[chico20854]

April 2, 1998

In Angola, the Cubans have managed to reorganize their forces after the nuclear attacks of the previous year on new defensive lines but their fight against UNITA and their new South African allies is not going well as they begin to run short on fuel, spare parts and munitions.

Unofficially,

Anti-American rioting in Mexico peters out as eaily identifiable symbols of America have all been damaged or destroyed, locals return to trying to eke out an existence, and the flow of Mexican evacuees from Texas and Arizona slows.

Soviet transportation planners complete another link in their effort to support the ongoing European war effort when they complete a repairs to a rail route between Ploesti, Romania and Miskolc, Hungary, which is already a junction in a cobbled-together continuous rail route between Ukraine and occupied souhern Germany through Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The development allows the Soviet occupation authorities to ship refined petroleum from Ploesti's remaining remnant refining capacity to the front in Germany. As yet the rail lines into Poland across the Carpathians remain inoperable.

The Norwegian sail training ship Statsraad Lehmkuhl arrives in Montevideo, Uruguay. Its captain and first mate go ashore, after clearing customs, to try to obtain a cargo of grain for its home port of Bergen.

The aircraft carrier USS John F Kennedy, in one of the last naval air raids of the war, strikes the Italian air base at Grazzanize near Naples. The base had been used in March to launch airstrikes that crippled the Bizerte refinery in Tunisia. The American raid hits the sole remaining radar and fuel tank farm with conventional munitions, knocking them out in preparation for the second strike, 15 minutes later, that inflicts massive damage from a lone F/A-18 dropping a 150-kiloton B61 bomb that lands 14 meters off the runway.