Today in History: April 7, Rwandan genocide begins

Today is Tuesday, April 7, the 97th day of 2026. There are 268 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On April 7, 1994, a day after the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi died in a missile attack on their aircraft, the moderate Hutu prime minister of Rwanda, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, and her husband were killed by Rwandan soldiers; in the 100 days that followed, Hutu extremists slaughtered hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsi and Hutu moderates.

Also on this date:

In 1862, Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell defeated Confederate forces at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee.

In 1922, Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall signed a secret deal to lease U.S. Navy petroleum reserves in Wyoming and California to his friends, oilmen Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny, in exchange for cash gifts; Fall would eventually be sentenced to prison on bribery and conspiracy charges in what became known as the Teapot Dome Scandal.

In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower held a news conference in which he outlined the concept of the "domino theory" as he spoke of the importance of containing the spread of communism in Indochina, saying, "You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly."

In 1966, the U.S. Navy recovered a hydrogen bomb that the U.S. Air Force had lost in the Mediterranean Sea off Spain following a B-52 crash.

In 1984, the Census Bureau reported that Los Angeles had overtaken Chicago as the nation's "second city" in terms of population.

In 1990, fire engulfed the Scandinavian Star as the ferry was making an overnight run from the Norwegian capital of Oslo to Frederikshavn in northern Denmark, killing 159 people in one of Scandinavia's worst peacetime maritime disasters.

In 2017, Rakmat Akilov, an Uzbek man who said he wanted to punish Sweden for joining a coalition against the Islamic State group, drove a stolen truck into a crowd in Stockholm, killing five people and wounding 14 others. (He was convicted of terror-related murder and given a life sentence.)

In 2022, the Senate confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, securing her place as the court's first Black female justice.

Today's Birthdays: Country musician Bobby Bare is 91. Former California Gov. Jerry Brown is 88. Film director Francis Ford Coppola is 87. Musician John Oates is 78. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian is 75. Actor Jackie Chan is 72. Football Hall of Famer Tony Dorsett is 72. Former boxer James "Buster" Douglas is 66. Actor Russell Crowe is 62. Actor-comedian Bill Bellamy is 61. Football Hall of Famer Ronde Barber is 51. Baseball Hall of Famer Adrián Beltré is 47. Actor Ismael Cruz Córdova is 39. Pop singer Anne-Marie is 35. Actor Cristine Prosperi is 33.