NEW YORK— Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said today that it has fired a Wal-Mart systems technician for recording phone conversations between the company's PR office and a newspaper reporter and for intercepting text messages without authorization.

The move is the result of an internal investigation that began on Jan. 11 when someone expressed concerns to the world's biggest retailer about the matter, Wal-Mart said. It did not identify the technician.

Wal-Mart's internal investigation initially found that the technician had monitored and recorded phone conversations between Wal-Mart's public relations staffers and a reporter from The New York Times. The recordings were made over a four-month period between September 2006 and January 2007. Wal-Mart said it notified The New York Times earlier today.

During the investigation, the company said it discovered that, in separate instances, the same technician had intercepted text messages and pages including communications that did not involve Wal-Mart employees.

OIL PRICES DROP

NEW YORK — Oil prices lost more than $1 a barrel today on continued concerns over stock market declines and an indication by an OPEC official that the cartel won't cut production at its next meeting.

Light, sweet crude for April delivery tumbled $1.57 to settle at $60.07 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Earlier, the contract dropped as low as $59.55 a barrel, dipping below $60 for the first time since Feb. 28.

Brent crude for April also fell $1.54 to settle at $60.54 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

Last Tuesday, the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index plunged 9 percent, triggering huge losses on Wall Street and other markets. The oil market still closed at a two-month high on Thursday on the news of tightening gasoline supplies, but afterward followed the stock market's downward pull.

Comments from an oil official that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is unlikely to call for another round of production cuts at its March meeting also undermined prices. Qatar's Oil Minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah said the cartel won't decrease production if crude oil stays near its current basket price of $58.34 a barrel, according to Dow Jones Newswires.

NEW POWERHOUSE IN SUPERMARKET INDUSTRY

TRENTON, N.J. — The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., operator of A&P and other supermarket chains, is buying Pathmark Stores Inc. for about $679 million in cash and stock in a deal that would turn two rival, struggling grocers into a Northeast powerhouse.

The deal would create a 550-store supermarket chain, with annual sales of $11 billion, operating in the New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia metropolitan areas as well as in Michigan, Louisiana and the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., region.

Pathmark has posted losses in its last seven quarters, and Great Atlantic has lost money in most quarters since 2002.

Haub called the deal "the latest step in A&P's transformation," which he said has included selling its Canadian operations in 2005, appointing new executives, outsourcing distribution and reducing overhead sharply.

Pathmark shareholders are to receive $9 in cash and 0.12963 shares of Great Atlantic stock for each Pathmark share.

That would amount to about $13 a share for each Pathmark share, or a 15.5 percent premium over Pathmark's closing price on Friday. Pathmark had about 52.2 million shares outstanding as of its latest regulatory filing.

ADVANCED MICRO SYSTEMS ISSUES REVENUE WARNING

SAN FRANCISCO — Advanced Micro Devices Inc. warned today that it was unlikely to meet its first-quarter revenue guidance of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion, the latest in a series of disappointments for investors in the struggling chip-maker.

The company's stock fell to a new 52-week low on the news.

AMD is hurting from a brutal price competition with much-larger rival Intel Corp. and has been punished by investors for a product lineup that some say is in dire need of an upgrade.

Sunnyvale-based AMD did not disclose details of the revenue shortfall in a brief statement before financial markets opened Monday.

But in a presentation at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco, CEO Hector Ruiz said the company overestimated the demand from the PC and server makers that now provide the bulk of AMD's business.

When sales to those original equipment manufacturers — or OEMs — fell short, AMD wasn't able to shift its resources quickly enough to sell more chips to the computer resellers that have historically been the company's strongest client base, Ruiz said.

RESEARCH IN MOTION CO-CEO TO STEP DOWN

NEW YORK — BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd.'s co-chief executive will give up the chairman's post after an internal probe identified a quarter-billion dollars in improper accounting for employee stock options at the mobile device company.

Jim Balsillie, who will remain on RIM's board, and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis also will pay up to $4.25 million apiece to defray the cost of the internal investigation, and return an as-yet undisclosed amount of personal profit from backdated options.

As a result of the improper accounting, the company expects to restate three years of past financial statements to record roughly $250 million of options-related expense that should have been deducted from the Ontario-based company's profits. Owing to the expanded scope of the revisions, RIM said it would need more time to complete the restatement, which it had hoped to finish this month.