The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 43

BUSINESS C3 LOSANGELESTIMES All cars subject to prior sale. Plus government fees and taxes, and finance charges, any dealer docu ment preparation charges, and any emission test charges. Not on internet priced vehicles. Expires end of business day of publication. On approv ed credit.

An independent Budget License. 12541 Rosecrans Norwalk Rent A Car Rent A Car CAR SALES CAR SALES 5 Fwy Exit Rosecrans Ave 91 Fwy Exit North on Bloomfield 605 Fwy Exit Rosecrans on the corner of Rosecrans Ave. Blooomfield 800-320-6415 '08 Altima Auto, Full Pwr. 1 6 999 '07 Edge Se Spotless, Low Miles (5YFZ626) Rent A Car Rent A Car CAR SALES CAR SALES '06 yundai Sonata GLS 5420836 Gas Saver (5RQA477) 1 1 999 1 8 999 '06 Lincoln Towncar Spotless, Loaded (5WVJ347) Sale Price: Sale Price: Sale Price: Sale Price: 1 8 999 new york Corp. on Friday rejected an unsolicited takeover bid from rival power wholesaler NRG Energy Inc.

as too low, but left the dooropen to a possible combination. Calpine said its board unanimously determined that offer and materially undervalues unique asset portfolio and future The San Jose-based company, examining whether is a basis for discussions between the two companies to explore a business It is uncertain whether any deal would come from talks between the companies, Calpine said. The all-stock bid was initially valued at $11.5 billion, but its value has fallen since the offer was made this month. NRG Chief Executive David Crane said he respected the Calpine decision but was that they have decided not to move quickly to deliver the benefits of our proposal to Crane added: continue to believe that our proposal offers significant strategic and financial benefits and we remain interested in a combination with Calpine on the terms we have Princeton, N.J.-based NRG made its offer May 14, but the bid only became public last week. The company is offering to swap 0.534 shares of its stock for each of about 500 million Calpine shares.

That makes the offerworth $10.9 billion, or $21.79 ashare. Citi Investment Research analyst Brian Chin said he be- lievedthatNRGwas likely to raise its offer, noting that a sale price of more than $24 ashare would still benefit shareholders. Competing offers are unlikely, he added. offer comes about four months after Calpine emerged from a two-year reorganization under bankruptcy protection that cost more than 1,000 employees their jobs. NRG itself left Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2003.

Calpinecontinues to operate in a state of transition. A search is underway for a replacement for CEO Robert P. May, the turnaround specialist who said in February that he would step down once a successor was in place. An interim chief operating officer was named this month. NRG has said it believesit canwring at least $100 million in annual cost savings from a deal with Calpine, suggesting more job cuts would belikely.

Calpine operates 60 power plants that can produce as much as 23,000 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power more than 17 million homes. NRG has 49 plants with a total capacity of 24,120 megawatts. Calpine rejects NRG offer It says the bid is too low but rule out a deal. From the Associated Press san francisco of the Internet is the latest literary genre: TwitLit. The micro-blogging service Twitter, which sends messages of 140 characters or fewer, inspired a contest of extra-short short storiesin the spirit of Ernest famous six- word masterpiece: sale: baby shoes, never When the results of the TwitLit contest were announced Friday, a writer going by the name Ron Gould had won with the following work of micro-fiction: travel the note read.

you can only travel to the past and I recognized my own handwriting and felt a Twitter allows users, called stay constantly connected with friends and family by sending and receiving short messages called Tweets. Those who are interested in random musings can subscribe to their Twitter feed. The free service is part of the broader online social-networking trend sweeping the country. It has enjoyed such strong success in Silicon Valley that San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. recently raised $15 million in funding at a valuation of nearly $100 million.

So it was only a matter of time before someone came up with a literary challenge: Write ashort story in the maximum length of a Tweet. More than 300 brave souls took part in the exercise, showing off their ability to choose just the right words, sentence structure and punctuation to squeezeunder the 140-character count. Brian Clark, a former attorney turned entrepreneur who runs Copyblogger, an online writing blog, sponsored the contest. He said the five judges were so overwhelmed with good submissions that it was difficult to select the winners. In second placewas a piece submitted by Anthony Juliano: was a snitch, so I surprised when his torso turned up in the river.

What did surprise me, though, was where they found his Awriter using the name Thelonius Monk came in third: Gibson hit that home- run in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was One honorable mention: sobbing she held the boy, her memory of his violent conception falling away. She had learned to love him, this would be her Asecond honorable mention: priest at the funeral home asked if she had been a loving mother. The children all stared at each other.

The silence spoke jessica.guynn@latimes.com Contest inspires few words In the spirit of Twitter, a micro-blogging service, contestants compose extra-short works of literature. By Jessica Guynn Times Staff Writer chicago Airlines parent UAL Corp. scrapped its latest attempt to combine with US Airways Group Inc. and create the largest carrier, formally backing away Friday from a deal that probably would have resulted in fewer flights and higher ticket prices. Now the question for United, US Airwaysand other U.S.

airlines is how to get by and make money with oil prices near $130 a barrel. The chief executives of the two airlines told their employees in separate messages that a combination was off andUS Doug Parker indicated thatit was unlikely for at least the rest of this year. They had spent months exploring a deal that would have enabled the carriers to shed costs probably by paring employees, eliminating competing flights and trimming overlapping operations in Washington, D.C., and parts of the West. But the attempt was hamstrung by tightening credit markets and the dimming financial outlook, which has dried up cash and made them less attractive to the banks that would have to provide capital. Would-be passengers may benefit from more choices for the time being, but the airline accelerating deterioration is likely to continue.

more competition we have and the more pricing deci- sions by CEOs we have, the better for said Tom Parsons, chief executive of BestFares.com, a travel web- site. still coming down to the bottom line, though: Can any one of these airlines survive in this United, the second- largest carrier, has been perhaps the strongest advocate for consolidation within the industry. But United CEO Glenn Tilton was unable to work out a deal with Continental Airlines Inc. after Delta Air Lines Inc. and Northwest Airlines Corp.

agreed in April to pair up. Til- tontold Parker on Thursday that he was walking away from a chance to hook up with the No. 7 carrier. Shares of UALrose 15 cents Friday to US Airways shed 36 cents to $3.96. UAL, US Airways to go separate ways MERGER ADVOCATE: UAL Corp.

Chief Executive Glenn Tilton has been a strong advocate for consolidation within the airline industry. Yoshikazu Tsuno Images From the Associated Press Wii Fit had to go to considerable lengths. Chris Pereira, a 19-year-old video-game journalist from Rocky Hill, tried to preorder a copy before the game was released but was told that all units of the game had already been reserved. Pereira, an editor for Ziff Davis hit up Best Buy and GameStop without success. At the local Circuit City, a salesperson said the game was available, but when she turned around to grab a box, she came up empty-handed.

had apparently sold out minutes he said. He then scoured several stores before finding a copy at a GameStop store. consumer response to Wii Fit was said Denise Kaigler, a Nintendo spokeswoman. are working as hard as we can to replenish the She declined, however, to divulge how many copies of the game the company has sold. Nintendo had said Wii Fit already sold 2 million units in Japan, where it launched in December.

Analysts say part of the problem stems from Nin- conservative approach in making hardware. Stung by the failure of its last console, the GameCube, the Japanese company resists building up too much factory resources for its products. It also is shrewdly maximizing its profit by sending four times as many units to Europe, reaping the benefits of the strong euro, said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. Pachter estimated that Nin- tendo shipped just 500,000 copies of the game in North America but as many as 2 million units to Europe. shortage demonstrates one consequence of the weak dollar.

seeing companies ignore their largest market simply because they can make a greater profit Pachter said. know that Americans will be just as fat a few months from when Nintendo will have more units available, he said. But the runaway success could backfire if Nintendo is unable to manage consumer expectations, said Billy Pidgeon, an analyst with research firm IDC. a tough line to Pidgeon said. does the consumer get frustrated and move on? far, the Wii still has he said.

the fact that consumers finda Wii or a Wii Fit is definitely a missed alex.pham@latimes.com Wii Fit no easy find PageC1 shortage demonstrates one consequence of the weak ICHAEL ACHTER analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, on Nintendo, which is sending more Wii Fit units to Europe than to the U.S. to maximize profit finalized what we want to do with the Kim said. considering plans to do it a couple of different One of them would be to convert the three-story structure at 3rd and Alameda streets into a Korean-themed center with a Korean market, an electronics storeand a Korean-style spa with herbal steam rooms. Another possible approach, Kim said, would be to create a more broadly American-style market with a mainstream grocery store such as Ralphs and nationally recognized retailers. want to analyze both Kim said.

The buyers should settle on their plans within a few weeks, he said, and either makeover will be expensive. No budget has been set, he said. The center opened in 1985 and became popular among Japanese American residents and Japanese visitors who patronized its Yaohan (now Mit- suwa) supermarket, Japanese restaurants, a two-screen mov- ie theater and bowling alley. But customer traffic began to dwindle as Los Angeles fell into a recession in the early 1990s, and the riots of 1992 scared off many visitors to downtown Los Angeles. economic problems also cut the flow of once big-spending Japanese tourists into Little Tokyo.

The theater and bowling alley are long gone, and several other store spaces in the mall are vacant. The recent seller was Los Angeles developer Richard Meruelo, who bought the mall for less than $20 million in 2000 from a Japanese lender. He could not be reached for comment Friday. Last year the Kyoto Grand Hotel and Gardens, formerly known as the New Otani, and the outdoor Japanese Village Plaza were also sold. Both have retained their Japanese themes, but rapid changes in the district, including the arrival of many non-Japanese residents, have created anxiety.

whole demographic of Little Tokyo will Chris Komai, spokesman for the Jap- anese American National Museum, said in an interview last year. Watanabe of the Little Tokyo Service Center said he knew the new owners had to make tough financial decisions but he hoped to talk to them about how they could fit into the 125-year-old ethnic neighborhood. are not saying come, you are not he said. are saying sit down and talk about what is good for your community and good for your roger.vincent@latimes.com Times staff writer Teresa Watanabe contributed to this report. SCENE FROM A MALL: Awave of multicultural investors, residents and visitors has been transforming Little Tokyo in recent years, making some of the denizens uneasy.

Above, a pub at Little Tokyo Shopping Center. Ken Hively Los Angeles Times Little Tokyo mall is sold sit down and talk about what is good for your community and good for your ILL ATANABE Director, Little Tokyo Service Center, offering advice to the new owners of the Little Tokyo Shopping Center Richard Hartog Los Angeles Times Mall, from PageC1 Sharper Image the 31-year-old retailer that filed for bankruptcy protection in February, won permission to sell all its assets to liquidators for as much as $50.5 million. AU.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, on Friday approved results of an auction won Thursday by a joint venture between affiliates of Hilco Merchant Resources and Gordon Bros. Group.

The buyer start liquidation sales Harvey Miller, a lawyer for Sharper Image, said in court. Sharper Image filed for bankruptcy protection with plans to shut about half of its 184 stores and reorganize. The San Francisco-based company said it had lost more than $135million since early 2005. Miller told the court that none of the offers at the auction exceeded the bid submitted previously by Hilco and Gordon Bros. Bidding opened at $42.5 million and one company jousted with the buyout group until its bid reached $49 million and the other suitor dropped out.

The final offer can be increased by $1 million if Hilco and Gordon get the e-mail list and by an additional $500,000 if the company wins other legal rulings. Sharper Image auction bid OKd From Bloomberg News Call1.800.658.8281today. Orvisitmyaccount.latimes.comandenteroffercodeIPQ108. 07HD086 0001550205 onSundayhomedelivery..