Abandonment

UNLESS immediate action is taken, by the year 2000 one-third of the world's children between 5 and 16 will be living on the street.Street children and the host of other problems facing children, including those in the United States, have prompted UNICEF, the United Nations children's fund, to organize a "World Summit for Children" this weekend in New York. President Bush is among 70 heads of state (probably the largest gathering of heads of state in history) committed to attend the first-ever PageHuidekoperWilsonworld conference on children.

A "disorderly person" was arrested Friday after acting strangely and abandoning a backpack in the area of the Towson University Media Center, said school spokeswoman Gay Pinder. The man, whose name was not immediately available, was not affiliated with the university, Pinder said. A university tweet, sent late Friday morning, warned students to stay away from the center and two other buildings while school police investigated. A follow-up tweet, apparently sent a few minutes later, said operations were clear.

A warrant has been issued charging a 20-year-old Annapolis woman with abandoning her infant daughter.Charged with deserting a minor is Lora Marie Weibley, of the 500 block of Bellerive Dr. in the College Parkway Place Apartments.Anne Arundel County police said the woman's 9-month-old daughter was left with the occupants of a house in the 1600 block of Ruxton Road in Edgewater yesterday . The occupants were believed to be acquaintances of the woman, police said.However, when the people realized they couldn't care for the child, the infant was taken to a house in the 1600 block of Oriole Road in Woodland Beach.

Less than 24 hours ago, an apparent act of terrorism marred this year's Boston Marathon. It's too early to know many of the details about this tragic event. Late last night, officials were reporting three deaths and well over 100 injuries; soon we will have a clearer sense of how many were killed and wounded. Their families, friends and co-workers will pay tribute to and then bury their loved ones. When they are ready, some of the wounded survivors and spectators will come forward to recount the horrors they experienced.

April Witch, by Majgull Axelsson. Villard. 408 pages. $24.95. Most of us cannot name a single cultural product of Sweden other than sauna and massage, small meatballs and Ingmar Bergman. So it is a labor of love to cause to be translated a contemporary Swedish novel, a "monster best seller" there but unquestionably something of an oddity here, lacking the warm lure of the more fashionable exotic. And once having thought of Bergman, one might find it difficult to forget him, as there is nothing light or banal about April Witch, Majgull Axelsson's second prize-winning novel.

Former Ravens running back Jamal Lewis, in Baltimore to sign autographs at the National Sports Collectors Convention, said Friday that his arrest earlier this week in Atlanta for child abandonment, a misdemeanor, was caused by a hearing he did not attend. “It was not about an abandonment issue, it was not about a kid issue,” he said. “It was the fact that, honestly, I didn't show up for a hearing to defend myself and everything else. But, like I said in my statement, you know, I've never been a bad father.

A 17-year-old mother, whose infant daughter was found abandoned near Sinai Hospital on Tuesday, was charged yesterday as a juvenile with child abandonment, Baltimore police said.The 6-month-old girl was found in a stroller by a passer-by at 10: 15 p.m. near the rear of the medical complex in Northwest Baltimore, police said. Sinai physicians declared the infant to be in good health and turned her over to the city Department of Social Services for foster care, according to a department spokeswoman.

A key to the subject of this intriguing biography is the word "abandonment," which crops up several times in different contexts in the book.Patrick McGilligan (author of "Cagney: The Actor as Auteur," among others) writes that even in the low-budget origins of what became an extraordinary career, actor Jack Nicholson excelled at an acting technique called "abandonment." It's the equivalent of a tantrum, which, Mr. McGilligan writes, requires "the pulling out of all the emotional stops to convey a deeper level."

LAST MONDAY night, a thousand Baltimoreans crowded downtown Baltimore's War Memorial building to protest the multimillion-dollar budget cuts announced by Governor Schaefer. Witness after witness testified that programs being cut are those that rescue people from death, illness and despair. Their protest has been followed by daily and nightly demonstrations in Annapolis.But these state-level cuts are only the latest insults to a city that has undergone more than a decade of cuts in financial aid from the federal government.

CITY HOUSING Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III likes to point out that Baltimore's abandoned housing crisis doesn't stem from the hefty tax liens it placed on properties. But as a recent Sun series by John B. O'Donnell and Jim Haner pointed out, it certainly exacerbates the problem by making liens so onerous with interest charges that few, if any, can afford to pay that bill plus the tab to repair a ramshackle shell.Baltimore's 24 percent annual interest charge on overdue city tax liens is the highest in Maryland.

When she thinks of Fort Carroll, the abandoned 19th-century military installation in the Patapsco River, Beverly Eisenberg thinks of her grandfather - and of duckpin bowling balls. She visited the six-sided artificial island as a little girl, just a few years after her grandfather bought the place in 1958 hoping to turn it into a destination with a slots casino, hotel and restaurants. He was making cast-iron facsimiles of the cannons that once armed the fort, and the cannons needed cannon balls - duckpin balls that she would paint black and set up at the guns to help Benjamin N. Eisenberg nurture a dream.

Perched on a wooded bluff in rural southeastern Carroll County, the old Henryton State Hospital bears silent witness to the ravages of decades of neglect and vandalism. First opened in 1923, the 18-building complex that once housed the sick and handicapped now appears beyond hope of recovery itself. Windows gape. Trees reach to the sky through roofs that have caved in or burned. Graffiti and vines cover stucco and brick walls. Broken glass and beer cans litter the ground, along with debris from the crumbling structures.

I once sat with a group of inner-city Baltimore kids, mostly 12-year-olds, who were being asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. Police officer. Prison guard. Judge. Those were the boys at least. The girls mostly seemed to aspire to cosmetology, which was depressing in its own way. There's nothing wrong, of course, with being a cop or corrections officer or a judge. But the fact that no other jobs came to mind reflected how very narrow was their world: You were either the guy getting arrested, tried and jailed, or the guy doing the arresting, trying and jailing.

Wall Street might have turned its back on Democrats this election, but that's not the case among Maryland investment firms. The vast majority of contributions to candidates by T. Rowe Price employees went to Democrats. And Democrats were the beneficiaries of all candidate donations by Brown Capital Management workers - with President Barack Obama receiving the bulk. But even in this deep-blue state, Democrats don't have a lock on political contributions. The top recipient of donations by Legg Mason employees: Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney.

A large, two-alarm fire burned in an abandoned lacrosse ball factory in Kingsville on Monday afternoon, bringing between 80 and 100 firefighters to the scene, according to a Baltimore County fire spokesman. The old factory belonged to the Belko Corp., a rubber manufacturer, but has been abandoned for years, said Lt. Paul Massarelli, the spokesman. Fire personnel were first dispatched to the factory, near the intersection of Jericho Road and Woodberry Place in the Franklinville area, about 3:35 p.m., he said.

The use of ethanol in gasoline has a long and sordid history ("Food or fuel?" Aug. 3). By the early 1990s, EPA regulations had reduced tailpipe emissions from new cars by over 95 percent of 970s levels, and only about 3 percent of the hydrocarbons in the atmosphere were from automobile exhausts. Nevertheless the government legislated the use of reformulated gasolines containing oxygen to facilitate complete combustion. This lead to the inclusion of MTBE in gasolines. After oil companies spent tens of billions of dollars to build government-mandated MTBE plants, ground water contamination from leaking fuel storage tanks forced the government to abandon MTBE and replace it with ethanol.

The woman who abandoned her newborn daughter under a restroom sink at Northwest Hospital Center in Randallstown last week has been found, Baltimore County police said yesterday. The identity of the woman, who was located Monday morning in Baltimore, was not released at her request. "There will be no charges from Baltimore County in regards to child abandonment," said Cpl. Ron Brooks, a county police spokesman. He added that the mother did not require medical care. The 6-pound, 9 1/2 -ounce African-American girl, nicknamed "Rosie" by Northwest staff, was discovered May 1 by a security guard who was making evening rounds on the hospital's first floor.

Psst, buddy, wanna rent a shot tower?The abandonment of City Life Museums will reverberate for years. If the city puts its past up for competitive bid, why not its soul?Save the Carroll Mansion! Call it a hotel and add a 30-story annex with public subsidy.Tara Lipinski is 15, with nowhere to go but down. Might as well turn pro.Pub Date: 4/10/98

A 19-year-old man was critically injured when he fell about 60 feet from a catwalk in an abandoned plant in Dundalk on Sunday afternoon, according to a Baltimore County fire official. Emergency crews were called to the old Joseph E. Seagram & Sons bottling plant in the 7100 block of Sollers Point Road about 3:49 p.m. by the man's friend, who had also been on the catwalk but did not fall, said Capt. C. Ross Cooke, a fire spokesman. The plant, closed in the late 1980s, has multiple buildings, some of which are gutted with unsecured stairwells, Cooke said.

A 32-year-old Millersville woman faces child neglect and desertion charges after she abandoned her infant son at a Severn church Monday, police said. After a multi-state search, Pettricia Finch-Miller, 32, of the 600 block Water Wheel Court, was located at a motel in Fredericksburg, Va., with her two daughters, aged 10 and 13. The girls were unharmed and are in the care of family members, police said. Her two-month-old son, who was last seen about 8 a.m., was found by a passerby at 12:15 p.m. Strapped into a car seat, he had been left under a porch at the entrance to Grace Point Presbyterian Church in the 600 block of Donaldson Avenue, near Telegraph Road.