May 10, 1996

HERE we are, once again approaching the holiday that benefits florists and greeting-card makers. H. L. Mencken probably got it right when he dismissed Mother's Day as an occasion fit for cads. Who else would need a grand ceremonial to prove that he loved his mother? "It is precisely the mark of the cad," the great curmudgeon wrote in 1916, "that he makes a public boast of what is inseparable from decency." But those were the days before "mother" became virtually synonymous, at least in the news, with anger and abuse. There's a story about a woman accused of beating her child to death. Here's a mom who supposedly threw her baby out the window. Look at that one, charged with dropping a barbell on her infant daughter's head.

Adding a new element of controversy at strike-torn Barnard College, administrators have told six seniors who participated in a four-hour sit-in last month that their diplomas would be withheld until disciplinary cases against them are resolved. The seniors, who joined the sit-in in support of a four-week strike by the college's clerical workers, contend that Barnard is being heavy-handed and insensitive in delaying their graduation over what they say was a peaceful act of conscience that caused minimal disruption.

The Congress Party, which has governed India for all but four years since independence in 1947, suffered a devastating rout in the general election, substantial returns showed today. Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao announced that he would resign as Government leader after a cabinet meeting this afternoon. Officials say he would then probably remain in office for a few days as a caretaker while parties scramble to shape a new coalition and pick its leader.

In a blistering election-year attack on President Clinton's policy in Asia, Senator Bob Dole lacerated the Administration today as incoherent and naive and said the President's "double talk" had undercut American authority abroad.

The woman who for 10 years has served as hostess at New York's most august lunch club for intellectuals, the New York Institute for the Humanities, was dismissed yesterday for trying to arrange to have Hillary Rodham Clinton address the group later this month. Article, page B3.