August 17, 1992

More than a decade after New York City started grappling with a surge in homelessness, a program by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to combine police enforcement with treatment has cleared out the authority's midtown bus terminal and started to wear away the building's image as a grim example of the link between bureaucratic failure and human pathos. Only eight months after the program's start, social workers for Operation Alternative have handled 6,000 referrals for mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse and abject poverty.

Investors in public companies rely on audits to sleep at night. Whatever hoopla a company may generate, the dull prose of an annual audit is a shareholder's assurance that the company's ledgers have passed the clear-headed, timely review of an independent professional. Unless, of course, the shareholder is an outside investor in the Met Capital Corporation of Boca Raton, Fla., a small diversified company controlled by Martin Hackman, a former real estate developer, and members of his family.

The almost naked body of a small boy was wheeled into an outdoor center for the starving on a rickety wheelbarrow in the late-afternoon chill and placed under a tree with others lined up ready for burial. But when Anita Ennis touched the motionless form, with the thin, bare legs caked in dirt, he opened his eyes. Two tears crept down his sunken cheeks.

The sharp fall in bond prices on Thursday raised doubts in the markets about the future of the rally that had carried the yield on the 30-year bond to its lowest level in five and a half years. And those doubts, in turn, are making investors think about what has actually been driving this rally and what can upset it, even though bond prices rebounded on Friday.

Hollywood was supposed to invade the Hamptons over the weekend. For the second time in three years, Michael J. Fuchs, the chairman of Home Box Office, gave a screening and soiree for 400 guests from each coast, to encourage the twain to meet at the East Hampton Cinema and for supper afterward. For weeks before, invitees indulged the grousing that is de rigueur. Hollywood must bemoan the frenetic East Coast social scene, its barbaric lack of amenities, its ambient and un-Zenned agita. The Hamptons must stamp its Topsidered foot and rumple its baggy Bermuda shorts when its bucolic hamlets are stampeded by sculpted legs in Day-Glo Lycra.