Business briefing: Chobani to pay off lunch debt for Idaho school district

Yogurt company Chobani has offered to pay off $85,000 in student lunch debt at an Idaho school district. The Twin Falls School District announced Tuesday that the donation would cover the debt acquired by more than 900 students during the last school year. The New York-based company operates a plant in Twin Falls. District spokeswoman Eva Craner said the school system still has about $115,000 in lunch debt from previous years. Craner said the schools make sure students are fed even if they don't have money in their lunch accounts. The company said in a statement that it reached out to the district in May at around the time it paid off lunch debt for schools in Warwick, R.I.

Ford has opened a research center in Israel, joining a legion of major automakers racing to develop new technologies for the world of driverless cars. Ford Chairman William Ford met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday as part of his visit, where he called Israel "ground zero" for technologies demanded by the fast-growing field of autonomous vehicles. General Motors, BMW and others have also recently opened Tel Aviv labs. Netanyahu said Israel, never known for its car manufacturing, "has finally got an automotive industry." Home to hundreds of startups developing the latest microchips and sensors, the country is drawing automakers aiming to tap the potentially lucrative market of autonomous vehicles. Ford joined 130 local and international companies at Israel's EcoMotion conference this week promoting the country's smart transportation sector.

Airline fares within the U.S. are inching higher again. American Airlines confirmed Thursday that it raised domestic fares $5 each way. JPMorgan said Southwest Airlines followed by raising prices on tickets bought within a week of the flight and favored by business travelers. Southwest did not immediately comment. Airlines had raised prices just five weeks ago, and J.P. Morgan analyst Jamie Baker said he wasn't expecting another round of increases so soon. Spot prices for jet fuel, a major airline expense, have dipped since May.

Twitter said it has deleted nearly 4,800 suspect accounts linked to Iran that the company says secretly pushed that government's agenda. Twitter is adding those accounts and their tweets to a public database it launched last year to track its battle against government-linked misinformation. It is also adding a smaller number of deleted accounts linked to Russia, Venezuela and the Catalonia region of Spain. Twitter said the removals are meant to prevent election interference while preserving valid political speech. The company confirmed last month it had removed about 2,800 of the Iranian accounts that were using fake personas. Twitter launched the database in October. Anyone can download the data sets, which has some information redacted. Researchers can request access to get the unredacted documents.