Divestment

PRESIDENT BUSH'S proposal to cut a community development program popular with the nation's mayors is a bad idea at a time when many mayors are struggling to create jobs, provide their residents with affordable housing and revitalize their cities. Cities and rural municipalities depend on Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds to pay for everything from community centers for the elderly to affordable housing developments for the working poor to adult literacy programs. The president's budget proposal to reduce federal funding for CDBG by $1.6 billion, nearly a third of the program's budget, is not a simple cutting, it's a major gutting.

Shareholders of Owings Mills-based Aether Systems Inc. voted to divest the company's last technology component in a special meeting yesterday, officially sending the former rising star of wireless communication on to its new venture in mortgage-backed securities. "The company has been so beaten up," said George M. Ward, a retiree who owns 1,000 shares of Aether stock and attended the meeting in Baltimore. "Two years ago we were hopeful it would come back, but it looks like that's not going to be the case."

Maybe simple is better. Sylvan Learning Systems Inc. shares gained 6 percent on the Nasdaq stock market and traded heavily yesterday after the Baltimore education company announced another step toward simplifying itself. The company said it will sell its Wall Street Institute, an international franchise that tutors adults in English, to continue its wholesale shift to higher education from Sylvan's former grade-school tutoring roots. Earlier this year, Sylvan announced the largest makeover in its history, selling off the tutoring centers that made the company a household name, to help free itself from a complex, and money-losing, venture capital arrangement.

NEW YORK -Pfizer Inc., the world's biggest drug maker, said yesterday that it expects to complete its $53 billion purchase of Pharmacia Corp. next month after agreeing with U.S. antitrust regulators to sell some products. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission staff will forward the proposal to the full commission for approval, Pfizer said. Pfizer spokesman Andy McCormick declined to identify the products to be sold, though the company said the divestments won't have a material effect on its business.

CHICAGO -- It would be foolish to suggest that all criticism of Israel is motivated by anti-Semitism, but it would be irresponsible to believe that none of it is. Consider the continued insistence of New Jersey poet Amiri Baraka that "4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers" were told to stay home the day that the World Trade Center was attacked. Mr. Baraka carries on the ancient tradition of blaming Jews for all types of disasters, from plagues to poisonings, in this case repeating a canard that was first issued by a Lebanese radio station.

Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers entered this week the nationwide campus debate about Israel and the Palestinians, using unusually personal language to criticize some Harvard professors and students for recent actions that he says are "anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent." Summers, who holds perhaps the most visible bully pulpit in American intellectual life, told an audience at Harvard's Memorial Church on Tuesday that recent calls for Harvard, Tufts, Princeton and other schools to divest from Israel were anti-Semitic.

Though more than 30 years in the making, the Museum of Dust and Lack of Industry will never open to the public. Now that his collecting mission is complete, Neil Wolfson, the Roland Park museum's founder and curator, intends to scatter its contents to the wind, via that great clearinghouse in the cyber sky, eBay. Together, the pulp fiction magazines, Japanese novelties, vintage painted ties, lunch boxes and board games (a round of Custer's Last Stand anyone?) make up a 20th-century gold mine of Americana and pop culture.

When Washington and Philadelphia faced the same multimillion-dollar budget deficit on Baltimore's horizon, officials looked to city workers.In Washington, the financial-control board imposed by Congress fired 18,000 city workers, or one in three. In Philadelphia, Mayor Ed Rendell fought for $300 million in health benefit concessions from workers and turned the city from the verge of bankruptcy to a $169 million surplus last year.In the waning months of his 12-year tenure, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke is proposing that Baltimore allow private companies to bid on some city services.

Royal Ahold NV, the international food retailer buying Giant Food Inc., said yesterday that it expects Federal Trade Commission staff approval next week of agreements to divest 10 supermarkets, which would pave the way for the $2.7 billion acquisition.To maintain competition, the FTC is requiring Ahold to sell 10 grocery stores in Maryland and Pennsylvania to rival grocery chains before buying Giant. In reviewing the sale, first announced in May, the FTC has focused on areas where Landover-based Giant competes with Martin's Food Markets, owned by Ahold's Giant Food Stores Inc. of Carlisle, Pa.Ahold announced yesterday that it is making headway in discussions with FTC staff and is negotiating sales agreements with buyers for the 10 stores -- expected to include a combination of Giant and Martin's stores in Bel Air, Eldersburg, Westminster and Frederick.

Officials of Giant Food Inc.'s food workers union said yesterday that they plan to step up pressure to protect members' jobs as the Federal Trade Commission reviews the Landover-based chain's proposed sale to international food retailer Royal Ahold NV.The FTC is expected to direct Ahold, as part of its purchase of Giant for $2.7 billion, to divest about five grocery stores in Maryland in areas where the Landover Giant competes with Giant Food Stores Inc....