September 28, 1994

JUST 10 days old, the refurbished Monkey Bar in the Hotel Elysee on East 54th Street in Manhattan resembles halftime at a football stadium's concession stand. On a recent evening, its cocktail lounge teemed with after-work revelers. In its stylized 1950's dining room Sylvester Stallone and his entourage held court in a corner banquette, food groupies were exchanging opinions about the penne with shredded lamb shank, and the irrepressibly hip dropped by to case the scene -- but not to eat. Down at C. T., the acclaimed new restaurant of Claude Troisgros on East 22d Street, the dining room was packed with customers ordering the likes of $24 crispy snapper with confit of eggplant and $26 beef tenderloin in red-wine sauce with yuca biscuits. Earlier in the day at Cafe Centro, the gleaming new 230-seat brasserie in the Met Life (ne Pan Am) Building, lunch customers were 12 deep at the reception desk. And at Gramercy Tavern, reservations for a weekend night -- if you are lucky enough to get through on the telephone -- must be made three to four weeks in advance.

Just days after an anemic showing in his primary and one local poll that put him well behind his Republican challenger, Speaker Thomas S. Foley returned to his district for a weekend of politicking. But of all places in his sprawling territory to visit, he picked this outpost near the Canadian border, a place so sparsely settled that cows amble across the road in their own sweet time and voters seem as scarce as mountain lions.

Barely a day goes by without Haitians taking to the streets to cheer the impending return of their elected President. But from the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy that educated and ordained the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, there has come no word or gesture of rejoicing or support -- only silence. To the President's many supporters within the church, it is clear that the mere thought of Father Aristide back in power is nearly as alarming to Haiti's Roman Catholic bishops as it is to the Haitian military.

Japanese and American negotiators engaged in a high-stakes economic duel today, with Japan insisting that it would make no more trade concessions to Washington and the Americans insisting that they would hit Tokyo with trade sanctions if more concessions were not forthcoming. The Clinton Administration's confrontation with Japan, one American official remarked, is the economic equivalent of the confrontation with Haiti, with only one major difference: "This is really important."

Having concluded that the Central Intelligence Agency cannot ably chart its course in the post-cold-war world, Congress is creating an independent commission to rethink the agency's role and review its continued existence in its present form. The commission, being formed despite active opposition by the C.I.A.'s leaders and passive resistance from the White House, will have the broadest possible mandate to propose changes in the structure, the power and the budget as well as the very existence of the C.I.A. and the nation's 11 other military and civilian intelligence agencies. In effect, Congress is forcing the C.I.A. to become something like a company undergoing a court-supervised bankruptcy reorganization.