February 27, 2003

The European Union moved today to strip its members of power to negotiate their own bilateral aviation agreements with outside nations and to replace those agreements with unionwide deals negotiated in Brussels. At the same time, the union's executive body, the European Commission, laid out a plan to reshape the airline industry on the Continent to make it easier for carriers to ally, merge or acquire one another and, the commission hopes, become more efficient and competitive.

This is a tale of two Bills, two video Bills. One is Bill Wegman and the other is Bill Viola. They have nothing in common, except video. And Bill. Mr. Viola's videos are serious, mythic, narrative, controlled, earnest, big and slow. Mr. Wegman's are funny, mundane, offhand, repetitive, ironic, small and fast. They are polar opposites in the wide world of video art, a world that began in the late 1960's with the advent of portable video cameras and that has come to dominate contemporary art. But it is still a new world, and whether it can be defined by the opposition of the Bills remains an open question.

THEY look like small snow globes. The dozen inconspicuous cameras on walls and ceilings at the school campus at the center of this central California city capture video images of students as they enter and leave the two buildings, work in the computer lab, climb and descend the main staircase or relax outside. Not only can the comings and goings of the 350 teenagers at the two public charter schools here be watched from a monitor in a small room next to the main building's reception area, but they can also be seen remotely over the Internet. Every night, someone in Jackson, Miss., home of the company that installed the cameras, watches over the buildings half a continent away.

North Korea has restarted a reactor at its primary nuclear complex, American intelligence officials said today. Over time, the reactor could provide a continuing source of plutonium for nuclear weapons. The action by North Korea -- detected a day after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said there was no evidence the reactor was operating -- was the latest in a series of steps it has taken toward building a significant nuclear arsenal, or at least appearing to do so. American officials are divided about whether the North Korean government is now on a determined course to produce more than half a dozen weapons or is still interested in drawing concessions from Washington.

All that stood between Ernie Els and victory today was a 26-foot putt by Phil Tataurangi on the 18th hole. Few people expected the putt to go in, just as few people expected Els to lose his opening-round match. If Tataurangi had 10 chances at that putt, how many times did he think he would make it? ''Probably once,'' he said later, smiling.