The Weekend Edition

Business, politics and food, all rolled into one ta3meya sandwich and served with generous helpings of tahina: Zooba’s ta3meya crowned the best at the London Falafel Festival. Zooba’s “falafel” was crowned the winner of the London Falafel Festival on Sunday, the Guardian reported. Before continuing further, a point of clarification is required: We do not eat “falafel.” Falafels are for those who cannot, or will not, say ta3meya, in a similar vein to the following scene from the 1997 episode of the Simpsons: ‘The Twisted World of Marge Simpson’:

Helen Lovejoy: Hmm, Pita. Well, I don’t know about food from the Middle East. Isn’t that whole area a little iffy?
Fleet-a-Pita Saleswoman: Hey, I’m no geographer. You and I – why don’t we call it pocket bread, huh?
Maude Flanders (RIP): Umm, what’s tahini?
Fleet-a-Pita Saleswoman: Flavor sauce.
Edna Krabappel: And falafel?
Fleet-a-Pita Saleswoman: Crunch patties.
Helen Lovejoy: So we’d be selling foreign…
Fleet-a-Pita Saleswoman: Specialty foods.

This is Egypt and we eat ta3meya. We elbow, push, shove, and cut our way to the front of the line to eat ta3meya. We serve the best street food in the world, and we serve it with a scowl.

This brings us to the international controversy surrounding this story. With the region only recently starting to rebuild after the intergalactic hummus wars, whose specter was briefly revived by Israeli restaurant Pilpel coming in at second place at the London Ta3meya Festival, one would think that politics would otherwise not intrude into our lunch. However, as the Guardian noted, the Lebanese contestants were denied entry visas to the UK, prompting calls of foul play. The comments section on the Guardian piece is getting flooded with Lebanese nationalists insisting that their recipe, made from chickpeas as opposed to the Egyptian version made from fava bean paste, is the best, and that it was unfair they were unable to compete. While we would agree it was unfair the Lebanese were unable to compete, the Egyptian recipe is still the best, objectively speaking.

We urge Egyptians everywhere to show restraint and good sportsmanship by refraining from jumping into the comments war, as the last thing we need is misspelled anti-Lebanese sentiment expressed online by Egyptians. In conclusion: MASR.

Trump’s 180 on Mexicans lands him in front of a taco bowl: More politics in food? Yes, more politics in food. It would appear that Donald Trump might be as crazy as the fox whose life was given to cover Trump’s scalp. Yesterday, Trump’s tweet and Facebook post, showing him seated in front of a Taco Bowl, marks the beginning of his shift in his campaign strategy as presenting himself as a non-bigot. The caption with the taco bowl reads: “Happy Cinco de Mayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!”

While this may all seem silly, absurd, and of little consequence, it raises a disturbing possibility: Will Trump be able to make everyone forget everything he’s said and done to get to where he is today? Don’t discount the possibility. With no offense intended to the world’s writhing masses, people everywhere in general tend to be dangerous, stupid, dangerously stupid, easily manipulated, have brief attention spans and even briefer memories.

Trump’s shift in his campaign strategy is being orchestrated by his most recent hire: former lobbyist Paul Manafort, who was brought on board early last month to run a more ‘traditional,’ ‘presidential’ campaign for Trump, as the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported weeks ago.

Who is Paul Manafort? Franklin Foer’s well-researched profile of the lobbyist, who has strong ties to pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarchs, leads with the following: “Paul Manafort made a career out of stealthily reinventing the world’s nastiest tyrants as noble defenders of freedom. Getting Donald Trump elected will be a cinch.” Food for thought.

“Golden Era” for investors ends as millennials expect much lower returns:  Millennials (the ones who don’t become bn’aires from their AI-fueled custom-falafel delivery startups, at least) may have to work seven years longer — or save twice as much — as the previous generation in order to get the same returns from their investment in European and American stocks and bonds, according to a May report by consultancy firm McKinsey & Company. For the past 30 years, investors have benefitted from “exceptional” inflation-adjusted returns (more than the 100-year average). But the next 20 years are set to generate much lower returns, and “that’s going to have some quite extreme consequences for all types of investors,” McKinsey director Richard Dobbs said. “The big decline in interest rates and inflation is reaching its limits, global GDP growth will be lower as populations in the developed world and China age, and the outlook for corporate profits is cloudier,” the report states, adding that emerging markets are the West’s biggest threat. The study sets two scenarios: the slow growth and recovery scenario. The first sees the U.S. GDP growing by 1.9% per year on average, while growth in other major economies is 2.1%, with returns falling below the 30-year average. The second path sees the U.S. continuing its 2.9% average of the last 30 years while non-U.S. rises 3.4%, with returns still below that “golden era” period. Bloomberg Gadfly columnist Nir Kaissar, however, reckons the future isn’t so bleak for millennials if they choose to invest instead in those emerging markets, considering that they might not be as risky as the U.S. was in the 1980s, “with stagflation and crumbling cities and sky-high interest rates and stocks in the toilet.”

Abandon hope all ye who are still attempting to shed kilos (or pounds, if you’re so inclined): A New York Times piece covering a study done on contestants who participated in season eight of The Biggest Loser has officially become 2016’s most depressing piece of news. Should you be of the lucky few who haven’t heard of the show, The Biggest Loser is a weight loss competition that has contestants eating very little and exercising very much while simultaneously beingberated and humiliated by trainers. Contestants have lost hundreds of pounds on the show, but have they kept it off? Over the six-year period of the study, only one of the 14 contestants weighs less now than before. The other 13 have all gained some, all, or more weight back. While studies have shown for years that diets don’t work, the reason Kevin Hall, a scientist at a federal research center, discovered is definitely news. Anyone who tries slim down, regardless of the weight they started out at, will end up with a slower metabolism, but what Hall was shocked to discover was that it never actually recovers — it becomes even slower. For contestants to maintain their weight, they would have had to eat several hundred calories less than someone of the same weight who hadn’t been on a diet. “As long as you are below your initial weight, your body is going to try to get you back,” said Dr. Michael Schwartz, an obesity and diabetes researcher who is a professor of medicine at the University of Washington.

But wait, there’s more: Not only did their metabolisms plummet, their levels of the satiety hormone leptin fell to almost nothing, leaving them constantly hungry. And even when their weights climbed again, leptin levels drifted up to only half of what they had been before. “What was surprising was what a coordinated effect it is,” Dr. Joseph Proietto of the University of Melbourne said. “The body puts multiple mechanisms in place to get you back to your weight. The only way to maintain weight loss is to be hungry all the time.” But the the worst part? No one knows what to do about it.

ExxonMobil could be looking at a Big Tobacco-style showdown over climate change: ExxonMobil looks set to be embroiled in a legal case that could change the status of the fossil fuel industry in America. The attorney general of the US Virgin Islands Claude Walker issued a subpoena in March for nearly 40 years of climate change documents from Exxon, joining the US states of New York, California, and Massachusetts in a probe into the extent of the corporation’s knowledge of fossil fuel’s role in global warming while pushing an agenda denying climate change. Earlier this year, a coalition of 17 state attorneys general formed an alliance to press Exxon to reveal a decades long document trail which demonstrates that it had knowledge of the harmful effects of the fossil fuels. The company itself had quietly funded some of the first climate research as early as the 1970s, according to an investigation by InsideClimate News last year. The investigation revealed an email from Exxon’s former scientific advisor that seems to show that the Exxon was aware of climate change and adverse effects of carbon emissions as far back as 1981, seven years before the issue came into public focus. Exxon then quietly tucked away this knowledge and joined other energy giants and formed Global Climate Coalition in the 1980s to lobby Congress against early calls by climate change activists — and continued to fund powerful climate change detractor lobby groups, according to Vice: Motherboard.

U.S. officials are hoping to collect enough evidence to bring fraud charges against Exxon by asserting that it knowingly deceived the public on the effects of greenhouse gasses. The subpoena was expanded this week to include 100 academic institutions, free-market think tanks and conservative groups named in the Exxon Secrets website. For its part ExxonMobil is not going down without and fight and is using the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in favor of corporate personhood (corporations have the same rights as individuals) to claim that the subpoena violates its First Amendment rights to not participate in a national discussion on climate change. However this pans out, this could be a potentially titanic battle the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the trials that brought down Big Tobacco.

The Syrian civil war is leaving a frighteningly large number of displaced children out of the education system. According to UNICEF, 6 mn children are affected by the conflict in Syria at present, with 2.5 mn more affected beyond Syria’s borders. Aside from their need of food and shelter, they also require access to education. If left unaddressed, the situation will, almost certainly, lead to another crisis in the future. “Roughly one of every two Syrian refugee children aged five to seventeen in Lebanon is currently out of school, or more than 180,000 children,” Elizabeth Buckner and Dominique Spencer write for the Carnegie Endowment. The problem is worse for older children, with “less than 10% of Syrian refugees of secondary school age are in classrooms,” according to the World Bank’s Noah Yarrow, who warns that because of this low enrollment rate “the risk of losing a generation of skilled professionals is very real.” Lebanon has responded by creating double shift schools and, for higher education, a number of universities have introduced initiatives to assist displaced Syrian refugees with their educational attainment.

The problem is not exclusive to Lebanon: in Egypt, as we mentioned yesterday, Syrian students continue to struggle. “Not only do they struggle to get into schools, they struggle to pay for them seeing as they’re considered foreign nationals,” according to a report by Al-Monitor. Besides UNICEF, to which you can donate here, there are number of other organizations working to improve access to education. One is Jusoor, which has been working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon since June 2013 and seeks “to ensure Syrian refugees in Lebanon have a holistic, well rounded primary school education through integration into formal schooling whenever possible.” Outside of Lebanon, there is The Syria Fund, an initiative focusing on providing Syrian refugee families living in Mafraq and Azraq in Jordan beyond the UN-organized refugee camps. It currently focuses on “building education facilities to provide access to children who have missed years of school” as well as providing material food and in-kind support.

Is Moore’s Law coming to an end? In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that “the number of components that could be etched onto the surface of a silicon wafer was doubling at regular intervals and would do so for the foreseeable future.” This principle has guided the tech industry ever since, taking it as an article of faith that engineers will find a way to continuously make tech smaller, faster, and cheaper. A global alliance of chip makers, including industry associations from the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, will make one final report based on a chip technology forecasting system called the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers plans to announce on Wednesday that it will a create a new forecasting system, called the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems. The decision to back away from reliance on Moore’s Law signals “the industry may need to rethink the central tenet of Silicon Valley’s innovation ethos,” writes John Markoff for the New York Times. Scientists are nearing the point where they manipulate material as small as atoms. Within the next five years, they may bump into the boundaries of how tiny semiconductors can become. At that point, they may have to look for alternatives to silicon, which is used to make computer chips, or new design ideas in order to make computers more powerful. Thomas M. Conte, a Georgia Institute of Technology computer scientist and co-chairman of the effort to draw up a new set of benchmarks to replace the semiconductor reports. “Just relying on the semiconductor industry is no longer enough. We have to shift and punch through some walls and break through some barriers.” This isn’t the first time the industry claims Moore’s Law was running out of steam. In 2005, researchers were concerned about overheating processors, but the industry addressed the problem by splitting tasks among many processors, eventually giving us the multi-core processor.

Among the other stories we have queued-up in our Pocket this weekend:

Undiscovered Nazi treasure in Polish caves, just waiting to be discovered? If you were ever fascinated by the Second World War or Hitler’s Third Reich — or dreamt as a child of finding treasure — the New Yorker’s “The Nazi Underground” is for you.”

Is it time to wade back into emerging market debt? The CIO for EM debt at JP Morgan asset management thinks it is. Maybe we need that sukuk law, after all? Read more in Institutional Investor.

What’s it like waiting for your memories to be locked-up in your own internal prison? Writes the New York Times: “A withered person with a scrambled mind, memories sealed away: That is the familiar face of Alzheimer’s. But there is also the waiting period, which Geri Taylor has been navigating with prudence, grace and hope.”

To mark the launch of its new gadgets vertical, The Verge has penned the State of the Gadget Union, a must-read for tech-geeks out there. “Gadgets are back. And they are messy, complicated, and sometimes terrible. But they’re also wonderful; full of potential that everyone can see and nobody has achieved.”

And speaking of The Verge, imagine being in the pool, happy in lane six, cranking out your morning laps. You hit the far wall and turn to head back, only to find that you’re swimming a slithering, black mechanical eel-robot.

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

• CV of presidential economic advisor Abla Abdel-Latif, who said on Wednesday night that devaluation isn’t coming (pdf download)
• When a king goes on holiday in Egypt, he golfs and swims. (Egyptian Streets)
• P2P currency trading in Egypt (website of eshteridollar.com)
• Ted Cruz accidentally punches, elbows his wife after bowing out of race for the Republican nomination (Vine)
• Egyptian banks will benefit from devaluation and rising interest rates (Moody’s, pdf)

Honorable mention: Reham Saeed cries and Reham Saeed as the girl from The Ring