Business & Education

One of the country's leading business schools — the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania — has never had a woman or a person of color as its dean since it was founded nearly 140 years ago.

Until now.

Erika James was named as Wharton's 15th dean in February and officially started the job earlier this month.

The business world has been slow to reflect the gender and racial makeup of America today, but James says that's not due to a lack of ability to make it happen.

Updated 1:55 p.m. ET Tuesday

TikTok is contemplating ways to distance itself from its Chinese parent company as threats from Washington grow louder.

The parent company of Ann Taylor, Loft, Lane Bryant and other clothing brands is joining the parade of apparel retailers to file for bankruptcy during the coronavirus crisis.

The firm Ascena Retail Group — whose stores are a major tenant of malls and shopping centers — did not specify how many locations it will close.

Updated at 11:34 a.m. ET

New claims for unemployment benefits rose last week for the first time in four months — since March 28 — as states began reimposing lockdown restrictions in an effort to reverse a surge of coronavirus cases.

More than 1.4 million new claims were filed during the week ending July 18, an increase of more than 100,000 over the week before, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

Tommy Rhine, 70, has been repairing shoes in Denver for more than 40 years. He's repaired shoes for everyone from Broncos and Nuggets players to doctors and lawyers at Rhine's Shoe & Boot Repair.

But three months of the COVID-19 pandemic almost forced Rhine to shut his doors.

"I mostly deal with downtown businesspeople," Rhine said. "Half of them are not working or if they are working, they are working at home. They don't need to dress up or have the shoes right now so that kind of killed everything."

Australia's Qantas Airways has retired its last Boeing 747 with a flourish.

Already a Wall Street superstar, Tesla turned a profit for the fourth straight quarter, an important milestone that will make it eligible to join the S&P 500 stock index for the first time.

Izzy Benasso was playing a casual game of tennis with her father on a summer Saturday when she felt her knee pop. She had torn a meniscus, one of the friction-reducing pads in the knee, locking it in place at a 45-degree angle.

Although she suspected she had torn something, the 21-year-old senior at the University of Colorado Boulder had to endure an anxious weekend in July 2019 until she could get an MRI that Monday.

"It was kind of emotional for her," said her father, Steve Benasso. "Just sitting there thinking about all the things she wasn't going to be able to do."

The federal government has reached a $1.95 billion deal with Pfizer to acquire 100 million doses of its vaccine candidate against the coronavirus if the Food and Drug Administration OKs it. The vaccine would be free to Americans, according to the deal, though health care providers could charge to administer it.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has unanimously voted to shut down the state's iconic Apalachicola oyster fishery after years of drought and other pressures have devastated wild oyster beds.

For decades, if you ordered oysters on the half-shell on the eastern Gulf coast, they most likely came from Apalachicola Bay – an estuary in north Florida where freshwater rivers meet the Gulf of Mexico, creating the perfect brackish mix for growing plump, salty oysters. But in recent years, they're hard to come by.

Sheera Talpaz, an assistant professor of literature at Oberlin College, has been teaching remotely, stuck indoors. So she figured having a place she could make her own would be good. And now she's found one and is buying her first house.

"I'm really happy because I like the home," she says. "And I think I will just simply enjoy my day-to-day life more living in it."

Updated 5:05 p.m. ET, July 23

The White House is repealing and replacing an Obama-era rule intended to combat historic racial discrimination in housing.

In a Wednesday announcement, the White House said it would be rolling back the rule as a part of a broader deregulation push.

Editor's note: This report includes graphic descriptions of sexual assault accusations.

A female former producer at Fox News and another woman who appeared frequently as an on-air commentator on the network have filed a civil lawsuit Monday accusing former longtime anchor Ed Henry of rape, sexual misconduct and harassment.

Packing into a small, dimly lit room while you and a few hundred strangers dance and listen to your favorite artists is one of the many small joys we've been missing for months. For many of those spaces and their fans, that experience could be gone forever if a new piece of legislation called the Restart Act doesn't pass Congress before it goes on recess in August.

Millions of Americans are facing the threat of eviction as a federal moratorium that has protected renters during the pandemic is set to expire Friday.

That eviction moratorium, coupled with unemployment assistance established in the CARES Act, has helped some renters stay in their homes.

European Union leaders emerged from five days of intense talks with a landmark 750 billion euro ($858 billion) plan to rescue the bloc's economies amid the ongoing assault of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Exhausted heads of state and government finally voted unanimously in Brussels early Tuesday to jointly issue debt to be disbursed through grants and loans to member nations as they face their worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

The employees who work in the poultry plants on the Eastern Shore of Virginia are accustomed to long hours and some of the most grueling work in the country — work that has grown uniquely dangerous amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Many of these workers came to the United States from Guatemala and Mexico, and are not used to having their voices heard. That is, until this past Wednesday, when one of their demands was answered.

Twitter says a total of 130 accounts were hacked in some fashion during a cybersecurity breach on Wednesday that affected some of its most prominent users, including Joe Biden and Kanye West.

Millions of American workers have been receiving $600 from the federal government each week during the pandemic in the form of unemployment assistance. But that's set to expire by the end of the month, leaving many in a high state of anxiety.

European Union leaders were going into their first face-to-face meeting in months on Friday, hoping to hammer out details of a 1.85 trillion euro ($2.1 trillion) EU budget and coronavirus recovery plan amid a global pandemic that has touched off the worst recession in the bloc's history.

The urgency of the crisis has caused the leaders of the 27-nation grouping to abandon a series of video conference summits in favor of looking one another in the eyes — albeit from across a large room.