In Brief

PAHRUMP

New general manager
named for Pahrump Nugget

Owners of the Pahrump Nugget have named Richard Yuhas as its new general manager.

Las Vegas-based Golden Gaming Inc. said Tuesday that Yuhas will replace Shannon Keel at the property. Company officials say Keel will take over Golden Gaming's operations in Black Hawk, Colo.

The Pahrump Nugget has 70 hotel rooms along with more than 500 slot machines and 10 table games. The property has more than 300 workers.

Company officials say Yuhas has nearly 30 years of casino experience, including work as a field agent for gambling regulators and as a consultant for casinos in Louisiana and South Dakota. He also worked in operations for various properties owned by Harrah's Entertainment and Tropicana Entertainment.

SAN FRANCISCO

Intel profits rise 59 percent in quarter, topping Street forecast

Intel Corp. said Tuesday that its third-quarter net income jumped 59 percent and sales rose 18 percent, both topping analysts' expectations.

Intel said after the market closed Tuesday that it earned $2.96 billion, or 52 cents per share, compared with $1.86 billion, or 33 cents per share, a year ago. Analysts expected 50 cents per share, according to a Thomson Reuters survey.

Revenue rose 18.1 percent to $11.1 billion from $9.4 billion. Analysts expected $10.99 billion.

WASHINGTON

Minutes show Fed open to buying more Treasury bonds

The Federal Reserve is leaning toward taking two steps to boost the economy: buying more Treasury bonds to drive down loan rates, and signaling an openness to higher prices later to encourage more spending now.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues appeared to be nearing consensus on those ideas at their Sept. 21 meeting, according to minutes of the closed-door deliberations that were released Tuesday.

Economists predict Fed officials will approve the bond purchase program at their Nov. 2 meeting.

Fed policymakers also spoke at their last meeting about setting a higher inflation target, hoping that would get people to spend more money in the short run.

The minutes showed the Fed was concerned that the economy was growing slower than they had expected. While Fed officials didn't see the economy slipping back into a recession, they worried it had become vulnerable to "potential negative shocks." They expressed concerns that unemployment, which has been at 9.6 percent for the past few months, would stay elevated.

Fed officials said they were prepared to provide additional relief "before long," according to the minutes.

NEW YORK

King Pharmaceutical bought for $3.6 billion by Pfizer

Pfizer Inc. said Tuesday it will buy a company specializing in pain drugs in a $3.6 billion deal meant to shore up the portfolio of the world's largest drug company.

The deal to buy King Pharmaceutical Inc. is Pfizer's largest since it bought rival Wyeth for $68 billion in 2009. Pfizer already has a large stake in the pain drug market with its drugs Lyrica and Celebrex, which combined for more than $5 billion in sales in 2009. But now the company is betting that King's work on "abuse-resistant" pain drugs will pay off and help make up for the revenue it will lose when top sellers such as the cholesterol drug Lipitor no longer have patent protection in a few years.

King markets one such drug, called Embeda, and it's seeking approval for two others under the names Remoxy and Acurox. Remoxy is similar to Purdue Pharma LP's OxyContin, the top-selling painkiller in the U.S. Both are designed to treat pain by slowly releasing the narcotic oxycodone.

Pfizer is paying $14.25 per share for King. That's a premium of 40 percent to the stock's Monday closing price of $10.15.

The boards of both companies approved the deal. Pfizer said the purchase will add about 2 cents per share to its net income in 2011 and 2012, and 3 to 4 cents per share in each of the next three years. It does not expect the deal to affect its 2010 results.

SAN FRANCISCO

After criticism from public, Gap Inc. reverts to old logo

Gap Inc. has aborted a new logo after consumer criticism and will revert to the blue-square emblem that has been featured in its marketing for more than 20 years.

The clothing retailer released a redesigned logo on its website Oct. 4 and had planned to roll it out in marketing campaigns starting next month. More than a thousand people left comments on Gap's Facebook page, most of them disparaging.

"We've learned a lot in this process," Marka Hansen, the Gap brand president in North America, said in an e-mailed statement. "We are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community. This wasn't the right project at the right time for crowd sourcing."

The new logo set the Gap name against a white backdrop, with a blue square in the upper-right corner. Gap, which owns Banana Republic, Old Navy, Piperlime and Athleta, has been updating its clothing lines and stores to appeal to consumers in their 20s and early 30s.

NEW YORK

Planned server outage
goes haywire for tax agency

Maybe they just need an extension.

A planned computer server outage over the holiday weekend went awry for the Internal Revenue Service on Tuesday, when the tax agency couldn't bring the system back into operation.

The glitch comes four days before the deadline for filing 2009 returns for taxpayers who got extensions in April.

So far, the shutdown of the IRS "modern e-file" system doesn't appear to be causing huge problems.

That's mainly because it involves only the updated version of the e-filing system. The one in use for years remains in operation, and large tax-prep companies like H&R Block and Intuit's TurboTax said their programs will default to the older version if returns submitted to the modernized system did not go through.

An IRS spokesman said returns submitted by individuals from home computers are generally held by service providers, and will be submitted when the system is restored.