INTERNET

NEW YORK TIMES WEB SITE EXPERIENCES THREE-HOUR OUTAGE

An unknown glitch took the New York Times Web site offline for nearly three hours last night. Technicians struggled to fix the problem, which first hit the company’s servers around 7 p.m., the editor in chief of the Web site, Leonard Apcar, said.

The New York Times Company Web site, www.nytco.com, was also affected. The newspaper Web site receives, on average, 1.9 million unique visitors a day and is the largest newspaper Web site in the world, Mr. Apcar said. He said outages of the length experienced last night were rare and that the cause was not known.

“If we knew what the problem was, we’d go in and fix it,” he said. He said technicians considered transferring data to another server to allow readers to view a cached, or backed-up, version of the Web site as it was at the time of the outage.

A modified version of the Web site was back online about 9:50 p.m. last night.

– Special to the Sun

INVESTING

CHINA GRANT YALE ACCESS TO SECURITIES MARKET

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – The Chinese government has authorized Yale University to trade domestic stocks and bonds, making it the first foreign university granted access to the country’s tightly restricted securities market.

The approval, announced this week in the state-run Shanghai Daily and confirmed yesterday by the university, allows Yale’s endowment investors to tap one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. It also underscores the increasingly tight-knit relationship between China and the prestigious American university, a relationship marked by President Hu’s scheduled visit to the school tomorrow.

– Associated Press

RETAIL

WAL-MART CEO DEFENDS COMPANY’S BENEFITS REFORM

The chief executive of Wal-Mart Stores, H. Lee Scott, took on his critics yesterday and defended the company against claims it has improved benefits only to bolster its troubled image.

“Union-funded critics say the changes under way are just a publicity stunt,” Mr. Scott said at the company’s second annual media conference in Rogers, Ark. “They couldn’t be more wrong.”

– Bloomberg News

EARNINGS

JPMORGAN POSTS RECORD EARNINGS

JPMorgan Chase & Company, the no. 3 bank in America, posted record earnings in the first quarter as fees from investment banking rose to a six-year high and credit-card defaults fell.

Net income climbed 36% to $3.08 billion, or 86 cents a share, from $2.26 billion, or 63 cents, a year earlier, the New York-based company said yesterday in a statement. Revenue increased 12% to $15.2 billion.

– Bloomberg News

BLACKROCK EARNINGS RISES 52%

BlackRock, which will become the fourth largest American investment firm after acquiring Merrill Lynch & Company’s fund unit, said first-quarter earnings climbed 52% on a rise in fees tied to real estate and bond returns. Net income climbed to $70.9 million, or $1.06 a share, from $46.5 million, or 70 cents, a year earlier, the company said yesterday in a statement. Revenue grew 58% to $395.7 million, driven by a fourfold increase in fees linked to investment performance.

– Bloomberg News

PFIZER PROFITS RISE

Pfizer, Abbott Laboratories, and Schering AG reported higher first-quarter earnings as sales of some of their biggest drugs for arthritis, pain, and birth control increased. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drugmaker, said profits rose because a $4 billion cost-cutting program and sales of more-profitable drugs for arthritis and pain offset a third straight quarterly revenue decline. New York-based Pfizer quadrupled its share buyback plan this year to $4 billion.

– Bloomberg News

COMMODITIES

GOLD REACHES 25-YEAR HIGH

Gold rose to a 25-year high and silver topped $14 an ounce for the first time since 1983 as investors snapped up precious metals as a hedge against inflation. Gold is up 45% from a year ago and silver almost doubled as oil costs reached record highs.

– Bloomberg News

IN BRIEF

Apple Computer said second-quarter profit rose 41%, buoyed by rising sales of iPod music players and Macintosh personal computers … The former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling denied a government lawyer’s accusation that he lied to investors about how much the company profited from energy trading before its 2001 bankruptcy … Oil prices leapt above $72 a barrel yesterday, settling at a record high for the third straight day.

– Bloomberg News and Associated Press