EXIT FROM NEVERLAND

It's anybody's guess why LISA MARIE PRESLEY married MICHAEL JACKSON in the first place, but London's Daily Mirror claims it knows why she is now fu rious enough to want a divorce. The paper declares that their smiling days are over since Jackson report edly took two boys-ages 11 and 14-on a jaunt to Paris.

SEEN & HEARD

Director Ariane Mnouchkine and four other French stage luminaries are fasting for Sarajevo on a diet lean even by Balkan standards: water and herbal tea. The hunger vigil in Paris began on Aug. 4-exactly a year after Bosnians signed a Declaration of a Free and United Sarajevo-to protest the West's failure to intervene.

MARK THIS TWAIN AS A STAR

When you're looking at SHANIA TWAIN, you're looking at Country. With her No. 1 album The Woman in Me and a top single plus three nominations for a U.S. Country Music Association award, the Canadian singer-songwriter, 29, is a Nashville queen. But she grew up poor in Ontario working summers with her Ojibwa father on a forestry crew and can handle a chainsaw as well as she can a guitar. Who is the woman in her? "I'm everything in the extreme and everything in between,'' she says. And she can appreciate a man "just for being a man.'' Her name-pronounced Shuh-NYE-uh-is from her dad and means "I'm on my way.'' As she surely is.

A GOODLY GIFT OF GOLD

What Stalin destroyed back in 1931, Russian Orthodox Patriarch ALEXEI II is grandly going about rebuilding. The reconstruction of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior received a big boost last week when Alexander Smolensky, president of Stolichny Bank, presented the Patriarch with a gold ingot as symbol of a donation of 50 kg of gold to re-create the domes. God and Mammon have been served: Guess where the patriarchate has transferred its bank accounts?

HATS OFF FOR THE WINNER

Turnabout is fair play. While America thrills to Japanese pitcher Hideo Nomo's fast ball, Japan is cheering on a foreign baseball hero of its own. ROBINSON CHECO, 23, has so far won 12 of 20 games for his team, the Hiroshima Carp. A shy guy, he has one big ambition: to build a house for his family in the Dominican Republic.