1981 жылғы сәуір айының оқиғалары

Month of 1981

The following events occurred in April 1981:

Mario Moretti, a co founder of Red Brigades and the mastermind of the 1978 kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, was caught by police after nearly three years of pursuit. CERN produced the world's first proton antiproton collisions. Cancer survivor Bob Champion won the 1981 Grand National at Aintree on the horse Aldaniti. His story would inspire the 1984 film Champions. The 127th Boat Race, the annual competition between the rowing eights the Oxford University Boat Club and the Cambridge University Boat Club, was held. Oxford was coxed by Sue Brown, the first female coxswain in the history of the event, and passed the finishing post eight lengths ahead of Cambridge, their largest margin of victory since 1898. Appearing for the United Kingdom, the rock band Bucks Fizz won the 26th Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin, with the song "Making Your Mind Up". Henry Cisneros became the first Hispanic American to be elected to lead a major United States city. The 33 year old professor won 62% of the votes to become the new Mayor of San Antonio.

Si Unyil began its run as the most successful children's television program in Indonesia. Born: Michael A. Monsoor, American Medal of Honor recipient, in Long Beach, California (killed in Iraq in 2006)

The 1981 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced. John Kennedy O'Toole won the prize for fiction for A Confederacy of Dunces. Despondent over failing to find a publisher, O'Toole had killed himself 12 years earlier, on March 26, 1969. Janet Cooke of The Washington Post won the prize for feature writing, for her September 28, 1980, story "Jimmy's World", about an 8 year old heroin addict. Two days later, the Post revealed that Cooke had confessed to fabricating the story; she returned the prize and quit her job.

Fifteen coal miners were killed in an explosion at the Redstone Coal Company's Dutch Creek #1 mine. An investigation by the Colorado Bureau of Mines concluded that the cause was a spark, possibly from a damaged cable, that ignited accumulated methane gas. FBI agents W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller were pardoned by President Reagan, five months after they had been convicted of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of friends and relatives of suspected members of the Weather Underground terrorist group. In his pardon statement, Reagan said, "America was generous to those who refused to serve their country in the Vietnam War. We can be no less generous to two men who acted on high principle to bring an end to the terrorist that was threatening our nation."

Air U. S. Flight 716, from Denver to Gillette, Wyoming, collided with a Cessna airplane carrying parachutists from the Skies West Skydiving Club of Fort Collins, Colorado. All 13 people on the airliner were killed, and two of the skydivers died. The rest of the group parachuted to safety.

The Rochester Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox began playing a minor league baseball game. After nine innings, the score was tied, and at the end of the 32nd inning, 4:09 the next morning, the game was halted with the score still tied at 2 2. The game would not be finished until June 23. Rochester and Pawtucket did play another game on the same Sunday, but, as one author noted, "they did not attempt to resolve their 32 inning tie then because officials of both clubs were worried that the eligible players were exhausted." Died: James H. Schmitz, 69, American science fiction author

Bai Hua, an award winning author in the People's Republic of China, became the first writer to have his career ended by a government campaign against "bourgeouis liberalism" and suspected violations of the Chinese Communist Party's new "Four Cardinal Principles", beginning with an attack on the front page of the military newspaper Liberation Army Daily. China's leader Deng Xiaoping had been outraged by a film based on Bai Hua's novel Kulian (Unrequited Love). Government campaigns against other authors soon followed. The Inderavelly Massacre took place in the town of that name in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, when police fired into a crowd of Gondi tribesmen. The police reported that 13 armed protesters and one policeman were killed, while an investigating committee estimated the number at 60 or more. Three college students, on spring break from the University of New Brunswick, were killed after their group camped near the edge of a cliff at the Hay's Falls near Woodstock. Over a course of several minutes, the three fell 80 feet (24 m) to their deaths. In Omaha, the very last game of the Women's Professional Basketball League was played, as the Nebraska Wranglers defeated the Dallas Diamonds, 99–90, to win the WPBL championship in the fifth game of the best of five series.

U. S. President Ronald Reagan ended the grain embargo that been instituted by President Carter on January 7, 1980, and which had restricted the sale of American grain to the Soviet Union following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In his announcement, Reagan said, "American farmers have been unfairly singled out to bear the burden of this ineffective policy." On the same day, President Reagan sent a handwritten letter to Soviet General Secretary (and, as Chairman of the Presidium, Soviet head of state) Leonid Brezhnev to open a dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union. Biographer Lou Cannon would later describe the missive as "one of the few foreign policy documents composed by Reagan without the assistance of speechwriters or formal position papers from his various departments". Reagan, who composed the letter from his hospital bed while recovering from the attempt on his life, opened with a reference to a meeting during Brezhnev's 1973 visit to California, when Reagan had been Governor, asking "Is it possible that we have permitted ideology, political and economic philosophies, and governmental policies to keep us from considering the very real, everyday problems of peoples?" In Hama, Syria, the Syrian Army randomly arrested more than 150 men and teenaged boys, then shot them. The massacre was in retaliation for the April 21 attack of an army patrol by guerillas of the Muslim Brotherhood, based in Hama.

Operation Red Dog, a plot to overthrow the government of the Commonwealth of Dominica, was foiled when FBI agents arrested ten mercenary soldiers near New Orleans as they were preparing to sail toward the Caribbean island nation with a cache of weapons. Led by Michael Eugene Perdue, the group of white supremacists had planned to take control of the government of the mostly black nation, after freeing former Prime Minister Patrick John (also black) from a Dominican jail, and being appointed to high government positions. "Bigfoot", the first "monster truck", was created by Bob Chandler, who had envisioned a vehicle with tires so large that it could crush anything in its path. On this date, Chandler gave the first test run of "Bigfoot" at a field near St. Louis, Missouri, and rolled it over abandoned cars. The first major event in the new sport of monster truck competition would take place on April 9, 1983, at the Pontiac Silverdome, before a crowd of 68,000. The Xerox 8010 Star Information System, the first personal computer to include a mouse in the two button format used today for a right click and left click function, went on sale for the first time. In a press release, the Xerox Corporation described the 8010's capabilities and then noted that "All of these jobs require only four main function keys on the keyboard, plus the 'mouse,' which controls a 'pointer' that moves around the screen to choose from alternative functions." 20 year old John Eric Hastrick of Radlett Hertz, London, England, fell 330 feet (101 m) to his death from the Rim Trail in Grand Canyon National Park while walking backward toward the Canyon to find the right spot to photograph the Bright Angel Lodge. Former Vice President Spiro Agnew was ordered to pay the State of Maryland $248,735 during a Civil law lawsuit against him. A judge stated that "Mr. Agnew had no lawful right to this money under any theory," and ordered him to pay the state $147,500 for the kickbacks and $101,235 in interest. Agnew paid the sum in 1983 after two unsuccessful appeals. However, Agnew applied unsuccessfully for the sum to be treated as tax deductible in 1989.

U. S. Representative Raymond F. Lederer (D Pa.) resigned his office, one day after the House Ethics Committee had voted 10–2 to recommend his expulsion from the United States Congress. Lederer had won re election in 1980 while under indictment for taking a bribe following the FBI's Abscam investigation and was convicted of felony charges on January 9. Steve Carlton became the seventh pitcher to have 3,000 strikeouts, and the first left handed pitcher, in a game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos; Tom Seaver of the Cincinnati Reds had become the sixth on April 18 against the St. Louis Cardinals. The first five were Walter Johnson (1923), Bob Gibson (1974), Gaylord Perry (1978) and Nolan Ryan (1980).

In elections for the Volksraad, lower house of South Africa's Parliament, the ruling National Party captured 131 of the 165 seats. The Progressive Federal Party (26 seats) and the New Republic Party (8 seats) won the other offices. Only White citizens, roughly 10% of the adult population, were allowed to vote. Promoting itself as the "no frills airline", People Express began low cost trips to and from its hub at the Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. A ticket for the inaugural flight, from Newark to Buffalo, was priced at only $23. The Anheuser Busch brewing company began test marketing of its lower calorie beer, Bud Light, which was then introduced nationwide in the summer of 1982.