Wire stories category, Page 111

NEW YORK — Gap Inc. is splitting into two. The retailer said Thursday that it’s creating two independent publicly traded companies — low-priced Old Navy and a yet-to-be named company, which will consist of the iconic Gap brand, Athleta, Banana Republic, Intermix and Hill City. The San Francisco-based company said...

NEW YORK — J.C. Penney is closing more stores after a weak holiday sales season. Net income tumbled nearly 70 percent and revenue slid 8 percent in the fourth-quarter, the most crucial period of the year for retailers who bank on a surge in holiday sales. The company did beat...

It’s tough to know all the answers at tax time, particularly in a year with massive tax law changes. Sometimes people need help, but where should they turn? Here are a few options: IRS The IRS has answers to most tax questions online. Its website also has a number of...

LEXINGTON, Ky. — A coal company manager took part in cheating on tests designed to protect miners from contracting deadly black lung disease, a federal grand jury has charged. The grand jury issued a new indictment adding Glendal “Buddy” Hardison to a group of mine officials charged with conspiring to...

A relentless focus on maximizing shareholder value has contributed to stagnant middle-class wages in the United States and fueled the rise of a society increasingly divided between haves and have-nots, according to a new working paper published by the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive economic think tank. “Nearly fifty years of...

Call it R2-D2 without the attitude. FedEx Corp. envisions a not-too-distant future in which it relies on Star Wars-style robots for more deliveries, as portrayed in a company video. Imagine a box-shaped bot that can roll out of a neighborhood pharmacy and drop off prescription medicine at a nearby house....

NEW YORK — Best Buy put up some big holiday sales numbers Wednesday, more evidence that Americans are willing and able to spend on gadgets and big TVs. The nation’s consumer electronics chain delivered a better-than-expected 3 percent increase in sales at established stores for the fiscal fourth quarter. The...

BERLIN — Germany’s Bayer AG, which bought Monsanto Co. last year, has underlined its determination to fight cases involving the Roundup weed-killer in the face of more than 11,000 lawsuits so far. In August, a San Francisco jury awarded a man $289 million after determining Roundup, part of the Monsanto...

ERIE — Workers at the former GE Transportation plant in northwestern Pennsylvania have gone on strike for the first time in a half-century, and a day after completion of a merger between GE Transportation and Wabtec. Employees at the plant now owned by Wabtec (the former Westinghouse Airbrakes Technologies Corp.)...

U.S. stock indexes edged higher in afternoon trading Tuesday as investors weighed conflicting reports on how the U.S. economy is doing and remarks by the head of the Federal Reserve. Gains in technology and communications companies helped lift the market after a mid-afternoon slide, outweighing losses in health care and...

WASHINGTON — Relief swept across world financial markets Monday after President Donald Trump pushed back a March 2 deadline in a trade dispute with China. But the respite might not last. The world’s two biggest economies have squared off over Beijing’s aggressive campaign to turn Chinese companies into world leaders...

Within 18 months, your phone may be able to identify you based on the gait of your walk, the tension in your hand or the way your thumb moves across the touch screen. That’s the Pentagon’s plan: It’s in the final phase of testing technology that will reduce smartphone users’...

SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweeting habits have triggered another legal challenge from stock market regulators worried about him using his Twitter account to mislead investors. The latest dust-up emerged late Monday when the Securities and Exchange Commission asked a federal court in New York to hold Musk...

NEW YORK — Stocks moved broadly higher on Wall Street after President Donald Trump agreed to hold off on raising tariffs on Chinese goods, which would have escalated a damaging trade war between the world’s two largest economies. Investors had been growing increasingly optimistic over the last two weeks that...

OMAHA, Neb. — Billionaire Warren Buffett says the economy continues growing although the rate of improvement has slowed, and the ongoing U.S. trade dispute remains a concern. Buffett appeared on CNBC Monday after releasing his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders over the weekend. “Right now things look fine,” said...

BARCELONA, Spain — China’s Huawei unveiled a new folding-screen phone on Sunday, joining the latest trend for bendable devices as it challenges the global smartphone market’s dominant players, Apple and Samsung. Huawei revealed its Mate X phone on the eve of MWC Barcelona, a four-day showcase of mobile devices, as...

DETROIT — As their company was swirling around the financial drain in the early 2000s, General Motors executives came up with an idea to counter its gas-guzzling image and point the way to transportation of the future: an electric car with a gas-engine backup that could travel anywhere. At Detroit’s...

Technology and health care companies led U.S. stocks higher Friday, erasing some of the market’s losses from a day earlier and giving the benchmark S&P 500 its fourth straight weekly gain. The broad rally came as investors grew hopeful that the latest round of talks between the U.S. and China...

Kraft Heinz Co. recorded a $15.4 billion non-cash charge to write down assets including some of its most well-known brands, a striking acknowledgment that changing consumer tastes have destroyed the value of some of the company’s most iconic products. The packaged food giant’s charge to reduce the goodwill value of...

URBANDALE, Iowa — Is the “ugly produce’” trend already reaching the end of its shelf life in supermarkets? Walmart and Whole Foods in recent years tried selling some blemished fruits and vegetables at a discount, produce they said might otherwise be trashed because it’s not quite the right size, shape...

WASHINGTON — U.S. home sales fell 1.2 percent in January to their worst pace in more than three years, as persistent affordability problems have put a harsh chill in the real estate market. The National Association of Realtors said Thursday that sales of existing homes declined 1.2 percent to a...

Several companies, including AT&T and Nestlé, are pulling advertisements from YouTube over concerns about inappropriate comments on videos of children. A video from a popular YouTuber and a report from Wired showed that pedophiles have made unseemly comments on innocuous videos of kids. The comments reportedly included timestamps that showed...

America’s surging shale oil production shows little sign of abating, despite industrywide spending cuts, as explorers learn to do more with less. Almost all the independent producers have reduced their budgets for 2019, but many still expect to deliver double-digit growth in production this year, fourth-quarter earnings reports show. Growth...

Wall Street capped another day of listless trading Wednesday with a slight gain, extending the market’s winning streak to a third day. Financial, materials and industrial companies accounted for much of the gain, outweighing losses in health care and real estate stocks as investors reviewed the latest batch of company...

NEW YORK — Walmart defied a gloomy government retail sales report for December, delivering fiscal fourth-quarter profits and sales that beat Wall Street expectations. The world’s largest retailer also enjoyed another quarter of surging e-commerce sales during the critical holiday period as it expanded its online assortment and services. Shares...