Signaling a continued fragile consensus on Moscow's relations with NATO, Russian media across the political spectrum gave straightforward coverage to President Boris Yeltsin's signing of a new charter with the alliance Tuesday in Paris. Leading television channels assumed a largely triumphant tone in reporting from the signing ceremony in the Elysee Palace. ""Today Europe started to count new time,"" said Sergei Iezuitov, the commentator for RTR television. ""Even recently this was impossible to imagine."" Yeltsin's impromptu statement about removing warheads from all nuclear missiles targeted at NATO countries caught Russian television reporters as off-guard as it did their Western counterparts. It took them several hours to air an interpretation from the Defense Ministry that the missiles would be retargeted, not disarmed. The Moscow print press displayed a wider variety of opinions, though nationalist and fatalistic rhetoric was hard to find even among longtime critics of the accord.

PARIS -- Intense jockeying broke out on the French right Tuesday in a race to succeed humiliated Prime Minister Alain Jupp? as President Jacques Chirac prepared a plan to lure back angry voters in Sunday's parliamentary runoff vote. Chirac was looking at Philippe Seguin, popular speaker of the outgoing National Assembly, and Edouard Balladur, an urbane former premier, as candidates to succeed Jupp? if the right won the runoff, the daily Le Monde said in an unsourced report. It was also possible that Chirac could choose to appoint a premier from the business sector, the newspaper said. Should the left claim victory on Sunday, however, Chirac would have to name -- and share power with -- Socialist leader Lionel Jospin. Juppe announced on Monday that he would step down as premier, taking the blame for the ruling coalition's disastrous showing in Sunday's first round of the snap assembly election in which it was outscored by the combined left.