Good morning, wonderful people, and welcome to our first slow news day in more than two weeks — we consider it our just recompense for having survived the vicissitudes of a news cycle that’s been rolling by in fast-forward for to long now..

We expect to be talking about oil and gas quite a lot in the coming days as the Egypt Petroleum Show (Egyps) gets underway today at the Egypt International Exhibition Center. The event runs through Wednesday. Speakers include OPEC Secretary General Mohammad Barkindo and International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol. Also speaking: Our ministers of oil, finance and the environment (among other government officials), as well as energy and oil ministers from countries including the UAE, Jordan, Yemen, Israel, Cyprus and Greece. Top execs from major oil and energy firms will also be in attendance.

There will be lots of noise about Egypt as the natural energy hub of the Eastern Med, a notion that longtime readers will recall we’ve been championing for years — and that has new relevance with Europe facing the prospect of a longer-term energy crunch thanks to tensions with Moscow. (More on those tensions below.)

On the other end of the “good for the planet” scale: We now have tariffs for charging electric vehicles after the Madbouly government published its rate sheet in the Official Gazette. We’ll have a deep dive into the details tomorrow in our Going Green vertical, presented each week thanks to the support of our friends at Infinity.

THE BIG STORY TODAY here at home? Policymakers are confirming what we’ve been saying for weeks here at Enterprise World Headquarters: War between Ukraine and Russia would not be good for the global wheat market. We’re the world’s largest importer of the grain. What’s more: They’re also two of our most important tourism markets (in volume terms, though admittedly not margin) — Russia is a key security and defense partner.

THE BIG STORY ABROAD- Is the Ukraine crisis coming to a head? This week could decide whether tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine bubble over into armed conflict, Bloomberg and the Associated Press are reporting this morning. US President Joe Biden promised a “rapid response” if Russia does invade its neighbor in a phone call with Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday, as White House advisers continued to brief that Russia could create a surprise “pretext” to invade Ukraine any day now. Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will head to Moscow today before meeting with Zelensky for talks on Tuesday for a last-ditch effort at diplomacy. More than a dozen countries have moved to pull non-essential diplomatic staff from Ukraine, with some airlines going as far as canceling flights to the country. The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Reuters have more.

Will there be war? Some pundits in our socials are suggesting that Putin doesn’t need to invade to accomplish his goals: Taking the threat right up to the red line (but not crossing it) has already done enough to draw a line under his “security sphere” and open sew discord among Western allies, they suggest.

The prospect of war in Ukraine and the wheat crunch come at the same time as the global commodity shortage is back in the headlines. Stockpiles of goods from copper to coffee are at historically low levels, threatening further inflationary pressures, the Financial Times reports. Raw materials, food staples, metals and energy futures have all slipped into backwardation — when spot prices exceed futures prices, signaling scarcity. Traders are paying over the odds to secure immediate metal supply, while copper stocks at major commodity exchanges sit at less than a week’s worth of global consumption. Add to that an oil supply squeeze that has pushed prices to record highs (now being further boosted by geopolitical tensions in Ukraine), and last year’s alarm bells over a “commodities supercycle” are ringing in our heads again.

The good news: We aren’t set to see global shortages (yet). “The risk of shortages by the end of winter is remote at this point,” one analyst says. “But the market will still need to secure significant supply through the summer in order to prevent those concerns coming back next winter.”

PSA #1- Are you about to quote Forbes “magazine” in a presentation or proposal? Don’t. Stop. Go read this. Then think again. Why? It’s not looking much like a real media outlet these days as much as it does an unedited platform for “scams, grift, and bad journalism” writes the founder of Harvard’s Nieman Lab. If it’s tagged as being written by a “contributor”? It’s someone’s personal blog, not an edited work of journalism.

PSA #2- Are you running Zoom on a Mac? It might be listening to you right now, warns Macworld.

What to try instead? Google’s video and voice conference stuff is better, we think (it’s called Google Meet… we think? They rebrand this particular service more frequently than Amer Group changes CEOs). Microsoft’s Teams isn’t bad at all, just ugly as sin.

From the Dumpster fire that is our social media:

• Did your #2 just call in sick because his emotional support alligator is having a bad day after being caught in construction on the Ring Road all morning? Our collective ability to come up with inventive excuses for missing work dates back at least 3.2k years.
• Bye-bye, pandemic. The guy who wanted to “close everything” at the beginning of the outbreak now wants to reopen all the things. (The Atlantic)
• It may be a bit harder to get a laptop, tablet or new phone in the next little while after 6.5 mn TB of flash memory was ruined at two of the world’s leading producers thanks to contamination. (Bloomberg | Apple Insider)

CIRCLE YOUR CALENDAR-

It’s day two of the three-day Arab sustainable development week. Some 400 participants including the EU, World Bank and other institutions are chewing over how to tackle in a sustainable way the development challenges of the Arab world.

The Industrial Development Authority will receive offers from companies for licenses to manufacture iron products tomorrow.

Orange Ventures’ deadline to receive applications from seed-stage fintech startups for its seed challenge is also tomorrow.

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

*** 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: Private schools have been hit by price increases in recent months, as domestic inflation accelerates. With inflation running close to two-and-a-half-year highs, spending is being impacted across the board, with rising capex costs putting particular pressure on companies in the sector, say several operators. Today, we look at how the impact of inflation varies among Egypt’s private schools, and what they’re doing to mitigate it.