BRIEFCASE.

Byline: Staff and Wire Services

Gas prices in L.A. continue to climb

Gasoline prices rose in the Los Angeles area this week for the sixth time in the past seven weeks, with record prices possible next week, the Automobile Club of Southern California said Friday.

The average self-serve price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was $2.604 in the area Friday morning, 2.5 cents more than last week, 11 cents more than last month and 46 cents more than at this time last year.

China Web engine soars on Nasdaq

SAN FRANCISCO - Baidu.com Inc., the maker of China's leading Internet search engine, mesmerized Wall Street on Friday as its stock more than quadrupled - a dazzling debut driven by the company's connections to Google Inc. as much as its own tantalizing potential.

The Beijing-based company's shares closed at $122.54 on the Nasdaq Stock Market, a 354 percent gain from its initial public offering price of $27. That represented the biggest one-day gain since the final days of the dot-com when IPOs regularly soared.

No IPO has climbed as high on the first day of trading as Baidu's did Friday since the shares of software maker Selectica Inc. soared 371 percent during their March 2000 debut, according to IPOhome.com. Selectica's shares closed unchanged Friday at $3.15 on the Nasdaq.

As the early search-engine leader in China's nascent Internet market, Baidu is inspiring comparisons to Google Inc., which quickly evolved into a cultural and financial phenomenon by becoming the Web's leading guidepost.

Drawn by Baidu's potential, Google even paid $5 million last year for 749,625 of the company's shares - a stake worth $92 million Friday.

Delphi could be near bankruptcy

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - Auto parts supplier Delphi Corp. said Friday that it's dipping into its credit line to finance operations, raising speculation that it might declare bankruptcy if restructuring talks with General Motors Corp. and the United Auto Workers union are unsuccessful.

Standard and Poor's Ratings Services, Fitch Ratings and Moody's Investors Service all lowered Delphi's credit rating further into ``junk'' status on the news. S&P said Troy, Mich.-based Delphi has total debt of about $4 billion and total unfunded pension and retirement liabilities of about $14.5 billion.

Delphi shares fell 82 cents, or 14 percent, to close at $4.96 Friday on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock has traded in a range of $3.20 to $9.63 in the past year.

SEC questioning fraud-trial ruling

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Trying to preserve its civil lawsuit against Richard Scrushy over the huge fraud at HealthSouth Corp., the Securities and Exchange Commission is criticizing the judge in Scrushy's criminal trial, which ended in his acquittal.

In a lengthy court document filed late Thursday, the SEC questioned key decisions about the criminal case by U.S. District Judge Karon Bowdre. Some of Bowdre's rulings, the SEC said, ``are simply hard to understand.''

The agency, which sued Scrushy and HealthSouth in March 2003 over a $2.7 billion earnings overstatement, attacked rulings in which Bowdre accepted defense claims that the SEC and the Justice Department improperly worked together on the fraud investigation.