President Boris Yeltsin is soon to sign a decree that would give the go-ahead for imports of spent nuclear fuel from Western and Asian power plants to be stored and reprocessed in Russia, according to officials and environmentalists. Alexei Yablokov, chairman of an ecological committee at the Russian Security Council and former adviser to Yeltsin, said the president planned to sign the decree, which would enable foreign nuclear energy producers to help finance construction of a plant for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. In return, Yablokov said, the plant would store and later recycle imported nuclear fuel rods. Environmental activists have blocked construction of such a plant in Germany and have protested against operating similar plants in France and Great Britain, arguing that radiation may spread from the plant or from by-products that remain after the recycling process.

If that was Tuesday, it must have been Boris. Or maybe it was Nelson Mandela, or Shimon Peres, or was it the Chinese or the Japanese foreign minister or maybe even that guy from the Irish Republican Army? Whoops -- we didn't meet him: The Irishman only got a phone call. It gets confusing in the White House when elections roll around, and half the world's leaders are expected to strut their stuff upon President Bill Clinton's stage. There are fewer than seven weeks to go before the mid-term Congressional elections, and President Clinton has a foreign policy reputation to build. Doubtless President Boris Yeltsin was informed by his diplomats in the United States that he was not getting a real summit, but only a 48-hour walk-on part in the latest production of ""The Comeback Kid: Bill Clinton Rides Again."" Hence the crush of dignitaries in the White House hallways these days. And hence also the presence of some 20,000 U.S. troops in Haiti.