May 5, 2000

The number of United Nations peacekeepers held hostage by rebels in the West African nation of Sierra Leone rose to at least 92, including 23 soldiers from an Indian battalion. Secretary General Kofi Annan flew back to New York from Paris to decide on the next step in the crisis. Article, Page A14.

The House today decisively approved legislation that grants more than 70 African and Caribbean countries broad new trading privileges by expanding duty-free access to American markets. In an unusually strong bipartisan vote, 309 to 110, lawmakers backed a compromise bill that House and Senate negotiators worked out over the last several months, with aides toiling into the early hours this morning to finish the fine print.

Twice this series, the benches at Pacific Bell Park emptied. Twice the San Francisco Giants scored six runs in an inning. Twice the Giants' Jeff Kent hit a home run to put a game away. Four times, the Giants beat the Mets. The Giants won today, 7-2, completing their first four-game sweep of the Mets since 1962, when the transplanted Giants returned to the Polo Grounds for the first time to play a four-game series against fthe expansion Mets, who had succeeded them and the Dodgers as New York's National League team. The Mets led today in the bottom of the eighth, but the Giants scored six times in the inning in which Dennis Cook cracked and Armando Benitez crumbled.

Rogue Software Program Wreaks Havoc Worldwide A rogue software program, borne by an e-mail message proclaiming ''I love you,'' wreaked havoc around the world, jamming and crashing e-mail systems and destroying data on hundreds of thousands of computers. To defend themselves, thousands of corporations unhooked their computer systems from the Internet and began the slow process of purging the program internally. The program also hit government agencies, including the White House, the Pentagon, Congress and the British House of Commons. [Page A1.]

IT sounds like the setup for some bizarre avant-garde reality show: take a dozen or so actors, put them on a bus for four months and see what happens. This isn't ''The Real World,'' however. This is theater, Acting Company style.