Profits

Shares of AT&T Inc. had their steepest drop in nearly five years after Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said Tuesday that slowing economic growth had led to "softness" in the company's home phone and Internet businesses. The shares fell 4.6%, helping to spark a broader decline in U.S. stocks, after Stephenson said AT&T was disconnecting more home-phone and high-speed Internet customers for failing to pay their bills.

Battles between authors and studios over "Hollywood accounting" are nasty, and almost never resolved in favor of the writer. Ernest Hemingway once noted that authors should drive up to the California border and throw their books over a fence while studio officials throw bags of money back over the fence. That, he said, should be the end of the transaction. Some of the biggest names in publishing, however, have ignored this advice.

Investors knew the first three months of the year were bad for companies, but now it appears that they were downright abysmal -- and that there might be more pain to come. With the nation's banks releasing their quarterly results this week, anxiety has returned to the stock market. Last week ended on a grim note, with the Dow Jones industrials falling 256 points Friday after General Electric Co. reported a profit decline and lowered its forecast for the year.

Exploiting a loophole in a deal struck with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a San Diego County Indian tribe has avoided paying the cash-strapped state $30 million in gambling profits. Voters in February allowed four tribes to expand their casino operations in exchange for a larger share of their revenues.

The Laguna Beach artist who created California's iconic whale-tail license plate is making a splash with state coastal officials, revoking the state's right to use his art after they snubbed his request to share profits from the image with his environmental group.

The same historically high oil prices that are expected to contribute to massive profits for the major oil companies in the second quarter are again dragging down financial results in their refining operations. And for companies whose primary business is refining oil and selling gasoline, quarterly earnings versus a year earlier could be ugly. Plummeting stock prices for many refiners reflect the difficult operating environment.

WellPoint Inc., the nation's largest health insurance company, ran into a snag last year while pursuing an important new business initiative. Federal banking regulators insisted on classifying WellPoint as a healthcare company. And that was interfering with its efforts to open a bank. The Federal Reserve Board eventually agreed that the company's core insurance business could be considered financial services.

Joseph and Victoria Hurley are the kind of customers that keep restaurateurs up at night. The Hurleys, parents of two young boys, have restructured their lives. The couple -- she's a marketing consultant and he's a much-traveled computer troubleshooter -- dumped their Jeep Grand Cherokee for a Lexus hybrid SUV that gets twice the mileage. Dinners out at places such as the Cheesecake Factory and the Daily Grill are rare treats instead of a weekly habit.

A major battle over horse racing revenue, one that has reportedly cost Hollywood Park an estimated $8.5 million in the first 17 days of its current autumn meeting, may be coming to an end. "I think it [a settlement] is imminent," said Jack Liebau, president of Hollywood Park. At issue is the loss of revenue at the Inglewood track from television and Internet betting sites.

A new report showed Nevada's major hotel-casinos posted their highest profit in fiscal 2006: a combined $2.1 billion before federal taxes. The report released Thursday by the state Gaming Control Board also showed that the 274 resorts had $5.4 billion in earnings before taxes, interest, depreciation and amortization, compared with $4.5 billion in the previous fiscal year. The resorts had $24.08 billion in total revenue for the fiscal year ended June 30, compared with $21.