May 1, 1994

Clinton Administration officials said today that they were examining the idea of helping to organize and pay for military intervention in Rwanda by neighboring African countries. But they have apparently rejected any direct American action to stop the civil war in the central African nation. Thousands of Rwandans trying to flee the massacres in their country were trapped when forces of the Rwanda Patriotic Front captured and closed the country's frontier with Tanzania on Friday evening, officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported from Geneva today. Until then, the Rwandan Army, which is predominantly made up of members of the Hutu tribe, had guarded the border. The Rwandan Patriotic Front is made up mostly of ethnic Tutsis.

IT was almost 13 years ago when it became clear that labor unions had lost much of their clout. President Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controllers' strike, and left the strikers unemployed. In retrospect, that action seems to have set the tone for an era in which the power of workers to get "more," as Samuel Gompers is said to have put it when asked what organized labor wanted, had ended.

Fordham University has turned a barren, paved plaza at its Lincoln Center campus into a verdant, landscaped, sculpture-filled expanse. "We're welcoming conversationalists and thinkers, readers and writers, daydreamers and loungers of all sorts," said Dr. Brian J. Byrne, Fordham's vice president for administration. "We tried to create an elevated urban park."

ROALD DAHL A Biography. By Jeremy Treglown. Illustrated. 322 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

There's a saying Joan Rivers is partial to (she calls it a Russian proverb, but the Jewish grandmothers who've used it for generations would never credit a Cossack) that goes like this: If you walked into a room and saw everyone's troubles hanging on a wall, you'd head straight to your own. "All that happened to me," she says, "was my husband committed suicide, my daughter didn't talk to me for two years, and I was broke."