June 13, 1994

A clutch shot by Sam Cassell and a controversial foul call against Patrick Ewing led to a deflating loss for the Knicks last night. Taking a lead of 2 games to 1 in the National Basketball Association finals, the Houston Rockets walked into Madison Square Garden and beat the Knicks, 93-89, in Game 3 of their four-of-seven-game series. By winning, the Rockets regained the home-court advantage they lost in Game 2, and they made it impossible for the Knicks to win a championship without another victory in Houston.

In a sure sign that Wall Street is nervous about lean times to come, Merrill Lynch has decided that its army of stock and bond traders no longer deserve a free lunch. The company confirmed last week that after July 5 it would no longer pick up the $5.45 tab for each of the lunches the hundreds of its traders eat at their desks while moving billions of dollars around the globe.

Very soon now, what is left of the senior class at Paul Robeson High School will walk up the narrow steps and across the stage at the Third Baptist Church on the South Side for the 1994 commencement. The boys will wear red caps and gowns. The girls will wear gold. An alumna who is an engineer will give the commencement address. "Pomp and Circumstance" will play. The seniors who managed to avoid being swallowed by the streets will finally touch a diploma, some becoming the first in their families to do so. The teachers expect it to be an exuberant occasion when their pleas for silence are likely be ignored by overjoyed aunts and foster parents.

Creating a huge building block for a Western Hemisphere free trade zone, the presidents of Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela will meet in Colombia on Monday to place their nations' 150 million people under a duty-free umbrella. "This is our step into the big leagues," Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's Minister of Foreign Trade proclaimed in a recent interview in Bogota. "This is a step toward the U.S. market."

When the most populist panel of the House Banking Committee -- the subcommittee on consumer credit -- met on Thursday, the most remarkable development lay in what was not said. Democrats criticized the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates, and assailed commercial banks for passing along the increase to borrowers, but not to depositors. But nobody suggested that solutions lay in legislation.