August 15, 1991

As much as any of New York City's 51 new Council seats, the five miles and many neighborhoods of District 7 illustrate the difficulty of mandating diversity and matching a seat to a particular racial or ethnic group. The complexities come in the form of more than 66,000 registered voters of all stripes -- poor blacks in the public housing projects of Manhattan Valley; upper-middle-class blacks and whites who own homes in a historic section of Harlem; Irish and Jewish New Yorkers who fled to Inwood when blacks began moving into the area in the 1950's and 60's, and a relatively recent wave of immigrants, primarily Hispanic, in Washington Heights. New Yorkers of All Persuasions When the New York City Districting Commission created District 7, its members expected that it would be represented by a black who would replace the white incumbent whose district was being folded into the new tuning-forked shape creation.

American banks have not put up any money to finance Soviet purchases of American grain, despite the Bush Administration's efforts to facilitate such loans. No American banks participated last month in a $600 million loan to the Soviet Union for grain purchases, even though the United States guaranteed repayment of almost all of the principal and half of the interest, banking and grain industry executives said.

Enough of "America's Funniest Home Videos." Let's look at America's Phoniest Home Videos. The script for one of them was recently described in the syndicated newspaper column Dear Abby. "It all started," writes Retired in San Diego, "when my son bought one of those video cameras. He's been driving everyone crazy sticking that camera in their faces."

Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach, who was named on Tuesday to succeed Clark M. Clifford as chairman of First American Bankshares Inc., has many of the personal attributes of his predecessor: He is a luminary of the Democratic Party, was an adviser to Presidents and has never worked in a bank before. But by accepting the post at the troubled bank, which was recently revealed to be secretly controlled by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Mr. Katzenbach is expanding the role he has developed over the last three decades as a troubleshooter in both politics and business.

In the afternoon there is sailing on Lake Wononskopomuc, tennis and, of course, golf. After dinner, there is a moment to relax. Then the summer crowd here breaks up and people head back to their rooms. They have homework. This is summer school, but not the kind of summer school where the motivation is last semester's D. This is the Hotchkiss School, the elite boarding school just below the Berkshires. A D in a subject gets you barred from that class here. But if your other grades are good, you might spend your summer vacation studying theater, or whales, or Russian, or television journalism.