AUTOMOTIVE

Chase stops loans on Chrysler leases

Detroit —- Chase Auto Finance says it will stop financing leases for Chrysler vehicles at the close of business Thursday. Spokeswoman Mary Kay Bean says the unit of JPMorgan Chase & Co. will continue to make loans for retail sales with Chrysler's dealers. Last week, Chrysler LLC announced that its own financial arm would get out of the leasing business by the end of the month.

DEALS

Miner to purchase coal trust

Charleston, W.Va. —- Mining giant Teck Cominco said Tuesday that it will buy up all of the Fording Canadian Coal Trust for nearly $14 billion in cash and stock. The deal is the latest in a string of acquisitions centered on coking coal, a key raw material for steel.

FOOD / BEVERAGE

Bennigan's, parent file for bankruptcy

Restaurant chains Bennigan's and Steak & Ale have filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection and will shut their doors, less than two months after their parent company said it was not preparing to do so. The companies filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday in the Eastern District of Texas. Their parent company —- privately held Metromedia Restaurant Group —- is based in Plano, Texas. In a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing, a company seeks to liquidate its assets and shut down. A lawyer listed in the filing, J. Michael Sutherland, did not return a call. According to a recorded message at his law firm, not all stores using the Bennigan's and Steak & Ale names have filed for bankruptcy and some franchise locations were not included in the filing. All company-owned Bennigan's and Steak & Ale restaurants are closing, but the company has not released a list of which stores are company-owned and which are franchised, said Leah Templeton, a spokeswoman for the restaurant firm. It could not specify Tuesday afternoon which stores would be closed, she said.

Starbucks to cut 1,000 more jobs

Starbucks Corp., which already plans to shut 600 stores, said Tuesday that it is also cutting almost 1,000 out-of-store jobs. The jobs being cut are in addition to the layoffs from store closings. Meanwhile, Starbucks said it will close two-thirds of its stores in Australia.

REGULATORY

IRS: Collections to be stepped up

Washington —- A top IRS official promised Congress on Tuesday that the agency "will do better" in collecting billions in taxes that businesses supposedly withheld from employees' paychecks but never remitted to the government. Linda Stiff, a deputy Internal Revenue Service commissioner, agreed with senators that the loss of about $58 billion in payroll taxes estimated to be owed the government is unacceptable. While too high, the $58 billion "represents a snapshot of unpaid employment taxes" as part of a long-term improvement effort, Stiff testified at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee's investigative panel. "Our numbers show dramatic improvement in the last several years, but we know we still have a long way to go."

FCC rules against Comcast

Washington —- A majority of the Federal Communications Commission has concluded that cable operator Comcast unlawfully disrupted the transfer of certain digital video files, affirming the government's right to regulate how Internet companies manage traffic. Three commissioners on the five-member FCC signed off on an order that finds Comcast violated federal rules by purposely slowing the transmission of video files shared among users of the application BitTorrent. Comcast has said it delayed the files to assure that enough bandwidth remained available for other users on its network. But the company did not disclose its practices until public interest groups and the video-sharing site complained to the FCC.

RETAILING

Sales up 2.6% year-over-year

U.S. retail sales rose 2.6 percent last week compared with a year earlier, the seventh straight week of at least a 2 percent gain, as consumers bought electronics and office supplies in the back-to-school season.

Mervyns files for bankruptcy

Department store chain Mervyns LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday. The Hayward, Calif.-based chain, along with some of its affiliates, filed for protection from creditors in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. It said that all of its stores will remain open. The privately held retailer operates about 175 locations in seven states but primarily in California.

TECHNOLOGY

Internet flaw moves to spotlight

While Internet service providers are racing to fix a security problem that makes it possible for criminals to divert computer users to fake Web sites where personal information can be stolen, Dan Kaminsky worries that they have not moved quickly enough. By his estimate, roughly 41 percent of the Internet is still vulnerable. Now Kaminsky, a technical consultant who first discovered the problem, has been ramping up the pressure on companies and organizations. Next week, he will take another step by publicly laying out the details of the flaw at a security conference in Las Vegas. That should force computer network administrators to fix millions of affected systems. But his exposing of the flaw will also make it easier for criminals to exploit it.

Disgusted Pickens sells Yahoo stake

Billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens has sold all of his holdings in Yahoo Inc. in a fit of pique over the way the Internet company's management handled talks with Microsoft Corp. Pickens told the San Francisco Chronicle that he sold all 10 million of his Yahoo shares at a loss because he grew frustrated with the company's rebuffs of Microsoft's advances. "I think that Yahoo management was pathetic," Pickens told the Chronicle.

Game suspended on Facebook site

New York —- The creators of a "Scrabble" knockoff at online hangout Facebook suspended their word game Tuesday after being hit with a lawsuit. Hasbro Inc., the company that owns the North American rights to the game, last week sued the brothers in India who created the "Scrabulous" program. Separately, Hasbro asked Facebook to block the program, something the site resisted despite risks of losing immunity protection from copyright lawsuits

Cloud computing venture formed

Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Yahoo Inc. have forged a partnership to promote cloud computing, technology that delivers programs over the Internet. Researchers will use Hewlett-Packard machines running on Intel chips. Yahoo will contribute software.

Chairman, CEO to exit Alcatel Lucent

Paris —- Both the chairman and chief executive of French telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent will resign this year, the company said Tuesday. The announcement of the departures of Chairman Serge Tchuruk and Chief Executive Patricia Russo came as the world's largest maker of fixed and mobile telecom gear reported its sixth consecutive quarter of losses. Tchuruk will step down Oct. 1, and Russo will resign "no later than the end of the year," the company said.

TRANSPORTATION

Delta affiliate to retire aircraft

Indianapolis-based Republic Airways Holdings Inc. said it will finish retiring 11 Embraer ERJ-135 jets from flying for Delta Air Lines Inc. by September, seven months earlier than planned.

American, El Al to code-share

El Al, Israel's national airline, and American Airlines said Tuesday that they will begin selling tickets on each other's connecting flights beginning in September. The agreement replaces a code-share deal that El Al had with Delta Air Lines Inc. until late last year, when Delta began its own direct flights from the United States to Tel Aviv.

Union sues over DHL-UPS deal

The Air Line Pilots Association, which represents about 500 ASTAR Air cargo pilots, has sued German-owned package carrier DHL for breach of contract and fraudulent inducement. The suit alleges that DHL fraudulently induced ALPA to dismiss lawsuits against DHL by promising to underwrite job security commitments even as it engaged in secret discussions with Sandy Springs-based UPS on an agreement to handle DHL's air cargo flights, ALPA said in a news release. ASTAR flies about 50 percent of DHL's North American cargo and is 49 percent owned by DHL. Another airline, ABX, handles the rest of DHL's flights. Under the proposed deal, UPS would take over these flights within the United States, Canada and Mexico. ALPA has been protesting the proposed deal, saying it will put about 10,000 workers out of their jobs. "We're going to fight this agreement in every way we can —- including in the courts," John Prater, president of ALPA, said in the release.

Strike disrupts Lufthansa flights

Frankfurt, Germany —- Some 4,000 Lufthansa employees walked off the job Tuesday on the second day of a strike for higher wages, causing Germany's largest airline to cancel more than a dozen flights and warn that more could follow. The work stoppages were centered on airports in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin and affected mostly short-haul flights.

UTILITIES / ENERGY

Official: Demand drives oil price

Washington —- The big surge in oil prices has been driven primarily by strong global demand and not market speculation or a decline in the value of the dollar, a top Treasury Department official said Tuesday. David McCormick, Treasury's undersecretary for international economics, said the role of market speculators and the falling dollar had a "relatively minor" impact on the huge run-up in oil. He said the basic cause of the increase was "a growing gap between the world's desire to consume oil and its capacity to produce it."

Gasoline demand off 4% from 2007

U.S. gasoline demand fell 4 percent last week, the 14th consecutive decline, as high pump prices kept people closer to home, a MasterCard Inc. report showed.