New York authorities began randomly searching bags of subway passengers on Friday in the aftermath of a second set of London bombings and planned to extend the practice to buses, airport trains and suburban commuter lines. Riders on the nation's largest subway system waited patiently while officers at various stations around the city combed through their briefcases and knapsacks on the first day of what Mayor Michael Bloomberg said would be a practice that would go on indefinitely. "Clearly we'll do it for a little while. It's partially designed to make people feel comfortable ... and keep the potential threat away," Bloomberg said in his weekly radio show, adding that there were no new threats to New York. In Washington, D.C., officials said they were not instituting a similar system of random searches on subways, but were still considering it.
