Word: importance
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Loosening restrictions on Soviet citizens' access to foreign currencies is not just another glasnost gambit. If the Soviet Union hopes to feed itself, it must find ways of getting its moribund farming sector to perform better. Notes a senior Western diplomat: "If they could import goods from a Sears catalog, that might be a pretty good incentive...
Under Customs rules, imported dolls are subject to a 12% import tariff, while toy soldiers are not. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has now upheld Customs, reasoning that, like other dolls, GI Joe is "a representation of a human being used as a child's plaything." But for little boys everywhere, said Donald Robbins, the firm's general counsel, "GI Joe is still one of the guys...
...plight from the headlines, and in the case of the ivory trade, Japan has a better record of reform. In the mid-1980s, Japan accounted for as much as 70% of the final market for ivory products. In 1983 and 1984 alone, more than 135,000 elephant tusks were imported, mostly to be carved into signature seals called hanko. Then, as international complaints about the ivory trade mounted, Japan's dealers reversed their aggressive import policies. By 1988 ivory imports had been reduced by 75% from the peak years...
Bush appointed former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett "drug czar" and accorded this post Cabinet status, but doesn't even allow Bennett to attend Cabinet meetings. He banned the import of semiautomatic assault weapons, the firearms of choice of drug lords, only to subsequently refuse to ban domestic manufacturing of such weapons. Of course, Bush's membership in the NRA, which somehow seemed less disconcerting to the electorate than Dukakis being a "card-carrying member" of the ACLU, may have a lot to do with these incongruous and contradictory policies...
Lastly, it has not gone unnoticed--at least by this observer--that Harvard has traditionally had an inordinate impact upon the practices of other institutions of American higher education. It therefore has inherited a moral reponsibility of national import with respect to the issue of faculty diversity. To some extent, this view is similar to that of those who have struggled so mightily for the Harvard Corporation to divest its stock in companies that are in South Africa. However, in the case of hiring a fair number of Black faculty, there cannot be an analogous counter-argument suggesting that...