Between what appears to have been an attack on the Louvre by an Egyptian citizen and Giza going without water for three days, the events of this past weekend were tailor-made for the Talking Heads.

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Ahmed Abu Zeid condemned as a “terrorist act” the attack on a soldier at the Louvre by Abdullah Reda El Hamahmy, an Egyptian national, saying during a call-in to Al Hayah Al Youm that it would have no impact on ties with Paris. The Ismail government will issue a formal statement on the incident once French authorities have concluded their investigation, he added (watch, runtime 2:44).

Hona Al Asema’s news team interviewed the alleged perpetrator’s father, a retired army general from Mansoura, who denied that his son held any extremist views, despite reports that he referenced Daesh on his social media accounts. El Hamahmy was based in Dubai and had been to Paris on a business trip which he extended for some sightseeing, according to his father (watch, runtime: 8:59).

Kol Youm’s Amr Adib rejected the father’s notion that his son was just a normal guy, noting: “El Hamahmy’s tweets show us that he was motivated by terrorist ideology.” Adib reviewed reactions from the international press to the attack, particularly Donald Trump’s tweet, which used the incident to justify his Muslim ban. Adib noted other press reports ridiculing Trump’s tweet, as Egypt and the UAE have not (yet been) included in the ban (watch, runtime: 9:07).

Closer to home, contractor Mokhtar Ibrahim was blamed entirely for the three-day water outage in Giza. A spokesman for the Holding Company for Water and Wastewater interviewed on Lamees El Hadidi’s Hona Al Assema said “engineering mistakes” were made by Mokhtar Ibrahim prolonged the outage from a planned 24 hours to around three days (watch, runtime: 5:23).

Host Lamees Al Hadidi put on her venture capitalist hat last night to speak about the Hona Al Shabab start-up competition launched by CBC in cooperation with EG Bank. Applicants will pitch their projects to leading entrepreneurs on Hona Al Assema. The top three projects will receive seed funding and loans of around EGP 1 mn each. Contest partners Endeavour Egypt, 138 Pyramids and RiseUp will offer winners training and mentorship (watch, runtime: 5:17).

In her weekly 4+1 debate segment, Lamees and her guests discussed increases in the price of subsidized commodities and the most important question in all of recorded history: Is Egypt is a poor country? (Watch; runtime: 36:02)
With no Zamalek or Egypt match last night, Amr Adib copied his better half’s homework and centered his episode on SMEs, interviewing the head of the National Bank of Egypt’s SME department (Hazem Hegazy) and head of the Small and Medium Enterprises Union (Alaa El Saqty). Hegazy announced that NBE’s SME loan portfolio has grown to EGP 200 bn thanks to the Central Bank’s small business initiative (watch, runtime: 6:41), while El Saqty discussed his organization’s program to get college degree holders and non-college-educated workers to collaborate on producing goods that Egypt imports (watch, runtime: 6:29).

Al Hayah Al Youm’s Lobna Assal interviewed the head of CAMPAS’ 2017 census unit Abdel Hameed Sharaf, who denied reports that this year’s census was designed to help cut welfare cheats from the subsidies system (not a bad idea) and obtain tax records, adding that the census data was strictly confidential (watch, runtime: 4:15).