IN BRIEF

NEW YORK

Gaming Partners warned of delisting

Gaming Partners International Corp., a Las Vegas-based maker of casino products, Friday said it received a warning from the staff of the Nasdaq Stock Market that its stock may be delisted because its financial reports are late.

Gaming Partners said it has requested a hearing before a Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel to review the determination. The stock delisting will be stayed pending the panel’s decision.

Gaming Partners said Monday that it would delay filing its 2006 annual report due to a “clerical error” the company discovered in preparing its financial results.

Company shares fell 35 cents, or 1.79 percent, Friday to close $19.16.

Community Bancorp reports higher profits

Community Bancorp on Thursday reported first-quarter net income jumped 59.1 percent from a year earlier.

In a statement, the company said net income was $5.4 million, or 52 cents per share, in the three months ended March 31, up from net icnome of $3.4 million, or 46 cents per share, a year earlier.

Return on equity declined to 9.9 percent from 12.7 percent in the first quarter a year ago, because Community issued additional shares for the acquisition of Valley Bancorp.

Shares in Community Bank rose 88 cents, or 3.03 percent, to close at $29.97 Friday.

Light-bulb trade offered by utility

Nevada Power Co. will give consumers energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs today in exchange for incandescent bulbs as part of the utility’s celebration of Earth Month.

Compact fluorescent bulbs use two-thirds or less energy than standard incandescent bulbs, generate 70 percent less heat and last up to 10 times longer.

The Las Vegas electric company will distribute up to 5,000 compact fluorescent bulbs to consumers who visit the New Horizons Academy, 6701 W. Charleston Blvd. between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. New Horizons also will be offering used goods at its annual yard sale at the same time.

NEW YORK

BlackBerry crash linked to software upgrade

After two days of silence about a lengthy outage in its BlackBerry e-mail service, the company that makes the addictive mobile device issued a jargon-laden update suggesting that a minor software upgrade had crashed the system.

The statement Thursday night by Research in Motion Ltd. said the outage from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning was triggered by “the introduction of a new, noncritical system routine” designed to optimize the cache, or temporary memory, on the computer servers that run the BlackBerry network.

RIM said “the pretesting of the system routine proved to be insufficient.”

The failed upgrade apparently set off a domino effect of glitches, which the company referred to as “a compounding series of interaction errors between the system’s operational database and cache.”

CHICAGO

McDonald’s earnings increase 22 percent

McDonald’s Corp. extended its hot streak to four years with a 22 percent jump in first-quarter earnings, and also said Friday it will sell nearly 1,600 restaurants in Latin America and the Caribbean to a franchisee.

Profit for the first three months of the year was $762 million, or 62 cents per share, up from $625 million, or 49 cents per share, a year ago.

Revenue rose 11 percent to $5.46 billion from $4.91 billion.

NEW YORK

Bonds little changed amid data dearth

Treasury bond prices inched down or held steady Friday depending on the maturity, as investors awaited fresh data about the strength of the U.S. economy.

At 5 p.m. EDT, the 10-year Treasury note was down 31 cents per $1,000 in face value, or 0.03 points, from its level at 5 p.m. Thursday. Its yield was virtually unchanged at 4.67 percent.

The 30-year bond fell 0.19 points. Its yield, which moves in the opposite direction, rose to 4.85 percent from 4.84 percent.