McDonald’s says it is offering its first new Happy Meal entree in a decade: Fish McBites.

The world’s biggest hamburger chain said the Fish McBites will be widely available at U.S. restaurants starting this week through March, to coincide with Lent. The Happy Meals will come with seven pieces of Fish McBites, French fries, apple slices and a drink.

The company had already announced last month that the Fish McBites would be sold on the standard menu in three sizes – snack (10 pieces), regular (15 pieces) and shareable (30 pieces).

Fish McBites, which are fried pieces of fish, will use the same Alaskan pollock used in the fast-food chain’s Filet-O-Fish.

H-P to sell first Chromebook

Hewlett-Packard Co. on Monday started selling its first Chromebook laptop, entering the market for low-priced portable computers running an operating system from Google Inc. that emphasizes working on the Web.

The HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook has a 14-inch screen, 16- gigabyte solid-state drive and Intel Corp. processor. It also comes with 100 gigabytes of free storage on the online Google Drive service for two years, which ordinarily costs about $120. The laptop has a starting price of about $330, the company said.

Funds flow to Vanguard

Vanguard Group Inc. attracted a record $24.3 billion from clients in January, mostly into stocks, as signs of an improving U.S. economy have prompted investors to return to equities. January’s deposits were more than 40 percent greater than the previous monthly record of $16.8 billion, achieved in the same month in 2012, Vanguard said. About $20 billion of last month’s total went into stock-oriented mutual funds and exchange-traded products.

Tomato trade

The U.S. Commerce Department and tomato growers from Mexico agreed to revive a 17-year-old pact governing prices for the goods, potentially averting a trade war between the two nations. The agency and Mexican producers over the weekend signed a draft agreement to prevent imports of fresh or chilled tomatoes from Mexico from being sold in the U.S. below production costs. The Commerce Department in September issued a preliminary decision to end the pricing accord, in place in various versions since 1996, after a complaint from U.S. tomato growers.

Foreclosure numbers

CoreLogic, a property information firm, said about 4.1 million homes were lost to foreclosures in the U.S. since the financial crisis in September 2008 through last year. Fewer homes are in some stage of foreclosure now, 12 million as of December, or about 20 percent less than a year ago.

The Star’s news services