Under pressure from stockholders to raise stock prices, Wendy’s International Inc. will offer up to 18 percent of it’s portion of the Tim Horton donut chain to the public and close as many as 450 of it’s Wendy’s fast food restaurants, it was announced on Friday.

The value of shares in Wendy’s have risen by 45 percent in the past two years in comparison with a 99 percent rise in the worth of shares in McDonald’s in the same period.

The plan calls the closure of as many as 60 of its company-owned stores and the sale of around 400 to franchisees.

It will also slow the opening of new stores to around 40 per year next year, down from an average of 71 new openings per year in the past four years.

Wendy’s will also sell the real estate at 217 franchise sites, buy back $1 billion in shares, and increase its dividend by 25 percent.

One analyst said that the announced moves will have no real impact on the company’s business dynamics, but will increase value to shareholders in the short run.

On the announcement of the new plan, shares in the Dublin, Ohio-based company gained $5.55 to $50.82 by mid-morning on the New York Stock Exchange.

The Wendy’s hamburger chain has 6,727 restaurants around the world, Tim Hortons has 2,491 stores in Canada and 264 in the United States. Additionally, the Baja Fresh chain has 303 restaurants in the US.

Officials of US aircraft manufacturer Boeing said on Tuesday that it believes it will win its World Trade Organization case charging the European Union of paying illegal subsidies to European aircraft maker Airbus, and that the WTO will make Airbus pay back the money that it has received from governments within the EU.

Boeing claims it was this government assistance which allowed Airbus to overtake Boeing as the world’s biggest manufacturer of aircraft.

Boeing is confident that Airbus will be required to repay the funds it received from the EU nations despite the fact that the WTO has only ruled once that an illegal subsidy be repaid, and that the order in that case was not complied with.

Boeing officials said that the current case is different, insisting that it is not a question of the WTO simply telling the governments that had given the aid to Airbus that the help was illegal and that they should not to do it any more, but more a question of how the subsidies will be withdrawn.

One possible way suggested by Boeing would be to convert the subsidies into normal market loans which Airbus would have to repay.

Exacerbating the case is the fact that Airbus has already said it might look for help from France, Germany, Britain, and Spain to help it with its Airbus A380 aircraft, money that it would likely receive before the WTO makes a ruling in the case which, including appeals, will probably not be resolved for at least two years.

Meanwhile, Airbus has countercharged Boeing with receiving government subsidies in the form of incentives from the state of Washington to keep their operations there as well as in the form of defense contracts from the US government.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer warned radio stations that they would not escape scrutiny as his investigation into pay-for-play schemes in which music companies pay for airplay of songs released on their labels.

The warning came as Mr. Spitzer announced the first settlement by a music company in the year-long investigation.

Sony BMG Music has agreed to pay $10 million to a music-related charity and alter its promotion practices, as well as to make a public statement acknowledging that it had pursued improper pay-for-play deals in order to get music by its artists played on certain radio stations and that such practices are still prevalent in the music industry.

Specifically, Spitzer said that Sony had bribed programmers and disc jockeys with luxury trips, gifts such as digital cameras, as well as payments through independent promoters.

Some members of the music industry disputed the impropriety of pay-for-play practices by using the example of product placement in supermarkets, where companies routinely pay the supermarket chains for optimum placement of their products in the stores.

Others claimed that the practices were not illegal, as well as that radio was not even that important a platform for the launch of music in the internet age, where websites have replaced radio as the media of choice for promoting music.

Some US congressmen would appear to be upset by the impending departure from office of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.

Amid the tributes and accolades during Mr. Greenspan’s semi-annual report on the economy in front of the House Financial Services Committee, California Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat, said that he is introducing a bill that would exempt Mr. Greenspan from the requirement that he leave his post on January 31, 2006, the end of his current term.

Representative Sherman said that Mr. Greenspan has done such a good job that he should get an additional five-year term.

If Mr. Greenspan does step down in January, he will have served in his job for 18 years and five months, the second-longest serving Fed chairman in US history; if he extended his service even to July of next year he would break the record for service set by William McChesney Martin, who was appointed by President Harry S Truman.

That could happen even if Sherman’s bill is not passed, as Fed chairmen may serve beyond the end of their term if a new chairman has not been appointed. Some have speculated that the Bush administration is so preoccupied with other matters that it could take at least that long to appoint a new chairman.

Mr. Greenspan did not say anything to encourage Representative Sherman’s efforts; he has expressed a preference for departing office at the end of his term, as scheduled.

The New York equities markets had to recover from losses incurred by disappointing quarterly results from General Motors, Intel, and Yahoo.

The Dow, the S&P and Nasdaq all managed to finish the day in positive territory, though.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.4 percent to 10,689.15, the S&P 500 was up 0.5 percent to 1,235.2, and the Nasdaq composite finished the day up 0.7 percent at 2,188.57.

Intel lost 4.4 percent on the day to $27.44 after reporting on Tuesday while it had met Wall Street’s earnings expectations, its margins were less than had been expected.

Yahoo lost 11.5 percent to $33.40 when it reported that it had achieved its earnings predictions but couldn’t hit revenue targets.

The news from Yahoo also pulled Google down by 0.7 percent.

Meanwhile, GM dropped 0.7 percent to $36.58 on what it characterized as “very disappointing” results.

The S&P, which was down 0.3 percent at one point in the day, was helped by biotechnology company Amgen, which reported an increase of 38 percent in second quarter profits, upon which it raised its forecast for the year. Amgen shares rose 15 percent on the day to $81.17.

Eastman Kodak lost 2.2 percent to $28.10 on the news of its third straight quarterly loss and on the announcement that it would eliminate an additional 10,000 jobs.

Microsoft is suing Google to stop one of its top engineers from going to work for Google.

Kai-Fu Lee was in charge of Microsoft’s research and development center in Beijing before going to work at the company’s head office in Redmond, Washington, in the United States.

However, on Tuesday Google named Mr. Lee president of its operation in China as well as the head of its planned research and development center in China.

In reaction, Microsoft announced that it had filed suit against both Mr. Lee and Google in order to force him to keep non-competition and confidentiality contracts he had signed with Microsoft.

The agreement, like those signed by all Microsoft employees, would prevent Mr. Lee from going to work for a direct competitor for a year after leaving Microsoft, from hiring anyone away from Microsoft, and from disclosing Microsoft’s trade secrets.

One of Microsoft’s lawyers said that it sometimes negotiated agreements with departing employees to allow them to go to other companies in positions not overlapping what they had done with Microsoft, but that Mr. Lee had not applied for such an agreement before accepting the position with Google.

Further, Microsoft claimed that Mr. Lee had accepted the position with Google in “egregious violation” of his contract with Microsoft. Google said that they had reviewed all of Microsoft’s claims and that they were without merit and that they support Dr. Lee and will fight Microsoft’s claims.

Shares in Maytag gained over 9 percent to $16.91 in early-day trading in New York, while Whirlpool was up by over 5 percent on the announcement that Maytag will consider an unsolicited takeover bid from Whirlpool.

Whirlpool’s bid of $1.3 billion is higher than the $1.125 billion bid from a group headed by Ripplewood Holdings LLC, which the Maytag board still favors.

This makes the third group showing interest in Maytag, as Chinese appliance maker Haier Group has proposed but not made official a bid of $16 per share. Analysts’ opinions on the Whirlpool offer were mixed.

Some felt that the acquisition of Maytag would be advantageous to Whirlpool.

The fact that Whirlpool already has a relationship with the unions that work with Maytag gives Whirlpool an advantage over other bidders, according to some analysts.

However, other analysts felt that Whirlpool’s bid was mostly an effort to keep Haier, a stronger international rival, out of the bidding. Meanwhile, Maytag shareholders are slated to vote on the Ripplewood bid on August 19.

A decision handed down by the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals late Thursday afternoon that immediately ended the ban on importation of Canadian cattle into to the US due to fears of mad cow disease sent shares of Tyson Foods Inc. soaring on Friday morning.

The stock gained 7.5 percent, or $1.39 to trade at $19.91 on the New York Stock Exchange early in the day. Under the decision, Canadian cattle might begin to enter the US as early as the end of the summer, according to analysts.

Tyson said on Friday that it is waiting for information from the US Department of Agriculture for details of how and when the border will be reopened to cattle.

The company plans to resume importation of cattle as soon as practically possible. The ban, according to one analyst, had severely cut Tyson’s capacity because there just were not enough cattle to process. Tyson, the worlds largest chicken producer, began processing beef in 2001 and beef is now the largest proportion of its business.

Before the ban, the US had imported about 2 million head of cattle per year from Canada, approximately 8 percent of the cattle slaughtered in the US annually. The ban on importation came in May 2003 after traces of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, were discovered in a cow born in Alberta.

Southwest Airlines had an increase of 41 percent in net profits despite the increase in oil prices, and it has set a target of an additional increase of 15 percent for next year’s earnings.

Net profits increased in the second quarter to $159 million, up from $113 million.

Southwest, the largest US air carrier when determined by market capitalization, has achieved this through an aggressive program to hedge fuel requirements that resulted in a savings of $196 million in fuel and oil costs in the second quarter.

It has hedged 85 percent of its fuel requirements for the second half of this year at $26 per barrel and over half of its fuel needs for 2006 at $32 per barrel.

It has also hedged various proportions of its fuel needs till 2009 for prices between $31 and $35 per barrel.

Another factor in Southwest’s excellent performance was the continuing recovery in the demand for air travel.

Unit costs fell by 3.5 per cent in the quarter despite a 25 percent increase in per gallon cost of jet fuel, according to Southwest’s chief executive.

He said that unit costs would remain about the same in the third quarter, but that fuel costs would be higher.

This was the 57th quarter in a row that Southwest has recorded a profit.

US equities markets ended the day in positive territory on Wednesday on news that the US trade deficit dropped in May as well as on falling oil prices.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the day up 0.47 percent at 10,577.00, while the Nasdaq composite closed ahead by 0.13 percent to 1,569.00 and the S&P 500 advanced by 0.40 percent to 1,228.30.

Proctor and Gamble was up 1.3 percent to $54.65 and Gilette also gained1.3 percent to $52.36 on the announcement that the two companies had agreed on P&G’s acquisition of Gilette. IBM was also up, by 1.8 percent to $81.51, as Sanford Bernstein raised IBM’s performance rating.

Harley Davidson’s better-than-expected quarterly results sent their shares up 1.7 percent to $50.54. Abbott Laboratories, however, lost 3.6 percent to $47.93 after it said that third-quarter profits will be lower than expected.

As the quarterly earnings season gets into full swing, one of the most awaited results are those from Yum! Brands, which counts among its holdings KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, which had been expected to report late Tuesday afternoon.

The founder of WorldCom, Bernard J. Ebbers, was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison for his participation in accounting fraud which misstated the company’s profits by $11 billion and caused the collapse of the telecommunications giant in 2002.

Federal prosecutors had asked for a sentence of life in prison. The sentence is one of the stiffest ever given to an executive charged with large-scale corporate corruption. In handing down the sentence, Federal judge Barbara S. Jones said that Mr. Ebbers deserved the sentence because his statements “deprived investors of their money” and that he was a leader of the criminal activity that led to his company’s downfall.

Legal analysts said that the long sentence given to Mr. Ebbers would encourage settlements in similar cases as well as serve as a deterrent to others thinking of engaging in such misconduct.

Mr. Ebbers remains free on bail for the time being, but he must report to a probation officer within 72 hours and he was ordered to report to prison on October 12. His attorney said that he would appeal Mr. Ebbers’s sentence and asked that his client be allowed to remain free on bail through the appeals process, but it was unclear whether the judge will allow that.

UK-based leisure group Rank, which owns the Hard Rock Café chain, announced that it will delist from Nasdaq and end its registration with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

They will, however, continue to trade on the London Stock Exchange. In order to untangle itself from US exchanges, it will change its Articles of Association so that US investors will have to transfer their shares in its ordinary stock.

By taking these measures, Rank will no longer have to comply with either the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requirement to prove adequate supervision of accounting practices or with SEC reporting requirements.

The costs of complying with these requirements are the reason Rank gave for its decision to delist.

According to a study published in June by a law firm in Chicago showed that in the past year, the costs for a large company maintaining a public listing in the United States went up by 45 percent.

Most of that rise in cost, according to the study, comes from rising accounting fees. Audit fees increased by 55 percent for large companies in the past year, according to the study.

Small companies, defined as those companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenues, have seen their audit fees rise even more, up 96 percent in the past year.