The Weekend Edition

One of the best pieces of writing we’ve read in a long time is also exceptionally relevant to Egypt this weekend. Mark Warren’s “How the NYPD secures Times Square on New Year’s Eve” for Popular Science is feature writing at its best. You can hear the Brooklyn accents and the rhythm of cop-speak run up against the slur of under-dressed, inebriated revelers as Warren asks “How does the world’s largest police department balance the security of the spontaneous masses with the freedoms that make us who we are? The counterterrorism cops of the NYPD take us deep inside their extraordinary operation.” In the wake of this week’s Palm Sunday bombings, this story should be on the reading list of anyone who thinks about the pointy end of the security equation.

Of wine and running: Whether you enjoy it over a meal or it’s your tipple of choice when, uhm, reveling, novice and intermediate connoisseurs of wine — oenophiles to the cognoscenti — will learn something from the New York Times’ “How to drink wine.” The long feature is divided into multiple sections, covering everything from fundamental types of wine to how to shop for it, how to order it at a restaurant, how to open a bottle and what wine goes best with which foods.

Then, while you’re on the Times’ site and before you refill your wineglass (you’re using one with a stem, not one of those useless and pretentious stemless glasses, right?), go read Gretchen Reynold’s “An Hour of Running May Add 7 Hours to Your Life.” Why should you lace up? A new study “found that, compared to nonrunners, runners tended to live about three additional years, even if they run slowly or sporadically and smoke, drink or are overweight. No other form of exercise that researchers looked at showed comparable impacts on life span.”

Whether they’re running Fortune 500 companies, three-person startups or established family businesses, execs across the US this morning are debating Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to shareholders. The letter touches on everything from artificial intelligence to why he insists it’s still “Day 1” for Amazon. The opening note to Amazon’s annual report is being taken as a lesson on how even an established giant can continue to innovate as if it’s a startup, and plenty of attention is being paid to his notion that you need to make decisions with only 70% of the information you’d like to have — and not be afraid to rapidly admit when you chose the wrong path. You can read the full letter here in Amazon’s SEC filing or catch coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider or CNBC.

Want to chuck it all and join the French Foreign Legion? Get accepted, serve three years with honor and it’s your ticket to French citizenship under the name of your choice. Aeon takes a look at the storied French fighting force, which is repositioning itself not as a group of ‘expendables,’ but as “an elite fighting force, to be compared with the British SAS or the US Navy Seals.” Go read “The legend of the Legion” in Aeon — it’s one part military history, one part psychological study, and well-enough written that you get to the end and wish there was more.

So if the Aeon piece isn’t enough, head back to 2012 and read the utterly inimitable William Langewiesche’s “The Expendables” for Vanity Fair: “The sergeant supervising the helicopter exercise had mastered the art of disciplining men without wasting words. He was a former Russian Army officer, a quiet observer who gave the impression of depth and calm, partly because he spoke no more than a few sentences a day. After one of the imagined helicopter landings, when a clumsy recruit dropped his rifle, the sergeant walked up to him and simply held out his fist, against which the recruit proceeded to bang his head.” From training to history and modern-day combat, Langewiesche has it all.

The Legion’s low-fi English-language recruitment site is here, by the way. Just sayin’.

If Langewiesche’s name looks as familiar as it is unpronounceable, it may be because he’s journalist and former commercial pilot who wrote “The Crash of EgyptAir 990” for The Atlantic magazine back in November 2001, ultimately suggesting that the pilot who crashed EgyptAir Boeing 767 from New York to Cairo into the sea either did so on purpose or was the worst pilot in history.

“Parents ‘control’ their children in one of 2 ways — and only one leads to happier kids” by Mic and syndicated to Business Insider makes for interesting reading if you’re wondering what your approach to parenting is doing for (or to…) your kid. Says the lead author of a recent study on the subject: “We found that people whose parents showed warmth and responsiveness had higher life satisfaction and better mental wellbeing throughout early, middle and late adulthood. By contrast, psychological control was significantly associated with lower life satisfaction and mental wellbeing. Examples of psychological control include not allowing children to make their own decisions, invading their privacy and fostering dependence.”

A masterclass in spotting BS business, when it’s worthwhile: The Financial Times’ Lucy Kellaway (who, we remind you, will be switching careers this fall — in her 50s) was delighted to hear that the University of Washington was offering a course entitled Calling Bullshit In the Age of Big Data. The course is designed for and limited to “spotting bullshit in numbers,” but Kellaway says there’s “an equal need for one spotting it in words, especially words used in business. Her suggested course begins with a definition: “bullshit means nonsense, usually of a puffed-up variety that pretends to be something it is not. Sharp eyes will spot at once the difficulty in applying this to corporate life — almost everything fits the description.” But there is a key rule one must stick to, Kellaway says: “the first rule about calling corporate bullshit is not to do it too assiduously or you will go insane. I have learnt to ignore 95 per cent of it, and of the remainder ask myself two questions: what is the quality? And: how damaging is it?” She gives three examples to illustrate the point.

The first case Kellaway cites is from a 2008 Pepsi rebranding document that said “the Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations.” Kellaway calls this “grade A, unadulterated BS. But on the second question — whether it was damaging — the answer is no. Pepsi changed its logo and carried on selling its brown sugar-water around the world willy-nilly.” The second case is of a document from Deliveroo, on its preferred language for describing the people who deliver takeaways to customers. The memo bans “employees”, replacing it with “independent suppliers,” and forbids “pay” and “hiring” preferring “invoices” and “onboarding” instead. On the bullshit quality measure, Kellaway says it is tame. However, on the measure of harm, it is egregious, as Deliveroo knows that “if people used the ordinary words ‘employee’ and ‘hire,’ they might make the mistake of thinking they were due ordinary things like holidays and sick pay.”

Kellaway saves her best example for last. “The third example comes from Jim Norton, who has the delightfully bullshitty title of chief business officer, president of revenue at Condé Nast.” Norton outline a new strategy in a memo that began with “‘Team’ and proceeded with a stream of corporate nonsense about playbooks and journeys and wide arrays of differentiated solutions,” and created a plan he calls “Condé Nast One.” Kellaway’s verdict: “for companies to claim themselves ‘one’ is standard bullshit — it is a cliché and a lie, given the inevitable number of vested interests in any organisation. If Mr Norton were in the motor trade or banking, I might let this pass. Yet Condé Nast publishes Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, where standards of editing are so exacting that one of the latter’s editors has written a whole book based on the correct placement of a comma.”

When failure to compete on the executive management level leads to failure to compete on the pitch: Arsenal FC is in crisis. This season has been the esteemed English football team’s worst since its legendary manager Arsene Wenger took over the club 19 years ago. The club has been on an impressive losing streak for its away games, going down 10-2 on aggregate in its Champions League matches with Bayern Munich (the worst loss by an English team in the competition’s history) and most recently 3-0 to bottom-three Premier League team Crystal Palace. All this despite boasting one of the best selections of world class superstars, including Alexis Sanchez, Mesut Ozil, and Hector Bellerin. The losses have seen calls by fans for the club not to renew Wenger’s contract reach a fever pitch. Even worse, their star player, Sanchez, has been fanning the flames of speculation that he is leaving the club, with reports of interest in him coming from rivals Chelsea and Manchester City. Arsenal is currently outside the qualification places for Europe’s elite Champions League, a competition in which it has played every season for the past two decades.

While fans hold Wenger primarily responsible for the losing streak, many have taken the view that the board of directors’ business and financing strategy is being the club’s dysfunctionality. At the heart of the problem: bn’aire US sports mogul Stan Kroenke. Arsenal had been financially strapped, something the board felt would be resolved if they sold a majority stake to Kroenke, often described as an absentee landlord. This came despite Alisher Usmanov, who owns more than 30% of the London club, offering to underwrite a rights issue he said would have provided Wenger with the money to try and buy the very best players, according to Bloomberg. Usmanov also called for an overhaul of Arsenal’s commercial operations. Arsenal’s full-year revenue of about USD 434 mn is about 30% less than rival Manchester United, which generates more commercial income from jersey-sponsorship rights and its branding. Other cost saving measures adopted by the club including a wage capped for players at GBP 150K per week, which has impeded the club’s ability to buy new players and retain vital ones. Recently Arsenal made an exception for Sanchez offering to double his pay if he renews his contract.

But perhaps one of the biggest issues that have been raised is how the board has set the bar low for the team and its manager. So long as Arsenal remain in the top-four (a difficult feat for the team this season), Wenger has been able to keep his contract, something which Arsenal fan Piers Morgan has rightfully noted would never happen to other Premier league managers (yes, this is the only time in which we will actually listen to the man’s blathering). The leadership vacuum has opened the door for Wenger to take full control at the club and effectively set his own contracts. Wenger has refused to so far disclose whether he is staying next season or leaving. Either way, these problems on the pitch cannot be resolved until the problems with the board and the business are addressed.

Kicking Qatar around on a long weekend: If you’re into thrillers and crime capers, go read Jon Gambrell’s fantastic “Qatari pays USD 2 mn to try to free royals abducted in Iraq,” which uses US Justice Department documents to “shed new light on the opaque world of private hostage negotiation in the Middle East in a case that now involves hackers, encrypted internet communication and promises of millions of dollars in ransom payments.” Near center stage: A Greek shoe salesman. If you prefer your dose of anti-Qatar sentiment straight up, head over to the Toronto Star, where Mohamed Fahmy (of ‘Marriott Cell’ fame) writes of terrorist financiers who are “strolling freely in Qatar’s malls and posting photographs of their expensive cars flanked by rare falcons and tigers.” Their social media handles, he notes, are @binomeir ‎and @khalifasubaey.

Why stop with Qatar? Here’s a kick for Turkey, too. The New York Times takes a deep dive “Inside Turkey’s purge,” explaining that “as the ruling party expands the ranks of its enemies, life in a fragile democracy becomes stranger and stranger.” The opening character in the drama: A medical doctor arrested at 6am and dragged off to detention for the crime of having opened a bank account at the wrong bank down the street after moving into a new neighborhood.

If a 94 year old can revolutionize battery technology for the second time, what’s your excuse for not being creative? The guy who co-invented the battery in your smartphone, laptop and tablet at age 57 is back at age 94 with a discovery that could turn the energy and automotive industries on their heads. The University of Texas at Austin professor and his team have “filed a patent application on a new kind of battery that, if it works as promised, would be so cheap, lightweight and safe that it would revolutionize electric cars and kill off petroleum-fueled vehicles.” The New York Times’ “To be a genius, think like a 94-year-old” is a data-driven meditation on creativity and age in a youth-obsessed culture.

Because emojis aren’t enough of a curse, Google wants to take the creativity out of drawing. The company has rolled out a new site on which you can sketch approximations of, say, a slice of pizza and have Google turn that into an image of a proper slice. Or a circle with dots on it into a cookie. A box with circles into a car. Try out AutoDraw.

Speed-reading tips for your holiday book: Don’t “say” words aloud inside your mind while reading and cut distractions that make you re-read sentences, writes Tim Adams for The Guardian. Read in blocks, not in individual words and sentences. The idea was conceived by American teacher Evelyn Wood in the 1950s has been revived just in time for the age of information overload in which we live.

Alternatively: Try tech. There are now apps that claim to make you read faster. “The apps generally use a technology called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), in which individual words, or blocks of two or three words, appear one after the other in the centre of your screen.” With it, you can read 300, 500, or 1,000 words per minute, and choose the rate at which words appear.” The app Spreeder, for instance, uses this technology. The problem with these methods is that the rhythm of the language is lost in the process. “While it is true that you don’t receive any fresh information in the spaces between words, the research suggests that the millisecond pauses are crucial for cognition: they are our brain’s tiny spaces for reflection,” writes Adams. Studies also show that trying to read more than 600 words per minute means comprehension falls below 75%. “A lot of our lives can be scanned and scrolled and skipped, but reading remains a more immersive kind of act, dependent on detail.”

There’s more than Amazon behind the meltdown of retail in the United States over the last two years, and if you’re doing retail in Egypt, you need to read this: Bankruptcies, store closures and liquidations in retail in the U.S. are partly due to online shopping, writes The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. “There have been nine retail bankruptcies in 2017,” according to Thompson. “J.C. Penney, RadioShack, Macy’s, and Sears have each announced more than 100 store closures,” and Ralph Lauren will close its flagship Polo store on Fifth Avenue. Online shopping is getting more popular, not just for books and music: Clothing is now the largest e-commerce category. Shopping has gone mobile, too. “Since 2010, mobile commerce has grown from 2 percent of digital spending to 20 percent.”

Retail is also collapsing in the US because Americans built too many malls. The number of malls grew over twice as fast as the population growth in 1970-2015. “So it’s no surprise that the Great Recession provided such a devastating blow: Mall visits declined 50 percent between 2010 and 2013.” They’re still falling. The third reason is a change in lifestyle, as people are going to restaurants and traveling rather than shopping.

We were fans of the “Fearless Girl” statue that was erected in front of the Wall Street Bull as part of a campaign to get more women on corporate boards. The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino made us view things from a different perspective; she says “there’s an infantilizing undertone that is often present in the discussions of women’s ambition happening right now.” Tolentino says this is part of a larger problem of infantilizing female ambition, which could be seen to include seemingly benign symbols such as Tory Burch t-shirts and bracelets emblazoned with slogans like “Bold” and “Ambitious.”

She quotes novelist Elisa Albert, to whom ambition “is a quality that arises organically from both vanity and a genuine wish to do good work; it’s also something she regards as alien and horrific. ‘So you got what you wanted and now you want something else,’ she writes. ‘You probably worked really hard; I salute you. . . . But if you have ever spent any time around seriously ambitious people, you know that they are very often some of the unhappiest crazies alive, forever rooting around for more, having a hard time breathing and eating and sleeping, forever trying to cover some hysterical imagined nakedness.’”

Ambition, Tolentino writes, “will always be complicated for women, and not just because of external impediments: it is an imperfect drive, enacted in imperfect circumstances, that inevitably leads to imperfect things.”Tolentino says Fearless Girl, which depicts an elementary-school student staring down the Bull, is “dismaying, and revealing, that this message is most easily conveyed through a figure of a girl—her skirt and ponytail blown back in the breeze, cheerfully unaware of the strained, exhausted, overdetermined future that awaits her.”

Charlie Murphy, one of the funniest and most underrated comedians, died on Wednesday after a battle with leukaemia. Murphy, who was 57, never achieved the fame his brother Eddie has, but his work, particularly with Dave Chappelle, remains iconic. He also appeared in films including Jungle Fever, Night at the Museum, and Lottery Ticket. Two of his funniest and most successful skits on The Chappelle Show came from him Charlie Murphy’s True HollyWood Stories of Rick James (part 1, runtime 05:06 and part 2, runtime 03:24) and Prince (runtime 05:05). You can catch other famous Murphy sketches from the Chappelle show including him as Tyree in The Mad Real World, The Playa Haters’ Ball, and his voice as Stinky from Kneehigh Park. Chappelle Show aside, The Wrap reminds that Murphy left a richer legacy including appearances in Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, The Boondocks, Jungle Fever, and also providing voice over for the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas videogame.

DOCUMENTARY OF THE WEEK- Fontline’s A League in Denial: Another great from the Frontline series of documentaries, this time exploring the ongoing crisis within the National Football League over what is known as the “concussion crisis.” It all started with Pittsburgh Steelers super star and Super Bowl winner Mike Webster, a player known for his aggressive style that helped endear him to fans as one of the toughest center position players in history. Soon after retirement, Webster’s mind slowly disintegrated and he died at the age of 50, but not before suing the NFL for injury compensation. Forensic neuropathologist Bennet Omalu examined Webster’s brain and cited the cause of death to be chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated trauma to the head.

The NFL aggressively pursued a campaign to discredit Omalu and its own team of physicians issued waves of denial that football was the cause of Webster’s death and the issue was pushed to the back of people’s minds. However, as more and more players began to show signs of CTE and a number of popular former players continued to die prematurely, the myth that football was a harmless sport began to unravel, jeopardizing the credibility of the most popular league in the US, and even that of the sport itself. To this day, the NFL continues to deny any wrongdoing, but has tempered its stance to acknowledge that more research must be undertaken.

Why would the NFL risk the safety of its most prized assets? At risk was a multi-USD bn industry revolving around sponsorships, primetime broadcasting rights, and merchandising, as the league was considered one of the most profitable athletics organizations in the world. The culture of the time also plays heavily here, as the NFL grew in popularity as violence became an intricate part of American popular culture, and the need to satisfy the public’s need for the bloodsport became a crucial part of keeping those profits churning. But even more crucial than the above was the fact that the sport itself was at risk, as medical evidence demonstrated that teenagers in high school were susceptible to CTE. Essentially, if word got around to American mothers that the sport was killing their children, then the whole party would be over. You can view the riveting documentary here (runtime: 1:56:10).

Podcasters are worried about nukes: A number of podcasts have put out episodes recently discussing issues related to nuclear weapons as concerns surrounding the Trump administration and the threat from North Korea increase. Radiolab (runtime 57:27) looked deeper into what happens if a US President ordered a nuclear attack and if a military officer on the receiving end of the order could refuse it. They looked into the process of checks and balances between the President, representing civilian oversight, and the military, which would have to execute such order. Radiolab interviewed a US Air Force Major who was once placed as the person who would have been on the receiving end of such a phone call from the President, and who once asked about his ability to refuse such an order. The Stuff You Missed In History Class podcast (runtime 30:23) looked into different, scarier incidences. They looked into three moments in history “when the world came perilously close to a full-scale nuclear war, due to false alarms or miscommunication.”

If you want your children to be successful, enroll them in school later rather than sooner. Parents often dedicate a great deal of time and mental effort to taking decisions that will help put their children on a path of academic success. For those whose children are born later in the year, one of the most important decisions is whether their children should enter school early (and be the youngest of the bunch) or a year late (and be the oldest). The decision to delay a child’s enrolment in kindergarten — referred to as “red-shirting” — does not necessarily correlate with improved academic experience. However, a recent study from Stanford University has found that what red-shirting does achieve is that it improves the development of certain characteristics, including self-control, mental health, and discipline, that help children do better in school, Bill Murphy writes for Inc. “We found that delaying kindergarten for one year reduced inattention and hyperactivity by 73% for an average child at age 11…and it virtually eliminated the probability that an average child at that age would have an ‘abnormal,’ or higher-than-normal rating for the inattentive-hyperactive behavioral measure,” according to one of the co-authors of the study. The catch: The study doesn’t control for what red-shirted children do in the extra year they have before starting school, which could play a role in the child’s development, nor does it account for socioeconomic background.

Bringing sociological findings into the mix might be good for state policies and strategies: Whileeconomics might the subject that presidents and world leaders rely on almost entirely to set strategies and create policies, the risk of giving one academic discipline so much say in the shaping of public policy is that “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail,” Neil Irwin writes in the NYT blog The Upshot, suggesting that lending an ear to sociologists might just be what the doctor ordered. “Most pressing problems in big chunks of the US may show up in economic data as low employment levels and stagnant wages, but are also evident in elevated rates of depression, drug addiction, and premature death.” The economic outlook offers only a partial view of the problem and as a result delivers only partial and unsustainable solutions. Because sociologists dedicate their lives to the study of issues such as identity, community, and society, this branch of academics — paired with economics — can give policymakers a more well-rounded view of the task(s) at hand.

For example, while employment is important for sustaining our livelihoods, it would beinaccurate to say that unemployment is a simple matter of losing income. A study by Massachusetts University professor Ofer Sharone found that most participants saw their “ability to land a job as a personal reflection of their self-worth rather than an arbitrary matter.” Meaning that rejection from the job market can prod people to throw in the towel and give up on the pursuit completely. This, the author suggests, can help explain why many US citizens who lost their jobs in the 2008 recession never returned to the market despite improving conditions.

The challenge with sociology though, and probably why states continue to base their plans on economics, is translating such research findings into actual workable policy. “It may be true that these lessons on identity and community don’t lend themselves immediately to policy white papers and five-point plans, but a deeper understanding of them sure could help policy makers.”

Spotify claims to develop an algorithm to sort songs by emotion, rather than genre: The human brain is wired to make connections with innumerable things that act as cues to trigger specific thoughts or emotions when we come across them. A specific aroma will take us back to our grandmother’s kitchen, and the sound of waves bring up memories of summers spent by the beach. Music is not only not an exception — we arguably form the most robust mental and emotional connections with musical cues. So for technology to tap into that to improve our musical (and hence, emotional) experience would be rather groundbreaking — and that’s exactly what the people at Spotify claim to have done, David Sumpter writes for The Economist’s sister magazine, 1843. They’re developing an algorithm that can apparently differentiate between a sad song and a happy one, thereby sorting mns of different songs into emotional categories to give users a better, more personalized listening experience. “The algorithm combines musical properties like volume, tempo and — most importantly — energy with “emotional valence,” a measure of how happy or sad a song makes you feel. Generally speaking, high valence sounds make people feel positive emotions, while low valence sounds are associated with negative emotions.” The development process relied on human feedback on their emotional reactions to songs that were either high or low valence sounds, which were then fed into a computer to allow it to learn the basis for analyzing the songs.

Markets are increasingly getting shaped by machines rather than us: FT mined data from top finance houses showing that high-frequency trading powered by automated trading algorithms is on the rise. The most outstanding result of this is investors turning aggressively passive, not just because it’s cheaper, but also because it’s getting increasingly hard to beat the market with a wide pool of educated investment managers in the market (the number of CFA charter holders to listed companies). Data from the past 20 years shows high-frequency trading volumes picking up from the post-crisis drop-off. Meanwhile, the volume of trading done by traditional active asset managers has flatlined. This shift has also reshaped the labor market of the industry, as now more quants and data analysts are recruited, while demand for traditional analysts has stagnated.

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

• Why ISIS Declared War on Egypt’s Christians (The Atlantic)
• Sara-Kristina Nour is MENA laureate for the Cartier Women’s Initiative (Cartier Women’s Initiative)
• Video shows the face of the suspected Alexandria church bomber. (Youm7)
• Footage of the Alexandria church suicide bomber detonating his device. (Youtube)
• Egyptian firms ranked in the Legal 500. (Enterprise)
• Video of a medical doctor assaulted and thrown off a United Airlines flight. (Twitter)
• Men bet she would fail; now she runs a USD 26 bn fund. (New York Times)

Is the Bahia emerald worth the trouble or is it just another hoax? Accidental business partners Jerry Ferrara and Kit Morrison seem to think it’s the former. The pair have been tied up in court cases for the last 10 years or so trying to prove themselves the rightful owners of the 752-pound Bahia emerald, a huge black rock “with cylinders of emerald” protruding out of it (watch, runtime 2:15). This rock “is the size of a mini fridge [and] weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers,” Elizabeth Weil writes in a piece for Wired. “Estimates of worth range from a hundred bucks to USD 925 mn.” It goes without saying then that everyone who get even a little bit close wanted in on a piece of the pie, but none got any. Since this emerald was unearthed from a mine in Bahia in East Brazil back in 2001, it appears to have brought and cost nothing but trouble for those who tried to procure it; four court cases were filed, 14 people or entities — including the government of Brazil — have tried to claim it as their own, a house reportedly burned down, a man was allegedly kidnapped, and three people filed for bankruptcy.

But has it all just been a big waste of time? What science (and life) tell us about emeralds suggest that this one particular rock may just be another MacGuffin, or in Weil’s words “an object that everyone’s chasing but doesn’t really matter.” Not only are emeralds complex in their formation, but almost all are typically full of impurities, cracks and inclusions that cause the stone to shatter if anyone tries to cut along them. The Bahia emerald, which is said to have survived Hurricane Katrina and has been sitting in a secret LA county vault since it was seized in 2008, is “huge, strange, and composed of low-quality crystals…imagine a petrified Jello mold made by Wilma Flintstone for a dinosaur.” But whether or not this stone is a hoax, it seems unlikely at this point that anything anyone says or does is capable of getting Ferrara and Morrison off its trail. The two partners had even won the case in 2015, only to be contested days later by the country of Brazil. One thing is for sure though, they are also not the first, nor will they be the last to fall in the thrall of a large and shiny rock that doesn’t live up to expectations.

Zaki Hashem & Partners won the Egyptian law firms football tournament held last Saturday. The tournament, organized by Zulficar & Partners, had teams representing Egyptian law firms that also included: Alliance, Shahid, Baker McKenzie, Matouk Bassiouny, Rizkana and Partners, and White & Case. H/t Firas El-S and Heba R.