April 24, 1981 (Friday)
- 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 President 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.
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