Hey there, Headliners. Today’s birthday belongs to Mother of the Blues, “Ma” Rainey, named Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett at birth. Here are some other Headlines Du Jour of yesteryear:

• 1564 – Playwright William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England (date of actual birth is unknown).




• 1803 – Thousands of meteor fragments fall from the skies of L’Aigle, France; the event convinces European science that meteors exist.
• 1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrenders his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina. Also the date of Confederate Memorial Day for two states.




• 1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia.
• 1933 – The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.




• 1958 – Final run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad‘s Royal Blue from Washington, D.C., to New York City after 68 years, the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives.
• 1962 – NASA‘s Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon.
• 1965 – A Rolling Stones concert in London, Ontario is shut down by police after 15 minutes due to rioting.
• 1981 – Dr. Michael R. Harrison of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center performs the world’s first human open fetal surgery.
• 1986 – A nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), creating the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
• 1989 – People’s Daily publishes the People’s Daily editorial of April 26 which inflames the nascent Tiananmen Square protests




• 1991 – Seventy tornadoes break out in the central United States. Before the outbreak’s end, Andover, Kansas, would record the year’s only F5 tornado.

Here is today’s Headlines Du Jour:

THE 2016 ELECTION:

LGBT NEWS:

SO GLAD WE’RE LIVING IN A POST-RACIAL SOCIETY:

GIMME THAT OLD TIME RELIGION:

MORE OF THAT REPUBLICAN OUTREACH:

ANOTHER SHOOTOUT AT THE OK CORRAL:

FREE THE WEED!!!

ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA:

Showing no self-awareness whatsoever, Loofah Lad actually said this during the week.

FOX “NEWS” IN THE NEWS AGAIN:

ANOTHER EXCITING EPISODE OF COPS GONE WILD:

ANOTHER EXCITING EPISODE OF CORPORATIONS GONE WILD:

IN INNER SPACE:

IN OUTER SPACE:

VIDEOS DU JOUR:

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