The Philippines: No News Is Bad News

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The Bolivian team—four marksmen, a fencer and a champion walker named Osvaldo MorejÓn—protested. Asked Victor Hugo Campos, one of the marksmen: "How are we to improve our record if we don't attend any major competitions?" The argument won over Bolivian President Hernán Siles Zuazo. On Friday he told the team it could go to Los Angeles.

SOVIET UNION

A Plea for Liberty

Eleven Western reporters, including members of a U.S. television crew, squeezed into a cramped Moscow apartment one day last week for a rare and risky event: a press conference by three Jewish refuseniks, would-be emigrants to Israel. Their message, as delivered by Boris Klotz, 34, a wiry mathematician: "There are thousands of Jews in the Moscow area alone who want to go to Israel. The authorities tell some of these people that they have insufficient motive, and others that East-West relations are too poor."

The three men called the press conference, the first in more than a year, to counter recent propaganda by a government-sponsored organization that disingenuously calls itself the Anti-Zionist Committee. Soviet Army General David Dragunsky, the committee's chairman, boasted to reporters last month that "the Zionist hope to lure Jews out of the Soviet Union has collapsed." According to official figures, Soviet emigration to Israel has indeed slowed to a trickle, from a high of 50,000 in 1979 to just 220 in the first four months of this year. For the many who cannot leave, said Viktor Fulmakt, 39, an underemployed computer programmer, "life has become extraordinarily difficult."

JAPAN

Priestly Tax Evasion

Remain impoverished, or you will end up forgetting your fundamental aspirations for Nirvana.

—Zen Monk Dogen (1200-53)

The Tokyo regional taxation bureau last month accused some of the country's 200,000 Buddhist priests of ignoring that admonition. One, it said, had used unreported income to maintain two mistresses. Another presented his wife with a $95,000 mink coat and a diamond ring worth $43,500.

A Buddhist priest's most lucrative activity is writing kaimyo, posthumous names (example: "Heroic disciple to Buddha residing in ravine full of sunshine and nightingales"), without which deceased Buddhists cannot reach "the better world." A kaimyo can cost between $650 and $1,300; prices for more lavish names reach several million dollars. The fees are taxexempt. Many priests, however, have also turned entrepreneur, running lots, wedding halls and real estate agencies. Although priestly income is taxed at a top rate of 20%, vs. 43.3% for corporations, the bureau charges have been engaging in loose bookkeeping.