April 20, 1981 (Monday)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 to their deaths.
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Famous quotes containing the word april:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)