A QUICK NOTE TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS

We publish the Enterprise Morning Edition in English and Arabic from Sunday through Thursday before 7am, with a focus on the business, economic and political news that will move markets each day. What you’re reading now is our Weekend Edition, which is light on news and heavy on stories to read, videos to watch, and podcasts to which you may want to listen on Friday and Saturday (that being the weekend for the vast majority of our readers). The Weekend Edition comes out each Friday between 9:00am and 9:30am CLT. We’re in beta and in English only right now.

We’ll be back on Sunday at around 6:15am with our usual roundup. Until then: Enjoy the weekend.

** Do you want to read our GCC Edition? We have had a phenomenal response to our request for beta readers, so we’re opening the alpha program to everyone who has written in asking to be added to the list. You can sign up via this link. The alpha edition will be published 2-3x weekly during the workday until a little later this month, then move to a Sunday-Thursday publication schedule, delivered before 6am KSA / 7AM UAE. Back issues of the Enterprise GCC Edition are here. You can also subscribe to our Egypt edition here — it’s published Sunday-Thursday at 6:05am CLT, with a lighter Weekend Edition on Saturdays at 9:30am.

SPEED ROUND, THE WEEKEND EDITION

A cheery thought to get your weekend underway: “A giant, invisible gas cloud is hurtling toward our galaxy at over one million kilometers per hour and when it collides it will unleash an explosion of star formation.” You may go on with your plans to make your morning coffee: Said gas cloud won’t arrive until about 30 mn years from now, Canada’s CBC reassures us. How might those who emerge from the fire thereafter rediscover the human race? For a suggestion, try “The Day the Mesozoic Died: How the story of the dinosaurs’ demise was uncovered.”

In a slightly different “end of the world as we know it” vein, the FT’s Lucy Kellaway writes for the Economist’s The World in 2016 issue that “In 2016 the job of management will be taken away from managers. For the salt-of-the-earth middle manager, it will be the most painful year on record. The manager’s three main functions—checking up on people, chivvying them and judging how they are doing—will either be deemed no longer necessary or will be given to machines to do instead.” We’re not sure how we missed the 2016 issue being posted to the web, but we did. About half of its content is available to non-subscribers. We recommend:

• Scientists are testing a way of ridding the ocean of tens of thousands of tons of floating garbage — a system developed by a Dutch teenager and originally funded on Indiegogo
• Do you speak 2016? Tech, teens and language trend. Still don’t know what “Netflix and chill” means? This story is for you on at least two levels.
• A revolution from below: Africa is redefining what it means to be middle class.
• What the world will be talking about in 2016. A video introduction to the package. (Run time: 31:24)

Okay, okay, we know, it’s horribly inside baseball for a Friday morning. And yes, we put a moratorium on news in the Weekend Edition a few months back. But: CIB has another suitor for CI Capital, Reuters reports. Al-Ahly Capital, the investment banking arm of the National Bank of Egypt, has made an offer. CIB confirms it has received “a written expression of interest that did not include a non-binding offer nor an indicative price.” The bank has asked “the interested party” to sign an NDA and make an offer before they open CI Capital to due diligence. CIB’s board agreed in December to allow Naguib Sawiris’ OTMT to start due diligence on a non-binding offer for the nation’s second-largest investment bank in a transaction the market expects will be valued at just under EGP 1 bn. A rival bid from London-based Rasmala failed to materialize.

Japan stunned the world last weekend by adopting negative interest rates. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) decided to charge 0.1% on excess reserves and may cut rates further if necessary “to stimulate the Japanese economy as volatile markets and slowing global growth threaten the central bank’s efforts to overcome nagging deflation,” according to Reuters. “The BOJ decision was a massive surprise. It’s further money printing from Japan on a massive scale after having told the markets that they’re not doing it … That triggered European investors to push the ‘risk-on’ button,” an investment analyst at Manulife Asset Management commented. “The move does speak to a certain degree of desperation,” William Watts writes for Market Watch. The main driver behind the move is the BOJ’s drive to achieve its goal of pushing inflation back up to 2%. Watts says the BOJ’s move could “a testing of the waters” with economists saying that it could “follow through with further cuts to the deposit rate, perhaps approaching the negative 0.75% rate in place in Switzerland.” Noah Smith has a more nuanced explanation of the BOJ’s drive to resort to negative rates in his Bloomberg View column.  He says it is an attempt to cancel out some negative demand shocks from the slowdown in China, soften the effects of attempts by the government to raise taxes, and to make government borrowing cheaper. Smith, however, concedes that “the world’s central banks are, after all, in uncharted territory here.” Frances Coppola spoke to the BBC’s Business Daily podcast about how the negative rates are designed to depress short-term interest rates and support quantitative easing. (Run time 17:27)

Tired of your local Cairo eateries and not certain where to order your next curry / hamburger / pizza / whatever? Top 10 Cairo is a rare gem: well-written, well-photographed and generally in good taste. Use it as a guide to expanding your culinary horizons within the narrow band that is comfort food, but we’re not entirely certain we’d trust a top-10 website to offer us advice on where to send the rugrats to school. The site’s also a bit too uncritical at times. (Mince among the best burgers in the city? It was a trailblazer — three years ago. And has gone steadily downhill). Check out Top 10 Cairo’s recommendations for best pizza (here), best hamburgers (here) and best breakfast joints (here).

If you’re looking at a business model for a new startup in Egypt, you may want to stay clear of subscription retail. Subscription-service Birchbox, the darling of cosmetics fans, is in trouble, calling into question the subscription business model taking over the retail sphere. Birchbox, which mails makeup samples to paying members, laid off 15% of its staff and will cease operations in Canada due to a difficult funding environment, according to Business Insider. “[These kinds of companies] grow quickly because consumers are eager to try new things, but then consumers stop buying because they find that they don’t need the product or service. Then the company needs to figure out how to reactivate lapsed customers or to find new customers. It’s a big challenge,” Suhcarita Mulpuru of Forrester Research told Business Insider.

The Putin of Chechnya: Joshua Yaffa writes from the Chechen capital of Grozny profiling Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s leader, and asking if he is out of control. In 2011, Yaffa writes, Kadyrov threw himself an extravagant birthday party with appearances by Hilary Swank and Jean-Claude Van Damme. “Asked where the money for the celebration came from, Kadyrov told reporters, ‘Allah gives it to us.’” Kadyrov is described as “a skillful and popular politician, one of the few in modern Russia, where nearly all officials tend to be charmless functionaries.” However, Anna Politkovskaya, the famed journalist believed to have been murdered by Chechens, called the situation with Kadyrov in Chechnya “an old story, repeated many times in our history: the Kremlin fosters a baby dragon, which it then has to keep feeding to stop him from setting everything on fire.” Yaffa writes “after more than a decade of Kadyrov’s rule, Chechnya has become Russia in miniature, a concentrated tincture of all its habits and instincts and pathologies, with Kadyrov worshipping Putin and consistently enacting the darker urges and impulses of the system that Putin has created.” Politics and the in-depth profile aside, Kadyrov also has a somewhat unconventional Instagram account that includes pictures from this reel and boasts 1.6 mn followers.

Did Led Zeppelin steal their 1971 hit Stairway to Heaven? “The surviving members of Led Zeppelin have all been questioned in a lawsuit that alleges their hit Stairway to Heaven was filched from an obscure song by the band Spirit. Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Robert Plant were each deposed separately over the past month as part of pretrial discovery in the copyright infringement case, new filings in Los Angeles federal court show,” Bloomberg reports. For real rock nerds, the news service’s Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine covered the story in a feature-length piece back in 2004.

U.S. ups spending to fight Daesh, confront Putin: The Obama administration plans to increase its spending on fighting Daesh by 35%, putting in a request to Congress for USD 7 bn to be added to the Pentagons 2017 budget for the mission. US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter will also be looking at a USD 3 bn increase to counter “Russian aggression”, 4x what the Pentagon spent on the same front last year. The Defense Department named Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and counter terrorism as the five challenges that determine the Pentagon’s budgeting, according to Carter’s preview of the FY 2017 defense budget.

A place even Donald Trump won’t go? Vice News says that while Donald Trump has made it clear that he will not shy away from bringing up Bill Clinton’s indiscretions in what the blowhard hopes will be his face-off with Hillary Clinton in the battle for the White House, he may back down considering their mutual friend, bn’aire Jeffrey Epstein. The disgraced business tycoon and major political donor who is a convicted [redacted] offender, has entertained both Trump and Clinton on his private jet. Trump, who is no stranger to mixing it up with much younger women (going so far as to say that if he wasn’t her father he’d date Ivanka Trump) has called him a friend, and Epstein had pleaded the Fifth when asked if he had socialized with Trump in the company of underage girls. Trump was even subpoenaed during an investigation of Epstein.

“A dangerous cult ducking accusations of brainwashing, abuse, and child marriage.” Daesh? Some breakaway Muslim sect? Christian polygamists? Nope: Lev Tahor is an ultraconservative Jewish group that has observers in the U.S., Israel and Canada reflecting on “how the complexities of religious freedom can make it tricky to distinguish between radical devotion and dangerous extremism.” Is Lev Tahor extreme? “‘Extreme’ is too mild of a word. They are their own universe,” says a Yeshiva University law professor. Read more in Foreign Policy.

In what may be the first truly ironic piece of news in 2016, Amazon is reportedly opening hundreds of brick-and-mortar stores, according to the Wall Street Journal (paywall). CNBC is also carrying the news. The information comes from an unnamed mall CEO, and Amazon sources are apparently quite peeved at the reports, which they say are rumors.

For your inner Walter Mitty — because who hasn’t dreamt of hitting the ‘eject’ button at one time or another, even if only for a sweet, fleeting second? Tim Ferriss on “How to Be Jason Bourne: Multiple Passports, Swiss Banking, and Crossing Borders.” Oh, and speaking of Walter Mitty fantasies, how many of us didn’t dream of something similar as kids: A German teenager is going to be allowed to keep a USD 20k gold bar she found at the bottom of an Alpine lake.

Guess who’s back? Egyptian comedy host Bassem Youssef has reportedly officially signed with American media company Fusion for a digital series and TV special called “The Democracy Handbook”. Back in December, Ahram Online reported that negotiations were underway between Fusion and Youssef for “a ‘little experiment’, where democracy from a Middle Eastern perspective inside America will be humorously and informatively discussed.” Fusion, huh? Out to get him at least a couple of hundred viewers an episode: More people work at Fusion than read its more popular posts, one media insider has alleged.

Our long read of the week for business geeks, history nerds and geographers alike” The Box That Built the Modern World: How shipping containers made distance irrelevant, in Nautilus.

DID YOU MISS AN ISSUE THIS WEEK? Check out our archive on the website.

WATCH THIS

Eagle vs. drone: “Sometimes a low-tech solution for a high-tech problem is more obvious than it seems,” and the Dutch police is teaming up with raptor training company Guard From Above to deploy eagles to take out dangerous drones from the sky. Yes, they’re training birds of prey to attack drones mid-air. “Law enforcement have been testing ways to stop dangerous drones from using ‘signal jammers’ to just shooting the flying machines down. But birds of prey could potentially be safer,” CNBC notes. Guards From Above has a short teaser showing one of if its trained birds intercepting a drone. (Run time 0:37)

DOCUMENTARY OF THE WEEK: The Commanding Heights is another great PBS adaptation of Daniel Yergin’s book (see The Prize) on the rise of capitalism and the freemarket economy. Like the book, the three-part, six-hour documentary takes us through the development of the John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek models of economics and their Biblical battle over the 20th and 21st century. It explores why Keynesian economics grew to prominence in the early part of the 20th century and how the failings of the Soviet and planned economy models drove the rise and redemption of Hayek under Reagan and Thatcher — and how the new model became the driver for much of the chaos we see today. (Episode 1 run time: 1:55:31; Episode 2 run time: 1:55:25; Episode 3 run time: 1:55:32)

READ THIS

“Strategic clarity has blurred in so many industries today to the point of near-invisibility thanks to the digital revolution and globalisation. Flying blind, companies seem happier to cut costs and buy back their shares than to invest purposefully for the future,” John Thornhill of the Financial Times (paywall) writes. Competition, Thornhill posits, is the driving force behind capitalism, but how can companies compete in an environment that shifts so quickly it makes it difficult to see where competition comes from in the first place? First, thoroughly understand the technological changes transforming the world to identify the threats and opportunities early on. Second, look as intensively inwards as outwards. “The traditional definition of competition is irrelevant. We are increasingly competing against ourselves,” Thornhill quotes CEO of Indian IT group Infosys Vishal Sikka as saying.

A trip down memory lane: It’s a little on the long side, but for men and women of a certain age, the face of 1990s nostalgia is… Winona Ryder. Read: Winona, Forever, a meditation (with an artsy-intellectual edge) on nostalgia and adulthood.

LISTEN TO THIS

We are confusing the roles of government and business: “Capitalism does not produce justice, any more than knife fights do. It produces winners and energy and growth. It is the job of government to channel that energy and growth into socially useful avenues, without stifling what it seeks to channel. That’s the basic problem of our form of government: how to achieve a balance between economic vitality and justice. It is a problem that we increasingly ignore,” economist Timothy Taylor tells EconTalk’s host Russ Roberts quoting a newspaper editor called Donald Kaul. On this episode of EconTalk, Taylor, who is the author of the Conversable Economist blog, discusses the paradox that the political process seems to expect firms to take care of workers and government to create growth and its application to decision making by businesses generally. (Run time 01:01:57)

There is a way to report on areas taken over by Daesh, NYT reporter Rukmini Callimachi tells The New Yorker’s David Remnik in an episode the Politics and More podcast. Using a technique she learnt in Mali, Callimachi goes to “the line of control,” the last safe place before the terrorists’ territory starts, and there she gets to meet with refugees that are coming across, traders who go back and forth, and survivors of committed atrocities. Getting closer to Daesh fighters themselves via social media, she says they believe they are living in a time just before an end-of-the-world battle and that they will be there on their “black steed” at the moment when it happens. (Run time 15:52)

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SOMETHING THAT MADE US THINK

Articles about words in other languages that have no English equivalent seem to pop up in our newsfeeds every week (for the record, ‘schadenfreude’ may not have an English counterpart but it has an Arabic one: ‘shamata’). Last month, however, a report was made available online that unearthed 216 “psychologically positive” foreign words for which there is no English translation, making us wonder if English is lacking in emotionally positive words. University of East London psychologist Tim Lomas says expanded vocabularies have the potential to “enrich [our] experiences of well-being.” Examples Lomas cites include schnapsidee, German for coming up with an ingenious plan when drunk, and baraka, Arabic for a gift of spiritual energy. Clearly Lomas has never ’shipped a couple or heard someone describe their day as on fleek.

TECH

What the heck is going on with Yahoo? The company announced on Tuesday that it would lay off 15% of its workforce, and “engage on qualified strategic proposals” — corporate speak for “looking for a buyer.” While Yahoo are one of the best-known brands on the internet, it’s core business is a mess. How much of a mess? A market value of negative USD 13 bn, after you subtract major assets in Yahoo Japan and Alibaba. The USD 1 bn investment Yahoo made in Alibaba in 2005 may have been the best decision they ever made. Now worth around USD 25 bn however, Yahoo can’t distribute its Alibaba holdings to shareholders without paying billions of USD in taxes on them. CEO Marissa Mayer tried spinning off the shares into a new holding company, but the IRS demurred and the spinoff was scrapped in December. Now Yahoo is attempting a reverse-spin off, which would see it form a new company from the core business and not the assets. Why has Yahoo, one of the most prominent names in the industry, found itself in such a tight spot? The reason behind this is confusion over the company’s identity. Yahoo identifies itself as a media company, not a tech company, and is not particularly excellent at either. In 1994, ad-supported software companies didn’t exist, that’s why Yahoo has a business model closer to CNN and NYT than Google or Apple. A horrible result of this was the company never sought after top line computer scientists, programmers, and designers the way its (actual) competitors do.

TechCrunch sat down with Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim to talk (video, run time 5:18) about his new discussion platform Parlio, which aims to encourage conversations “encourage intelligent conversations around the issues of our day and utilizes social media and online articles to do so.” The best thing about the app, which is so far invite-only, is that you need to pledge to be “civil” before contributing to the discussion. Ghonim clearly lived in Egypt far too long.

THE WEEK’S MOST-CLICKED STORIES

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

• Amr Adib gets an impromptu call from President Abdel Fattah El Sisi (Youtube link has been taken down due to copyright infringement)
• Kickstarting Growth: Could the Central Bank’s new directives be the, uhm, encouragement that Egypt’s banks need? (Enterprise)
• Image of then-missing (now dead) Italian graduate student Giulio Regeni (Quotidiano) (tie)
• “This Land is their Land”: Egypt’s Military and the Economy (Jadaliyaa) (tie)
• New customs rates hit everything from nuts to deodorant, including a .PDF of the Arabic-language decree. (Al Masry Al Youm)
• Fortune may yet favour the brave, by Dr. Arshad Sufi, chairman of METAS Energy and former president of BG Egypt (Enterprise)

ON YOUR WAY OUT

Salma Hayek is being featured in Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil’s ode to belly dancing in “I Saved My Belly Dancer”, which will be on view at The Third Line in Dubai from February 3 to March 5. The film, which is also accompanied by a series of stills made to resemble billboards from the golden age of Egyptian cinema, “takes its aesthetics from the 1940s-60s, when Omar Sharif was king, and Egypt was known as “Hollywood on the Nile”, according to Art News.

A team of MIT student engineers have won Elon Musk’s competition to design a Hyperloop system to transport people through high-speed vacuum tubes, Times reported. The new technology would move passengers through vacuum tubes at speeds up to 750 mph using solar power. “Delft University of Technology from the Netherlands finished second in the contest, with the University of Wisconsin third, Virginia Tech fourth and the University of California, Irvine, fifth.” Cairo University was represented by a team in the competition, Bloomberg had reported.

Here’s one way to get you to waste your time this weekend and maybe giggle a little: Let’s mess with Donald Trump’s hair using a trumpet.