December 26, 1992

At a meeting in November with a delegation of American Senators, Vietnamese officials interrupted the conversation to offer their guests a glass of what is now Vietnam's most popular soft drink: Coca-Cola. The Senators took small sips. The Vietnamese gulped it down. In a sign of how the free market has begun to take hold here -- and of the willingness of Vietnamese to embrace even the most potent symbols of American capitalism -- Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7-Up and Sprite are being sold openly almost everywhere in Vietnam, north and south, city and countryside, smuggled in across the porous border from Cambodia.

Deprived of his primary targets by Presidential pardons, the independent prosecutor in the Iran-contra affair said today that his investigation would now focus on President Bush himself, specifically on whether Mr. Bush improperly withheld his personal diary to conceal a cover-up of the arms-for-hostages swap. The final thrust by the prosecutor, Lawrence E. Walsh, may lead to one last confrontation between Mr. Walsh and the President. Mr. Walsh is almost certain to seek an interview with Mr. Bush, probably after he leaves office next month.

It was a hair-raising holiday season for many of the nation's retailers: sales started out strong, dropped off precipitously and finally skyrocketed the last weekend before Christmas. Most merchants say their holiday business improved this year despite the ups and downs caused by unusually nasty weather and news of more layoffs and revampings among America's blue-chip companies.

The nation's economy is staggering out of the recession, say most of the gauges that measure it, but people who are getting jobs again tell a sobering story. Many good factory jobs and white-collar office jobs with good wages and benefits are giving way to unstable and mediocre jobs. That makes this recovery different from any other.

Haifa Melhes, the highest-ranking woman in Jordan's Education Ministry, sits in her large office with not much to do except light one cigarette after another. In 1989, after Mrs. Melhes's 23-year career brought her to the position of the ministry's director of cultural affairs, the Muslim fundamentalist who had been named to head the ministry gave her job to a male colleague because, he told her, he opposed "women holding leadership roles" in society.