1.  London responded to terrorist attack on July 7th in true Blitz style: rescuers were heroic, and ordinary citizens showed compassion and fortitude. Or so the politically correct version goes. A report this week from the London Assembly takes a sterner line. In fact, radios failed to work, medical supplies were lacking, some ambulances arrived inexplicably late and traumatized people were left to wander off.
    This is the third official report into the bombs on tube and bus that killed 56 people last year and injured hundreds more In May the Home Office offered a "narrative" of events but cast blame only on the terrorists. A parliamentary investigation concluded that the intelligence services, stretched thin, had done their best. The London Assembly's take on the matter will not satisfy those who want an independent public inquiry. But it has, at least, got beneath the gloss.
    The response to the July 7th bombings was chaotic, and in ways that ought to have beer preventable. The emergency services had no coherent plan in place to care for those who survived, the report suggests. But most crippling were the communication failures.
    Police, ambulance workers and firefighters were unable to talk to each other underground; only the radios of the transport police worked in the tunnels. The emergency services had to rely on runners to pass information to and from disaster areas. Yet a report on a big fire at King's Cross tube station had drawn attention to precisely this problem in 1988.
    Communications above ground were not much better. Rescue workers competed with bewildered bystanders for access to overloaded mobile-phone networks. The City of London Police, for its part, asked one wireless operator to favor certain rescue workers by limiting service for ordinary users. Earlier, a body headed by the Metropolitan Police had decided this was unnecessary.
    Richard Barnes, who chaired the assembly's July 7th review committee, says the report is not meant to disparage the work of the rescuers but rather to fix the problems they encountered. Almost a year later, the situation has barely improved: a new digital radio network for London's underground, for example, is running behind schedule. The assembly plans new hearings in November to hold various feet to the fire.

2.  Even discussions of architectural esthetics have taken a strange turn. The Bloomberg Tower is now finished, dominating the skyline in one area of midtown Manhattan; love it or hate it, it's quite a, building. "I just wish it wasn't so tall", someone lamented at dinner.
    The citizens of New York, who live in the spiritual home of the skyscraper, now fear the office ower and the high-rise. In San Francisco they build structures that are earth-quakeproof. But there's no structural steel, no rein-forced foundation, that can ward off fear.
    It's been nearly five years since all area in the southernmost part of Manhattan was renamed Ground Zero. On September 11, 2001, New York became a city of survivors: That's on a sliding scale, of course: it would be all insult to claim otherwise.

3.  Every country with a monetary system of its own has to have some kind of market in which dealers in bills, notes, and other forms of short term credit can buy and sell. The "money market", is a set of institutions or arrangements for handling what might be called wholesale transactions in money and short term credit. The need for such facilities arises in much the same way that a similar need does in connection with the distribution of any of the products of a diversified economy to their final users at the retail level. If the retailer is to provide reasonably adequate service to his customers, he must have active contacts with others who specialize in making or handing bulk quantities of whatever is his stock in trade. The money market is made up of specialized facilities of exactly this kind. It exists for the purpose of improving the ability of the retailers of financial services—commercial banks, savings institutions, in- vestment houses, lending agencies, and even governments—to do their job. It has little if any contact with the individuals or firms who maintain accounts with these various retailers or purchase their securities or borrow from them.

4.  Americans have a great love for informality and nowhere is this better expressed than in their love for nicknames. Upon greeting strangers for the first time they will quickly introduce themselves by their nicknames. These are shortened forms of their given names at birth and reflect the casual relationships which exist among friends and coworkers. Family names are hardly ever used in daily situations and the use of one's father's last name is saved only for rare and formal occasions.

5.  Not long ago I heard myself describe a friend, half-jokingly, as "a much better person than I am, that is, she doesn't gossip so much." I heard my voice distorted by that same false note that sometimes creeps into it when social strain and some misguided notion of amiability make me assent to opinions I don't really share.

6.  The primary danger of the television screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces—although there is danger there—as in the behavior it prevents: the talks, the games, the festivities and arguments through which much of the child's learning takes place and through which his character is formed. Turning on the television set can turn off the process that transforms children into people.

7.  How many a pear which presents a blooming face to the world is rotten at the core. How many an innocent-looking apple, is harboring a worm in the bud. But the orange has no secret faults. Its outside is a mirror of its inside.

8.  The fame of great men ought to be judged always by the means they used to acquire it.