•Companies

General Mills goes for the gold: First the gold, then the Wheaties. At the Olympics in Beijing this month, Nastia Liukin followed in the footsteps of Mary Lou Retton and Carly Patterson, the two other American gymnasts who have won Olympic gold in the all-around competition. Now she and American decathlete Bryan Clay follow them onto the Wheaties cereal box. Liukin and Clay will get their own special edition Wheaties boxes, General Mills Inc. announced yesterday. Liukin, who is from Parker, Texas, won five medals in the Beijing Olympics, including helping the U.S. win silver in the team competition. Clay, a native of Honolulu who lives in Los Angeles, was the first American to win the decathlon since Dan O’Brien brought home the gold in 1996. Two other Americans — Jim Thorpe and Bruce Jenner — have won the event. The special-edition boxes will be sold starting next month. (Associated Press)

Lehman Brothers plans layoffs: Lehman Brothers, the ailing Wall Street bank, plans to lay off as many as 1,500 employees, or nearly 6 percent of its work force, before it announces third-quarter results on Sept. 15, a person briefed on the plans said yesterday. Lehman has already laid off 6,000 workers since June of last year, mostly in its mortgage origination and securitization businesses. It was not immediately clear what divisions would bear the brunt of the latest cuts but virtually every Wall Street business is struggling, and investment bankers and traders at Lehman were anticipating layoffs. A Lehman spokesman declined to comment. The bank is scrambling to piece together a plan to shore up its finances ahead of its third-quarter results. (New York Times)

Amgen to halt rebates: Amgen Inc., the biotechnology giant that has a drug manufacturing plant in West Greenwich, will stop giving rebates to cancer clinics prescribing its anemia drug Aranesp to avoid what it called the “possible misperception” the payments encouraged overuse. Amgen also will change pricing for two other cancer drugs, Neulasta and Neupogen, by stopping discounts based on doctors’ purchases of Aranesp and selling each product separately, the Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based company said yesterday in an e-mail. (Bloomberg News)

•Markets

Dollar uneven: The dollar closed mixed against major currencies yesterday in New York, ending at 109.56 Japanese yen, down from Wednesday’s close of 109.65 yen. The euro closed at 3:30 p.m. at $1.4702, down from $1.4712.

Metals climb: Gold for current delivery closed at $830.90 a troy ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up from Wednesday’s close of $828.00. Silver closed at $13.604 an ounce, up from $13.468.

Fuels drop: October light, sweet crude oil fell $2.56 to $115.59 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. September heating oil fell 7.91 cents to $3.1826 a gallon. September gasoline fell 4.58 cents to $3.0214 a gallon. October natural gas fell 55.8 cents to $8.05 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Associated Press