July 27, 1981

Israel is now engaged in some sober arithmetic, adding up the pluses and minuses of its intensive bombing of Lebanon, including Beirut, and of the cease-fire that halted the fighting on Friday. The ledger shows significant gains for Israeli interests, militarily and politically. But the losses, from the Israeli perspective, are equally dramatic, including the diplomatic damage to Israel's reputation and the enhanced status of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The military gains include losses inflicted on the new, heavy artillery and multiple-rocket-launchers that had recently been acquired by Palestinian guerrilla units in Lebanon and moved south to within range of Israeli border towns.

that is, vitamins - even the washroom graffiti reads, ''Take your salt and sportsmins.'' Outside, the playing field - enclosed by a high stake fence to keep some practices secret - was vacant now, except for a lone player. He was making several slow, almost lumbering laps around the field; his black curly hair glistened with sweat under the warm California sun, the sun that had bleached the tan mountains behind him. This was Jim Plunkett, the 33-year-old quarterback who was beginning his 12th season in the National Football League. Down on his luck at the beginning of last season - no team had any interest in the veteran, except Oakland - he took over as starting quarterback when Dan Pastorini, the first-string quarterback, suffered a broken leg in the fifth game; then in storybook style Plunkett, the son of blind parents of Mexican-American ancestry who grew up poor in the nearby San Jose barrio, led what was a struggling Raider team all the way to a Super Bowl victory. He was named the most valuable player in the game.

They started, most of them, in Georgia in the spring and they have moved north with the warm weather. Once they were a rarity, sometimes only one a year, but their numbers have increased sharply. They are the hikers who are out to go the entire distance of the Appalachian Trail and many of them are now passing through the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut sections of the trail on the way to its end at Mount Katahdin in Maine. From its beginning in Springer Mountain in Georgia, the trail extends 2,050 miles in 14 states, running along mountain ridges and through forests - and often, because of recent of land development, along paved roads. ''It's like a whole different world strung out along the trail,'' said 24-year-old John Jurczynski, who started hiking on the trail on March 29. ''It's like a moving community.''

From the architecturally innovative pedestrian mall that has revitalized the downtown business area to the newly restored residential neighborhoods bordering the commercial district, Minneapolis is a company town, a thriving urban center where virtually every civic improvement has been planned and paid for by the prosperous corporations that have their headquarters here. ''The most important things in this city have happened at the initiative of the business community, not because of government,'' Mayor Donald M. Fraser says. As cities around the country face cutbacks in Federal aid for housing, welfare and the arts, Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul are suddenly the focus of national attention because so much has been accomplished with so little money from government. Urban experts are flocking here to study the ''Minnesota model'' for developing business-government partnerships to tackle community needs. Several cities already have organizations that are based on one in Minneapolis that gets corporations to pledge a percentage of their pretax profits to civic projects and charity. Another Minneapolis-based organization has initiated enterprises in several depressed urban communities around the nation.

Caught in a profit squeeze as the result of high interest rates, the nation's 15 largest banking concerns experienced a difficult second quarter. Nine announced earnings declines from the levels of the second quarter of 1980, and 12 reported declines in their annual rates of return on total average assets, which indicates their basic profitability. The main problem was a shrinkage of the difference between the average rate banks paid for their funds and the average yield on their loans and investments. This, they said, reflected the unexpected persistence of high interest rates.