Business news in brief

The Philadelphia area's labor force shrank by 13,500 in June as more people stopped looking for work, a report from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry showed. With the drop in the labor force, the area's unemployment rate fell by one-tenth of a percentage point last month to 9.3 percent. People who stop seeking work are not counted as unemployed. The number with jobs also fell - by 9,200. In the city of Philadelphia, the unemployment rate was unchanged at 11.7 percent. - Paul Schweizer

CardWorks Servicing L.L.C. is taking over the servicing of Advanta Corp. credit cards, the Woodbury, N.Y., company said. Customers of Advanta, Plymouth Meeting, which filed for bankruptcy protection last November, still owe $1.7 billion on more than 200,000 accounts. - Harold Brubaker

Kenexa Corp., Wayne, said it bought The Centre for High Performance Development Ltd., a management training business, for an undisclosed price. The center, based in London and New York, focuses on leadership assessment and training and has 60 full-time employees and 200 outside consultants. It had been owned by Capital H Group, a consulting firm. Kenexa designs workforce software for recruiting and other applications. - Paul Schweizer

Orthovita Inc. said it had received regulatory approval for a facility where it will process collagen used in Vitagel, a product used to control bleeding during surgery. The Malvern company said the Food and Drug Administration cleared a supplement for the new facility. - AP

Shareholders of First Resource Bank, Exton, have approved its merger into Continental Bank Holdings Inc., Plymouth Meeting. The $8 million deal, announced in May, is expected to close in the fourth quarter, First Resource said. In addition to its main office, it has a 24-hour location in Coatesville. Continental Bank has 10 banking offices. Both banks began operating in 2005. - Paul Schweizer

United Technologies Corp. will cut another 1,500 jobs this year and next on top of the 900 positions it has already eliminated in 2010, the company said. The industrial conglomerate last week posted an almost 14 percent increase in second-quarter net income, citing a "relentless focus on cost." It cut deeply into its payroll during the worst of the recession, cutting 11,600 jobs last year. These most recent job cuts come, however, with the company posting its first increase in revenue in about two years as aerospace and refrigerated transportation orders rebound. - AP

The Ford Explorer, the family-hauler that helped launch the SUV boom in the early 1990s, is back. And it hopes to define a new generation of more streamlined, fuel-efficient sport utility vehicles. Ford Motor Co. begins a marketing campaign Monday for the 2011 Explorer, which will be in dealerships this winter. The automaker promises a utility vehicle with seating for seven that has similar fuel economy to a Toyota Camry sedan. Pricing hasn't been announced. The new Explorer has been completely redesigned. The most obvious difference: It's built on a car platform, not a truck one, so it sits lower to the ground and has a smoother, more fuel-efficient ride. The new Explorer shares a platform with the Taurus X sedan. - AP

Nissan Motor Co. is recalling 51,100 of its Cube hatchbacks in the United States and Canada because of possible problems with fuel spilling during rear-end collisions. In documents filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Nissan said tests conducted by it safety regulators found more fuel spilled than federal standards allow. The recall covers model year 2009 and 2010 Cubes made between Jan. 30, 2009 and July 30. It includes 45,700 in the United States and 5,400 in Canada. - AP

Owners of the iPhone will be able to legally unlock their devices so they can run software applications that haven't been approved by Apple Inc., new government rules announced Monday say. The decision to allow "jailbreaking" is one of a handful of new exemptions from a 1998 federal law against bypassing technical measures that companies put on their products to prevent unauthorized use of copyright-protected material. The Library of Congress, which oversees the Copyright Office, reviews and authorizes exemptions every three years to ensure the law does not prevent certain non-infringing uses of copyright-protected works. - AP

The European Union opened two antitrust investigations against IBM Corp., accusing it of abusing its dominant position in the mainframe computer market. One investigation stems from complaints by emulator software vendors T3 and Turbo Hercules, which accuse IBM of tying the sale of mainframe hardware to its mainframe operating system, the European Commission, the EU's antitrust regulator, said. The other, begun at the EU executive's own initiative, accuses IBM of "discriminatory behavior toward competing suppliers of mainframe maintenance services." - AP

Interest rates on short-term Treasury bills were mixed in Monday's auction. The Treasury Department auctioned $30 billion in three-month bills at a discount rate of 0.150 percent, down from 0.155 percent last week. Another $30 billion in six-month bills was auctioned at a discount rate of 0.200 percent, up from 0.195 percent last week. The discount rates reflect that the bills sell for less than face value. For a $10,000 bill, the three-month price was $9,996.21, while a six-month bill sold for $9,989.89. - AP

The Federal Reserve said Monday that the average yield for one-year Treasury bills, a popular index for making changes in adjustable-rate mortgages, was 0.27 percent last week, down from 0.28 percent the previous week. - AP