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As warming climate hammers coffee crops, this rare bean may someday be your brew

NZARA COUNTY, South Sudan (AP) — Catherine Bashiama runs her fingers along the branches of the coffee tree she’s raised from a seedling, searching anxiously for its first fruit buds since she planted it three years ago. When she grasps the small cherries, Bashiama beams. The farmer had never grown coffee in her village in western South Sudan, but now hopes a rare, climate-resistant species will help pull her family from poverty. “I want to send my children to school so they can be the future generation,” said Bashiama, a mother of 12. Discovered more than a century ago in ...

Stock market today: Wall Street rallies, and Dow jumps 600 to make a dreary February not so bad

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks rallied on Friday to close out their dreary February on a brighter note. The S&P 500 jumped 1.6% to trim its loss for the month, enough to make it the worst only since December instead of since April. It had dropped in five of the prior six days after weaker-than-expected reports on the economy and worries about President Donald Trump’s tariffs knocked the index off its all-time high set last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 601 points, or 1.4%, and the Nasdaq composite climbed 1.6%. Much of the recent damage had focused on the market’s ...

Economic Blackout: Will a 24-hour boycott make a difference?

NEW YORK (AP) — A grassroots organization is encouraging U.S. residents not to spend any money Friday as an act of “economic resistance” to protest what the group’s founder sees as the malign influence of billionaires, big corporations and both major political parties on the lives of working Americans. The People’s Union USA calls the 24 hours of spending abstinence set to start at midnight an “economic blackout,” a term that has since been shared and debated on social media. The activist movement said it also plans to promote weeklong consumer boycotts of particular ...

A Texas child who was not vaccinated has died of measles, a first for the U.S. in a decade

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — A child who wasn’t vaccinated died in a measles outbreak in rural West Texas, state officials said Wednesday, the first U.S. death from the highly contagious respiratory disease since 2015. The school-aged child had been hospitalized and died Tuesday night amid the widespread outbreak, Texas’ largest in nearly 30 years. Since it began last month, a rash of 124 cases has erupted across nine counties. The Texas Department of State Health Services and Lubbock health officials confirmed the death to The Associated Press. The Lubbock hospital where the child ...