Abroad

Managua Looking East Nicaragua has just concluded a $140-million trade agreement with Bulgaria to finance industrial and agricultural projects, a deal that powerfully boosts Nicaraguan trade with the Eastern bloc. The money will be used to buy machinery and equipment to build, among other things, a deep-water port on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. Trade between Nicaragua and Eastern Europe was almost nonexistent until the Sandinista revolution in 1979. At first, East Germany was the leading trading partner, to the tune of about $20 million a year. Then last May a bilateral agreement worth $2 billion was signed with the Soviet Union—half for machinery credits and the rest for telecommunication, health, and hydroelectric projects. An important feature of these deals is their financing. Like most underdeveloped countries, Nicaragua has a big foreign-trade deficit, in this case an annual $400 million, and those governments that offer credit find the Nicaraguans most responsive.

Paris Retro Feminism Simone de Beauvoir at 75 remains a landmark in the history of twentieth century feminism. Interviewed the other day as to whether the public does not perceive the women’s movement as having flagged since its successes of the last decade, she commented: “No, it is less brilliant, less scandalous, because the 1970s were when the explosions occurred, but I don’t think the movement is either dead or decrepit. Perhaps in the United States, but not in France. Over there, I believe there has been a terrible retrogression, not only because of Reagan, but because of the new feminism. Women are now being asked to abandon the fight and to return to the traditional values of the difference between men and women; to the vocation of the woman; of the wife or the mother; of devotion and so on. The new American feminism is very dangerous, for it is a return to the eternel feminin.”

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Managua Looking East Nicaragua has just concluded a $140-million trade agreement with Bulgaria to finance industrial and agricultural projects, a deal that powerfully boosts Nicaraguan trade with the Eastern bloc. The money will be used to buy machinery and equipment to build, among other things, a deep-water port on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. Trade between Nicaragua and Eastern Europe was almost nonexistent until the Sandinista revolution in 1979. At first, East Germany was the leading trading partner, to the tune of about $20 million a year. Then last May a bilateral agreement worth $2 billion was signed with the Soviet Union—half for machinery credits and the rest for telecommunication, health, and hydroelectric projects. An important feature of these deals is their financing. Like most underdeveloped countries, Nicaragua has a big foreign-trade deficit, in this case an annual $400 million, and those governments that offer credit find the Nicaraguans most responsive.

Paris Retro Feminism Simone de Beauvoir at 75 remains a landmark in the history of twentieth century feminism. Interviewed the other day as to whether the public does not perceive the women’s movement as having flagged since its successes of the last decade, she commented: “No, it is less brilliant, less scandalous, because the 1970s were when the explosions occurred, but I don’t think the movement is either dead or decrepit. Perhaps in the United States, but not in France. Over there, I believe there has been a terrible retrogression, not only because of Reagan, but because of the new feminism. Women are now being asked to abandon the fight and to return to the traditional values of the difference between men and women; to the vocation of the woman; of the wife or the mother; of devotion and so on. The new American feminism is very dangerous, for it is a return to the eternel feminin.”