Europe Government

Time to poke your head out of the foxhole. Wall Street ended a painful eight-day losing streak on Wednesday with a modest gain. The Dow Jones industrial average closed up 29.82 points, or 0.3%, to 11,896.44, rallying from an early decline of as much as 165 points. All told, the Dow has fallen nearly 830 points, or 6.5%, in less than two weeks. Here are answers to some of the questions dazed investors may have about what has happened. Why did the market hit such a severe losing streak?

Hoping to stave off another crisis in the Northern Ireland peace process, the British government announced Wednesday that it will overhaul the province's Royal Ulster Constabulary and rename the largely Protestant police force in an attempt to draw more Roman Catholics. The RUC, as it is called, will lose its "royal" designation next year for a more neutral name: the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

While the world may have an insatiable appetite for music, movies and fast food from the United States, at least one American cultural icon has drawn the ire of officials here and may be on its way out. Woe be to the British version of Los Angeles' shopping-crazy Valley Girls and Boys: Officials suddenly are saying "no way" to suburban malls.

A Hungarian proverb holds that when a listing rider attempts to right himself in the saddle, he usually falls off the other side of the horse. And this, liberal politicians say, is what has happened to Hungary's drive to transfer state-run industries to private ownership: First the government gave away the store, and now it is wary of all foreign investment, the key to economic recovery.

The tsunami of global stock sell-offs swept through Europe on Friday as shareholders deserted the markets in droves, pushing down stock prices in a frenzy some dubbed Red October. Exchanges that had hit record highs just a year ago plunged almost from the moment they opened. London's FTSE 100 lost 10% of its value within half an hour of the opening bell.

The deteriorating condition of the East German economy, crippled by a daily drain of 1,800 people leaving for the West, has heightened concern among officials, but both German governments denied Friday that collapse is imminent.

This day, like most days, thin, pale children crowd the corridor that serves as a waiting room at Dr. Ladislav Peychl's clinic. Some lie quietly in their parents' arms. Some wander about fretfully. All cough. Outside, a light rain falls, dampening the ever-present soot into a blackish mud. The rain is laden with acid, etching ever-deeper lines into buildings and adding a few more dead trees to the ranks of denuded trunks that line Teplice's streets each spring.

Adriana Sut lives with leaky bathroom plumbing, four hours of hot water a week and a broken elevator that forces her to climb the stairs to her seventh-floor apartment in a crumbling high-rise. "We have heating for now," the 28-year-old miner's widow said on a mild autumn day in western Romania's coal country. "But who knows how it will be in winter?"

Like soldiers falling into step, governments across Europe offered up a series of sweeping bailout plans for their banking systems Monday, pushing past $2 trillion the amount of taxpayer money that has been pledged to shore up the continent's floundering financial sector. Markets responded positively to the news, with stock exchanges gaining back some of the ground lost in last week's selling binge.

For the two months it has been in office, Prime Minister Jan Olszewski's government has operated without an economic policy, although it has been under mounting pressure from its international creditors to devise a credible budget before continuing negotiations on debt relief.