Corruption

PARIS - France's highest court of appeal has granted President Jacques Chirac broad immunity while in office, effectively derailing efforts by five investigating magistrates to question him on a range of corruption allegations dating from his time as mayor of Paris. Yesterday's broad ruling agreed with Chirac's stance that as head of state he is above the law, confirming that the president cannot be compelled to appear as a witness in a case, even one as mundane as a traffic accident. But the ruling, the first of its kind by the court in France's 43-year-old Fifth Republic, was not entirely good news for the conservative Chirac, who is expected to seek re-election next year.

TBILISI, Georgia - They've suffered so much in silence - sporadic electricity, freezing apartments, corruption swallowing up the nation's assets, going for months without receiving their tiny salaries. But when freedom of speech appeared threatened, citizens of this small country finally made themselves heard. A few weeks ago, a crusading television reporter who broadcasts a weekly program called "60 Minutes" held a news conference to announce that government officials had threatened to kill him unless he dropped his corruption investigations and left the country.

MEXICO CITY -- Much of Mexico's anti-drug strategy -- from informants' names to intelligence methods developed over the years -- has now passed into the hands of criminals as a result of the alleged corruption of this nation's top anti-narcotics official, a former senior official declared yesterday.The comments by Francisco Molina Ruiz, who was Mexico's drug czar until December, were the strongest public indication yet that Mexico's anti-narcotics fight is in a shambles and could take years to rebuild.

NEW DELHI, India - India's former prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, was sentenced yesterday to three years of "rigorous" imprisonment for his role in bribing members of Parliament to vote for his government in a 1993 no-confidence measure. The 79-year-old politician led the nation from 1991 to 1996, opening India's socialist economy to free-market reforms. While in office, he also titillated the country by publishing his own pulp fiction filled with political chicanery and racy sex. Rao was fined $2,200, but he was not jailed.

UNITED NATIONS -- Three years after the United Nations established an inspector general's office to combat waste and fraud, a clearer sense of the scope and style of corruption within the organization is beginning to emerge. So is an understanding of why it is often difficult to detect and stop.On Thursday, Undersecretary General Karl T. Paschke, the German foreign service officer who has directed the anti-corruption office since its founding, released his third annual report.It reveals a pattern of sloppy management in which contracts are awarded and money disbursed without reference to the organization's financial regulations or accepted rules of accounting.

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Carol Wanjiku's latest run-in with petty corruption occurred when a policeman saw her double-park near her house. Instead of issuing a ticket or a warning, she says, the officer demanded "something little." For the $2 or so that she handed over, he let her go. "It happens all the time," says Wanjiku, a 30-year-old software programmer, who also remembered the final step for getting a license plate for the car. "You want your number plate? You won't get it unless you give `something little.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - With a long-simmering political corruption scandal at a boil, all eyes are on President Thabo Mbeki as he weighs how to respond to a court ruling that some experts say is an important test of South Africa's 11-year-old democracy. Mbeki is under pressure to act after a judge asserted that Deputy President Jacob Zuma had a "generally corrupt relationship" with a Durban businessman recently convicted of graft. The question is: Will Mbeki - who appointed Zuma - fire him to demonstrate South Africa's intolerance for impropriety and its commitment to the type of good governance that lures foreign aid and investment?

WASHINGTON -- In one of the largest police corruption cases in Washington's history, a dozen officers have been indicted on charges that they took bribes to protect federal undercover agents who they thought were drug dealers and to help transport cocaine.The indictment was returned by a federal grand jury Tuesday, when the defendants were taken into custody. All 12 pleaded not guilty yesterday and were taken from the courtroom to a local jail, where they will be held pending hearings on whether they should be granted bail.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- On his first day as the Palestinian Authority's new minister of social affairs, Hassan Abu Libdeh arrived at the office early, eager to reform a ministry widely viewed as ineffective and corrupt. Just how much work Abu Libdeh had in front of him became frustratingly clear when he discovered the ministry headquarters was locked. He waited more than two hours, until well after 9 a.m., before the first employee arrived to let him in. To enter his office, he had to break open the door.

THE DEATHS of five U.S. service personnel in the July 23 crash of a de Haviland RC7 spy plane sent an alarm about U.S. aid to Colombia, now some $289 million a year.The plane was supposedly seeking cocaine operations. It may really have been hunting leftist insurrectionists, whom Colombia's army finds to be the greater enemy. The leftists and narco-terrorists do have mutual interests.A second alarm was the Aug. 5 arraignment in Brooklyn, N.Y., of Laurie Anne Hiett for allegedly mailing nearly 16 pounds of cocaine through the Army Post Office in the U.S. Embassy in Bogota to New York.