National Front

Eager, smart, broke and discouraged, Anne Arundel County Young Democrats are pinning what little hope they have on Bill Clinton.The presidential candidate lost his national front-runner status this week, but the Arkansas governor remains the favorite with local Democratsbetween 18 and 25, an often-overlooked group and possibly the most despairing segment of the population."

PARIS -- The French Communist Party, so orthodox it opposed Mikhail S. Gorbachev's early efforts at perestroika and glasnost, yesterday ruled out following the Soviet Union's Communist Party into the dustbin of history.At a two-day meeting that ended yesterday, the party's Central Committee also rejected internal calls for reform and for the resignation of its Politburo -- despite a steady loss of membership over the past few years, a growing disorientation among the rank and file and a disaffection that reached into the Politburo itself.

SINCE SEIZING POWER in 1989, the National Islamic Front of spiritual leader Hassan al-Turabi and President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has put Sudan on the cutting edge of the Islamic revolution.They have served as a conduit for Iran's export of terrorism, harbored subversives of neighboring Arab regimes, genocidally suppressed the black Christians of the south and given sanctuary to cultist Christian insurgents in Uganda. This was the regime that sponsored the revival of black slavery in its own country that was exposed by Sun reporters Gregory Kane and Gilbert Lewthwaite last year.

PARIS -- At a time when the multicultural model for society has made great progress in the United States and Britain, and is firmly established in Canada, the French are determined to stick with their policy of cultural assimilation.This is a crucial choice, since tension in France over immigration is fundamentally cultural and social in origin, rather than racial. Even National Front voters object mainly that these people are ''different'' in the way they live. They say they have created an alien society of their own inside France.

Paris -- William Faulkner, nearly a half-century ago, speaking of the American South, said that the past ''is not even past.'' France has just demonstrated what that means. The Dreyfus case, which occurred exactly a century ago, is not ''past'' either.The French army's magazine just published an article on the Dreyfus case, written by the head of the army's historical section. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a Jewish officer, graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique, the most highly regarded of France's ''grands ecoles.

ALGIERS, Algeria -- A party that says it wants to turn Algeria into an Islamic republic in the Iranian mold has triumphed in the nation's first free parliamentary elections, trouncing the ruling National Liberation Front, which has governed the country since independence 30 years ago.Government officials said that virtually complete returns from Thursday's voting had delivered 189 of the Algerian Parliament's 430 seats to the Islamic Salvation Front, a...

Guillermo Ungo, 59, who headed the political wing of El Salvador's guerrilla movement, died of a heart attack today in Mexico City. He returned from exile in Panama in 1989 to head his own party, the National Revolutionary Movement. Mr. Ungo was a candidate for the Salvadoran National Assembly in elections set for March 10 and had been a presidential candidate in 1989. He served on El Salvador's governing junta from 1979 to 1980 and in 1972 ran for vice president on the ticket headed by the late former President Jose Napoleon Duarte.

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.

At the age of 16, a French villager named Jeanne d'Arc responded to what she said were the voices of saints, exhorting her to take up arms against English invaders. Dressed in male clothing, she led troops to victory in battle after battle before being captured when she was 19. Jeanne heard voices again soon enough, but these were decidedly human ones, some mocking her and others praying for her as she slowly burned to death at the stake during a brutal execution carried out 580 years ago. This week, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra presents its first performance of a 1938 oratorio commemorating the woman whose faith, vision and bravery would eventually earn her sainthood.

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.