President Xi Jinping expresses concern about the threat to its neighbour, and offers to help.

An investigation details how extremists are trying to exploit the pandemic via the social network.

In China, the live-streaming industry has become an important platform for economic recovery.

The firm has already announced job cuts affecting 14% of its staff, but more measures may be needed.

The Xbox team shows off new footage of the highly anticipated Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.

A slickly-produced "documentary" has exploded across social media, peddling medical misinformation.

"We had to leave all our shopping," a mother tells BBC News.

Cast and crews might have to quarantine together in the future when filming begins again.

An investigation by BBC News Arabic has found how one Iranian airline contributed to the spread of coronavirus around the Middle East.

Park rangers in Africa say the closure of safari tourism is leading to an increase in poaching.

Some of the stories from around the world that you may have missed this week.

Blasian - black and Asian - couples now exist in South Africa... but they don't always have an easy time.

Coronavirus is throwing many birth plans up in the air and leading some health trusts to increase home births.

Figures suggest that IT now generates as much CO2 as flying, with some arguing it's nearly double.

Some dairy farmers are throwing away thousands of litres amid supply chain disruption due to coronavirus.

Firms will be able to borrow up to £50,000, which will be interest free for the first year.

The singer, who had Jamaica's first million-selling single, dies after suffering a stroke.

The military is preparing to deploy to the region to try to stop illegal logging and mining.

After writing my post a few months ago on building your own redux app, I have been asked a couple times to write a guide on creating redux middleware and how it works. This will be a quick post on how you can acheive anything with your own middleware!

##Basic middleware

const customMiddleware = store => next => action => {
  if(action.type !== 'custom') return next(action)
  //do stuff!
}

Applying it:

import { createStore, applyMiddleware, } from 'redux'
import reducer from './reducer'
import customMiddleware from './customMiddleware'

const store = createStore(
  reducer,
  applyMiddleware(customMiddleware)
)

Whaaa? store => next => action => I know that looks confusing. Essentially you are building a chain of functions, it will look like this when it gets called:

//next looks something like this:
let dispatched = null
let next = actionAttempt => dispatched = actionAttempt 

const dispatch = customMiddleware(store)(next)

dispatch({
  type: 'custom',
  value: 'test'
})

All you are doing is chaining function calls and passing in the neccesary data. When I first saw this I was confused a little due to the long chain, but it made perfect sense after reading the article on writing redux tests.

So now that we understand how those chained functions work, let’s explain the first line of our middleware.

if(action.type !== 'custom') return next(action)

There should be some way to tell what actions should go through your middleware. In this example, we are saying if the action’s type is not custom call next, which will pass it to any other middleware and then to the reducer.

##Doing Cool stuff

The official guide on redux middleware covers a few examples on this, I’m going to try to explain it in a more simple way.

Say we want an action like this:

dispatch({
  type: 'ajax',
  url: 'http://api.com',
  method: 'POST',
  body: state => ({
    title: state.title
    description: state.description
  }),
  cb: response => console.log('finished!', response)
})

We want this to do a post request, and then call the cb function. It would look something like this:

import fetch from 'isomorphic-fetch'

const ajaxMiddleware = store => next => action => {
  if(action.type !== 'ajax') return next(action)
  
  fetch(action.url, {
    method: action.method,
    body: JSON.stringify(action.body(store.getState()))
  })
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(json => action.cb(json))
}

It’s pretty simple really. You have access to every method redux offers in middleware. What if we wanted the cb function to have access to dispatching more actions? We could change that last line of the fetch function to this:

.then(json => action.cb(json, store.dispatch))

Now in the callback, we can do:

  cb: (response, dispatch) => dispatch(newAction(response))

As you can see, middleware is very easy to write in redux. You can pass store state back to actions, and so much more. If you need any help or if I didn’t go into detail enough, feel free to leave a comment below!

The four teams who will see us through to the final day of FIFA Futsal World Cup Colombia 2016 have been settled, as Russia and Iran were joined by Argentina and Portugal in the semi-finals.

FIFA.com catches up with Miriam Moreno and her daughter Sara Isabel Collazos who have had a great experience working at Colombia 2016 as volunteers.

Argentina and Portugal both have their sights on making their first ever FIFA Futsal World Cup final when they go head to head in Cali. FIFA.com previews the crucial Colombia 2016 semi-final.