Blockbuster Inc., the world's largest video-rental chain, said Chief Executive Officer John Antioco will leave by the end of this year after billionaire investor Carl Icahn led a fight to reduce his pay.
Antioco, who has been with the company since 1997, will receive $8.

04 million in compensation before he leaves, 62 percent less than the $21.2 million he was entitled to under terms of his contract, Blockbuster said.
Icahn, who ousted three board members in 2005 and is the largest Blockbuster investor, blessed the payout package.

John and the company have reached terms that are clearly in the best interests of the stockholders, Icahn said.
Costume jewelry retailer Claire's Stores Inc. said Tuesday it agreed to a $3.

1 billion takeover proposal from New York-based private equity firm Apollo Management LP.
Claire's, which operates about 3,000 stores in the United States and around the world under the names Claire's and Icing by Claire's, sells low-cost costume jewelry and accessories to tweens, teens and young adults.
Under terms of the agreement, Claire's shareholders will receive $33 in cash per share.

The purchase price represents a 7.3 percent premium over the stock's Monday closing price.
Oracle Corp.

's fiscal third-quarter profit climbed 35 percent, lifted by strong software sales that exceeded management's projections.
The business software maker said it earned $1.03 billion, or 20 cents per share, for the three months ended in February.

That compared with net income of $765 million, or 14 cents per share, at the same time last year.
Revenue for the period totaled $4.41 billion, a 27 percent increase from $3.

47 billion last year.
John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.

Backus died Saturday in Ashland, Ore., according to IBM Corp., where he spent his career.

Much of my work has come from being lazy, Backus told Think, the IBM employee magazine, in 1979. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.
Virgin clears hurdle to start U.

S. airline
The Transportation Department removed a barrier to Virgin America's plans to start a U.S.

airline, voicing support for its plan to comply with laws limiting foreign control of a domestic carrier.
The agency gave a tentative OK to a revised plan filed in January by Burlingame, Calif.-based Virgin America, saying the plan should meet U.

S. ownership rules that cap foreign control of a U.S.

airline at 25 percent. The start-up still faces opposition from several U.S.

airlines.
One condition for the Transportation Department's support is that Virgin America replace CEO Fred Reid, the former Delta Air Lines Inc. president hired by British billionaire Richard Branson.

Former media baron Conrad Black's racketeering trial got under way Tuesday with a federal prosecutor calling him a corporate swindler who stole millions of dollars and his attorney ripping into the government's star witness as a liar.
It was theft, it was fraud, it was crime, federal prosecutor Jeffrey Cramer said in a fiery opening statement.
But defense attorney Edward Genson said the money was made legally and scoffed at the notion that Black and his three co-defendants had defrauded shareholders in the Hollinger International newspaper empire.

They were entitled to the money, Genson said. Were they entitled to that much money? That's a philosophical matter.

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/Associated press -->