WHAT HAPPENED YESTERDAY?

Pico Group founder and Al-Masry Al-Youm owner Salah Diab was referred to trial yesterday on charges of possession of unlicensed firearms, Ahram Online reports. There’s no word on whether his son Tawfik’s case will also be taken to trial. No date for the start of court proceedings has yet been given.

“Joke” forces a Hurghada-bound flight to land in Bulgaria: Early on Small Planet flight from Warsaw to Hurghada, an unidentified man on board said there was a bomb on the plane, according to a passenger speaking to the AP. The plane landed in Bulgaria on Thursday morning and was checked for explosives. The passenger who made the bomb threat was “joking,” but charter airlines Small Planet said “for the sake of security of all travelers, all security procedures had been launched” and the plane had to land in Bulgaria. Ahram Online said the jokester “admitted on questioning to having consumed alcohol.”

We may be cross with Vladimir, but if he’s willing to build us a nuke plant — and finance it… Russia’s Rosatom will build a four-reactor nuclear power facility in Dabaa with a total generation capacity of 4.8 GW, Ittihadiya announced last night, saying President Abdel Fattah El Sisi had signed three nuclear cooperation agreements with Russia. Moscow will provide finance for the construction, with repayment coming through a share of revenues over a 35-year period. Said the readout: “The first two reactors will be completed within nine years, from the start of the construction. … The reactors can withstand a collision by a plane of 400 tons at a speed of 150 meters per second.” Egyptian companies are guaranteed c. 20% of the construction program for the facility, the statement noted. (We’ll have additional coverage on the agreement in Sunday morning’s edition, for those of you fascinated — or appalled — by the news.)

Russia became the world leader of the USD 500 bn global nuclear energy market in 2014, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in a profile of Rosatom last month, “building 37% of all new reactors in the world … In the last year alone, Russia has penned deals across Europe, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.” Rosatom’s operates its nuclear reactors on a build-own-operate (BOO) model, “providing uranium fuel, managing the reactors, and clearing away nuclear waste,” the Bulletin notes, saying “Russia’s civil nuclear deals could fundamentally change Africa’s energy landscape.” There’s a catch, of course: “Rosatom’s past projects have been mired in cost overruns, delays, and quality-control failures—issues that are, admittedly, all too common in the nuclear power industry,” however “under Rosatom’s vendor financing model, delays and unforeseen costs are recovered through electricity tariff hikes, effectively shifting the financial risk onto their cash-strapped local consumers. As the BOO model has yet to be seen in practice, however, such fears are speculative.” The same piece, an article by the International Desalination & Water Reuse Quarterly industry website, and a statement from the Kremlin in February all say that Egypt signed-up to acquire the new edition of Rosatom’s VVER nuclear reactor, which is able to desalinate water “at an unprecedented scale.” While the statement from the Kremlin on yesterday’s agreement states that the reactor is a NNP 3+ Gen, making Egypt the only country in the region with the technology, there is no mention in either country’s statement on desalination capabilities.

The second stage of parliamentary elections is set to begin tomorrow, covering 13 governorates, including Cairo. Egyptians abroad will vote from 21-22 November; those in Egypt will vote from 22-23 November. Find your polling station here and navigate the drop-down menus here to find the list of candidates in your voting district.

Readers in Cairo may have noticed in the past few days, especially last night, the presence of campaign vans prowling the streets blaring sha’aby music. One candidate running in the Shebin El Kom district of Menoufiya, took the electioneering fervor one step further, drove around the streets of his district on Thursday in the back of a truck standing above a caged lion, AMAY reports, with photos. The stunt was apparently a play on his lion electoral symbol. The convoy thus became the trashiest motorcade in modern Egyptian history since Morsi took his closest 30 friends for a spin in his family’s wood-grain paneled station wagon in the 6 October 2012 celebrations. Domestic media are reporting the candidate’s name as Saber Abu Khashaba, however, according to the list of candidates in Shebin El Kom, the candidate with the lion symbol is named Nabil Abdel Razek Abdasameea Aboualnin. Whatever the case may be regarding which candidate did this, instead of riding into election quite literally on the back of a vulnerable species, this incoming parliament should instead (but likely will not, unless there was some sort of real movement pushing for it) ban the use of animals for entertainment purposes. As we’ve noted before in Enterprise, the global trend has been for countries to ban such use of animals.

Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry met with Sir John Jenkins, the British Deputy National Security Adviser on Thursday, according to the MFA. The two “discussed British-Egyptian cooperation to address the implications of the Russian plane crisis,” the statement read. Jenkins was “instructed by the British prime minister to rapidly finalize necessary arrangements with the Egyptian side to ensure the prompt return of air traffic to and from Sharm el-Sheikh,” according to the statement. The two diplomats also reportedly discussed the situation in Libya as well as other regional crises. On Thursday, we had noted an article in Ahram Online saying the meeting originally scheduled between Shoukry and Jenkins had been cancelled.

Square’s shares soared as much as 45% yesterday as the U.S. payments service IPO’ed after having priced its offer at USD 9 instead of the expected USD 11-13. Noting that the debut performance “shows investors crave tech investments but only at the right price,” the WSJ (paywall) wonders whether the “Square IPO may prove to be a turning point for technology.” Says on investment banker they quoted: “‘We are likely to see more IPOs but at lower valuations … Private capital for some companies is expected to dry up unless they are willing to raise money at lower values’, he said.”

Days of Future Past: Donald Trump wouldn’t rule out having all of the Muslims in the United States registered in a database and issued separate IDs, when posed to him as a question in an extensive interview by Hunter Walker for Yahoo News. “Certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.” At the time of dispatch, the interview has nearly 3,000 comments.

SPEED ROUND, THE WEEKEND EDITION

Best description of Paris attackers, #1: If you’ve been watching the non-stop coverage of the Paris attacks this week like we have, you might be a bit tired of hearing journalists ask traumatized Parisians over and over again to describe “how they feel” or for their “gut reaction” about the horrific events that their city has witnessed. The best answer to these questions of pure idiocy came from French Senator Nathalie Goulet, while being interviewed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Watch here to see how Goulet shocked Amanpour with words that have never before been uttered on CNN (running time: 0.28).

Best description of Paris attackers, #2: The inimitable John Oliver revels in the freedom offered by HBO. Warning: If your tender ears are easily offended (or if anyone under the age of 18 is within earshot), you may want to give this one a skip or come back later when your won’t have to explain why it’s okay for mommy / daddy to revel in this kind of language, while the kiddies cannot. (Watch, running time: 2:14)

One tweet for every victim of the terror attacks in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015. Each Tweet includes a micro-bio and a heartbreaking photo. Start with Egypt’s Lamia Mondeguer: “Lamia Mondeguer, 30, Egypt. Film student. Girlfriend, daughter, sister. ‘Bubbly, lively, so very funny.’
#enmémoire.“ Or just begin at the top of the feed and work your way down @ParisVictims (the feed is still growing at the rate of about one tweet an hour.)

Bloomberg writes on “Why ISIS Has All the Money It Needs,” and it goes far beyond the standard oil narrative. Daesh is “one of the richest terrorist armies the world has known,” the newswire says, with “resources beyond crude—from selling [redacted] slaves to ransoming hostages to plundering stolen farmland—that can likely keep it fighting for years.” Then there’s taxes: “Islamic State allows policemen, soldiers, and teachers in its territory to atone for the ‘sin’ of having worked under religiously inappropriate regimes—for a fee. Forgiveness comes in the form of a repentance ID card costing up to USD 2,500, which requires an additional USD 200 a year to renew.”

When fleeing war, people are willing to make perilous journeys to reach safety: Apparently, going through the Arctic Circle is now providing relatively a comparatively “easy and cheap way” for refugees to get into Europe, Quartz explains. The border between Russia and the northernmost part of Norway can be crossed without papers, and Syrians can enter Russia without visas. That’s led some refugees to make the trip to Moscow and, from there, overland to the little town of Nikel. From Nikel, refugees cross the border to the small Norwegian settlement Kirkenes. But there’s a catch: according to Russian law, you are only allowed to cross the border using a vehicle, so the town of Nikel has been making a killing selling bikes for USD 100-150 to the refugees to just ride them for over 100 metres to cross the border because, in Russia, a bike counts as a vehicle. An estimated 50-60 people cross that border each day, and the number has been increasing since September. Barents Observer has pictures showing the border crossing. Interested in learning more? Check out this BBC documentary about relations between Norway and Russia (listening time 26:58).

French Muslims are likely to face challenging times following the terrorist attacks in Paris. The New Yorker’s George Packer quotes a French Muslim man in saying that “the fear will be hard on everyone—on non-Muslims who look at their Muslim countrymen with anxiety, on Muslims who sense the blame falling on them. He holds out a small hope that France’s leaders will be able to help the country come together by cautioning against scapegoating. This time around, though, the official response is likelier to be more punitive than in January, when the Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls appealed to the universal values of the republic. Now the talk is all about security. France is having regional elections next month.” But Packer calls on the the U.S., France, and the West to not let fear take over, “We shouldn’t abandon the values we claim to uphold by closing the doors to desperate refugees, who, after all, are fleeing the kind of places where last Friday in Paris is an ordinary night. We shouldn’t allow fear to tear apart fragile social fabrics.”

Google Maps has launched traffic updates in Egypt. It may still occasionally provide some really (really) stupid suggested routes, but the map app will now aggregate information from users across Cairo to give you a heads-up on which routes to use. We’d be worried right about now if we were Bey2ollak… To access the feature, just make sure you’re using the latest version of Google Maps on iOS or Android, On your desktop, go to google.com/maps and type “traffic in Cairo” into the search box and watch. Green roads are running fast, bottlenecks are shown in red, and there are symbols for accidents and road closures.

Aya Nader and Nadia Mounir visited the Maison Francis Papazian, one of the last watchmakers in Cairo. “Upon entering, customers are welcome to admire the antique furnishings and the walls covered by wooden clocks and framed clippings of old advertisements. The combined sounds of the ticking fills the air with a palpable calmness,” Nader writes. The real gem of the post is Mounir’s nostalgic, beautiful photo essay of 112-year old watchmaker’s shop that accompanies it. You can view the post and the pictures here. H/t Sarah R.

Need some more nostalgia? We can think of no better starting point than the Twitter feed @effendina, who among modern-day tweet salts-in images ranging from a view Mena House from the top of the Great Pyramid to a shot of a roving band in Luxor c. 1889 that could be an Instagram shot of the same scene today. One of our recent favourites: Dalida visiting the Sphinx after being crowned Miss Egypt 1954.

Dystopia calling: Extreme weather is expected as the strongest-ever El Niño is expected to strike, leaving the planet facing “uncharted territory” with the existential risk of food shortages, floods, disease, and drought. The UN says the extreme weather, already exacerbated by global warming, could persist well into 2016 but is expected to peak at the end of the current year. What’s El Niño? It is “a natural climatic phenomenon that sees equatorial waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean warm every few years. This disrupts regular weather patterns such as monsoons and trade winds, and increases the risk of food shortages, floods, disease, and forest fires,” The Guardian explains. Batten down the hatches.

…We’re already feeling its effects in Egypt, where temperatures are rising every year, and the rural poor are being scorched by it, Emily Crane Linn writes. “As August crept along and the heat wave persisted, city hospitals became overrun as patients poured in from surrounding rural villages,” she notes. The Health Ministry probably did not even account for all of the heat-related deaths as government did not count some of the casualties as heat-related. “What’s going on, in a nutshell, is that Egypt is seemingly getting hotter with every passing year. As of 2010, data from the Egyptian Meteorological Authority showed that Egypt’s five hottest years in recorded history have occurred from 2002 onward. The data also showed that heat waves are becoming more common and prolonged,” Linn adds. A rising instance of parasitic diseases is also becoming a threat, with one doctor saying that the higher temperatures are now adding the risk that malaria-carrying mosquitos could expand to Egypt, introducing the parasite to the country.

The next infectious disease challenge the world is facing is the “deadly axis” of tuberculosis (TB) and diabetes. TB surpassed HIV / AIDS to become the world’s deadliest infectious disease last year, Anthony Harries writes in Project Syndicate. “Type-2 diabetes not only renders the body incapable of processing or responding to insulin; it also weakens the immune system…  Diabetes can also make patients less responsive to standard TB therapies and elevate the chance of relapse after the disease has been treated,” he notes. This is reminiscent of two decades ago when TB and HIV/AIDS were paired in a similar way and now, Harries says, “we must not wait until the crisis spirals out of control before we act.” Harries is calling for wider adoption of The Bali Declaration (PDF), which calls for measures including “concrete and relatively simple steps like ‘bidirectional screening,’ which requires any person diagnosed with diabetes to be tested for tuberculosis and vice versa.”

The most inconsequentially stupid thing we’ve heard this week: You’ll be dead by the time the John Malkovich movie ‘100 Years’ comes out. The film, which reportedly imagines different versions of our future, won’t be released until 18 November 2115. In the meantime, all we get are three trailers: One, two and three. As one of our nieces would say: Whatever.

The Economist takes what most Egyptians understand about their state’s bloated and ineffective bureaucracies and expands on that by noting “Citizens the world over complain about red tape and pen-pushing bureaucrats. But those across the Arab world have more cause for complaint than most. Dictators and one-party states have long treated the civil service far more as an employment agency for loyal supporters (and family members) than a provider of services.” The article goes on to note different initiatives throughout the region to try to rein in out of control public sectors, including Egypt’s Civil Service Act, but also takes note of the pushback already encountered. The Economist offers an alternative approach, as proposed by World Bank economist Shanta Devarajan: “Instead of reforming from the top, countries may well have more success starting at the bottom by making bureaucrats accountable to citizens at a local level.” While valid, this approach would still not address the public sector wage bill. (Read: Aiwa (yes) minister)

Hipster alert: Preventing heirloom date palm extinction in Siwa: Believe it or not, the best dates in the world might not be in Saudi — in fact, they might in the Siwa Oasis. Layla Eplett dives into the history of Siwan history, culture and economy told through its most valued crop: The date palm. Several of Siwa’s folk varieties of dates have been added to Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, an international catalog of endangered heritage foods. In addition to risking extinction, the foods must be part of the region’s local memory and tradition. The Ark consists of 800 items from 50 countries, including regional specialties like Chilean white strawberries and Altamurana sheep from Puglia. Dates have been integral to Siwa’s diet and economy for thousands of years, dating to its time on the ancient date trade route.

When surging prices and unemployment meet falling marriage rates, the kids definitely aren’t alright. Ramadan El Sherbini explores why Egypt’s youth are in a perpetual state of ‘waithood.’ Egyptians aged 18-29 make up around 23.6% of Egypt’s population, and 39% of people aged 15-24 are looking for jobs, according to BBC. Worsening the squeeze: Those finding work are too-often doing so in jobs unrelated to their fields of study, and few are able to afford marriage because of wildly unrealistic social norms and “a culture dominated by materialism,” says sociologist Khaled Abdul Moneim. High marriage costs in Egypt are widely believed to be responsible for a rise in the numbers of unmarried people in a country in which, in the past, young people married as early as 18 years of age. A would-be husband is expected to own or have rented an apartment for his new family. He traditionally offers a gift of jewellery to his bride and shares the cost of the furniture. This usually means a five-digit bill in a country where around 40% of the people are believed to live below the poverty line. “Society — both the government and people — will benefit a lot from taking the youth’s problems seriously and try to ease the pressure on them.”

“Christian churches flourishing in United Arab Emirates,” the Toronto Star tells us. Redundant headline aside (anyone heard of a Jewish church?), the piece is certainly worth a read: “Roman Catholics hurry to mass at St. Joseph’s Cathedral. Metres away, a chorus of voices rises from inside St. Andrew’s as Anglicans begin a hymn. The sound mixes with the chatter of dozens of children waiting in the morning sun for bible lessons to start. In the midst of the churches is the local mosque, where Muslim men wander up the steps of the pale stone building as they answer the call to prayer. The Christians praying peacefully among their Muslim neighbours point to a unique phenomenon in the Middle East: in the United Arab Emirates, the number of churches is growing.”

If you’re spending too much time debating why it’s a great investment / project / expansion product, it probably isn’t. That’s one of the core take-aways from private equity kingpin Stephen Schwarzman’s success, according to Business Insider, which spoke recently with the Blackstone boss: “One of the rules I’ve learned is that struggling to try and think your way into making an investment is usually the best way to not have a great outcome. The best investments are the easiest ones to approve. Ironically, when a bunch of very smart people are sitting around a table for hours trying to figure out whether they should do something, that tends to not necessarily lead to the best results.”

One of these companies is about to become Goldman Sachs’ favourite startup: “Every fall, Goldman Sachs holds a private, off-the-record conference at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, where it gathers some of tech’s most influential investors and some of tech’s buzziest companies. Ultimately, the purpose of the event is to burnish Goldman’s reputation in the Valley, where it doesn’t carry as much weight as it does in older industries. But people who attend say they get genuine value from going there — it’s a super-high-level crowd, and the onstage interviews and speeches can be surprisingly useful. … The companies Goldman asks to come onstage are either the ones it thinks are most promising, or the ones it would like to land as clients, or some combination.” Check out the list here.

The Guardian’s Randeep Ramesh details the recently revealed demands by the UAE that the UK “crack down on [the] Muslim Brotherhood or lose arm deals.” Seen by the Guardian and dating mainly around 2012 and 2014, the internal UAE documents, if genuine, reveal that the billion pound agreements, alongside additional offers of “lucrative” weapons and oil deals, were threatened by  ”the British government’s indifference to the Brotherhood’s operation” and “the supposed infiltration of the BBC’s global news channel by Islamist sympathisers.” Another leaked UAE report promised that that the UK could expect “BP back in the game” and a “further deepening of the intelligence and military relationship” if their demands for a “measured” public approach towards the Brotherhood was met. Despite the issue being raised as a “red flag” for the “apparently not impressed” UAE, only possible “parliamentary discussion on new legislation” was promised, and several UK military contracts have since been cancelled.

WATCH THIS

Documentary of the Week: “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” (view trailer) is the most riveting documentary out there covering the Enron scandal, which, at its time, was the largest corporate bankruptcy in America. It is the ultimate riches to rags story. The scandal provoked a discussion on corporate greed six years before the ‘Great Recession’ and called into question how markets value companies. It’s a story of hubris, enlarged egos, and the importance of perception destroying what was considered the corporate embodiment the potential held by a deregulated energy industry. Someone was kind enough to post the full feature on Youtube.

James Bond has become deadlier, less romantic than before: The Economist analysed all 007 films and concluded that Bond, played by Daniel Craig and Pierce Brosnan, accumulates kills at 2x the agent’s historical rate. And in what could explain why the modern-day Bond also has fewer love interests, the agent has been drinking more, now averaging more than four “shaken, not stirred” tipples per film. It looks like this new mix is working better, as Daniel Craig’s Bond films have been the most successful yet (watch, running time 03:13).

Daesh’s attack on Paris is a “major shift” in its global strategy. Along with the attack in Beirut and the suspected role in the Russian plane crash in Sinai, Brookings’ Will McCants says that instead of restricting its operations to protecting its territory, Daesh could now be focusing on two things: attracting more recruits to the terrorist organisation using high profile attacks and, more strategically, trying to deter further military action against its strongholds in Syria and Iraq by effectively raising the stakes of engaging with it militarily. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp spoke to McCants in detail about his view on this strategy shift and put the main points in a short video (watching time 01:57).

“Visually spectacular” Gods of Egypt trailer delivers on action, forgets to include actual Egyptians: Proving that Hollywood really will make a movie out of anything (as long as most of the actors are white) the USD 150 mn film is an “action-adventure inspired by the classic mythology of Egypt” with an all-star American cast allied against the dastardly god of darkness Set, who has taken over “the once peaceful and prosperous empire” for his nefarious no-good schemes. So long as it brings in a tourist or two… (Watch, running time 2:15)

READ THIS

Sayre’s Law: Many of us are familiar with the phrase “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” Coined by US political scientist and Columbia University professor Wallace Stanley Sayre in 1973, what came to be known as Sayre’s law is the concept that “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake,” as explained by historian and economist Charles Issawi. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the low-stakes high stress world of baking. Prepare for actual laughter in Rainbow-Cake Recipe Inspires Comment Apocalypse.

Gender equality is not just a social and moral issue, it also makes economic sense: “If women matched men in terms of work – not only participating in the labor force at the same rate, but also working as many hours and in the same sectors – global GDP could increase by an estimated $28 trillion, or 26%, by 2025. That is like adding another United States and China to the world economy,” Laura Tyson, a UC Berkeley economist and former chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers and Anu Madgavkar, a senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, write. What’s the biggest barrier to gender parity? Tyson and Madgavkar point their fingers at “deeply held beliefs and attitudes” that include undervaluing care work relative to paid work. However, even though they agree that it is unlikely to expect full gender parity globally in the foreseeable future, the authors see that matching regional best performers is a more reliable target that could add up USD 12 tn to the global economy by 2025. McKinsey emphasises four key areas in order to achieve that target: first, improved education and skills training as parity in education is likely to make women share unpaid work with men more equitably, to work in high-productivity professional and technical occupations, and to assume leadership roles. Second, legal provisions guaranteeing the rights of women as full members of society should be introduced or expanded. Third, improved access to financial services, mobile phones, and digital technology. Fourth, having men share unpaid care work “such as looking after children and the elderly, cooking, and cleaning” more equitably.

… But the social issue still persists, even amongst the academic elite. Even famous and extremely accomplished female economists get no respect, Economist Justin Wolfers complains in the New York Times. The gender gap is so clear in the number of times female co-authors of studies are demoted as secondary authors by the press, especially in the case of economist power-couples. A clear case is the letter sent by (the habitually failing U.S. presidential candidate) Ralph Nader to the Chief of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, criticising her policies. Nader, asked Yellen, arguably the most powerful economist in the world, to “sit down with [her] Nobel Prize-winning husband George Akerlof.” Akerlof is not even a monetary economist. Wolfers says the issue touched him personally when his partner, Betsey Stevenson, was demoted to second author on their paper referenced by an Anne-Marie Slaughter piece, to which Stevenson suggested “only half-jokingly — that the reason women can’t have it all is because even leading feminists don’t give them credit.”

Blame the slowdown in Turkey’s economic growth and stagnation in productivity growth on the “ominous slide in the quality” of its economic and political institutions, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Murat Üçer suggest. Going back, Acemoglu and Üçer say the Turkey’s rapid economic growth from 2001 onwards came after the country accepted “a slew of fairly radical structural reforms imposed by the IMF and the World Bank” that brought persistently high inflation under control, cut budget deficits and imposed discipline on the budgetary process, fostered autonomy in decision making and regulation, and “introduced transparency in the notoriously corrupt government procurement procedures.” Then came Erdogan’s AK Party. Discretionary policy made a comeback, corruption increased, taxation and regulation decisions turned increasingly arbitrary, and macroeconomic framework worsened. Even when the government increased spending to support the economy, it resulted in low-quality growth that led “to a relatively large current account deficit and an inflation rate stuck at high single-digits.”

LISTEN TO THIS

France is grappling with what it means to be French in the wake of the Paris attacks, the New York Times’ former Paris bureau chief, Elaine Sciolino, explained to Terry Gross on her Fresh Air show on NPR. “In France you have this idealistic notion of what it means to be French. It’s an idealization of the secular republican ideal that doesn’t recognize difference. So that even in the census … you don’t count ethnicity, religion, or race.” However, being a product of immigration is, unlike other parts of the West, not celebrated in France, “those with an Arab-sounding last name or a Muslim-sounding last name are stigmatized.” On the attacks, Sciolino says they “were a gift to the far right, wrapped up in a bow before Christmas. This feeds perfectly into the French fear that there’s no security on our borders, that immigrants are the enemy, that there aren’t enough jobs for ‘normal’ French people so that we have to prevent the other, the alien, the foreigner, from invading our country.” (Run time 35:05)

What’s the point of financial markets? That’s the question at the heart of an episode of the BBC World Service’s Business Daily podcast, reporting from the Bank of England’s Open Forum 2015. The episode covers some of the views of Bank of England Governor Mark Carney and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. “The single word most often associated with financial market participants is ‘corrupt,’ which is really obviously a huge problem,” Helena Morrissey, CEO of Newton Investment Management, lamented, but noted that there is a rift between perception and reality. Morrissey says financial regulation “has gone far enough.” Today, the challenge is ensuring that “better behaviour” in markets arising from better regulation is embedded in daily practices — hinting that while top management learnt their lesson and new entrants are aware of the new standards expected, actions by middle management continue to pose a risk. Swimming with Sharks author Joris Luyendijk is also interviewed and says that instead of asking bankers to behave in a better way when faced with temptation, financial market regulations should remove temptation altogether. (Listen, run time 17:27)

SOMETHING THAT MADE US THINK

The 13th century poet Rumi had Forty Rules of Love. Syrians have the 40 Rules of the Siege, written piecemeal by 25-year-old Abdullah Al-Khateeb, a former sociology student and resident of Yarmouk, which the Guardian describes as the “once-bustling once-bustling neighbourhood in southern Damascus … in ruins after being starved of food, water and electricity by the government in a brutal three-year siege. Now, the terror group Islamic State stalks what is left of the camp, a short drive from the heart of Syria’s capital.

“During a Skype interview from his home, Khateeb disconnects every half an hour. He has five laptops that he charges every night on a generator because electricity is cut off. The laptops belonged to activist friends who were killed, one on the first day Isis arrived as he tried to document the invasion with his camera.”

We’ve posted a compilation of all 40 rules, edited only the clean-up missing spaces and line  breaks, on our blog. From that, Rule 16:

“The siege can make you contradictory in everything
Like how it makes you fragile, crying at the simplest things: a Fairouz song.
And it makes you hard like a stone, unaffected by the greatest losses: losing a friend.
If you have a choice, try to be as fragile as you can.
Me, I am a stone… if only the boy had been a stone.”

ENTREPRENEURS

Are you on medication, but have problems remembering to take it on time? The Medica Reminders app probably has a solution for you. Wamda profiled the app and its developer, Ahmad El Karagy. Medica Reminders “sends a reminder at the registered timing of each medication, and displays the required dose. It also reminds the user of doctors’ follow-ups, and medical recommendations can be recorded as voice notes as well as written notes.” El Karagy is looking to market the app in Germany, but his aim now is turn it into “ a comprehensive package that helps in maintaining the patient’s comfort, like online booking of doctor’s appointments” and “to market this package for institutions that service patients, like pharmacies and hospitals.”

AUC’s incubator—AUC Venture Lab (V-Lab)—has managed to draw in EGP 23 mn worth of investments in its startups, said Venture Labs manager Mohamed Hamza to Al Borsa. These investments have been injected into 46 startups and have so far achieved a return on investment of EGP 36 mn. V-Lab plans to “graduate” (it’s what they call it, we swear) 12 startups this December, and will open the door for entrepreneurs to apply to join the incubator that same month, with an application deadline of January. If accepted into the program, a startup team will receive EGP 20K in grant funding, access to the university’s facilities and labs, workspace on campus, in addition to receiving business training and mentorship from faculty and other entrepreneurs. Teams will have to network in events set up by the V-Lab to obtain funding. The incubator receives sponsorship from a number of big-name players including the Arab African International Bank and our very own sponsor SODIC, according to V-Lab’s head of PR Miram Shalaby.

Not all business ventures end up successful and, from the failures of some, there are lessons to be learnt: After Tahrir Academy, an online education portal, announced it was shutting down in August after four years of operation. CEO Seif Abou Zaid tells Wamda’s Eman Mostafa about three lessons this experience taught him: the first concerns the operational environment for non-profit organisations in Egypt, where the law forbids them from entering into commerce activities and often results in long delays in foreign transactions – be it grants or award. The second lesson: don’t mix non-profit activities and for-profit business initiatives together. The third lesson, and arguably the most important one: don’t give something away for free if you want to charge users for it in the future. “Abou Zaid warned entrepreneurs of providing free mobile services and applications just for the purpose of attracting users. This was because later on users might not pay for services that were once free. The solution was to let users experience a free service only as part of a marketing strategy.”

Upcoming events:

• 12-13 December: RiseUp Summit 2015: The largest and most significant event for startups in Egypt of the year, held at the Greek Campus in downtown Cairo. A who’s who of both experienced startup types and wannabes as well as top regional and global investors and industry players will be on hand. (Register here)

PERSONAL TECH

While we maintain that gifting is *NOT* a verb, The Verge’s 2015 Holiday Gift Guide is still worth checking out, particularly if your tastes run to gadgets, games and home entertainment. Excerpt: “Selfish: Selfish is a book of Kim Kardashian selfies. Whoever you give this to will either love you or never speak to you again.” We’re the latter. (Oh, and yeah, yeah, we know: Gifting is a 400-year-old verb. It’s also in fashion among techno-hipsters, which is enough to make us loathe it. Now regifting? That, Seinfeld fans, is a word. More on gifting here and here.)

There are over 196 bn emails sent back and forth every day, only 5% of which is encrypted. In the digital age of conspiracy theories, surveillance and an absolute lack of privacy, why is everyone’s information still unencrypted? Jason Thomas of Thomson Reuters writes for Big Think on Why You Should Encrypt Everything and the Reason You Probably Don’t. First of all, Google and Yahoo both offer end-to-end encryption, as does third party software like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). A famous study by scholars at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University, found that most people didn’t use email encryption technology like PGP because it was too complex to use. The user interface was clunky. “User errors cause or contribute to most computer security failures, yet user interfaces for security still tend to be clumsy, confusing, or near-nonexistent,” the authors argue. PGP was so complicated, in fact, Edward Snowden had to first explain it to Glenn Greenwald, The Guardianreporter he had contacted, before he could leak information.

Know who likes encryption? Indonesia’s newly-appointed trade minister, who runs his ministry using WhatsApp and his iPhone because of the former’s end-to-end encryption. Read more at Tech in Asia. The piece is a good starting point as a micro-profile of Thomas Lembong, a former banker and PE guy who is trying his damndest to reform Indonesia’s investment climate.

TECH

Could the future of wind power be bladeless? That is what Spanish firm Vortex Blades is banking on, according to Wired. The technology centers around an aerodynamic effect called vorticity, which produces patterns of spinning vortices. These have been a challenge to architects and engineers who have always had to plan around them. Vortex Blades plans to harness the kinetic energy of these vortices in a torch-shaped (Wired more aptly likened it to a type of cigarette recently legalized in Colorado) structures made from a composite of fiberglass and carbon fiber. These structures—with their minimalist mass—can then oscillate to produce the kinetic energy. Vortex Blade’s Mini prototype captures 40% of the wind’s kinetic energy, 30% less than conventional wind turbines. However, you can fit twice as many Vortex turbines into the same space as a propeller turbine. Why even care, you ask? This is still pretty much fringe technology. However, beyond space efficiency, a cooler design and pleasing bird-loving environmentalists, it does solve an issue we have with propeller turbines in Egypt. Turbine gearboxes are susceptible to dust and sand, which are in abundance in places where we plan to build wind farms. Since Egypt has been increasing its wind power MoUs over the past year and plans to continue to do so, technology such as this may not be too far-fetched.

THE WEEK’S MOST-CLICKED STORIES

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week were:

• Op-ed by Pico Group founder and Al Masry Al Youm owner Salah Diab after his release from detention (English and Arabic versions)
• The latest edition of the Daesh terrorist ‘magazine’ Dabiq (pdf, posted on Aaron Zelin’s Jihadology blog)
• Really creepy photo of the day: Erdogan and Obama (image)
• Video shows driver crashing his USD 1.4 mn Ferrari minutes after buying it (BGR)
• To improve your focus, notice how you lose it. (Harvard Business Review)
• Stray cats run around onstage at the G20 summit in Antalya, Turkey. (Youtube)
• There is only one way to defeat ISIS (Esquire)

ON YOUR WAY OUT

“Nobody’s Sure Who’s Running Algeria But It Definitely Isn’t The President“. Borzou Daragahi writes for BuzzFeed: “It is the largest country by land mass in all of Africa, and the second or third largest by population in the Arab world, blessed with massive oil and gas reserves that have turned it into one of the key military and political powers of the Mediterranean. But many say Algeria is in deep trouble, with its ailing longtime ruler nowhere to be seen and factions struggling over a successor. … ‘We all know that there is a state of power vacuum and that Bouteflika is no longer able to be in charge and that this power vacuum is being filled with extra-constitutional forces,’ … ’There is no one to lead the country.’”

Master of None review, first two episodes: Last week, we promised to review Aziz Ansari’s new comedy for Netflix, Master of None, given the strong recommendations we’ve received. The answer is not going to please anyone, given that we don’t have an internal consensus, and everyone else’s reviews are praising the show as nothing less than groundbreaking. Unfortunately, two episodes in, this reviewer just doesn’t like the show. It isn’t offensively bad – and that seems at the heart of the show’s problem – it seems so terrified of offending anyone that it ends up saying nothing. Master of None’s problem is that it is written and filmed more or less as a sitcom without the laugh track. Tidy conclusions, solutions that would never happen in real life, avoidance of anything approaching dark comedy make the show, to this reviewer who acknowledges that this is apparently a minority opinion in the world, not that funny. Having it released by Netflix gave Ansari and the show co-creator Alan Yang wide berth to do anything, and instead they went for the safest route possible. Given the strong recommendations and that we’re only two episodes in, this reviewer is willing to give this show a third and fourth chance but after that, if it’s still not funny, that’s it. What is the point of watching a sitcom minus the laugh track, when one can simply watch a sitcom minus the laugh track.

Can’t get the threat of devaluation out of your mind this morning? Go read Patrick Werr’s weekly column on Egyptian economic affairs for the UAE’s The National. Bottom line: Devaluation won’t be a quick fix, and “it may be forced to swallow a bitter pill and turn to the IMF and the World Bank for help. Whatever it does, it had better invest part of its energy in explaining to a sceptical public why this is all necessary, something it has not been good at in the past.” We couldn’t agree more on that last point.