September 21, 1986

NOT since the Algerian War of independence in the late 1950's and early 1960's has Paris suffered such a bloody wave of terrorist attacks. In the last two weeks, five bombings at crowded, well-known spots in Paris have killed eight people and injured 200. Parisians have been shaken, and the Government admits that, while it suspects a particular group of terrorists, no arrests seem imminent. The most recent phase of the terror began Sept. 8, when a bomb exploded in the post office of the Hotel de Ville, Paris's City Hall, in which Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, who is also the Mayor, lives and works. Last Monday, terrorists audaciously planted a bomb inside police headquarters, not far from Notre Dame Cathedral, humiliating French security, demonstrating that virtually no place was safe.

SOMEWHERE in this region, a brave and mighty hunter is displaying a new trophy this weekend. One pictures him perched on a barstool in Hicksville or Bay Ridge or East Orange, holding up the trophy for his admiring pals to see. ''The dangers were great,'' he tells them. ''I was almost trampled. I was almost gored. I was almost suffocated.''

TO Theresa Fiore, whose 9-year-old daughter Elizabeth left a predominantly white neighborhood school in Yonkers to attend a racially mixed program for gifted students on the opposite side of the city, the initial results are encouraging. ''I think for the first time, Elizabeth is being challenged,'' Mrs. Fiore said. ''No matter what she did, Elizabeth was best in her class at the local school. Now, she's meeting students who are at her level or above.'' As a result of a court-ordered school integration plan that went into effect with the opening of city schools Sept. 8, Elizabeth, who is white, was enrolled in a magnet program for gifted students at the city's Hawthorne School. Because Mrs. Fiore had a choice, she picked the the program for her daughter rather than keep her in the neighborhood school, even though it meant a 20-minute bus ride, because she felt it would ''do the most for her potential.''

THE Idaho panhandle, a land of lyrically named lakes and thick Ponderosa pines, is in the midst of a dramatic change from a timber- and mining-based economy to one founded on tourism. No place is the change more evident than in the new $60 million Coeur d'Alene Resort, a hotel and convention center on Lake Coeur d'Alene in this town of 20,000 residents. Gov. John Evans has called the 18-story, 340-room resort, which opened May 9, ''the biggest thing to happen to Idaho since Sun Valley'' arrived on the scene as a world-class ski resort 50 years ago.

THE delicate web of relations between the Soviet Union and the United States is easily torn, and a disruption in one spot can quickly lead to a widening rift. This is the danger now, amid a series of actions and retaliations surrounding the arrest of an American correspondent in Moscow, as officials on both sides work toward finding some common ground in the difficult area of arms control. Their immediate goal, undertaken as the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, conducted talks in Washington last week with President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz, is to reduce the obstacles to a meeting this year between Mr. Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. This would be hard even if the atmosphere had not been soured by the Soviet imprisonment of Nicholas S. Daniloff of U.S. News & World Report. In apparent retaliation for the arrest of an accused Soviet spy, Gennadi F. Zakharov, in New York Aug. 23, Mr. Daniloff was arrested in Moscow Aug. 30 and accused of espionage. Last week, Mr. Daniloff said in Moscow that the charges against him were political; Mr. Zakharov said he had been the victim of an F.B.I. setup.