Pfizer yesterday publicly agreed to pay $490.9 million in a settlement of two lawsuits filed in federal courts in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania over the illegal marketing of the kidney-transplant drug Rapamune by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, a company it acquired in 2009. Pfizer reportedly cooperated fully with the investigation once it learned of the charges.

In a deal that's all about the location, location, location of bricks and mortar -- particularly on Manhattan's Fifth Ave. -- the Hudson's Bay Company has apparently emerged as the winning bidder for Saks Inc., a retail brand that still exudes swank despite ill-advised efforts to appeal to shoppers punching up shopping apps to save a few bucks on a blouse.

As the data-driven advertising cosmos expands at a dizzying rate, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies -- New York-based Omnicom and Paris-based Publicis Groupe -- announced yesterday that they are merging to create Publicis Omnicom Group with a combined staff of 130,000 worldwide and a market cap of $35.1 billion. The two holding companies brought in combined revenue of nearly $23 billion last year -- but that's still half that of Google.

The last time I saw my family's 1968 Chevy Impala, it was literally a burned-out shell of its former self, sitting stripped of all working parts on a street in the also-smoldering South Bronx in the early 1970s. Thieves had snatched it the night before. Over the years, the Impala nameplate seems to have suffered a similar fate. It was toast as a first choice for the family vehicle.

PepsiCo's surprisingly strong results yesterday would seem to add up to a healthy portion of vindication for PepsiCo chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi, who reiterated "that she doesn't see the need for any large-scale acquisitions" such as Mondelez, as activist investor Nelson Peltz is agitating for, while "[leaving] the door open for potentially significant changes at PepsiCo's North American beverage unit," Mike Esterl reports in the "Wall Street Journal."

RadioShack's new CEO, Joseph Magnacca, yesterday unveiled some details about his plan to rebrand the struggling electronics retailer and to upgrade about 5% of its stores into more experiential environments even as it has slashed prices to cut inventory by as much as 25% in some locations. The revelations came in a second-quarter earnings call transcribed by Seeking Alpha yesterday.

Wall Street may have had a negative reaction in after-hours trading to the storyline in Netflix's "fireside chat" conference call on Google yesterday but if there's one thing founder Reed Hastings has been proving recently it's that his self-described slide into "arrogance" a couple of years ago was akin to that of a resilient cat.

George Lois, the ad guy and former Esquire art director, has added his voice to the excoriation of "Rolling Stone" and its publisher, Jann Wenner, for its soft-focus cover of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, which led to the issue being banned from the shelves of national retailers such as 7-Eleven, CVS, Walgreens, Kmart and Rite Aid, as well as numerous local chains.

Allowing that close contact with killer whales is a highly calculated risk, SeaWorld Entertainment has a lot of hands-on experience in what may be its most daring attempt to control forces whose natural instincts are to swim unfettered and beholden to no outside influences.

Robinson Cano, the New York Yankee's best position player, spun off baseball-centric agent Scott Boras and acquired Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter and the CAA Sports earlier this year precisely because he wanted to expand his business interests beyond collecting a paycheck for whacking baseballs, as Daniel Barbarisi reports in the Wall Street Journal this morning.