And we’re back …

Good morning ladies and gents, and welcome back from a well-earned week-long break. We hope all of our readers had a happy Eid and are feeling as refreshed as us here at Enterprise HQ.

The holiday has hardly finished but we’re already getting rumors of a major post-Eid cabinet shuffle. Unnamed government sources have reportedly told Al Shorouk that as many as 10 ministers could soon be on their way out, with an announcement expected either at the end of this week or the middle of the next.

Who could be getting replaced? Al Shorouk’s sources claim that Oil Minister Tarek El Molla, Public Enterprises Minister Hisham Tawfik, Environment Minister Yasmine Fouad, Higher Education Minister Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, Local Development Minister Mahmoud Shaarawy, and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Alaa Fouad are among the ministers who could be on their way out.. We should also be getting a new information minister after Osama Heikal’s resignation back in April.

WHAT’S HAPPENING THIS WEEK-

The House is expected to today hold a final vote on a draft law that would impose fees on the use of water for irrigation. The move aims to regulate how the country utilizes its water resources amid threats from climate change and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, through limiting the use of some of the nation’s canals for agriculture and reducing water wastage.

YOUR ESSENTIAL COVID STORY OF THE MORNING- There’s good news and bad news from Israel. As the world grapples with the spread of the infectious delta variant, a new study into the performance of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in one of the world’s most vaccinated countries will validate the positions in both the optimist and the pessimist camps. It should be noted, though, that the study is both preliminary and small-scale, so we should all take these findings with a grain of salt.

The good news: Pfizer/BioNTech remains effective at preventing people from becoming seriously ill with covid, even those infected by the delta variant. The vaccine has a 88-91% efficacy rate at preventing hospitalizations and severe disease.

The bad news: The vaccine is now much less effective at preventing infection. Two shots of the vaccine was just 39% effective at preventing infection and 40% effective at limiting symptomatic disease.

The story got coverage everywhere in the global press from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times and CNBC.

EGYPT IN TOKYO 2020: Day 1. Here are the highlights from the opening day of the Games:

• Handball: The men’s handball team got off to a good start, beating Portugal 37-31 in the opening match to go second in Group B.
• Tennis: Maiar Sherif suffered a first-round exit in the women’s singles, losing in straight sets to Sweden’s Rebecca Peterson.
• Swimming: Marwan Aly El Kamash came second in the third heat of the 400m freestyle while Farida Osman came last in her heat of the women’s 100m butterfly.
• Table tennis: Egypt’s entrants both suffered defeats yesterday, after Yousa Helmy lost 4-0 to France’s Jia Nan Yuan and Omar Assar and Dina Meshref lost their mixed doubles tie to South Korea 4-1.

CIRCLE YOUR CALENDAR-

The Clean Energy Business Council will host a webinar focused on female entrepreneurs in the MENA renewable energy scene at 3 pm on Wednesday, 28 July.

Egypt will host the Africa Food Manufacturing exhibition at the Egypt International Exhibition Center on 2-4 August.

The Central Bank of Egypt will meet to review interest rates on Thursday, 5 August.

Check out our full calendar on the web for a comprehensive listing of upcoming news events, national holidays and news triggers.