September 2, 1992

President Bush came here today and promised to rebuild Homestead Air Force Base, an economic mainstay of South Florida that was virtually destroyed last week by Hurricane Andrew. In a three-hour visit this morning, he also said the Federal Government would pay almost all the costs of rebuilding public property and services in Florida. Ordinarily the Federal Government would pay 75 percent of such costs and the affected state would pay 25 percent. Washington, however, has paid the entire cleanup bill for at least one other recent disaster, Hurricane Hugo in 1989. No Estimate on Cost In addition, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will issue grants of up to $11,500 to families who can prove they lack insurance for their homes or belongings or who are not being helped adequately by other emergency services.

There are no maps to motherhood in 1992, so Anne Jaffe is struggling to find her way, trying to make peace with her choice to be a full-time mother rather than pursue a full-time career. "I feel like I'm a disappointment for the women who have worked so hard to broaden opportunities for other women," said the 36-year-old Mrs. Jaffe, once a co-president of the student body at Stanford University and now a mother of two and a volunteer at the Yorktown Community Nursery School.

Americans are finally waking up to the pleasures of good coffee. In the last five years the taste for darker-roasted, better-quality, stronger coffee has been rolling east from the West. And with this taste have come new ways of enjoying coffee. This new coffee culture is catching on in New York, where pots of 90-cups-to-the-pound weaklings sit on warmers for hours on end. Virtually every New York restaurant, from the exalted to the expedient, now serves something called espresso, strong Italian-style coffee in small cups. In Manhattan alone, the number of new espresso bars, cafes and stands that offer hot and cold, regular and decaffeinated espresso-based drinks with names like caffe latte have risen in the last year, from only a few to more than a dozen.

In Russia, a child is everybody's business, and perfect strangers think nothing of offering their uninvited advice. Teachers got plenty of it today, as 19 million Russian children started a new school year in a new country with plenty of problems. There are shortages of money, teachers and textbooks. And in a new candor unlikely even during the most liberal days of the old Soviet Union, Education Minister Eduard D. Dneprov disclosed that across the vast expanse of Russia, 29 percent of the schools have no heat, 38 percent have no running water, and nearly half have no sewage systems.

Business school professors tend to be an anonymous breed, and their research is often denigrated as a blend of big words and small ideas. Yet Michael E. Porter of the Harvard Business School stands out as a genuine star. When he speaks, people in business, finance and government listen -- frequently paying handsomely to do so. He commands up to $25,000 a lecture. Mr. Porter's three major books on economic and corporate competitiveness are footnote-filled doorstop tomes, but roughly a half a million copies have been sold. His instructional videos sell like hotcakes. Besides business clients, he has increasingly worked as a brain for hire, with clients including New Zealand, Canada and the Basque region of Spain. He did a pro bono study of the Massachusetts economy last year that helped shape the thinking beind the cost-cutting and business development programs of the state's Republican Governor, William F. Weld.