July 31, 1981 (Friday)
- 1981 Major League Baseball strike: In New York, federal mediator Kenneth Moffett announced that the major league owners and players had agreed to end the strike. The All-Star game, set for August 9 in Cleveland, would mark the return of baseball, and regularly scheduled games would resume on August 10.
- Died: General Omar Torrijos, 52, military leader of Panama, and head of state from 1972-1978. Torrijos and six other people had taken off from Penonomé in a storm, bound for Coclesito, and the plane crashed into the Cerro Julio mountain.
- Died: Joe Gqabi (born 1929), African National Congress representative in Zimbabwe and former member of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, was assassinated as he backed out of his driveway in Harare; decades later one of the Districts of South Africa was named in his honour.
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Famous quotes containing the word july:
“This, it will be remembered, was the scene of Mrs. Rowlandson’s capture, and of other events in the Indian wars, but from this July afternoon, and under that mild exterior, those times seemed as remote as the irruption of the Goths. They were the dark age of New England.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)