Harare / AFP They sleep outside banks, skimp on meals and sell flowers in hospitals. After long years of work, Zimbabwe’s pensioners are struggling to survive old age as the country’s economy collapses. With banks short of cash to pay out pensions, 80-year-old Gift Kaondera-Shava, a former truck driver, bus conductor and factory supervisor, now scrambles to feed himself …

CAIRO / AP For two weeks now, the shelf once piled with bags of sugar — for better or worse Egypt’s most loved commodity — has stood empty at this grocery store in bustling downtown Cairo. “This is nothing — they’re missing even more things in my village,” said Mahmoud Sulayman, a former army conscript from the Nile Delta now …

  Reuters Vodafone Egypt and Etisalat Misr have signed licence deals allowing them to operate fourth-generation (4G) mobile services in Egypt, the country’s telecoms regulator said on Sunday. Egypt is selling four 4G licences as part of a long-awaited plan to reform the telecoms sector and to raise money for stretched government finances. The country’s three existing mobile phone operators …

  Reuters Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) said on Sunday it closed a $1.5 billion loan with regional and international banks that will fund its Line 6 expansion project. Alba will become the world’s largest single aluminium smelter complex, boosting its annual output by 540,000 tonnes to 1.5 million tonnes per year by adding a sixth “potline”, used in producing the metal …

  Kuwait City / Emirates Business GE marked a new milestone in its operational presence in Kuwait with the opening of the GE Kuwait Technology Center (GEKTC), a flagship facility that will foster localized research, provide hands-on training and build an innovation ecosystem specifically for the power sector. Approved by the Kuwait Direct Investment Promotion Authority (KDIPA) for a Foreign …

  Bloomberg Iran is ramping up efforts to woo foreign investment in an energy industry stunted by years of sanctions, with a request for companies to submit documents to pre-qualify as bidders to develop the country’s oil and natural gas fields. State-run National Iranian Oil Co. will solicit documents from international companies starting from Monday, according to an announcement posted …

  AWEIL / AP The mother faced an anguished decision: choosing which of her children to save. With hunger gripping this remote region of South Sudan, Elizabeth Athiel could either get urgent medical attention for her 8-month-old daughter, Anger, or make sure her other five children could eat. The little girl was shockingly thin, but the medical clinic was a …

  Washington / AP Looking to break out of a “messy” email situation, the nonprofit group dosomething.org recently switched over to a new way of communicating among its far-flung teams. Moving most internal communications to the messaging application Slack with its “channels” for various teams made it easier to coordinate the group’s social change projects across 131 countries, said software …

  NEW YORK / AP Does this sound familiar? You want to stream a movie and end up spending most of your time clicking through a disorganized sea of options, most of which aren’t especially good, anyhow. FilmStruck, a new subscription streaming service to launch on Wednesday by Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Collection hopes to fill what’s been …

    Relaxnews Putting a premium on premium, HP has overhauled its flagship Envy and Spectre devices just in time for the US holiday season. The HP Spectre x360 was already an aesthetically pleasing convertible PC — i.e., it can be used as a tablet or a notebook — but now it’s even thinner and lighter for stylish on-the-go productivity. …