The Week Ahead

PRESIDENT Bill Clinton, continuing his sweep through Europe, addresses the French National Assembly tomorrow, to become only the third foreign head of state to do so. The first was Mr Clinton's predecessor, Woodrow Wilson, in 1919. The second was Spain's King Juan Carlos last year.

Mr Clinton will have to keep a sharp eye on the clock if he is to squeeze in his parliamentary appointment, since it is sandwiched between lunch with the Prime Minister, Edouard Balladur, and dinner with President Francois Mitterrand.

The timing - between the post- prandial liqueurs and the pre-dinner cocktails - is crucial: it is designed to catch live coverage on United States television networks.

On Wednesday Mr Clinton returns to Britain (where he spent D-Day weekend) to revisit Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar between 1968 and 1970, to be awarded a doctorate in civil law by diploma. Such degrees are bestowed only upon heads of state and members of royal families in recognition of their statesmanship, Oxford University says.

At some point during the day, Mr Clinton is expected to have a drink in a pub with John Major.

Back in Paris, a court decides tomorrow whether Mr Mitterrand's former chief aide, Jacques Attali, stole from the work of the Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel. The ruling could be a big embarrassment to Mr Attali, who resigned in disgrace from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development last year after auditors criticised him for lavish spending.

The case, in which the Wiesel camp is claiming pounds 1.7m damages, has landed Mr Mitterrand in the middle of a bitter dispute between two close friends.

Mr Wiesel's case is that Mr Attali 'stole' 43 passages from Mr Wiesel's interviews with President Mitterrand in 1988 and 1989 and put them in his memoirs, thus 'deflowering' Mr Wiesel's own planned book based on the interviews.

India's 'Bandit Queen', Phoolan Devi, freed in February when Uttar Pradesh's Supreme Court promised to drop charges against her after 11 years in jail without trial, is not out of the woods yet. She appears in court in New Delhi tomorrow charged with the murder of 18 upper-caste Hindus.

Nasa releases Hubble telescope pictures on Wednesday of 'proto- planetary discs' in the Orion nebula, thought to be the best evidence so far that other planets exist in other galaxies. Perhaps the pictures will be eagerly studied at a meeting opening today in Vienna of the UN committee on the Peaceful uses of Outer Space.

East Africa's oldest kingdom is restored on Saturday when the 27th omukama (king) of Bunyoro- Kitara, Solomon Iguru, is crowned in Hoim, 150 miles north of Kampala. Iguru's father, the late Sir Tito Winyi, was deposed when Uganda's four hereditary kingdoms were abolished by president Milton Obote in 1967.

The revival of the kingdoms was made possible when the law was amended last year after pressure from tribal groups. The kings of Buganda and Toro have already been crowned, but Iguru's coronation was delayed by legal argument after his elder brother, John David Rukidi, contested his claim on the grounds that Iguru was born out of wedlock.

A court rejected Rukidi's claim, saying that although custom demanded that the first son of the king should succeed, Sir Tito had willed that Iguru should succeed him instead. Bunyoro-Kitara's history goes back more than 600 years, and once stretched more than 600 miles from what is now Zaire to Kenya.