* By a Hair: Police in central...

* By a Hair: Police in central France swooped down on a drug dealers’ hide-out and recovered locks of hair of George Washington and Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette. The lock from Washington was inset in a ring, and that of Lafayette was in an old envelope. Both locks were stolen five years ago from the castle-turned-museum where Lafayette lived.

* Di’s Duty: Princess Diana will visit British military bases in Germany Thursday in her second visit to troops abroad since the Persian Gulf crisis began. Diana will hit an army and an air force base on the trip . . . . Meanwhile, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. says: “Vital interests are something you kill and die for. They are no more involved (in the Persian Gulf War) than they were in Vietnam.”

* Posthumous Power: Scholars at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., put down their pens and books Tuesday and picked up crowbars and wire cutters to open plywood boxes containing some of H.L. Mencken’s longest-kept secrets. The works, sealed since the author’s death 35 years ago, included a skewering of another famous author: “All the while I knew Sinclair Lewis, he was either a drunkard or a teetotaler.”

* Paper War: The U.S. soldier in the Persian Gulf who signed himself “Zorro” as a guest cartoonist in Sunday’s “Doonesbury” comic strip has been unmasked--by his mother. Tommy Rominger’s mother, Marilyn Rominger, said in Ormond By the Sea, Fla.: “I frankly don’t understand the humor in some of the cartoons, but I think this is wonderful.” The cartoons lampooned U.S. soldiers in the gulf.