Vietnamese

HANOI, Vietnam - When President Clinton attends a Vietnamese production tomorrow evening at the Hanoi Opera House, he will be stepping back through time in a city that is among the most beautiful in Asia. After entering the ornate French-colonial building, which is a smaller version of the opera house in Paris, the president will probably stride up the red carpet that covers the Italian marble staircase and sink into a crushed velvet chair in the VIP box overlooking the horseshoe-shaped theater.

WASHINGTON -- The White House promised yesterday that a presidential envoy would press Vietnam next week for an explanation of a previously secret document suggesting that Hanoi held 1,205 U.S. prisoners of war in 1972, three times more than it admitted then or later.The document, found in January by an American researcher in the archives of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow, could prove politically explosive if it is authentic, because it suggests that more than 600 American prisoners were killed, died of natural causes or remain in Vietnamese hands.

ONCE AGAIN, Michael Jordan had a chance to speak out about working conditions in Nike plants in Southeast Asia. Once again, he failed to do that.In a recent interview aired on ABC's ''Prime Time Live,'' reporter Chris Wallace wanted to know Mr. Jordan's response to charges some Nike products are made in Indonesian sweatshops by children who earn as little as 14 cents an hour.''I couldn't voice an opinion until I found out exactly what was happening and how that affected me,'' he said. Mr. Wallace answered the rest for Mr. Jordan with a voice-over saying the Chicago Bulls star ''now backs Nike, citing a recent study that shows workers are paid a fair wage.

Peace, if it really happens, has been a long time coming to Cambodia.For more than 20 years before the signing of a peace agreement Wednesday in Paris, that unhappy country experienced an unbroken succession of violent upheavals that killed millions, uprooted millions more, and devastated Cambodia's land and spirit.The Cambodians themselves, including the leaders of all four factions involved in the peace settlement, bear a heavy share of blame for the barbarism, death and misery their country has endured for so long.

Iraqis who have worked for the United States have put their lives on the line - the least the U.S. can do for them now is grant them visas to come live here. Take interpreters, for instance - who are so necessary because there are still so few Arabic speakers in the U.S. military, more than five years after 9/11. They've served alongside soldiers and Marines, in battle and in raids - 5,000 of them. Many have been killed, and more wounded. Dozens are being treated for severe injuries at a hospital in Jordan, and many of them believe they can't go back to Iraq because their work on America's behalf will mark them as dead men. Let them in. Since the war began in 2003, the U.S. has admitted just 466 Iraqi refugees, according to Ellen R. Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state.

Joseph Hill, 57, lead vocalist and songwriter for the traditional roots reggae group Culture, died Saturday after falling ill in Berlin while the group was in the middle of a European tour. One of reggae's most enduring bands, Culture was led by Mr. Hill for three decades. He penned the group's best known songs, including "Two Sevens Clash," "Natty Never Get Weary" and "I'm Not Ashamed." Born in the rural Jamaican parish of St. Catherine, he began his musical career in the late 1960s as a percussionist.

LAM NGUYEN looked at Pigtown and saw a Little Saigon in the making. The way it went wrong is a cautionary tale for Baltimore. This is a city that needs immigrants - to bring new life and creativity to its calcifying neighborhoods, to halt the destructive decline in population. But Baltimore has been out of the immigrant track for so long that it will take a concerted push to make it an attractive destination again. Everyone is going to have to help - employers, city planners, nonprofits, the police, neighborhood leaders.

Philadelphia. -- Trying to prove what happened to U.S servicemen missing in action from the Vietnam War is like trying to prove how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It can't be done. In the end, it's a question of faith.Logic dictates that no MIA survived. Ugly things happen to human bodies in modern war. Napalm reduces corpses to the size and consistency of burned-out campfires. Box mines leave not enough to fill a shoebox. White phosphorus melts everything.Add to that the fact that 81 percent of the missing were pilots or air crew, most of whom went down in remote tropical terrain where human remains vanish utterly in weeks, and even steel and aluminum are swallowed by jungle growth in a few months.

HAVRE DE GRACE -- As the Iraqi potential for major catastrophe grows and the most anti-military administration in American history wonders what, if anything, to do about it, a new book arrives and evokes memories of other bad times not so long ago. Some of these may be relevant today.First, a little background. In the fall of 1970, a year after Bill Clinton managed to evade the draft and the same year he was working in Washington for Project Pursestrings, a lobbying effort to cut off funds for the war in Vietnam, I was a young reporter newly arrived in Saigon.

MOSCOW -- A document described as a top-secret report written by a senior North Vietnamese general and delivered to the Communist Party Politburo in Hanoi in September 1972 says that North Vietnam was holding 1,205 U.S. prisoners of war at a time when North Vietnamese officials were saying that the number was only 368.A copy of the report was recently discovered in the archives of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow.The report, which has been authenticated by leading experts and has been circulated among U.S. government officials, is being called by some of those experts a "smoking gun" that proves Hanoi has been withholding information about the fate of U.S. prisoners of war in Vietnam.