Shares of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. traded lower Friday, playing off a wider-than-expected third-quarter loss tied in part to a $120 million charge taken for its acquisition of ATI Technologies.

The shares were off more than 5% at their worst levels in morning action, down lately by 74 cents to $13.81.

Analysts said the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker AMD  got a boost from strong consumer demand for personal computers, particularly notebooks.

But they also said AMD continues to face stiff competition from archrival Intel Corp. in the server market, and it's still struggling to keep costs under control.

"While we believe these results represent a nice recovery quarter and reaffirm the sustained strength in overall PC demand trends, we believe that the company still has a challenging road ahead both on [the] competitive technology front as well as a near-term return to profitability," analysts at Cowen & Co. said in a research note Friday.

Cowen's analysts also pointed out that AMD appears to have lost some market share to Intel in servers but that "some of these share losses could be stemmed in [the fourth quarter] as AMD ramps production of its quad core platform."

Cowen maintained a neutral rating on AMD's shares.

Meanwhile, analyst Robert Burleson of ThinkEquity Partners offered a more upbeat analysis, noting AMD's "very robust sequential notebook unit growth" and "a rebound in graphics, which we believe will accelerate" in the fourth quarter.

ThinkEquity Partners reiterated its buy rating on AMD.

The company said it lost $396 million on revenue of $1.63 billion in the three months ended Sept. 29. This compares to a profit of $136 million on revenue of $1.33 billion in year-earlier third quarter.

The company reported a loss per share of 71 cents, compared to a profit of 27 cents a share in the same quarter last year. But the company said the ATI-related charges totaled 22 cents a share. AMD acquired ATI, one of the world's top makers of computer graphic cards, last year.

Analysts had expected AMD to post a loss of 62 cents per share on revenue of $1.52 billion, according to Thomson Financial.

The former wife of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger has lived in the rent-stabilized apartment for some 20 years and argued that it was her primary residence and her landlord should be barred from evicting her.

A British citizen who was born in Nicaragua, Jagger is in the United States on a B-2 tourist visa.

Her lawyer, Ryan Goldstein, had argued that a mold problem in the apartment had made it unlivable and that she had stopped paying the $4,614 a month rent in 2003.

Goldstein was not immediately available for comment.

The landlord, Katz Park Avenue Corp, countered that Jagger was in the United States on a tourist visa and, as a result, is not eligible to maintain permanent residence.

The 3-2 decision by New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division reversed a lower court's finding.

The decision, which noted that the environmental activist maintains a luxury apartment in London's Belgravia section, said Jagger will also have to pay back rent and other fees.

Tenants in rent-stabilized apartments are protected from sharp increases in rent. Once a tenant leaves a rent-stabilized apartment, the landlord is free to charge market rate.

After their post-midnight deal, leaders hugged each other and toasted with champagne a treaty that will be signed on December 13 in Lisbon. But for some, the celebration was tempered with pangs of regret for the constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

"At least it's a good thing it is over now. Now we need to continue to work to have it ratified in all countries -- it won't be easy," said Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, one of the most fervent backers of the constitutional project.

Asked to comment on the deal, French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave a thumbs-up to reporters but said nothing before entering a second day of talks, set to cover economic issues.

Provided it is ratified by all 27 member states, the treaty will take effect in 2009 giving the EU a long-term president, a more powerful foreign policy chief, more democratic decision making and more say for the European and national parliaments.

Clinched after midnight, the accord ends a crisis opened by Dutch and French rejections that were votes of no confidence in an organization seen as remote and bureaucratic.

"Some courts are being prudent by waiting to see how the Supreme Court will go," said Lisa McCalmont, a consultant to the death penalty clinic at the University of California at Berkeley law school.

Fewer than 50 executions will take place this year, even if several states pushing ahead with lethal injections defeat legal efforts to stop them. The last time executions numbered fewer than 50 was in 1996, when there were 45.

Since executions resumed in this country in 1977 after a Supreme Court-ordered halt, 1,099 inmates have died in state and federal execution chambers. The highest annual total was 98 in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment.

So far this year, 42 people have been executed. Texas, where 26 prisoners have been executed this year, plans no more executions in 2007 after federal and state judges stopped four death sentences from being carried out.

Executions also have been delayed in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas and Oklahoma since the court announced Sept. 25 it would hear a challenge to Kentucky's lethal injection method. Courts in California, Delaware, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee have previously cited problems with lethal injections procedures in stopping executions.

The last person executed in this country was Michael Richard, 49, who died by lethal injection in Texas the same day the Supreme Court agreed to consider the constitutionality of lethal injection procedures in Kentucky. A Texas state judge refused that day to accept an appeal from Richard's lawyers, saying it had arrived after office hours.

Kentucky's method of lethal injection executions is similar to procedures in three dozen other states. The court will consider whether the mix of three drugs used to sedate and kill prisoners has the potential to cause pain severe enough to violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

"The U.S. is clearly in what amounts to a de-facto death penalty moratorium," said Bridgers' attorney David Dow, who runs the Texas Innocence Network out of the University of Houston Law Center.

Josh Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Oregon, and a death penalty supporter, said executions should continue even while the Supreme Court looks at lethal injection.

Marquis distinguished the lethal injection issue from court reviews that led to banning execution of the mentally retarded and people younger than 18 when they committed their crime. "The court's response is not going to be ban all lethal injections. At most, it's going to be reformulate the protocol," Marquis said.

The reprieves for the dozen or so men whose dates to die had been set are likely to be only temporary. Even the lawyers for the Kentucky inmates concede that there are alternative drugs and procedures available that lessen the risk of pain.

Justice Antonin Scalia also has suggested that people are reading too much into the court's decision to take up the Kentucky case. Scalia said Tuesday night he would have allowed Arkansas to proceed with the execution of Jack Jones.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had earlier put off Jones' execution because of the high court review. That decision "was based on the mistaken premise" that the high court wants state and federal judges to intervene every time a defendant raises a court challenge to lethal injection, Scalia said in a statement accompanying the Supreme Court's order that kept the appeals court ruling in place.

Aside from the 38 percent who agreed with mandatory retirement provisions, 46 percent disagreed and 16 percent were not sure.

At its annual meeting in August, the American Bar Association adopted a recommendation proposed by the New York State Bar Association that calls for firms to eliminate mandatory retirement policies and evaluate older partners on individual performance.

Opponents of the recommendation said firms shouldn't be told how to run their internal policies, particularly ones that are a matter of private contracts.

"The profession's position on this seems to be moving towards getting rid of those things," James D. Cotterman, an Altman Weil principal who handled the survey, said of mandatory retirement policies.

Aside from any question of legality, Cotterman said it makes good business sense to do away with retirement policies.

People are living longer, are healthier, have wisdom to share and have a "tremendous" prominence in the community, he said.

"There's really no downside to that," Cotterman said.

Firms should be planning for the next generation regardless of age, Cotterman said.

"If you have mandatory retirement, it's easy because you can say, 'Well, you've reached the age and you're out,'" he said.

It's the job of a managing partner or executive committee, however, to make the tough decisions, Cotterman said. That's what evaluations are for, he said.

According to the survey, the majority of respondents (61 percent) plan to continue working in some capacity after retirement. Of those who continue to work, 48 percent will continue to practice law and 35 percent will pursue another line of work. Seventy five percent will work part time, according to the survey.

If any of the respondents are Pennsylvania attorneys, their future career plans may depend on where they work.

At Stradley Ronon Stevens & Young, for example, partners are required to retire at age 65, 66 or 67, depending on their date of birth and how that coordinates with Social Security payments, managing partner Jeffrey A. Lutsky said.

On its face, the policy doesn't provide for retirement-age attorneys to simply leave the equity partnership tier; they must leave the firm.

Lutsky said that from time to time, partners ask for exceptions and they are granted on an individual basis. If extensions are granted, they are generally done on a one-year to two-year term. Extensions are based on the partner's current contributions to the firm, but not necessarily just his or her book of business, Lutsky said.

There have been occasions when the firm has transitioned partners into a senior counsel role when they plan on working part time, he said.

"This is an issue that's obviously being framed by demographics," Lutsky said.

Issues surrounding retirement, he said, aren't things the firm talks to partners about on their 65th birthday. That planning starts a couple of years out.

Despite the increasing talk about the morality and legality of firm retirement policies, Lutsky said he thinks the firm's policy works for the firm.

It allows Stradley Ronon to transition both client matters and leadership roles to a younger generation, he said.

"We're creating opportunities for younger people," he said.

That doesn't mean the firm has left it's older attorneys empty-handed. Stradley Ronon pays "significant" retirement benefits to its partners that are firm-funded, which is something many large firms no longer do, Lutsky said.

That pool is partially funded by the firm from year to year, and the rest is paid out of partner profits, he said.

Thorp Reed & Armstrong has what its managing partner Jeffery Conn calls a "flexible" policy. The firm requires that partners retire -- but not necessarily leave the practice -- at age 67.

Conn said partners can either request to stay on longer as an equity member or they can take another role as of counsel or senior counsel, for example. He said pretty close to all of those attorneys at retirement age stay on in another role.

Having a policy in place allows a firm to address the issue of retirement at a set, and known, time.

Mark Alderman said he wasn't quite sure he'd call his firm's policy mandatory. At Wolf Block Schorr & Solis-Cohen, the partnership agreement calls for attorneys at age 68 to transition out of the equity partner tier, he said.

"It does not require retirement or any particular alternative status," Alderman, Wolf Block's chairman, said.

Some attorneys retire before 68 and others continue in various capacities well into their 70s, he said.

There are also exceptions to nearly every rule. It is possible to waive the mandatory transition, Alderman said. Many partners have asked for the waiver and the firm has asked many partners if they were interested in the waiver, he said.

Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott Chief Executive Officer Timothy Ryan said up until about 15 years ago, his firm had a retirement policy.

"We jettisoned it with the belief that our members continue to be contributing past the age of 65," he said.

The firm's former system would take 10 percent of a member's equity away for a five-year period and then another 50 percent at age 70, which meant they were no longer a member, Ryan said.

"Sixty-five just seemed to be almost a random date selection," he said, calling the time frame an "unnecessary restraint."

The firm hasn't had any problems without a retirement policy and there hasn't been any talk of bringing one back, Ryan said. When Ryan, 48, transitioned into leadership, there were no problems with older members and the firm still has some of the same clients it did when it opened 50 years ago, he said.

Altman Weil's survey, conducted in September 2007, includes responses from 521 lawyers in management positions in U.S. law firms, including 28 percent from firms with 50 to 99 lawyers, 35 percent from firms with 100 to 249 lawyers, 17 percent from firms with 250 to 499 lawyers and 20 percent from firms with 500 or more lawyers.

The results show that lawyers in smaller law firms and women lawyers were less likely to support mandatory retirement.

In the firms where retirement was mandatory, 38 percent force retirement at age 65 and 36 percent say age 70. The smallest firms tend to use 70 as the retirement age, while most other firms look to 65.