McDonald’s has started testing mobile order-and-pay after acknowledging the ordering process in its restaurants can be “stressful.” The company says it will gather feedback from the test before launching the option nationally toward the end of the year. It says mobile order-and-pay is now available at 29 stores in Monterey and Salinas, California, and will expand to 51 more locations in Spokane, Washington, next week. The rollout comes as customers increasingly seek out convenience through options like online ordering or delivery. McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook has noted the initial stages …

It is tempting, says Godfrey Nwosu, to blame Nigeria’s rising food prices on something as simple as a drought that has battered the Lake Chad basin and sent crop yields tumbling across the region. If only it were that simple, Nwosu says. As the head of an organization that promotes Nigerian farming, he would be fielding endless calls from young upstarts eager to plant maize and cassava. Nwosu isn’t, however, and says he worries that the environmental shocks are only a starting point to this ongoing food crisis. “The younger …

The U.S. central bank is expected to raise interest rates slightly Wednesday afternoon as the economy nears full employment and inflation rises modestly. Leaders of the U.S. Federal Reserve have been debating interest rate policy for two days here in Washington, and most analysts predict they will raise rates one quarter of a percentage point (putting the rate in a range between three-quarters of a percent and one percent). PNC Bank economist Gus Faucher says the consumers who drive most U.S. economic activity are “in good shape” with “more jobs …

Those encrypted messaging apps you may have been using to avoid prying eyes had a major flaw that could have allowed access to hackers, according to a cybersecurity firm. According to Check Point Software Technologies, both Telegram and WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, were vulnerable. The company said it withheld the information until the security holes were patched, saying “hundreds of millions” of users could have been compromised. The vulnerability involved infecting digital images with malicious code that would have been activated upon clicking the pic. That, according to …

President Donald Trump is to tell American autoworkers Wednesday in the state of Michigan that he is setting aside strict fuel-economy requirements imposed by the previous administration in its waning days. The Trump White House contends that action broke an earlier agreement with the auto industry to wait until 2018 to review the standards. “The auto industry, rightly, cried foul,” a senior White House official told reporters Tuesday. “We’re going to get this midterm review back on track.” Advocates of the tougher standards dispute that. The year 2018 “was the …

The White House has issued a statement saying President Donald Trump made more than $150 million of income in 2005 and paid $38 million in income taxes that year. Its statement late Tuesday came ahead of a report by MSNBC-TV host Rachel Maddow revealing what she said is part of what was included on Trump’s 2005 tax forms. She said she got the tax return information from David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and tax analyst. In its pre-emptive statement, the White House said, “You know you are …

Orson Welles’ last film finally has a home.   Netflix has acquired the global rights to Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind” and will finance its completion and restoration.   Netflix’s announcement Tuesday brings to a close the decades-long mystery surrounding one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers. Welles began shooting the film in 1970 but never completed it. The “Citizen Kane” director died in 1985.   “The Other Side of the Wind” is a Hollywood satire about a filmmaker attempting a comeback. Its stars include John Huston, Dennis Hopper and …

A renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement could benefit the United States, Mexico and Canada, enhancing the continent’s competitiveness in global markets, say several close observers of the trade deal with a keen interest in entrepreneurship. Revising NAFTA with an eye toward increased protection of intellectual property rights would bring “a more collaborative environment … to get some real innovation going,” said Reva Goujon, a vice president at the global geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor. “Because that’s what this continent needs when you’re talking about aging demographics, technological adaptations. “There’s so …

Ministers and officials representing the 12 countries of the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership, plus China and South Korea, began talks in Chile on Tuesday, but any concrete decision on how a new trade pact might look seemed far off. The TPP, which would have included about 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, was effectively torpedoed after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in January. Chile, a keen free-trade enthusiast and one of the signatories of the original agreement, invited TPP representatives to its Pacific-facing …

South American trade bloc Mercosur expects to sign a framework accord this year for a trade deal with the European Union as the U.S. shift to isolationism under President Donald Trump encourages it to look outside the hemisphere for opportunities, Brazil’s top diplomat said on Tuesday. Foreign Minister Aloysio Nunes told Reuters in an interview that Brazil and its neighbors in Mercosur, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, have sped up long-running negotiations with the European Union and expect to have a political pact by year-end. “The U.S. withdrawal from agreements like …