us companies also decided to cut the price of the place by batteries more or less in business with those. that it is up next here on day to others. the top stories followed across social media share your comments and content welcome to. us. when i'm traveling to be comfortable.

but i also want to stay up to date on all the latest news and events. and d.-w. makes that part of traveling easy just because it's available and thousands of hotels resorts and cruise ships worldwide. or have you found a domain signing some the subject that sure is d w in your room you can read a great price go to d. w. dot com travel quiz. at the. poles apology at mit saying it had deliberately slowed down overall i phones apple is now saying sorry to its customers promise is to replace aging batteries for free will drop. be enough to calm down enraged fans.

duce books dreams are final stop on the new silk road the former still making town of this book and germany's industrial heartland hopes a new eleven thousand kilometer or a late china will revive the local economy. also on the show venezuela's crippled socialist economy forces many to leave their country but the flow over it cannot make refugees is now creating pressure in neighboring countries. this is d.w. business i'm going to office in berlin after facing a barrage of criticism for deliberately slowing down old arrived phones apple now says it will reduce the price of battery replacements to regain customers trust some users had long suspected the company was using their regular software updates to slow down all right phones encouraging customers to buy newer models apple admitted the procedure but says it was done to prolong the life of aging batteries

the company eight separate lawsuits in the u.s. filed against it over the over that matter and has additional legal trouble in israel and france. let's bring in our financial correspondent julie benz who is standing by in frankfurt only how damaging is this next little mini scandal for. i don't think it's going to be a game changer you're talking of a mini scandal i don't think one can assess the extent of the financial fallout yet both in terms of perhaps what results from court cases but also perhaps from enraged customers perhaps not moving to the next generation of i phone but of course there's a huge pride in being part of the apple community and there's still so much that offsets the i phone image wise marketing wise from other products i don't think it will help will hurt. in the long run because there's so much momentum behind it

additional headlines this week aren't helping apple's image tim cook the c.e.o. making over one hundred million dollars for two thousand and seventeen and apple forcing him to travel only by private jet including privately that's sure to enrage apple customers even more only bounce that thank you very much for this is us. around one thousand years ago carbons boards brought a spices and porcelain goods other goods from china to the middle east and europe also on board the camels was precious so with gave the route its name the silk silk road this story version of it covered thousands of kilometers right across asia the chinese government now wants to revive it on land and on sea in recent years beijing has been investing billions of dollars in ports and roads bridges and airports between china and its trading partners to the west this week we've been

looking at some of the stops along that route and how serious finishes today at the end of one of the railroads in the western german city of this book it's home to the largest inland port in europe and then three point seven million shipping containers a year making it an ideal hob for china's new silk road project and that railing bring freight here from china is already up and running it's currently served by over two dozen trains a week the transit time of around two weeks is some four times shorter than the original sera the traditional sea route giving the rail link a competitive advantage because in trade time really is money. but europe's largest in one port most containers arrive by ship but not all. it might look and spectacular but this is one end of the new silk road a freight rail route stretching eleven thousand kilometers and connecting duis book

with chongqing in central china. instead of silk and spices typical cargoes today include how full the electronics and textiles. over the through the balance mostly to the we're part of the largest connotation in central europe. the chinese want to sell masses of consumer goods. and the best place to sell them is where you have a lot of consumers. combine that with a dense network of roads and rail links at this end plus the rhine river connecting with rotterdam and also the burger on europe's west coast it's ideal. coming this will. turn out twenty five trains a week to do is book from china carrying both goods and hope for the future. located in germany's industrial heartland duesberg used to be a wealthy city but it's been in economic decline for decades. the city's

representative for chinese affairs still remembers the steel plants lighting up the nighttime sky when he was a boy today like the coal mines across the river valley to most have been closed down. in the last twenty years we've lost around thirty or thirty five thousand jobs in the steel industry. which is why he welcomes trade from china. and the new silk road will boost the influx of investors such as ya mean one who has big plans for do is book. beginning here in china and we will be building a china trade center here. on this line behind us we will have one hundred twenty thousand square metres of office space over five stories. hundred twenty thousand metre. the center is set to accommodate around two hundred companies which will have excellent access to the european market from here. the construction is being

subsidised by the chinese government as part of a long term strategy. that also includes the new train link. it may not be making any money for beijing yet but the financial commitment makes do is confident that when it comes to the new silk road and future trade the chinese really do mean business. is a gigantic project costing the chinese hundreds of billions of dollars will it all be worth it let's bring in philip bilski he's the head of china desk and joins us now from bonn philip what is the long term strategy behind this. what we're trying is trying to do here is to find a new perspective for the chinese economy the chinese economy as you may know is not growing as fast as it used to and one of the big questions is what to do with

these huge not that efficient state owned chinese companies. so what china's trying to do here basically two things in the short term they are trying to generate a lot of work for these chinese companies because obviously someone has to build all these roads and railway networks all across asia and europe and and secondly china wants to do something much bigger achieve something much bigger bigger obviously it wants to get access to new markets and it wants to build a huge network of future trade partners and china will be right at the center of this network as you said china's investing huge amount of money in all sorts of trading partners some of which are really more reliable than others because they're all around the world is that really going to be a sound investment thing. well let's say there's some risks involved right now almost all of the these investments are financed by chinese banks and

even chinese experts are getting more and more nervous whether they're ever going to get their money back the basic idea of these investments is that their investments lead to economic growth and that these countries used this growth then to pay back the chinese loans so whether this is ever going to happen nobody knows for sure right now there are all already estimates saying that for instance about half the investments in burma might be lost in pakistan it might be even up to eighty percent. seriousness of the chinese economy there thank you very much philip bilski. china this. going to visit venezuela. which sits atop the world's largest oil reserves for in the crude price and gross mismanagement by the socialist government has crippled the country's economy inflation is style high two thousand percent just this year hundreds of thousands

of venezuelans are leaving the country in desperation and try to make it elsewhere . jorge gutierrez is taking the bus not to work sadly his work is on the bus his selling money worthless money from his homeland of when this oil and. they get it do you know what i can buy with this absolutely nothing gentleman. because he left his country for neighboring colombia and is now panhandling on buses in bogota he explains his country's economic plight to local commuters hoping to store their horace. i left my country with two million body of ours when i arrived at the border they would only give me sixty thousand pesos for it twenty dollars so i decided to bring them here instead to bogota and give them away so that people can give me whatever they feel in their hearts that's it but if i need it think of it it was with us the concept works call him makes

a few bucks every day and manages to send some money back home meanwhile the crisis there affects the neighbors across the western border colombia has its own economic problems and it's facing a larger influx of migrants than the country has ever seen before. in there are a lot of people in the cities where there are issues with lack of lodging lack of schools it's a challenge and you can imagine that if the colombian population already has problems accessing basic services if six hundred thousand more people arrive it's very difficult colombiana. difficult but still better than in venezuela for jorge got here yes that's all that matters. and that's it for me and the business team here. thank you very much for watching good of your business partner.

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