Rebels

BAMAKO, Mali - Despite a punishing bombardment by French warplanes, al-Qaeda-linked insurgents grabbed more territory in Mali on Monday, seizing a strategic military camp that brought them far closer to the government's seat of power. Declaring France had "opened the gates of hell" with its assault, the rebels threatened retribution. "France . . . has fallen into a trap much more dangerous than Iraq, Afghanistan, or Somalia," said Omar Ould Hamaha, a leader of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, one of the rebel groups controlling the north, speaking on Europe 1 radio.

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration plans to give the Libyan opposition $25 million in nonlethal assistance in the first direct U.S. aid to the rebels after weeks of assessing their capabilities and intentions, officials said Wednesday. Amid a debate over whether to offer the rebels broader assistance, including cash and possibly weapons and ammunition, the administration has informed Congress that President Obama intends to use his so-called drawdown authority to give the opposition, led by the Transitional National Council in Benghazi, up to $25 million in surplus American goods to help protect civilians in rebel-held areas threatened by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's forces.

KINSHASA, Congo - Congo's president accused Rwanda of backing a new rebellion in Congo's east and called their support an "open secret. " President Joseph Kabila spoke to journalists late Saturday in a rare appearance and said that the government would investigate accusations that Uganda may also be backing the M23 rebellion in the east, though the country said it was not involved. The uprising has brought the worst violence in years to the already volatile Congo. It has forced more than 260,000 people from their homes in the last three months.

President Ferdinand Marcos appeared on government television today to prove he was in control of a nation. Forty minutes later, the government lost control of the station carrying his address. During that hastily called news conference at the presidential palace - which continued even after rebel soldiers commandeered the station's transmitter - Marcos declared a state of emergency and the use of "extreme force" to retake control of all military and broadcast installations.

Troops loyal to President Saddam Hussein used heavy artillery and tank fire yesterday in an attempt to quell the Shiite Muslim insurrection sweeping through southern Iraq, and one top U.S. military official predicted that the rebellion would fail. Adm. Mike McConnell, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he believed Hussein would eventually come out on top because the rebels lacked heavy weapons, communications and leadership. McConnell said forces loyal to Hussein had used tanks, artillery and heavy weapons against some of the insurgents or buildings they have occupied.

Leftist guerrillas in El Salvador have flagrantly violated international law by executing several hundred people since the early 1980s, the human rights group Americas Watch said yesterday. Americas Watch, which has a reputation for careful documentation of its reports, rejected statements by the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) that its executions are carried out after trials that meet international standards of due process. The New York-based human rights group called on the FMLN to abandon executions and to stop holding trials until it can prove to an impartial body, such as the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States, that the rebel courts are fair to the defendants.

Even though it is spanking new, Pascali's Island has the musty odor of a turn-of-the-century relic. And not because this period piece about European intrigue on a Turkish-occupied Greek isle in the Aegean is set in talk, no- action saga. Since it looks written instead of directed and pictorial instead of cinematic, Pascali reeks of quality films from an era when literacy and luster genteelly substituted for narrative thrust. This, the first big-screen feature by James Dearden, who earned a kind of immortality as the screenwriter of Fatal Attraction, demands to be read like a novel or regarded like a sculpture.

The Strip and its opulent excesses are less than 2 miles away, but there are no flashing signs posted at the entrance of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Predominantly a commuter school in only its 29th year of existence, UNLV, on the surface, is like many American universities. There would seem to be little to distinguish it from any other school. Except when the Runnin' Rebels play basketball. In the Thomas and Mack Center, a $30 million, 18,000-seat sports palace that is the most imposing structure on campus, every appearance by the Rebels is a reflection of the fantasies that are at the heart of this city.

Former National Security Council aide Oliver L. North collaborated with a private pro-contra lobbying drive when a protracted internal struggle hampered White House efforts to rally public support for the Nicaraguan rebels, according to conservatives and administration officials. Several conservative contra-backers and administration officials interviewed last week said that North's surprising collaboration with a private campaign that portrayed the contras' congressional foes as communist dupes could only be understood in the context of the White House infighting.

Tony Richardson, the Oscar-winning English director who in Tom Jones, Look Back in Anger and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner gave the screen some of its most memorable rebels, died of complications of AIDS Thursday at Los Angeles' St. Vincent Medical Center. He was 63. Richardson's career spanned three decades and was as noteworthy for its influence as for its achievements. In 1959, he directed Richard Burton as Jimmy Porter, the trapped and raging protagonist of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger.