Sports
Sa'id out, and a slow start in Mali
The national soccer team lost to Senegal in its first match of the African Nations Cup currently taking place in Mali. The 1-0 contest was decided deep in the second half with a Senegalese goal. Egypt next plays Tunis on Friday.
The headlines, however, are also filled with news of Egypt's star striker Ibrahim Sa'id being sent back to Cairo by the team for alleged bad behavior in Mali. Did Sa'id overstep his limits with the coaches and his teammates, and will it result in a suspension on both home and international play? "If it weren't for his excessive behavior, he could be the best player in Egypt," Harb El-Dahshoury, head of the Soccer Federation," says on Al-Wafd's front page. The Federation is considering suspending Sa'id, who with his dyed hair and history of troublemaking is renowned as the bad boy of Egyptian soccer. With Al-Akhbar  dedicating four pages of  daily coverage to the tourney, there are far more details on Sa'id's ouster, including team mates at his club Ahly back home defending him and the team saying they're not going to suspend him from play.
(January 22, 2002)

Economy
Learning to push the local
Buy Egyptian is the slogan of the day, and Prime Minister Atef Ebeid was recently at an Egyptian Federation of Industries conference on the necessity of using Egyptian products -- especially in the construction industry. The conference, reports Al-Ahram, aimed to explore the ways and means of encouraging that critical industry to buy local. A web site was being launched as well to provide a database of local manufacturers, and a way to network contracts both at home and abroad.
In response, perhaps, to all the Encourage National Brand Loyalty going on, opposition Al-Wafd 's cartoonist thinks the government should look at itself first. A back page strip shows Ebeid being filmed for a TV ad, reciting different cheesy slogans encouraging people to buy local. In the last frame, he whispers to an assistant: "Don't forget to get the Italian marble, French statues and Iranian carpets that I'm going to decorate my office with..."
(January 22, 2002)

Education
Big changes in the works?
There's been a noticeable stylistic upgrade in the way the papers are covering the parliamentary debates currently trying to take apart the nation's educational system and put it back together again. The more user-friendly approach to parliamentary news features pull out sound bites like  Parliamentary Speaker Fathy Surour's quip about not taking, but giving private lessons.
The intense coverage probably has a lot to do with how close to home the topic really is. Egyptian families spend a whopping LE12 billion on the lessons every year, it was reported in the session, which included talk of bringing back the old one year thanawiyya amma final secondary school exams instead of the recently put in place two year system, and adjusting the way college admissions are decided.  Are we on the verge of a major shift in education policy, a notch on the ladder from rote to learning, a nostalgic return to the good old days when no one took private lessons? Or will it be yet another see-saw within the current system, like when we cancelled, then brought back, the sixth grade?
(January 22, 2002)

New developments
Crash course globalization
Damietta -- the longtime furniture-making capital of Egypt -- will be getting an intensive dose of global preparedness training, according to a tiny item in Al-Akhbar. Damietta's governor announced that a series of specialized training centers will be opening up to teach the furniture making trade, with a focus on cost-optimizing and meeting international standards so that Egyptian goods can compete in the world without borders.
(January 22, 2002)

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