There’s plenty of ‘meh’ news for Egypt in the international press this morning, most of it our own doing (we have chapter and verse in Egypt in the News, below). After all, we appear now to live in a parallel dimension in which the Prosecutor General’s Office is siding with a free press while the Press Syndicate takes the side of the censor, as we outline in Last Night’s Talk Shows.

But let’s start the week with two bright notes, shall we?

Lex likes us… In only its second mention of Egypt in the last five years, the Financial Times’ influential Lex column gives Omm El Donia a nice shout-out. Lex notes the country’s continued attractiveness to the carry trade, the nascent recovery in tourism, and the outperformance of the EGX relative to the MSCI EM gauge — and cites Carbon Holdings’ USD 10.9 bn petrochemical complex as a “glimpse of the future.” “Prosaic industrial investment,” Lex writes, will be more valuable in the long-run for Egypt than big dreams such as the USD 500 bn Egyptian arm of Neom, Saudi Arabia’s planned robot utopia.

…and so does Citi. Frontier markets have had their worst half-year performance since 2012, Citi said as it released a six-month update to its FM ranking model, but all is not lost: Egypt remains the bank’s fifth most attractive frontier economy from an investment point of view, behind Romania, Nigeria, Kuwait and Sri Lanka, the Wall Street Journal notes.