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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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032789
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03278900.019
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1990-09-17
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WORLD, Page 56GRAPEVINE
CHECK-OUT TIME. Remember the "arms supermarket" revealed by
the Iran-contra hearings, a stockpile of hardware that the CIA said
was financed by drug money and secretly cached in Honduras to
supply the Nicaraguan contras when U.S. official aid ran out? Looks
like the supermarket may have found an ironic new customer: El
Salvador's leftist guerrillas. The Salvadoran rebels have recently
been toting Soviet-style AK-47s in addition to their usual captured
American-made M-16s. Publicly, the U.S. says it is likely that the
weapons came from the Sandinistas. But intelligence officials
privately believe that free-lancing Honduran military officials,
in partnership with professional arms traffickers, have been
peddling the AKs from their huge unused stash.
WARMER NONRELATIONS. In Jerusalem they keep wondering when
Moscow will finally restore diplomatic relations broken over the
Six-Day War in 1967. Might be soon. Then again . . . The good news
is that the Israelis have received quiet permission to reopen their
onetime embassy on Bolshaya Ordynka Street -- not as an embassy,
or even a consulate, but only as a diplomatically inferior interest
section. Still, that will allow Israel to process its own visas for
emigrating Soviet Jews, one of several housekeeping chores handled
over the past two decades by the Dutch.
INSIDE SKINNY. As the Bush Administration goes through the
exercise of reviewing policy on how to deal with Moscow, officials
have accumulated a few first impressions. Most prominent: the
regime of Mikhail Gorbachev has no well-thought-out game plan and
is very concerned that George Bush may be less willing than Ronald
Reagan to negotiate. "Much of what they're doing is ad hoc, and
they are pressed," said a ranking U.S. official. That combination,
he concluded happily, "offers the U.S. some good opportunities if
we play our cards right."