June 14, 1991

"A good mother feeds her children milk and meat," said Amina Abdi Ali, a 22-year-old mother of two children, as a tear rolled down her cheek. "I wish I could be a good mother." Mrs. Amina wrapped her bony arms around her 4-year-old daughter Ferdowsa, who is so weak she needs to be fed by a refugee camp nurse by a tube through her nose and into her stomach. Then Mrs. Amina lovingly brushed the flies off her daughter's legs.

If the West really wants the Soviet Union to plunge into democratic capitalism, a team of Soviet and American scholars says, it should be prepared to cushion the shock with at least $100 billion in aid over five years. The team's proposal for a "grand bargain" -- large-scale aid tied to a radical transformation of the Soviet Government and economy -- is to be delivered to the White House and the Kremlin this weekend.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit yesterday accusing Ernst & Young, one of the nation's largest accounting firms, of having improper business dealings with two of its clients that caused those clients to violate Federal securities laws. The complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, contends that the firm lacked independence when it audited the Republicbank Corporation and the Cullum Companies. At the time of the audits, dozens of Ernst & Young partners had private business ties with the two clients, including bank loans from Republicbank to finance shopping centers where Cullum operated supermarkets.

In naming H. Carl McCall as his choice for president of the Board of Education, Mayor David N. Dinkins is trying to restore something like the golden days when Mayor Edward I. Koch was able to work comfortably with a board controlled by a loyal but self-reliant surrogate like Robert F. Wagner Jr. The problem Mr. Dinkins faces is that the emotional and political convulsions created by his previous appointee, Dr. Gwendolyn C. Baker, make that restoration far from certain, and will test all of Mr. Dinkins's canniness as a statesman and his pluck as a political street fighter.

Fast, thorny, pungent.