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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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121889
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12188900.022
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1990-09-19
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NATION, Page 42Grapevine
BYE-BYE, BLACKBIRD. It's the world's highest-flying (100,000
ft. plus), fastest (almost 3,000 m.p.h.), most secret spy plane.
But the Air Force has decided to ground the remaining six or eight
SR-71 Blackbirds and stuff them into museums. Over its 25-year
operational life, the Blackbird succeeded in avoiding more than
1,000 attempts to shoot it down during operations around the
perimeter of the Soviet Union and over China, Viet Nam, Cuba and
the Middle East. Pentagon officials say advanced
photo-reconnaissance satellites can do the Blackbird's job more
cheaply and efficiently.
CALIFORNIA, HERE WE COME. The end of the much vaunted
Massachusetts economic miracle has become the Bay Area's gain.
Silicon Valley firms are raiding top talent from such faltering
firms as Wang, Data General and Digital Equipment that once reigned
supreme on Boston's Route 128. But no matter how eager the Eastern
refugees are to begin their new jobs, many must wait until next
summer. The reason: a six-month waiting list for moving vans
heading west.
THANK GOD FOR STAR WARS. Whom does Vatican Secretary of State
Agostino Cardinal Casaroli credit for the outbreak of new thinking
in the U.S.S.R.? "Ronald Reagan obligated the Soviet Union to
increase its military spending to the limits of insupportability,"
Casaroli told TIME. "He made everyone understand that rearmament
was a dead-end street." The Cardinal's statement represents some
new thinking in Rome. Never an admirer of Star Wars, Casaroli once
urged Reagan to moderate his enthusiasm for a military buildup --
and the space shield in particular -- for fear of a war breaking
out.
DOUBLE TROUBLE. The mysterious hijacker D.B. Cooper became a
legend in 1971 after he bailed out of the rear door of a Northwest
Airlines jet, probably over Washington State, with $200,000 he had
extracted by making a bomb threat. He and the money vanished. Four
months later, Richard Floyd McCoy, a former Green Beret, hijacked
a United Airlines jet and bailed out of the rear door over Utah
with $500,000. Both men scribbled the phrase "No funny stuff" and
forced the planes to land so that money and four parachutes could
be brought on board. Now two former federal agents in Salt Lake
City are hawking a manuscript claiming that McCoy was also Cooper.
Ex-FBI agent Russell Calame, who originally investigated the case,
and ex-probation officer Bernie Rhodes, who spent four years
reinterviewing people, say they have evidence linking the two men.
McCoy was killed in a gunfight with FBI agents in 1974 after
escaping from a federal prison in Pennsylvania, where he was
serving a 45-year sentence for skyjacking.