Today is Thursday, April 26, the 117th day of 2012. There are 249 days left in the year. 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." 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). In 1992, Moscow saw its first publicly observed Russian Orthodox Easter in 74 years. In 2000, Vermont Gov. Howard Dean signed the nation's first bill allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions. Ten years ago: Robert Steinhaeuser, an expelled student, went on a shooting rampage at a school in Erfurt, Germany, killing 16 people, plus himself. David Gunn, who had run transit systems in New York City and Washington, was named president of Amtrak, the troubled national rail passenger service. Five years ago: The Senate joined the House, 51-46, in clearing legislation calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq to begin by Oct. 1, 2007, with a goal of a complete pullout six months later (President George W. Bush later vetoed the measure). Eight Democratic presidential hopefuls gathered in Orangeburg, S.C., for their first debate of the 2008 campaign, during which they heaped criticism on President Bush's Iraq policy. Former White House aide and movie industry lobbyist Jack Valenti died in Washington, D.C., at age 85. One year ago: An 84-year-old naturalized American from Burundi accused of participating in the 1994 Rwandan genocide went on trial in Wichita, Kan. (While Lazare Kobagaya (luh-ZAR' koh-bah-GY'-ah) was convicted of making false statements on immigration forms, the jury deadlocked on whether he'd played a role in the genocide. Federal prosecutors later moved to dismiss all the charges because they'd failed to disclose information about a witness who could have benefited the defense.)