Secretary General

In a test of wills between NATO and the United Nations as to which organization has the power to authorize air strikes in Bosnia, the U.N. and its assertive secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, is the clear winner. By attaining the right to veto the first proposed offensive operation in NATO history, he has set a precedent that could serve his expansive vision of a secretary-general's authority.The Clinton administration must have swallowed hard in accepting this arrangement. For months, it has insisted that NATO on its own could initiate air strikes to protect U.N. peacekeeping forces and insure the delivery of humanitarian supplies to Muslim victims of Serb aggression.

Sister Mary Reparata Clarke, a member and retired secretary general of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, died Oct. 28 of complications from diabetes at Summit Nursing Home in Catonsville. She was 90. Catherine Lois Clarke was born in Baltimore and raised on Druid Hill Avenue. She was a 1935 graduate of Douglass High School and earned a bachelor's degree from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland in 1957. In 1968, she earned a master's degree from Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y. Before entering her order in 1940, she worked as a typist and substitute teacher in Baltimore public schools.

OXFORD, England -- Boutros Boutros-Ghali is on the way out. Five countries have a U.N. veto, but the veto that counts is America's.The Clinton White House should hang its head in shame for the way it has treated the secretary general. In Somalia, the U.S pinned the blame on the U.N. for the killing of 18 American soldiers and the disaster that followed. But it was the U.S. Quick Reaction Force, acting independently of the U.N. command, that led the attack on the Somali warlord that provoked the slaughter of American soldiers.

LONDON -- New United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, who assumes office today, faces a tough job. Not only is the South Korean coming into a job as the other half of his motherland is testing the international community with nuclear saber-rattling, but he is also taking the helm at an institution that increasingly appears to have lost its way. The United Nations' loss of credibility is in part due to a disconnect among what it can do, what people...

LONDON -- Alger Hiss -- yes, the same Alger Hiss -- summed up the criteria for selecting the U.N. secretary general in a private note to the U.S. secretary of state in 1946: ''The qualifications of the secretary general should be the primary consideration.''But qualifications have never been paramount. And the American veto of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who is about as well-qualified as a secretary general can be, reminds us again how basely political the appointment always has been.Another State Department memo from around the same period put it this way: ''He should be 45 to 55 and be fluent in both French and English . . . It was generally agreed that it would be undesirable if the candidate should come from the U.S.S.

AFTER A HALF-CENTURY, the United Nations will begin the new year with its seventh secretary-general. Kofi Annan of Ghana, 58, will be the most experience-qualified of the lot, having spent three decades as an international civil servant. And he will be the first black African.Now the under-secretary-general for peace-keeping, Mr. Annan enjoys a high reputation around the U.N. for competence and tact. That may not please the likes of Sen. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the sort of critic to be assuaged if the U.S. is to pay its $1.4 billion arrears to rescue the U.N. from bankruptcy.

KOFI ANNAN, seventh secretary-general of the United Nations, needs to be replaced in December when his five-year term is up. On Thursday, he offered his services for a second term. He should get it. Since the United States helped put him in office after vetoing a second term for his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, Mr. Annan has presided over long-demanded administrative reforms. He reached a deal on U.S. dues with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and Sen. Jesse Helms. He managed peacekeeping, brokered disputes and shined the spotlight on neglected crises of anarchy and health.

UNITED NATIONS -- When Ban Ki Moon was in high school in South Korea in 1962, he won a speech contest and was invited to the White House to meet President Kennedy. When a journalist there asked him what he wanted to do, he said, "I want to become a diplomat." It is a story tailor-made for the man who won the U.N. Security Council's backing yesterday to fill the world's top diplomatic post. Yet Ban, South Korea's foreign minister, did not tell the tale during his eight-month campaign to become the next U.N. secretary-general until last week, when it was clear he had clinched the spot.

UNITED NATIONS Secretary General Kofi Annan's visit to Washington marks an improvement in relations between the United States and the world organization. Mr. Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, clashed often with the U.S. over Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and the issue of U.N. reform.But Mr. Annan owes his selection as secretary general (the first sub-Saharan African to achieve this post) to the Clinton administration's support. At meetings with President Clinton, State Department officials and Republicans on Capitol Hill, the Ghanaian diplomat repeatedly stated his commitment to reform.

UNITED NATIONS -- In an effort to end the United Nations' financial troubles by persuading Congress to pay the United States' overdue dues, Secretary-General Kofi Annan is working on a plan to eliminate some $200 million a year of administrative spending and shift the money to aid for poor countries.The new secretary-general hopes to secure these savings in the administrative budget by eliminating 500 jobs from a work force that has already shrunk from 12,000 to 9,000 since 1985.The moves would slash administrative spending nearly in half and reduce administrative costs from 38 percent of the United Nations' $1.3 billion budget to 20 percent.

UNITED NATIONS -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan says that he will keep working right up until midnight today, when his 10-year tenure as the world's top diplomat officially ends. But he has begun reflecting on his achievements, frustrations and failures as a leader who embodies the world's ideals, and as a man who often could not escape his limitations to make them a reality. Although sometimes it is debated whether Annan, 68, was more "secretary" or "general," he was more of an idealist than either.

UNITED NATIONS -- Ban Ki Moon of South Korea took the oath of office yesterday as the U.N.'s eighth secretary-general. Ban, 62, pledged that after he officially assumes office Jan. 1, he would try to restore trust in the institution tainted by scandal and management lapses, and to bridge divisions between rich and poor nations. "I look forward with a mixture of awe and enthusiasm to taking up my duties as secretary-general of the United Nations," the former foreign minister said after being sworn in yesterday morning.

UNITED NATIONS -- When Ban Ki Moon was in high school in South Korea in 1962, he won a speech contest and was invited to the White House to meet President Kennedy. When a journalist there asked him what he wanted to do, he said, "I want to become a diplomat." It is a story tailor-made for the man who won the U.N. Security Council's backing yesterday to fill the world's top diplomatic post. Yet Ban, South Korea's foreign minister, did not tell the tale during his eight-month campaign to become the next U.N. secretary-general until last week, when it was clear he had clinched the spot.

Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. nominated yesterday a Democratic legislative leader to be the state's veterans secretary. Ehrlich named Del. George W. Owings III to be secretary of the Maryland Department of Veterans Affairs effective June 1. Owings represents Calvert County and is the House majority whip. His appointment requires Senate approval. Owings served in the Marine Corps from 1964 to 1968, rising to sergeant, and served three years in Vietnam, where he earned the Presidential Unit Citation, the Navy Unit Commendation with Bronze Star Device, the Navy-Marine Corps Medal, and the Vietnam Service Medal with Silver Star Device.

UNITED NATIONS - Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his strongest expression of alarm about the Palestinians under Israeli assault, called yesterday for an international force to be sent to the Middle East. Israel has always opposed the introduction of outsiders, with the possible exception of an American force to guarantee peace in the future. Annan has often referred to stiff Israeli opposition as a reason not to press the issue. Recently at the United Nations, however, the Palestinians and Arab nations have renewed their demand for peacekeepers, a move the United States opposes and would be expected to try to block in the Security Council.

THE 2001 Nobel Peace Prize to both the United Nations and Secretary-General Kofi Annan is a vindication of that body, but also of its critics. It rewards Sen. Jesse Helms and the Reagan and Clinton administrations, which forced reforms on the U.N. and dumped former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for Kofi Annan. This prize says the reforms worked. It honors Mr. Annan for whipping up world concern about AIDS and for holding the chaotic U.N. Conference on Racism, but also for making the U.N. the center of a global coalition against terrorism.

UNITED NATIONS -- As the U.N. General Assembly prepares to open its 46th annual session today, negotiators from 22 nations have agreed on a plan that would deprive the United States and other powers of the senior posts they have automatically claimed in the world organization.The plan, worked out by the group of 22 industrial and developing countries, including the United States and the other permanent Security Council members, is intended to streamline the unwieldy U.N. Secretariat, increase the power of the new secretary general -- who is to be chosen next month -- and make the organization more responsive to humanitarian disasters.

Lund, Sweden -- The appointment of the new secretary general of the United Nations is imminent, and with it, we should hope, a new period of U.N. activism that will make the world body do what its charter members in 1945 intended it to do -- be the force which intervenes whenever and wherever there is a threat to peace.The U.N. Charter was an immense creation of the intellectual imagination, an outcome of the peculiar horrors of World War II that stretched the minds of mankind. Tragically, for most of the post-war era, much of the charter has remained dormant, frozen in unanimated suspension by the nullifying rivalries of the Cold War.Only two times in its history has the U.N. used the ''enforcement'' procedures of the charter.

KOFI ANNAN, seventh secretary-general of the United Nations, needs to be replaced in December when his five-year term is up. On Thursday, he offered his services for a second term. He should get it. Since the United States helped put him in office after vetoing a second term for his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, Mr. Annan has presided over long-demanded administrative reforms. He reached a deal on U.S. dues with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and Sen. Jesse Helms. He managed peacekeeping, brokered disputes and shined the spotlight on neglected crises of anarchy and health.

AS ONE OF two master sergeants assigned as secretaries to then-Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. when he commanded II Corps in North Africa during the early days of World War II, Alfred J. Rapetti had the opportunity to observe the flamboyant and almost mythical general up close.His counterpart, who had been promoted to warrant officer the day before, was asked by Patton to take dictation. When he mistakenly asked to borrow the general's notes to check the spelling of several names, Patton erupted.