On a slow news morning, the biggest news is what didn’t happen: We have a new cabinet today after yesterday’s minor shakeup, and as expected, the Cabinet economic group remains intact.

Prime Minister Sherif Ismail will reportedly be returning to work next week as his health continues to improve, government sources tell Youm7. Ismail made his first public appearance yesterday since returning to Cairo on 21 December from Germany, where he had sought medical treatment. The PM appeared yesterday at the swearing-in ceremony for four new ministers. Other government sources had said over the weekend that Ismail is still recovering and will not go back to work soon.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn will arrive in Egypt on Wednesday for a three-day visit that will wrap on Friday, unidentified sources tell Al Masry Al Youm. The Egyptian-Ethiopian Joint Committee will meet on Thursday to discuss “bilateral, continental and international issues,” according to the Ethiopian News Agency. Desalegn was scheduled to arrive in Cairo yesterday, but his trip was postponed again after having first been pushed from December. The prime minister is expected to be accompanied during his trip to Cairo by Foreign Minister Workneh Gebeyehu, who left for Khartoum yesterday to meet with his Sudanese counterpart, Ibrahim Ghandour. At a press conference after their meeting, Gebeyehu urged Egypt and Sudan to de-escalate tensions over territorial disputes, according to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. The minister also denied that Cairo had requested to exclude Khartoum from ongoing negotiations about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

EFG Hermes’ annual Egypt Day gets underway starting tonight with the firm’s annual CEO Dinner at the Four Seasons Nile Plaza. It’s the first major event on the 2018 investor calendar in Egypt.

Morocco began implementing a more flexible exchange rate regime yesterday in a bid to boost the competitiveness of its economy. The Moroccan Central Bank announced it would widen the official band within which the dirham fluctuates to 5% from a current 0.3%. “Unlike nearby Egypt, which floated its EGP in November 2016, Morocco isn’t facing a currency crisis and wasn’t under pressure to take immediate action,” Bloomberg notes.

Is the fallout from Mifid II beginning? The president of Nomura, Japan’s largest investment bank, says his outfit has already stopped providing research services in Europe, believes there is “probably … no advantage in providing the service in the US.” Nomura is “not a charity,” he added, and cannot provide research without charge, the Financial Times reports. “Nomura is the first leading bank to publicly indicate that it is considering restructuring as a consequence of the new rules,” the paper notes, writing that, “bankers and experts have warned of significant cuts to research divisions as a consequence of the European reforms, which requires investors to explicitly pay for research instead of its cost being covered by the commissions investors pay for trades.”

Not the name-check Naguib was hoping for: With the Winter Olympics in South Korea looming, the North will be more and more in the headlines in the coming weeks. “Global businesses faced a deadline last week to exit joint ventures operating in North Korea,” reports the Journal, “but dozens of them are still there, experts say, operating under opaque structures that help conceal their links to North Korea.” The paper looks at how “cigarettes and murky joint ventures” help the DPRK “evade crackdown.” OTMT’s JV in North Korea gets extensive mention in the piece, along with the note that it is “unclear if Orascom is violating any sanctions regime” and a note that Naguib may have exposure through his US citizenship.

Also worth noting this morning:

The occasional “swear word” is good for the [redacted] soul—and can “promote social bonding, help us withstand pain and more,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

The Mercedes G-Class has gotten a makeover, but aficionados needn’t worry—it stays true to the beast’s 1970s DNA and is really on par with the one Jeep’s iconic Wrangler recently announced.

And, finally, with all due respect to the good people at the New York Times: Tofu and quinoa cannot be as good for the soul as chicken soup.