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A weekly briefing on the economic calendar Monday * Auto and truck sales for April * Construction spending for March * Institute for Supply Management index for April Earnings reports Bally Fitness, First Health, John Hancock, MetLife, Priceline.com, Principal Financial Tuesday * Factory orders for March Earnings reports Clear Channel, Dean Foods, Hewitt Associates, Northrop Grumman, Qwest, Safeway, Tyco, DirecTV, Hartford Financial, Prudential Wednesday Earnings reports CVS Corp.

I LOVE THIS town and will probably remain here the rest of my days. But in some ways, my beloved Baltimore has failed me. Take the area of cable television, for instance. Let's go back a year and a few months, to January 2000. America's No. 1 religious event, the Super Bowl, was playing on network television. Super Bowl XXXIV pitted the Tennessee Titans against the Los Angeles Rams, who play out of St. Louis these days. It was the waning seconds of the game. The Titans trailed by seven points but had the ball.

For two decades, Rupert Murdoch has been building up his empire by tearing down the status quo. When many in Britain thought it foolhardy to challenge the state-owned BBC, Murdoch ignored them and launched the first pay-TV service in the United Kingdom, eventually turning it into a roaring success. Then, as media barons in the United States shied from trying to undo the 30-year stranglehold of the three broadcast networks - ABC, NBC and CBS - Murdoch's News Corp. established Fox as a viable alternative.

Pilots incensed at Merrill LynchAmerican Airlines' pilot union, furious over a report by a Merrill Lynch & Co. stock analyst, is yanking a $14 million account away from the securities firm and asking its 11,500 members to switch accounts to other firms.The Allied Pilots Association is incensed about a March Merrill Lynch research report that it claims pins the airline industry's woes on high labor costs, particularly high pilot pay.Pay-TV firm, Universal agreeDirecTv Inc., a satellite pay-television service, has signed an agreement with MCA Inc.'s Universal Pictures to offer the studio's movies.

Baltimore-based SpotCrime.com already uses the Web to deliver up-to-the-minute crime maps for communities across the United States. The company's next medium? Satellite television. The start-up company said this week that it struck a deal with DirecTV to feature a SpotCrime application that the satellite service's customers can access through their television sets. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SpotCrime is one of a handful of companies in the United States that makes crime data available for free on Web-based maps.

Fans of NBC's much-lauded, small-town football drama Friday Night Lights finally get to see the show's third season premiere tonight. If you're a DirecTV subscriber, you might have already seen the 13 episodes of the new season. (The satellite service got first crack, you might recall, because it forked over production money to NBC when the network was waffling on renewing the low-rated series.) If you watched FNL on DirecTV when it debuted Oct. 1 and appreciated the sheer genius of the season, you might be ready to see the episodes again.