Topping coverage of Egypt on a ridiculously slow news day in the foreign press is still Ethiopia’s refusal to accept World Bank mediation in its dispute with Egypt on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.

Climate change and rapid population growth are threatening the survival of ancient Egyptian artifacts, according to a piece by UN Environment. “Increasingly erratic weather that many largely attribute to climate change is eating away at the ancient stones. At the same time, booming population growth is complicating preservation efforts. After surviving thousands of years of war, invasion, and cannibalization for building materials, the splendours of ancient Egypt might have finally met their match… The effects of climate change will only get more intense, experts say, possibly requiring some tricky decisions about the viability of maintaining vulnerable historic sites.”

Queen Nefertiti never actually ruled Egypt, claims Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist from The University of Manchester, according to Phy.org. Nefertiti “wasn’t born a royal, and for a non-royal woman to become king would have been unprecedented. Her daughter Meritaten, however, was indeed born a royal – and so is a more likely candidate for pharaoh, if anyone is,” Tyldesley says.

Also worth a quick skim this morning:

• Border forces killed an Israeli man on the border between Egypt and Israel during an attempt to smuggle illegal substances, YNet reports. The story also gets a shout in Haaretz.
• There are more arrests of members of the LGBTQ community in Egypt and “world leaders remain largely silent,” according to Human Rights Watch.
• The government is using “defamation campaigns to target its opponents as a tactic to silence and discredit any critical voices,” Esraa Abdel Fattah writes for Open Democracy.