1994 what was happening in the world

In Kigali, the presidential guard immediately initiated a campaign of retribution. Leaders of the political opposition were murdered, and almost immediately, the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began.

Within hours, recruits were dispatched all over the country to carry out a wave of slaughter. The early organisers included military officials, politicians and businessmen, but soon many others joined in the mayhem. Organised gangs of government soldiers and militias hacked their way through the Tutsi population with machetes, or blew them up in churches where they had taken refuge.

The extremist ethnic Hutu regime in office in appeared genuinely to believe that the only way it could hang on to power was by wiping out the ethnic Tutsis completely.

Encouraged by the presidential guard and radio propaganda, an unofficial militia group called the Interahamwe meaning those who attack together was mobilised. At its peak, this group was 30,strong. Soldiers and police officers encouraged ordinary citizens to take part. In some cases, Hutu civilians were forced to murder their Tutsi neighbours by military personnel. Participants were often given incentives, such as money or food, and some were even told they could appropriate the land of the Tutsis they killed.

On the ground at least, the Rwandans were largely left alone by the international community. Most of the UN troops withdrew after the murder of 10 soldiers. The day after Habyarimana's death, the RPF renewed their assault on government forces, and numerous attempts by the UN to negotiate a ceasefire came to nothing. The government collapsed and the RPF declared a ceasefire. These refugees include many who have since been implicated in the massacres. At first, a multi-ethnic government was set up, with a Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu as president and Mr Kagame as his deputy.

But the pair later fell out and Bizimungu was jailed on charges of inciting ethnic violence, while Mr Kagame became president. Although the killing in Rwanda was over, the presence of Hutu militias in DR Congo has led to years of conflict there, causing up to five million deaths.

Rwanda's now Tutsi-led government has twice invaded its much larger neighbour, saying it wants to wipe out the Hutu forces. Major League Baseball Players Association begin day strike causing season to be cancelled.

Estonian Ferry Estonia sinks in the Baltic sea off the coast of Finland over dead. Russian President Boris Yeltsin orders tanks and troops into the rebel region of Chechnya to restore order. Frederick West serial killer together with his wife Rosemary West, was responsible for the murder of at least twelve young women. The journal Nature reports the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull.

Jordan and Israel sign a peace treaty ending state of war that has existed between the nations since The Irish Republican Army announces a "complete cessation of military operations". Netscape Navigator released quickly becoming market leader for browsing the web.

Scientists in Southern England estimate the oldest Europeans at , years old. The Channel Tunnel , which took 15, workers over seven years to complete, and is 31 miles long joining France and England opens on 6th May. The European Fighter Aircraft "Eurofighter" has makes its inaugural test flight after 10 years in development. Today In History Years and Decades. More Information and Timeline for the attack on Nancy Kerrigan.

Netscape Navigator Netscape Navigator released quickly becoming market leader for browsing the web. More Information for Netscape Navigator. The African National Congress party won a majority of the votes with about 62 percent.

There was nearly 87 percent turnout with over 19 million ballots cast. Among the dead are children who drink the poison. A small number of cult defectors are killed by Peoples Temple gunmen who also slay California congressman Leo Ryan, who had gone to Guyana to investigate Jonestown. Worsening economic conditions, increasing discontent with the government, and wide support for religious leader in exile Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini end the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

The shah and his family flee Iran in January With support among the nation's clergy and their many followers, he begins rebuilding Iranian society based on conservative Shiite religious principles. With the United States in an economic malaise and the Iranian hostage crisis hobbling the presidency of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan is elected the 40th president in a landslide. Reagan, who would serve two terms, was the oldest man elected president at the time.

Reagan's election changes the trajectory of American politics, ushering in an era of conservative leadership. During his tenure, he takes a more aggressive approach to the Soviet Union and increases defense spending. Reagan convinces Congress to cut taxes, a move that many economists credit with triggering an economic boom in the s. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes a report about five gay men who had been diagnosed by local physicians with a rare form of pneumonia — the first reported U.

The autoimmune disease spread so fast that by the end of , Americans had died from what now the CDC called acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

An estimated 35 million people worldwide would die from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic. After the announcement, lenders realize virtually every country in Latin America, led by Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, are not able to pay back loans. The crisis would lead to years of eroding wages, weak-to-negative economic growth, sky-high unemployment, severe austerity measures, and political instability — known as the "lost decade" in Latin America.

The internet as we know it today — a seemingly endless collection of websites hosted on servers scattered across the globe — is still more than a decade away. The protocol would become the internet's cornerstone and technical foundation as it allows expanded available address space and decentralizes the network, thus also expanding accessibility.

The chemical disaster in Bhopal is still considered history's worst industrial disaster. About 30 tons of methyl isocyanate, an industrial gas used to make pesticide, are released at a Union Carbide Corp. About , poor residents of nearby shanty towns are exposed to a highly toxic compound that kills about 15, people and countless farm animals, according to Indian government estimates.

The calamity leads to a generation of birth defects. To this day, locals claim the now-abandoned site is riddled with toxic materials left behind by Union Carbide, which was acquired by Dow Chemical in Despite his often bellicose criticisms of the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan agrees to meet with his counterpart, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, in Geneva in the first meeting between leaders of the two Cold War foes in nearly a decade.

Though the meeting yields little of substance, it starts a closer relationship between the two men who both seem committed to scaling back the nuclear arms race between the two nuclear superpowers.

The 25th mission of the U. Among those killed are Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first teacher in space. The failure is later identified as a problem with the so-called O-rings used to form a seal in the seams of the shuttle's external fuel tanks.

The drop is worse than the crash in It is also worse than the market plunge after the terrorist attacks and the financial crisis.

Among the reasons cited for the drop are rising tensions in the Persian Gulf, concern over higher interest rates, and the belief that the bull market is ending. Computerized trading, relatively new at the time, accelerates trade orders, which speeds up the market drop. As a result of the collapse, exchanges put in place so-called circuit breakers intended to halt trading when stocks fall too fast.

This measure is designed to provide investors a cooling off period and avoid a panic. Oliver North and Vice Adm. John Poindexter are indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States for their involvement in the so-called Iran-Contra affair.

The scandal involved members of the Reagan administration who illegally sold arms to Iran to help facilitate the release of American hostages, and then transfer the proceeds of the sale to fund the Nicaraguan contras, a loose affiliation of right-wing militias.

North is convicted, but his conviction is vacated and reversed, while Poindexter's convictions are also reversed on appeal.

Cracks in the monolithic Soviet bloc are starting to appear in the s, and the very symbol of communist repression comes crashing down in November, when the Berlin Wall is breached, ending a year division of the city. During the day on Nov. Almost immediately Berliners start slamming the wall with axes and sledgehammers. By nightfall, the celebration turns into what one observer calls "the greatest street party in the history of the world" and the city is reunited. East and West Germany would reunite one year later.

With the hold of the Soviet Union and communism on East Europe loosening, Poland's ruling communist party votes to dissolve and become more moderate.

With Saudi Arabia secured, U. Just weeks after the dissolution of the Soviet Union on Dec. President George H. The meeting comes days after both countries announce they would stop aiming nuclear missiles at each other.

Russia declares its 11 former communist satellite republics — from Armenia to Uzbekistan — independent. The Treaty of the European Union, also known as the Maastricht Treaty, goes into effect in November, after a rough series of political wrangling that, among other concessions, allows the U. The treaty opens the way to removing border controls among member states and invites new members to join the union.

With an initial aim of becoming an online bookstore, Jeff Bezos and a handful of angel investors launch Amazon. In the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in U. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. They time the truck-bomb attack for a weekday morning in order to maximize casualties. For the murder of at least people, including 19 children who were in a childcare center in the building, and the injury of hundreds of others, an unremorseful McVeigh is executed by lethal injection on June 11, Nichols is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Dolly the Sheep enters the annals of bioengineering when scientists at Scotland's Roslin Institute become the first to not only successfully clone a mammal, but also the first to do so using an adult cell rather than an embryonic one. After so-called cell fusions that created 29 embryos, the teams managed to turn an udder cell into a nearly complete biological carbon copy of the sheep from which it came. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been serious areas of study and hype for over 60 years.

In , one of the most significant victories for silicon logic came when IBM's Deep Blue became the first machine to beat a world chess champion. The the refrigerator-sized computer beat Garry Kasparov twice and tied him three times in a six-game match.

The digital advertising behemoth Google Inc. Security Council authorization as Russia and China oppose the attack. Commanders Bill Shepherd from the United States and Yuri Gidzenko of Russia, along with Russian flight engineer Sergei Krikalev become the first temporary residents of the International Space Station two years after the first component of the research center was put into low-Earth orbit about miles above sea level. Since that first crew, there have been other visitors to the ISS, some of them multiple times, led by from the United States and 47 from Russia.

In the worst attack on U. A fourth plane, United Airlines 93, crashes in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew attempt to regain control of the plane headed Washington D. Following the Sept. Congress and President George W. Bush enact the Homeland Security Act, the biggest government reorganization of national security efforts since the Department of Defense was created in The sweeping legislation creates the massive Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for everything from protecting infrastructure from cyber-attacks to managing the new U.

With the help of British and other allied forces, the United States begins its invasion of Iraq with a rapid bombing "Shock and Awe" campaign with the intention of destroying Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction; the weapons are never found. Coalition forces manage to quickly topple the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, but have to fight insurgent forces for years afterward. After spending four days in the Gulf of Mexico bulking up to a category 5 hurricane, Katrina slams into New Orleans, inundating the city and creating a humanitarian crisis that lasts for weeks.

The catastrophe underscores the precarious situation not only in the Big Easy, but also the surrounding area of the Gulf Coast. Three years after U. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who died in October , first shows the world one of the most popular branded consumer electronic devices in history, the iPhone. Since the first generation phone that Jobs introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show that year, there have been 18 versions of the mobile device, and more than 1.

Only Samsung's Galaxy smartphone comes close to that volume. The Dow Jones Industrial Average records an intraday drop of The bill would pass days later.

The market reacts also to months of global market turmoil amid the global financial crisis spurred by the U. The Dow fell by more than half during the Great Recession, tumbling from 14, on Oct. After defeating Republican Sen.

Obama inherits the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, but with his party holding majorities in both houses of Congress at the time, the president is able to pass a stimulus package and his signature Affordable Care Act in March Eleven workers die and 17 are injured after an explosion and fire erupts on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig 40 miles from the Louisiana coast.

The explosion causes the largest environmental disaster in U. In an intense minute nighttime firefight, 25 U. Nearly feet below the France-Switzerland border at CERN's Large Hadron Collider Facility, an international team of scientists discovers a new particle widely believed to be the elusive Higgs boson, known as the "God Particle," which is thought to be a fundamental component of the universe.

Higgs boson has been an important element of particle physics theory for decades, but until there had been no physical evidence to support its existence. After surreptitiously leaving his job at U. He reveals the first of a series of secrets about numerous U. Hailed as a courageous whistleblower and privacy champion by some, and a traitor that compromised counterterrorism efforts by others, the American now resides in exile in Moscow.

The action incites peals of condemnation from world leaders and a raft of economic sanctions against Moscow.