1968, the United States exploded beneath the Nevada desert a 1.3 megaton nuclear device called “Boxcar.”
In 1986, an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine caused radioactive fallout to begin spewing into the atmosphere. (Dozens of people were killed in the immediate aftermath of the disaster while the long-term death toll from radiation poisoning is believed to number in the thousands.)
In 1989, actress-comedian Lucille Ball died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles at age 77.
In 1994, China Airlines Flight 140, a Taiwanese Airbus A-300, crashed while landing in Nagoya, Japan, killing 264 people; there were seven survivors.
In 2009, the United States declared a public health emergency as more possible cases of swine flu surfaced from Canada to New Zealand; officials in Mexico City closed everything from concerts to sports matches to churches in an effort to stem the spread of the virus.
In 2018, Bill Cosby was convicted of drugging and molesting Temple University employee Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia mansion in 2004; it was the first big celebrity trial of the (hash)MeToo era and completed the spectacular downfall of a comedian who broke racial barriers on his way to TV superstardom. (Cosby was later sentenced to three to 10 years in prison.)