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Tuesday, 6 June 2017

What we’re tracking on 06 June 2017

Cairo’s ban on flights from Qatar to Egypt kicked in at 6:00am CLT today. And forgive us for being all Qatar, all the time today. We tried to focus on other news, but when even the Financial Times devotes five stories to the severing of ties by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, it’s big news. Our views on the Statelet have never been secret, but we’ve tried to be as objective as possible on this one — and regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, it’s difficult to see yesterday’s developments as anything less than the most significant shakeup in regional geopolitics in a decade, perhaps ultimately in a generation. It’s not “Sadat makes peace with Israel” big, but…

Meanwhile, the US embassy prohibited yesterday its diplomats from visiting religious sites outside the Greater Cairo area, saying in a security message to US citizens that terrorists have been targeting Christians in “both urban and isolated settings [and] additional attacks are possible.”

Apple held a blockbuster event last night, finally getting serious about the iPad as a productivity tool with new features including an actual, honest-to-god exposed file system in iOS 11, announcing a new 10.5 inch iPad, unveiling a pretty cool answer to Amazon’s Alexa, teasing the iMac Pro(which positively vibrates with computing power, but won’t be out until December), and releasing incremental updates to its MacBook and iMac lineups alongside tweaks of macOS and watchOS. Bloomberg has an exclusive interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook (text and video), while the homepages of iMore, Apple Insider and 9to5 Mac have rundowns on the announcements last night. You can also watch Apple’s stream of last night’s WWDC event.

The Egyptian Private Equity Association will be hosting Investment Minister Sahar Nasr for its annual sohour today at 10pm at the Four Seasons Nile Plaza Hotel in Garden City. RSVP details here if you would like to attend.

So, when do we eat? Maghrib prayers are at 18:54 CLT in Cairo, and the cutoff time for sohour is 3:09am.

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