April 21, 1996

The most far-reaching and comprehensive study to date has found that using day-care centers or baby sitters does not affect infants' trust in their mothers. The results, announced yesterday at a conference in Providence, R.I., run counter to several previous studies that seemed to show that infants in child care were slightly more likely to have an insecure relationship with their mothers than those whose mothers stayed at home with them.

A decade after revolutionizing the luxury care market, the Acura division of the American Honda Motor Company is reinventing itself, revamping its product line and plugging vehicles into nearly every conceivable niche. It is also renaming its models with letter-number combinations that represent the type of vehicle and the engine size. Acura says it research indicates that affluent customers associate luxury with numbers, not word. Rich Thomas, executive vice president and general manager, boasted in an interview that "we now have a full line of vehicles with no holes." He added, "The broadening of the product line will allow a buyer to stay within the Acrua family no matter what kind of vehicle he or she desire.*

From time to time something goes wrong with the clock that rings Big Ben, perhaps some humidity that slows the aging mechanism or a spasm of wind that speeds it up. Then a workman appears with a pocket full of thick one-penny copper coins. He deftly dangles from a railing and carefully adds or subtracts a penny from a tiny pile on top of the 13-foot pendulum, thereby gaining or losing two-fifths of a second over the course of 24 hours. Down below, the Houses of Parliament run much the same way as the clock. Nothing fancy, nothing digital, and when something needs fixing give it a rap on the knuckles or a smidgeon of oil. After all, it has been working for 731 years.

MAKING IT WORK 3 On welfare, trying to get off: a park worker's tale of job loss, life crisis and new hope.

A little more than five years ago, at the Middle East peace conference in Madrid, it was hard to find a policy maker from the United States, Israel, Egypt or Jordan, or among the Palestinians, who had a kind word about Syria and its hard-line President, Hafez al-Assad. As an outline of peace began to appear in the Middle East, the Syrian President was still resisting the sweep of optimism, and this led to descriptions of him in the corridors as a "dinosaur," "deadwood" -- a relic of the past soon to be swept away as the cold war had been swept away by the collapse of Communism.