The Toy Store plans downtown move

The Toy Store is growing up.

The downtown Lawrence store, 841 Mass., is relocating this summer to 936 Mass., the current home of Everything But Ice.

The move will give The Toy Store 6,000 square feet of retail space and another 6,000 square feet for storage, manager Lana Best said — a welcome change from the jam-packed 3,300-square-foot toy store that opened five years ago with only 1,000 feet for storage.

“It’s just time,” Best said. “We need a bigger space.”

Margaret Warner and Mel Guffey, owners of The Toy Store, are set to take possession of the building June 1 and have the relocated, “stroller-friendly” store open Sept. 1, Best said.

Love Garden, a used record store upstairs from Everything But Ice, will remain in the building, said Sam Pepple, who is selling the building to the owners of The Toy Store.

Kansas University

Nobel Prize economist, KU alum talks tonight

Vernon L. Smith, a Kansas University alumnus who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics, will return to campus tonight for a lecture.

Smith will deliver “World Issues and the Role of the Economist” at 7 p.m. in Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union. The event is free and open to the public.

Smith, well known in the field of experimental economics, recently participated in the Copenhagen Consensus, which drew some of the world’s top economists to answer the question, “How would you spend $50 billion on the world’s most pressing issues?”

Smith received his master’s degree in economics from KU in 1952 and is the only KU graduate to have received a Nobel Prize.

Settlement

Arthur Andersen to pay $65 million

A federal judge gave preliminary approval Tuesday to a deal under which auditor Arthur Andersen LLP will pay $65 million to settle allegations it failed to protect investors from WorldCom’s historic accounting fraud.

The settlement brings to a close a class-action lawsuit by investors that also laid blame on major investment banks that underwrote WorldCom securities and 12 former directors of WorldCom itself.

The banks settled before trial for more than $6 billion, and the directors agreed to pay nearly $25 million out of their own pockets.

Andersen was the only defendant left when the case went to trial last month. In a statement Monday, when the settlement was announced, Andersen denied wrongdoing.