It was a very quiet night on the airwaves to wrap up a more than eventful week. With Kelma Akhira and El Hekaya off for the night, the only news worth noting came from Masa’a DMC and Ala Mas’ouleety.

What happened to prepaid cards? The central bank has instructed a number of digital payment providers to stop their prepaid cards from making foreign-currency transactions. Prepaid cards aren’t linked to bank accounts which opens the door for FX misuse, Masa’a DMC’s Ramy Radwan said (watch, runtime: 3:57), adding that debit and credit cards are working fine. “I hope that in the future these kinds of decisions are officially announced,” he said, explaining that an official announcement will help limit the spread of social media speculation. We have the details in the news well, above.

Yesterday was the World Health Organization’s No Tobacco Day and Masa’a DMC (watch,runtime: 5:43) and Ala Mas’ouleety (watch, runtime: 17:02) took the chance to call on their viewers to quit smoking. “According to latest figures, 16.8% of the Egyptian population are smokers, representing around 18 mn people,” Radwan said. “Egyptians smoke around 80 bn cigarettes a year,” former head of the Egyptian National Heart Institute Gamal Shabaan told Ala Mas’ouleety.

Egypt’s contribution to AI: Radwan interviewed Egyptian AI researcher at Meta Alaa El Nouby (watch, runtime: 7:17) to discuss his contribution to Meta’s ImageBind — an AI model capable of bringing together images and video, audio and text, as well as data from the physical world.

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