November 1981 - November 23, 1981 (Monday)

November 23, 1981 (Monday)

• England was swept by 105 tornadoes over the space of five hours. Normally, the United Kingdom has 30 tornadoes in an entire year. The twisters formed at random along a cold front sweeping from Anglesey to East Anglia.
• Iran-Contra scandal: President Reagan signed the top-secret NSDD-17, a National Security Decision Directive, authorizing the CIA to recruit and support Contra rebels in Nicaragua and allotting $19,950,000 funding.
• After 45 years, the New Jersey State Police files on the Lindbergh kidnapping were opened for public viewing. The release of the files had followed a lawsuit brought by Anna Hauptmann, the widow of Bruno Hauptmann, who had been convicted of the 1930 kidnapping and murder of Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the 18-month old son of legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The materials are now housed at the state police Museum and Learning Center in West Trenton.
• Male nurse Robert Diaz was arrested at his home and charged with murdering 12 hospital patients by injecting them with overdoses of the heart medicine Lidocaine. Eleven of the murders had taken place in April at the Community Hospital of the Valley, in Perris, California. Diaz was suspected in the deaths of as many as 60 other lidocaine related deaths. He was convicted on the 12 counts of murder on March 29, 1984, and sentenced to death, but died of natural causes on August 11, 2010 at the age of 72 .;
• U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Cuba's Vice-President Carlos Rafael Rodríguez met secretly in Mexico City at the home of Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda Gutman, to discuss whether Cuba would cease funding of guerilla operations in Central America. The meeting was unsuccessful, and did not remain a secret for long, being reported by the Mexico City newspaper El Pais two weeks later.