What we’re tracking on 12 April 2017
Investigators have reportedly identified the perpetrators of the Palm Sunday cathedral attacks in Tanta and Alexandria, Ahram Online reports. The media is rife with speculation about the names of the suspects, which authorities refused to publicly disclose, referring to them only by the pseudonyms revealed by the Daeshbags after the attack on Sunday: Abu Ishaq and Abu Baraa Al Masry. Conflicting reports surfaced in the local press, with AMAY claiming in one report that forensic tests proved that the Tanta suicide bomber was the man aliased Abu Ishaq and in another that the same person was the suspected Alexandria attacker. Kuwait’s Arab Times also reports that Abu Ishaq, who had lived and worked in Kuwait for four months in 2016, is “allegedly responsible” for the attack in Alexandria, while Abu Baraa is behind the Tanta attack.
Honoring Taymour: The Annual Capital Markets Summit presented Pharos CEO Elwy Taymour with an award honoring his late father, Pharos and EFG Hermes founder Mohamed Taymour, Al Borsa reports.
How’s yer stock price now, skippy? Investors “re-accommodated” United Airlines’ stock price yesterday, sending it down about 3% at one point as the furor gained steam over the airline violently removing a 69-year-old MD from a flight out of Chicago O’Hare. After initially commending his staff for going “above and beyond to ensure we fly right” and blaming the passenger entirely for United’s need to “re-accommodate” the passenger as it did, the airline’s CEO wrote (post the hammering of his share price) that “I deeply apologize to the customer forcibly removed and to all the customers aboard. No one should ever be mistreated this way.” It was, he said, a “truly horrific event.” Reuters has more.
Sometimes, the internet’s sense of humor feels very Egyptian. That was the case yesterday, when memes exploded about United. One of our favourites riffed on the classic 1980 spoof “Airplane.” USA Today, of all places, has a nice roundup of others.
Food for thought this morning: Job interviews do little to predict how a candidate might actually work out on the job. That’s the takeaway from a New York Times piece by a management prof from Yale whose research found that “the problem with interviews is worse than irrelevance: They can be harmful, undercutting the impact of other, more valuable information about interviewees. … Realistically, unstructured interviews aren’t going away anytime soon. Until then, we should be humble about the likelihood that our impressions will provide a reliable guide to a candidate’s future performance.” Better than asking random questions? “Use interviews to test job-related skills, rather than idly chatting or asking personal questions.”
The IMF is “sounding the alarm” over Bahrain’s 18% budget deficit, Bloomberg reports, saying the country needs to make “urgent spending cuts.”
Samsung’s “Bixby” voice-activated virtual assistant may not launch until May even though the phone is due to be released globally on 20 April in the US and a week later in the rest of the world, the Wall Street Journal reports.
There’s a light drizzle coming down in the People’s Democratic Republic of Maadi as we write this morning, and there’s a fair chance of thunder showers in Cairo this afternoon from about 3-6pm before we slip into what looks to be beautiful weather. Expect highs between 26 and 31°C through Thursday through Tuesday If you’re sticking around Cairo for the break,