Trade between China and countries along the Belt and Road reached a value of $786bn in the first three quarters of this year, up 15 percent on the same period last year.
From the window of our small plane flying low over the desert, Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter looks as remote as the name suggests, with burnt-orange dunes stretching into infinity under the blinding sun. Not even the Bedouin nomads with their camels are visible, because there are too few of them amid the vast landscape. It's only when the plane bumps down on an empty runway at an outpost called Shaybah that it is clear that the world's biggest sand desert is not, in fact, empty.
Wheat shipments to Egypt, the world's largest buyer, are being disrupted by a dispute involving government inspectors angered by a ban on the expenses-paid foreign trips they once enjoyed to approve cargoes at their ports of origin.
A new platform service called diili is giving a voice to commercial refrigerators via a solution based on the Internet of Things (IoT) concept. According to the creator, Embraco, the platform is designed to boost sales of food and beverage brands that use its handsets.
In a remarkable initiative modeled on the campaign against AIDS in Africa, two major pharmaceutical companies, working with the American Cancer Society, will steeply discount the prices of cancer medicines in Africa.
Africa's past is the mildewed train station in central Addis Ababa, where locomotives sit gutted and rusted tracks vanish in the grass. The line was once the greatest in Africa; built by France in the 1910s, it ran more than 450 miles northeast to neighboring Djibouti, where the desert meets the sea.
Dubai's new freight hub is now handling about a third of the emirate's air freight, as both regional airports posted middling first half numbers, reflecting a regional downturn.