Good morning, ladies and gents, and welcome to what is (so far) a relatively calm news day.

We love writing to all of you each morning, but there’s nothing we love more than to see how engaged our readers are. A number of you wrote to us over the weekend to give us your two cents on our latest edition of Your Wealth, our special monthly briefing, in which we dipped our toes into the expansive world of art. We read each and every one of your messages (even the multi-paragraph emails) and truly appreciate you all taking the time to drop us a line with your feedback.

Calling all golf aficionados: Our friends at Somabay are hosting a three-day golf tournament over the upcoming three-day weekend (8-10 October) on the Somabay Championship Gary Player Course. The tournament, which will follow the rules of golf approved by the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, will be held under the auspices of the Egyptian Golf Federation. You can register for the event by contacting ghada@somabay.com or calling +201223934205, and find out more about special accommodation packages here.

It’s PMI day, with the September figures for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE due out here at 6:15am — just a few minutes after our usual dispatch time. The recovery of Egypt’s non-oil private sector stalled in August despite growth in output and demand, after business conditions rebounded in July.

Other news triggers over the coming weeks:

• Foreign reserve figures for September should be out this week.
• Inflation data for September will land on Saturday, 10 October.

We’ll have a final list today of candidates standing in the upcoming House of Representatives elections that are scheduled to kick off later this month and run through early December, according to the National Elections Authority public timeline. Voters go to the polls to elect a new House of Representatives in a multi-stage process starting 21 October (voters abroad) and 24 October (in Egypt).

Investors will be able to bid on industrial land in manufacturing zones this week, said Mohamed El Sayed Fadel, head of the Trade Ministry’s Industrial Development Authority, according to Al Mal. The ministry has set specific industries and projects that can be set up in these zones based on market needs, Minister Nevin Gamea said yesterday (watch: runtime: 19:05).

The Health Ministry reported 108 new covid-19 infections yesterday, up from 109 the day before. Egypt has now disclosed a total of 103,683 confirmed cases of covid-19. The ministry also reported 11 new deaths, bringing the country’s total death toll to 5,981. We now have a total of 97,355 confirmed cases that have fully recovered.

The ministry is now gearing up for a potential second wave of infections, with President Abdel Fattah El Sisi stressing yesterday the importance of being prepared, Ittihadiya said in a statement.

New preventative measures for stopping the spread of covid in schools: Classes will be closed for 28 days if more than one case of covid-19 is detected within a two-week period, according to new guidelines for public, private and international schools published by the Education Ministry yesterday. The entire school will be shuttered for 28 days should more than one classroom be closed in a two-week period. On her first night back on the airwaves, Kelma Akhira’s Lamees El Hadidi got the details on the Education Ministry’s guidelines for containing covid-19 infections in schools from Minister Tarek Shawki, who noted that these policies were put in place in coordination with the Health Ministry (watch: runtime: 4:58).

Pilgrims returned to Mecca yesterday after the government lifted its Umrah ban, reviving the holy site that has been all but deserted for the past seven months, Reuters reports. Only local residents were allowed into the holy site with a 30% maximum capacity, or 6k people a day, with international pilgrims to be allowed entry starting from 1 November.

Almost half the jobs in the Middle East’s aviation-dependent industries may be lost this year as a result of border closures that have slashed the industries’ contribution to GDP, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has said. The trade association urged countries to ramp up covid-19 testing “as an alternative to restrictive quarantine measures” to avoid further job loss in the region.

Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds are helping investment firms splurge on lending to major corporations battered by the pandemic, as private borrowing becomes increasingly popular thanks to the flexibility and privacy it offers compared to conventional forms of financing, the FT reports. Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, teamed up with private equity firm Apollo earlier this year to exclusively seek out big ticket loan agreements for no less than USD 1 bn each, with an eye to loan out USD 12 bn in only three years.

Uber has offloaded a stake in its freight arm for USD 500 mn to a group of private equity firms as the company looks to focus on its core business and recover from painful losses suffered during the pandemic, the FT reports.

Go long on Musk: The space economy will more than triple in size over the next decade to become a USD 1.4 tn industry, a Bank of America analyst wrote in a note picked up by CNBC. With record investments and B2B spending largely unaffected by the pandemic’s outbreak, the bank is estimating that based on the industry’s growth rate over the past two years, revenues will grow from USD 424 bn last year to around USD 1.4 tn in 2030, CNBC reports.

In international miscellany:

• Facebook is preparing to defend itself against potential anti-trust lawsuits, arguing in a legal document that it would be expensive, nearly impossible, and harmful to users to break up its social media empire, the Wall Street Journal reports. This preemptive defense comes as the House Antitrust Subcommittee prepares to announce the findings of its investigations into Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon later this month.
• Things are continuing to escalate in the Caucasus: Armenian forces have escalated clashes with Azerbaijan, firing rockets at its second city of Ganja, killing one civilian and wounding four, Reuters reports.

US ELECTION WATCH- Presidential hopeful Joe Biden is leading by his widest margin in two separate likely voter polls — one conducted online by Reuters and Ipsos following incumbent Donald Trump’s covid-19 diagnosis, and another over the phone by Wall Street Journal and NBC News following last week’s debates. Biden’s 10-point lead comes as many US citizens believe Trump would have avoided catching the virus if he hadn’t played down the pandemic from early on, says Reuters. The former vice president led by 14 points even before Trump’s confirmed diagnosis, according to the WSJ-NBC poll.

Meanwhile, Trump’s health appears to be improving but might have been worse than initially thought, according to Reuters. His doctors are monitoring his lungs after a drop in his blood oxygen levels, but refused to give details of what they’re seeing, says the newswire. The president could be released from the hospital and return to the White House today to continue a five-day treatment of Remdesivir.

*** It’s Blackboard day: We have our weekly look at the business of education in Egypt, from pre-K through the highest reaches of higher ed. Blackboard appears every Monday in Enterprise in the place of our traditional industry news roundups.

In today’s issue: Education leaders give their opinions on Egypt’s policy of internationalization and reform to retain more students and become an education hub.