It's hard to imagine a country where butter is taken more seriously than it is in France.

Amazon.com has driven an economic boom in Seattle, bestowing more than 40,000 jobs upon a city known for Starbucks coffee and Seahawks fandom. Its growth remade a neglected industrial swath north of downtown into a hub of young workers and fixed the region, along with Microsoft before it, as a premier locale for the Internet economy outside Silicon Valley.

Diversifying your supply chain brings innovation and improves business credentials, according to the head of procurement at pharmaceutical firm Roche.

Seaborne trade grew by 2.6 percent in 2016, to reach 10.3 billion tons, but the pace remained below the historical three percent average, and demand for maritime shipping continued to lag behind supply, a new United Nations report says.

In its most recent quarterly survey of airline business confidence, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) found that 80 percent of airline CFOs and heads of cargo saw an improvement in third-quarter profitability compared with the same quarter of 2016 — making it the strongest outcome IATA has seen in a decade.

The U.S. merchandise-trade deficit widened to a four-month high as imports rose for the first time since April, according to the Commerce Department. The report also showed inventories increased at wholesalers and fell at retailers.

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.