We end a very busy news week with a lull on the international front this morning. Among the more noteworthy pieces out there today:

“How Eni Bet Big and Won Big on Natural Gas off Egypt”: The New York Times’ Stanley Reed dives deep into Eni to tell the story of how the Italian oil giant “reignited the [oil] industry’s flagging interest in Egypt and the entire eastern Mediterranean region.” Reed is a veteran oil and gas reporter with a strong interest in geopolitics whose decades covering the industry show in an exceptionally readable story that nevertheless provides never-before-told details on how the discovery was made by the team on the ground in Egypt.

Veteran financial writer Patrick Werr speaks for us here at Enterprise this morning when he writes in his weekly column: “Is it not time to pry the sugar industry out of the sclerotic hands of the government and turn it over to the country’s more agile private traders and manufacturers?” Werr’s explainer for the National on the origins of the current sugar crisis is a must-read if you’re getting up to speed on the topic.

The Washington Post’s Sudarsan Raghavan and Heba Mahfouz get in on popular discontentment with economic conditions in Egypt with “As Egypt’s economy struggles, calls for protests against Sissi grow louder.”

Finally, theNew York Times has a solid look at governments’ addiction to petroleum subsidies in which Egypt plays merely a walk-on role, but which is nevertheless great reading. As we’ve been grumbling for some time: “Economists say the vast majority of benefits from the subsidies go to the wealthy, not to the poor, because it is the wealthy who do the most driving and use the most electricity.”