Updated April 26, 2014, 8:54 am

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On April 26, 1986, the world's worst nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl plant in the Soviet Union. An explosion and fire in the No. 4 reactor sent radioactivity into the atmosphere; at least 31 Soviets died immediately.
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On April 26, 1914, Bernard Malamud, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, was born. Following his death on March 18, 1986, his obituary appeared in The Times.

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1607	An expedition of English colonists went ashore at Cape Henry, Va., to establish the first permanent English settlement in the Western Hemisphere. (They later settled at Jamestown.)
1785	Naturalist and artist John James Audubon was born in Haiti.
1865	John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, was surrounded and killed by federal troops near Bowling Green, Va.
1937	Planes from Nazi Germany raided the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
1945	Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, the head of France's Vichy government during World War II, was arrested.
1964	The African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania.
1989	Actress-comedian Lucille Ball died at age 77.
1998	Auxiliary Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a leading Guatemalan human rights activist, was bludgeoned to death two days after a report he'd compiled on atrocities during Guatemala's 36-year civil war was made public.
2000	Vermont Gov. Howard Dean signed the nation's first bill allowing same-sex couples to form civil unions.
2005	Syria's 29-year military presence in Lebanon ended as Syrian soldiers completed a withdrawal brought about by international pressure and Lebanese street protests.
2008	Police in Austria arrested a man accused of holding his daughter captive in a windowless cellar for 24 years, fathering her seven children and killing one of them. (Josef Fritzl is serving life in a psychiatric ward.)

Historic Birthdays

66	John James Audubon 4/26/1785 - 1/27/1851 West Indian-born American ornithologist, artist and naturalist
71	Friedrich Flotow 4/26/1812 - 1/24/1883 German-born French composer
75	Alfred Krupp 4/26/1812 - 7/14/1887 German industrialist; developed and sold armaments
81	Frederick Law Olmsted 4/26/1822 - 8/28/1903 American landscape architect; designed Central Park in New York City
72	Harold Rothermere 4/26/1868 - 11/26/1940 English newspaperman; built a journalistic empire in England
53	Ma Rainey 4/26/1886 - 12/22/1939 American singer; known as "the mother of the blues"
62	Ludwig Wittgenstein 4/26/1889 - 4/29/1951 Austrian-born English philosopher
92	Anita Loos 4/26/1889 - 8/18/1981 American novelist and Hollywood screenwriter
89	Cass Canfield 4/26/1897 - 3/27/1986 American publisher and editor
83	Morris West 4/26/1916 - 10/9/1999 Australian novelist