National Front

SAN JOSE LAS FLORES, El Salvador -- For 11 years, An Ayala was a guerrilla fighter for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) during this country's civil war.Now, the war has been over for nearly a year. She has exchanged her M16 for a cooking pot and the other trappings of a housewife in the Latin American mode.And like many of the other women who risked their lives with the FMLN, she has rediscovered a more intransigent enemy."I'm bored of living in the same place all the time without being with lots of people," says the 28-year-old Mrs. Ayala.

Well, it appears that The Sun, the Democratic Party Journalistic Tool, is in full gear. During the Republican National Convention, The Sun carried front page convention coverage only the day after Mitt Romney spoke. Otherwise, coverage was inside the paper. But for the Democratic National Convention, front page coverage began a full two days prior to the convention and has continued every day since. In addition, articles have appeared in The Sun which, for instance, extolled President Barack Obama as the great conciliator between the Democrats and Republicans (never mind his "us" and "them" divisive rhetoric)

PARIS -- Fifty years after they collaborated to send 76,00 Jews to their deaths in Nazi camps, two leaders of France's Vichy regime are being called to account.One, the former head of Vichy police, Rene Bousquet, is alive and may face charges for crimes against humanity. The other, long-dead Vichy chief of state Philippe Petain, is being tried in the court of public opinion with the appearance of an unprecedented film on his World War II government.Mr. Bousquet, who ordered the roundup of 12,884 Jews by French police in the summer of 1942 for deportation to Auschwitz, is the archetypal French administrator who went on to a brilliant banking career after the war.Petain, the World War I hero who stepped in to lead France after its defeat in 1940, incarnates a conservative, anti-international tradition in French society whose legacy is carried today by the extremist, right-wing group, the National Front.

Hegyashalom, on the Hungarian border with Austria, September 1989: East Germans line up in their pastel Trabant cars, pushing, jump starting and cajoling the cardboard automobiles across the border. At the first parking lot in Austria, the clown cars meet sleek BMWs and Volkswagens. West Germans emerge, tearfully embracing their kin from the East.Berlin, two months later, about 9 p.m.: a couple of East Berliners, testing what they'd heard on the television news that evening, try to cross the Berlin Wall at Bornholmerstrasse.

PARIS -- There is something wrong in France, everyone agrees. As always, they call it the malaise, a tired word for a tired and dispirited condition.But not everybody concurs on the cause or the cure.To some the cause is obvious, and so is the corrective. Franz-Olivier Giesbert, editor of the influential newspaper Le Figaro, thinks he knows what to do.For him, the source of the malaise is the Socialist Party that has governed France since 1981 (with a two-year interruption). By extension, that includes President Francois Mitterrand, who founded it, and who has been in office longer than any president since the Fifth Republic was launched by Charles De Gaulle in 1958.

INDIAN VOTERS deserted the ruling Congress Party by the hundreds of millions in the largest free election ever held. Out of the chaos will come a coalition government. It will be led either by leftists representing low-caste Hindus, Muslims and Marxists; or by high-caste Hindu extremists who would abolish the secular laws and protections for minorities and launch a nuclear arms race.The Congress Party, in power most of the time since 1947, rolled back British imperialism. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)

French Socialist Lionel Jospin delightfully humiliated the pollsters with his first-place 23.3 percent in the first round of his nation's presidential election. The left lives. But Mayor Jacques Chirac of Paris, former prime minister, is the front-runner in the run-off between the top two on May 7. He starts with the base of his own 20.8 percent plus the third-place 18.6 percent (total, 39.4 percent) of his fellow Gaullist, Edouard Balladur.The French are bemused by the phenomenon they call "the excluded" -- the destitute, North African immigrants and 12.3 percent unemployed left out of French prosperity -- a concept pretty close to "the marginalized" of Mexico or "underclass" of the United States.

FOR THE NEXT two weeks, France, and the world, will witness the spectacle of an extreme nationalist right-winger as one of two candidates for president. Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose National Front party is built on poisonous resentments, shocked the nation by coming in second in Sunday's first round of balloting, edging out the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin. Mr. Le Pen stands virtually no chance of winning in his face-off with Jacques Chirac, the incumbent, on May 5. But simply by getting to the second round, and muscling the left out of the race entirely, he has set off alarm bells throughout European politics.

Communism may rise again in Eastern Europe, if the transition to democracy and capitalism is too painful, too long, too destructive of people's living standards and hopes. This is clearly a concern in Russia, Ukraine and Poland. It is what divided Slovakia from the Czech Republic and, to some extent, Serbia from Croatia and Slovenia. But in Romania, the story is different. There, communism never gave up.Except in name. The Communist Party was outlawed, by Communists ruling as the National Salvation Front.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- At least 28 people, including five Afghan lawmakers and a number of children, were killed yesterday in one of the country's deadliest suicide attacks since the ouster of the Taliban, authorities said. The bomber struck a sugar factory in Baghlan province, north of Kabul, during a visit by a delegation from the lower house of parliament. The legislators, on an economic fact-finding trip, were being greeted by local dignitaries and children at the time. "The explosion happened when the school students were singing songs to welcome the lawmakers to their province," said Zemeri Bashary, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.