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- NATION, Page 24Grapevine
-
-
- BACK TO BASICS. Yasser Arafat is telling aides that he may
- break off talks with the U.S. and order a resumption of P.L.O.
- attacks on Israeli military targets. The P.L.O. leader angrily
- claims that Washington has backed out of a bargain: he made a
- concession by recognizing Israel, but the U.S. has yet to
- explicitly endorse the idea of a Middle East peace conference
- or to assert the right of Palestinians to seek an independent
- state. Arafat threatens to unveil his tougher line at a meeting
- of his Fatah guerrilla organization later this month.
-
- CAPITOL PUNISHMENT. When Senators itched to start their
- Fourth of July recess without acting on a child-care bill,
- majority leader George Mitchell applied some schoolmaster's
- discipline. He vowed to keep them in session until midnight
- Friday, a horror to those who love to flee the Capitol on
- Thursday night. If they still dallied, Mitchell threatened, he
- would demand a Saturday vote, eating into their break. Aware he
- was not kidding, the Senators passed the bill late Thursday.
-
- JESSE VS. JESSE. After Jesse Jackson traveled to Syria to
- win the release of Navy Lieut. Robert Goodman in late 1983, he
- obtained $25,000 from North Carolina businessman Marion Harris,
- a Jackson campaign supporter, to settle a Damascus hotel bill.
- Harris now wants his money back, and he has turned for help to
- another Jesse: North Carolina's ultra-conservative Senator Jesse
- Helms is pressuring the perennial Democratic presidential
- aspirant to pay up.
-
- DOUBLE AGENCIES. In 1987, when the Soviets displayed
- eavesdropping bugs planted in their new Washington embassy, a
- wire on one device was mysteriously marked MADE IN CANADA. A
- Western intelligence source explains that Canadian agents
- arranged the bug's installation to show the Soviets how closely
- the U.S. and Canada cooperate in intelligence ventures. In a
- similar game, Canada found Soviet bugs in a government building
- in Ottawa, then replanted them in an East bloc embassy in the
- same city. The idea was to sow suspicion that the Kremlin was
- snooping on its allies.
-
- SHE LED TWO LIVES. Sheila Ward was a congressional
- employee. No, Sheila Ward was a campaign employee. Actually, she
- was on both payrolls of Newt Gingrich, Jim Wright's accuser,
- during the last quarter of 1988 -- requiring, presumably, that
- she be in two places at once. Ward, who now lives one life as
- Gingrich's Washington press secretary, claims that she was on
- an unpaid leave from her congressional duties at the time and
- that House records to the contrary are wrong. Wright was
- criticized for using a congressional staffer to work on his
- book, Reflections of a Public Man.
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