Jacques Chirac

PRESIDENT Jacques Chirac of France came back to an America where he was a student four decades ago to tell President Clinton and Congress mostly what they wanted to hear. He had unilaterally ended French nuclear testing in the South Pacific -- for all time he said -- on the eve of the visit. He came as political heir to Charles de Gaulle, who had yanked France out of NATO participation and kicked U.S. soldiers out of France three decades ago. He came also as head of a French regime that has placed French soldiers under U.S. NATO command in Bosnia.

VINCENNES, France -- Almost all of the 210 illegal immigrants from Africa thrown out of a Paris church and arrested by police Friday were free yesterday after official attempts to deport most of them bogged down on legal grounds.Ten men who had been on a hunger strike for 52 days in support of the group's demands for official permission to stay here returned, along with scores of other men, women and children, to a theater complex where the group had stayed before in the Bois de Vincennes, a park on the eastern edge of Paris, to await the outcome of deportation proceedings against 94 of them.

PRESIDENT Clinton can claim a foreign policy victory of historic magnitude in the unanimous invitation of membership by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, effective in 1999. Once "defended" by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Bloc against West Germany and the United States, these countries will instead be defended by NATO against their former protectors, moving the border of "the West" 300 miles eastward.Mr. Clinton had staked his prestige on admitting these three countries and no others, after President Jacques Chirac of France pushed for admitting Romania and Slovenia along with them.

THE CRESCENDO of threats by American public figures to bomb targets in Iraq may be ill-advised. But it is not new and not frivolous. Despite similarities to a satirical new movie, "Wag the Dog," the threats are not cynically designed to distract attention from the scandal in which President Clinton finds himself, but predate it.What the United States demands from Iraq is to cease developing biological and chemical warfare and to scrap weapons it now possesses....

BARCELONA, Spain - European Union leaders ended a two-day meeting in Barcelona yesterday with an agreement to increase competition in energy markets and to press ahead with economic reforms, with the goal of overtaking the United States and making Europe the most dynamic economy in the world by 2010. The summit, heavily policed for fear of protests by anti-globalization groups, also approved the creation of Galileo, a European satellite network to rival the U.S. Global Positioning System.

IN FRANCE, the extreme nationalist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen lost his bid for the presidency Sunday but pulled in more votes than he had ever received and left no one in doubt that right-wing discontent is a force to be reckoned with in Europe. In the Netherlands, Mr. Le Pen's counterpart was assassinated yesterday, just nine days before general elections there. European politics haven't looked this grim in a long time. Pim Fortuyn, who was shot and killed as he was leaving a Dutch radio station, objected to the comparison with Mr. Le Pen. He was openly gay, for one thing, and he said he wanted to preserve the Dutch tradition of tolerance, not obliterate it. But his proposed means?

WHAT DOES yesterday's horrifying arson attack on a South Korean subway train have to do with Saturday's anti-war protests by several million people around the world? Just this: If a mentally unbalanced man can kill upwards of 100 people with nothing more than a drink container full of flammable liquid, then maybe the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is a little misplaced. An attack on that same subway train with nerve agents would probably not have killed any more people than the arson did. There are, in other words, all sorts of garden-variety tools of death available to terrorists.

Daily war briefing The battlefield A suicide bomber driving a taxi killed four American soldiers at a road checkpoint near Najaf after drawing them near his vehicle. Military officers confirmed reports that U.S. forces had found bodies of some coalition troops in shallow graves near Nasiriyah. Iraq's Ministry of Information building was damaged in a U.S. missile attack before dawn, as warplanes dropped six 500-pound laser-guided bombs and nine 500-pound unguided bombs on military vehicles and a command bunker south of Baghdad.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - After five months of foreign military occupation and the ouster of Saddam Hussein, nearly two-thirds of Baghdad residents believe that the removal of the Iraqi dictator has been worth the hardships they have been forced to endure, a new Gallup poll shows. Despite the systemic collapse of government and civic institutions, a wave of looting and violence, and shortages of water and electricity, 67 percent of 1,178 Iraqis told a Gallup survey team that within five years, their lives would be better than before the U.S. and British invasion.

WASHINGTON - President Bush defended yesterday his policy of barring France, Germany, Russia and other nations from $18.6 billion in U.S.-financed Iraqi reconstruction projects. But despite the anger the policy has aroused in foreign capitals, he said his personal envoy, James A. Baker III, would still meet with the leaders of several of those nations to ask that they forgive debts they are owed by Iraq. Bush's argument was that only those nations that contributed militarily to the effort in Iraq should reap the benefits of the $18.6 billion that Congress approved last month for reconstruction.