Nigerian Abdulhakim Mohammed has just graduated in architecture but, like many people ranging from unemployed locals to foreign investors and Africa’s richest man, he has decided the future lies in rice farming. The reason is that domestic rice prices have more than doubled in the last two years due to an import ban and a dive in the Nigerian currency. At the same time, the government is subsidizing tractors, mills and fertilizers as well as arranging cheaper loans to boost production – with considerable success. And yet the drive to …

Iran’s supreme leader criticized the country’s slow pace of economic recovery on Thursday despite the lifting of sanctions and called on President Hassan Rouhani’s government to champion greater self-sufficiency, state TV reported. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s criticism comes ahead of Iran’s presidential election in May, when the pragmatist president is expected to seek re-election. “Of course the government has taken remarkable steps but if the resistance economy had been implemented fully and widely, we could witness a tangible difference in people’s lives,” state TV reported Khamenei as saying. The “resistance economy” …

Since January of this year, thousands of school children in India’s northeastern state of Assam have pored over an illustrated story of how two young girls from a relief camp were lured by a man who told them of the good life they could lead in a big city, home to swanky buildings and flashy cars. It sounded attractive to the poor youngsters who could only visualize a bleak life ahead. Fortunately spotted by a policeman as they waited for the man at a railway station to head to the …

China on Thursday defended its handling of 38 trademarks it recently approved provisionally for President Donald Trump, saying it followed the law in processing the applications at a pace that some experts view as unusually quick. Democrats in Congress were critical of Trump after The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the potentially valuable trademarks had been granted, raising questions of conflict of interest and political favoritism. One senator said the issue “merits investigation.” Trump has sometimes struggled to win trademarks from China; he secured one recently after a 10-year fight …

China is developing an advanced new spaceship capable of both flying in low-Earth orbit and landing on the moon, according to state media, in another bold step for a space program that equaled the U.S. in number of rocket launches last year.   The newspaper Science and Technology Daily cited spaceship engineer Zhang Bainian as saying the new craft would be recoverable and have room for multiple astronauts. While no other details were given in the Tuesday report, Zhang raised as a comparison the Orion spacecraft being developed by NASA …