Today is Thursday, April 7, the 98th day of 2016. There are 268 days left in the year.

On this date:

In 1927, the image and voice of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover were transmitted live from Washington to New York in the first successful long-distance demonstration of television.

In 1953, the U.N. General Assembly ratified Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden as the new secretary-general, succeeding Trygve Lie of Norway.

In 1984, the Census Bureau reported Los Angeles had overtaken Chicago as the nation’s “second city” in terms of population.

In 1994, civil war erupted in Rwanda, a day after a mysterious plane crash claimed the lives of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi; in the months that followed, hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsi and Hutu moderates were slaughtered by Hutu extremists.

In 2001, NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft took off on a six-month, 286 million-mile journey to the Red Planet.

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