THE WEEK: DECEMBER 3-9

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Nearly three decades after President Charles de Gaulle removed France from NATO's military command and ordered U.S. troops from French soil, Foreign Minister Herve de Charette announced that France will rejoin the alliance's military committee. But France is hardly backing down from its insistence on an independent path in European affairs. French officials credited the move to a pragmatic need for closer coordination between the French troops to be deployed in Bosnia and the nato officers who will command them.

FRANCE: FERMEE!

Striking public workers continued to hobble France as public-transit, mail, electrical-generation and air-transport services were severely disrupted. Angered by the government's decision to try to cut a $50 billion debt in the national social security system by limiting benefits and raising taxes, the workers vowed to continue their strike. Desperate Parisian commuters, battling snow and freezing temperatures, took to bicycles, roller skates, bateaux-mouches (tourist boats) and their own two feet to escape a record 300 miles of traffic jams clogging roads.

BUSINESS

NEWS-CHANNEL MANIA

So far it's been a less than festive holiday season for CNN, which learned it may soon be facing some formidable competitors. Two weeks ago, News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch said he was planning to start a 24-hour TV-news service in the U.S. Last week Capital Cities/ABC revealed a plan for taking on CNN with a cable channel it hopes to start in 1997. And then came word of potentially the most forbidding challenge of all: a 24-hour news channel linked to an online-video service that would be parented by the combined talents--and muscle--of NBC and Microsoft. The last two firms are still in talks over their venture, which would face a number of technological hurdles.

TOBACCO FIRE

"The primary reason" smokers light up is to "deliver nicotine into their bodies" and obtain the effects of a substance that is "similar" to drugs like cocaine. The conclusions of a Food and Drug Administration hell-bent on regulating cigarettes as pharmaceuticals? No. These are the conclusions of an undated confidential report by Philip Morris, obtained and published by the Wall Street Journal. Faced with an apparently smoking gun, the tobacco giant explained that the document had been written by a nonscientist and did not reflect the company's views.

--By Janice M. Horowitz, Lina Lofaro, Michael Quinn, Jeffery C. Rubin, Alain L. Sanders and Sidney Urquart